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06.08.11

Links 8/6/2011: Viewsonic Embraces Linux, Naev 0.5.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 4:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A Report From Beyond: Linux Sound & Music At Virginia Tech

    From April 7 through 9 I attended Beyond, a series of lectures, workshops, and concerts promoted by the DISIS group at Virginia Tech – a.k.a. VTech – in Blacksburg VA. The festivities included presentations from Professor Brad Garton and Create Digital Music’s Peter Kirn, plus some incidental ramblings from yours truly. The concerts featured performances by VTech’s own Linux Laptop Orchestra, accompanied at times by percussionist extraordinaire Ron Coulter and a group from the Boys And Girls Club of Roanoke. Other performances included improvisations with some unique hardware controllers (more about those performances below) and original works composed by the participants.

    [...]

    I’ve just begun to look into similar programming environments for the Android and the existing audio APIs.

  • A use for EFI

    But when ERST support was added to Linux, a generic interface called pstore went in as well.

  • Windows killed my laptop, again

    Not sure how Windows kills itself, but Linux continues to work fine.

  • Desktop

    • How’s the Linux Desktop Doing?

      Linux doesn’t live in the one size fits all world of the proprietary operating system(s). As a matter of fact, I see Linux on the desktop offering better compatibility than their proprietary OS cousins thanks to its diversity. Each distribution is able to offer a customized kernel calibrated best for the given tasks at hand.

    • BluSphere – Sleek Linux Pre-Installed Computers

      I have been frequenting Linux message boards and chat rooms for several years now. During my time spent in these places I would estimate that 95% of the issues I have helped people with (and seen posted) are related to the installation and setup of the operating system. This comes largely from the fact that most of the computers you can buy come with Windows by default. The experienced Linux user knows that they need to research their hardware before forking out their hard earned money for something that might not work too well with their favorite operating system.

      [...]

      One of the reasons I like BluSphere (and am giving them this small plug) is because they give 5% of the profits on every notebook they sell back to open source projects.

    • M$ Attacks its “Partners”

      How about in the long term? Yes! The monopoly dies with “8″. How would you feel if M$ sold its PCs without “the tax” and “the tax” was larger than your margin??? Expect to see a lot more PCs shipping with Linux and expect to see a lot more PCs on retail shelves with Linux.

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • A New Open-Source KMS Driver Just Published

        Embedded GPUs on Linux are a big mess due to their lack of fully open-source drivers, memory management complications, and other technical issues. However, there is some good news to report today and that’s on the emergence of a new open-source KMS driver.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome shell media player extension

        New extensions for the gnome shell appears by the day. Today its a ‘musicplayers’ extension. This new gnome shell extension will add a new menu to the gnome shell top panel and allows you to control various aspects of the allow you to control different music players through the menu.

  • Distributions

    • Zenix GNU/Linux – Fun, Fast, Different

      Back when I used to write full-length distribution reviews for a living, I always kept my eyes open for unique offerings. Unique distros were few and far between, but when those jewels were found – fun followed. Well, one of those gems of the Linux world appeared on my radar this evening. Zenix GNU/Linux is a Debian-based distribution that uses Openbox and Awesome WM to create something that’s just a little different.

      According to the Website, Zenix is designed to be lightweight, yet not light in features or applications. Not that it comes with lots of software, but its developers’ choices aren’t necessarily those little known or commandline versions. To quote the Website, “The goal of Zenix is to provide a light weight “base” without sacrificing functionality expected of a Desktop.”

      [...]

      Zenix is currently on Distrowatch.com’s waiting list…

    • New Releases

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon XFCE: the story continues

        “Enough”, told I myself.
        I know now that Sabayon Linux is better than I though about it earlier. Some of the issues I had last time are solved.
        But Sabayon still requires more tweaking than I would like to make. And it behaves itself quite strange way sometimes.
        Does it mean I dump Sabayon? Not necessarily. I may come back to it later, but most likely with different desktop environment. KDE? GNOME? Guess or suggest!

      • New Gentoo Goodies
      • music videos made with gentoo
      • PMS Test Suite: getting the test results

        One of key problems in PMS Test Suite is getting actual test results. With the whole complexity of build process, including privilege dropping, sandbox, collision protection, auto-pretending it is not that easy to check whether a particular test succeeded without risking a lot of false positives.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Interview: Troy Dawson from Scientific Linux

        Red Hat Inc. rules the “enterprise” Linux market with their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product line. Novell Inc. (now owned by The Attachmate Group) is second with their SUSE Enterprise Linux product line. To the best of my knowledge, there aren’t any free SUSE Enterprise Linux clones but there are a number of free RHEL clones. CentOS is the most well known RHEL clone but with the seeming unending delay of the 6.0 release (July 11th is my guess), CentOS has received quite a bit of criticism leading some users to investigate alternatives. As a result, Scientific Linux is getting a lot of long overdue attention given the fact that it too is a solid enterprise clone… that has been around for a long time… that has a lot of support behind it.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Provides The Technology Foundation For Italian Dnshosting.it Cloud Offerings

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Dnshosting.it, the advanced Internet solutions developer located in Italy, has migrated its Cloud Server offering from VMware to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in order to remain competitive in the Italian market and gain the advantages of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology.

      • Obsidian drives Red Hat growth in emerging markets

        Adoption of open source systems in the South African enterprise is continuing unabated, with the country’s leading open source enterprise implementer, Obsidian, reporting a staggering 37% growth in Red Hat implementations in the past year. This is almost double the 21% global growth reported by Red Hat, the frontrunner in Linux-based enterprise systems.

        “I think it’s fair to say that open source adoption in South Africa has matured, but is still a long way from reaching saturation point,” says Muggie van Staden, Obsidian CEO. “The question is less ‘who is using it’ than ‘who isn’t using it’, with a great number of large corporates running mission-critical systems on Red Hat.”

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • So what is Ensemble anyway?

            Have you heard of Ensemble? Are you excited about Cloud/Service Orchestration? What? Ok you’re not alone if you are scratching your head.

            Ensemble is an implementation of a new idea that has been taking shape the last couple of years. Ever since Amazon hooked up a remote API to thousands of machines to provide access to their virtual infrastructure (and called it macaroni? err.. AWS), people have been dreaming up ways to take advantage of what is basically a robotic “NOC guy”. No longer do you have to pre-rack servers or call your vendor frantically to get servers sent next-day to your colo. Right?

            Naturally, the system administrators that would normally be in charge of racking servers, applied their existing tools to the job, to mixed success. Config management is really good at modelling identical hosts. But with virtual hosts instantly available, this left those thinking at a higher level wanting more. Chef in particular implemented a nice set of tools and functionality to allow this high level “service” definition with their knife tools and simple ruby API.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Sprint to launch Gingerbread smartphone and tablet on June 24

          Sprint will ship the 4.3-inch HTC Evo 3D 4G smartphone and seven-inch HTC Evo View 4G tablet on June 24 for $200 and $400, respectively. Both devices run Android 2.3, and offer the latest Sense UI layer — which is now supported with a new HTCdev developer site and an OpenSense SDK to tap the Evo 3D 4G’s 3D capabilities and the Evo View 4G’s Scribe pen technology.

        • Will your next PC be running Android?

          Recently, I predicted that the future of the PC may not be powered by the x86 processor architecture.

          With ARM chips assimilating everything from smartphones to cars, and companies like Nvidia working on high performance CPUs based on the ARM architecture, the assumption that x86 will continue to dominate the PC no longer looks iron-clad.

          One of the key catalysts for that realisation was Microsoft’s announcement that Windows 8 would support x86 and ARM. If Microsoft is picking up on a trend, you know it has momentum.

          The thing is, if it makes sense to question one half of the Wintel alliance, surely it makes sense to question the other. If today’s PCs largely run Windows on x86 processors, could tomorrow’s be Android on ARM?

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source identity: FreeNAS 8′s Josh Paetzel

    FreeNAS is an open source operating system based on FreeBSD and, as its name implies, designed for networked storage. The project recently celebrated the release of FreeNAS 8, which racked up some 43,000 downloads in the first 48 hours after its release.

    Techworld Australia caught up with Josh Paetzel, director of IT at iXsystems and project manager for FreeNAS 8, to talk about the current state of the OS, what lies ahead for it, and the relationship to FreeNAS 0.7.

  • Two Open Source Ideologies That Are Just Wrong

    Ideology #2: Open source project should all play nice together

    When Oracle announced their proposal to bring Hudson to Eclipse, a number of people complained to me and others why didn’t Eclipse Foundation force Oracle to work with Jenkins. There is a similar conversation going on with Oracle participating with LibreOffice. It seems people believe Apache should have rejected the project proposal, so Oracle would be forced to work with LibreOffice.

  • Community Doesn’t Come for Free

    At Eclipse, we talk a lot about community. Developing a community is an important part of being an open source project. It is from a community of users, adopters, and contributors that a project draws strength and longevity. Without a community, an open source project is just a bunch of code that might as well buried on a server behind a firewall somewhere in parts unknown.

  • Events

    • Upcoming Open Source Webinars: Bitnami, Hippo vs Plone, Sonatype

      Improving Your Java development with Maven 3 and Hudson – Attend this webinar to learn about the advantages of upgrading to Apache Maven 3, including improved speed, greater stability and increased compatibility. Jason will also talk about the greatly improved support for Maven 3 within Hudson that is easy to configure and supports complex build scenarios with ease. We will cover the Eclipse IDE integration for both Maven and Hudson that improves developer productivity.

    • Zarafa SummerCamp 2011

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Releases Chrome 12 Stable for Linux

        The Google Chrome developers at Google proudly announced last evening (June 7th) the stable release and immediate availability for download of the Google Chrome 12 web browser for Linux, Windows, Macintosh and Chrome Frame platforms.

        The new Google Chrome 12 web browser includes various interesting new features, such as the highly anticipated hardware accelerated 3D CSS support and a brand-new Safe Browsing mode.

    • Mozilla

      • Is Mozilla’s Webian Shell An Answer to Google’s Chrome OS?

        Mozilla Labs is generating a lot of buzz with its announcement of Webian Shell, which, as Digitizor notes, “basically consists of a browser which will replace the traditional desktop, and where the web applications are given more importance than the native applications.” You can download the early version of Webian Shell for Windows, Mac OS and Linux, but be warned that it exists in a very early version at this point. You can get a look at it here. Is Webian Shell an answer to Google’s Chrome OS?

      • Google and Mozilla Are Leveraging WebM and More for 3D Online Video

        Is 3D the future of web video? A few months ago, when Google announced its WebM video format, based on technology it acquired from On2, with its VP8 video codec, many people interpreted the move as an effort to undercut entrenched video standards, such as H.264. Could 3D video have been the actual brass ring that Google had its eyes on, though? Both Mozilla and Google are making moves to support 3D video in browsers, and Google’s YouTube web video juggernaut is increasingly supporting 3D videos. This blog post from Mozilla illustrates the focus that it has on 3D and Google’s efforts to make YouTube a haven for 3D videos. You can also find a good discussion of WebM and 3D video here.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice motors right along with a new release

      TDF proudly boasts that the latest LibreOffice “incorporates the contributions of over 120 developers (six times as many as the first beta released on the launch date).” And, that, “The majority of these contributors have started to hack LibreOffice code less than eight months ago, and this is an incredible achievement if one recalls that the OOo [OpenOffice.org] project has attracted a lower number of contributors in ten years.”

    • Oracle v. Google – 3rd Oracle In-House Attorney Gets Limited AEO Access

      A third Oracle in-house lawyer has been granted limited access to Attorneys’ Eyes Only materials. You will recall in an earlier ruling the magistrate denied Attorneys’ Eyes Only rights to Dorian Daley, Oracle general counsel, and limited the rights of Deborah Miller and Matthew Sarboraria, but the status of Andrew C. Temkin was left for further determination based on supplemental filings.

    • Google Granted Leave to File a Daubert Motion; Says Oracle’s Damages Report is Unreliable, Misleading – by pj

      Experts are hired by the parties. The parties hire them to say helpful things. There are all kinds of experts, some more reliable and independent than others. Do you remember when one of SCO’s proposed experts came to Groklaw and in a comment admitted that he took on the assignment to get paid and hopefully to attract more such work? So courts are not as much in awe of experts as the title might lead one to believe.

    • OpenOffice.org to Apache: What does it mean?

      What’s in it for Oracle?

      This is easy – Oracle off-loads OpenOffice.org, for which it has no further use, without damaging its relationship with IBM and other commercial OOo partners. They lose any revenues involved, but apparently they were resigned to losing those anyway. So for Oracle this is all up-side.

    • Publishing our recommendation to Oracle

      From time to time TDF is required to engage in private correspondence with parties, yet we are committed in our bylaws after a suitable period to make this content public.

  • CMS

  • Business

  • Funding

  • Project Releases

    • Naev 0.5.0 Release

      The Naev devteam is proud to announce the release of Naev 0.5.0! This release is the result of over a year of hard work done by nearly 30 committers. This release is just a step in the path for ultimate greatness and a major step forward in the maturity of Naev. It has many major gameplay changes and signifies the coming of age of Naev, which has now exceeded the tag of Escape Velocity clone.

      Due to the size of the 0.5.0 ndata, downloads shall from now on be hosted at Sourceforge instead of Google Code due to the latter’s arbitrary size limits.The rest of the project infrastructure will remain unchanged.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Here’s the Pitch: Open Ocean Celebrates Fund Three With Contest for Start-Ups

      ast September, an ambitious code-sharing initiative named Civic Commons was launched at the Gov 2.0 Summit in a bid to help city governments use information technology better. This week, Civic Commons took a big step forward with a new management team in place and $250,000 of funding from Omidyar Network.

      Former White House deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin will be the first executive director and Nick Grossman, former director of Civic Works at nonprofit Open Plans, will be its first managing director. Grossman was one of the lead architects of Civic Commons from its inception.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Google pits C++ against Java, Scala, and Go

      Google has released a research paper closely comparing the performance of C++, Java, Scala, and its own Go programming language.

      According to Google’s tests (PDF), C++ offers the fastest runtime of the four languages. But, the paper says, it also requires more extensive “tuning efforts, many of which were done at a level of sophistication that would not be available to the average programmer.”

    • Why OSCON Java?

      What is OSCON Java? It’s a good question. There are many Java conferences on every continent except Antarctica. Why is O’Reilly throwing its hat in the ring?

      The Java community has always been a broad, fractious, interesting mess, capable of doing surprising things with little warning, and that’s precisely why we’re attracted to it. It’s undeniable that Java is huge; it’s been in one of the top two slots on Tiobe’s Programming Community Index since Tiobe started in 2002. It’s always been one of the largest components of the technical book market. Java’s 2010 book sales represent a resurgence since 2008, but even in its weakest years, Java has always been one of the largest components of the book market. Beyond being huge, Java is one of the key languages of the open source movement. While there has been plenty of discussion over the years of the JDK’s status as open source software, there has been no shortage of open source projects. SourceForge lists more than 25,000 Java projects, more than any other language.

Leftovers

Reader’s Picks

Clip of the Day

Korean Gamers: APM Demonstration


Credit: TinyOgg

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