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

GNU/Linux
- Distributions
- Devices/Embedded
Free Software/Open Source
Leftovers
Clip of the Day

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
- Install ScreenRuler in Ubuntu
- Yakito a multimedia converter
  
  At the moment my favourite way to do (simple) elaborations and conversions of multimedia file is FFMPEG. But i understand that is not exactly the most user-friendly tool around, so if you don’t want to open the terminal and read the man page of FFMPEG perhaps you could take a look at Yakito.
- Proprietary
  - FOSS Hacker’s Reverse-Engineering Has Skype Seething
    
    Skype’s code has been hacked and its innards published on the Web by Efim Bushmanov, a self-described freelance researcher in the tiny Komi Republic, about 870 miles from Moscow.
    
    His aim, he said, was to make Skype open source.
    
    Another goal: to find “friends who can spend many hours for completely reverse it” because he hadn’t finished the task.
    
    The move has Skype fuming.
    
    “We are taking all necessary steps to prevent or defeat nefarious attempts to subvert Skype’s experience,” said spokesperson Sravanthi Agrawal.
    
    “Skype takes its users’ safety and security seriously, and we work tirelessly to ensure each individual has the best possible experience,” Agrawal continued.
- Instructionals/Technical
- Wine
  - Wineconf 2011 dates and location has been set
- Games
  - World of Goo- A game that you should know about
    
    Well if you have a yen for puzzles and Physics is of particular interest to you, then World of Goo is something that you should never miss exploring. The other is a true-blood MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) called Vendetta online.
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
    - Review: Kororaa 14 “Nemo”
      
      I had no stability or other issues with KDE, which is at version 4.6 in Kororaa.
    - IPv6 Test Day tomorrow (World IPv6 Day)
- 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
  - Viewsonic unveils pair of seven-inch Android tablets
    
    ViewSonic announced a new ViewBook tablet line, starting with a Android 2.2-powered, seven-inch ViewBook 730 with a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, all for $250. At Computex last week, the company also tipped a more powerful Nvidia Tegra 2-based seven-inch tablet called the ViewPad 7x, running Android 3.x.
  - Competition Heats Up and Prices Come Down for Android/Linux Tablets
    
    It’s like Christmas all year round with tablets. Expect explosive growth in shipments of Android/Linux tablets. If I get another job,

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
- Heroku Announces Major New Version, “Celadon Cedar”; Includes New Process Model, Full Node.js Support
- CloudBees Introduces First Commercial Java Platform as a Service With Advanced Clustering and Auto-Scaling Features
  
  CloudBees, the Java PaaS innovation leader, today announced a for-pay offering for its RUN@cloud Java Platform as a Service (PaaS). Developers can now decide, per application, whether they’d like to utilize a free plan (with limited memory and computing resources) or benefit from increased memory, more computing capacity and/or additional features through a pay-as-you go pricing scheme.
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
- Acquia Partners With Engine Yard to Offer Cloud Services for Fully Managed Drupal and Ruby on Rails Apps
  
  Acquia, the leading provider of commercial solutions for Drupal, today announced plans to partner with Engine Yard, the leading Ruby on Rails development and deployment platform for the cloud, to offer a fully managed cloud solution for Drupal and Ruby on Rails (RoR). This new partnership will accelerate development of social websites and custom web applications for professionals who use Drupal and RoR.
Business
- Digium® Adds Fixed Mobile Convergence to Switchvox, its Award-Winning Unified Communications Solution
  
  Switchvox version 5.0 offers advanced features for integrating business applications and seamless mobile communications inside and outside the office
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
- Open Data
  - Informatica Overhauls Data Integration Platform for Big Data and Social Media
    
    Informatica (NASDAQ: INFA) says it has unleashed the business potential of “big data” by offering support for social media data and Hadoop in the new Informatica 9.1 open data integration platform.
- Open Hardware
  - ‘Open-source,’ privately-funded rocket lifts off
    
    Copenhagen Suborbitals is a self-described Danish open-source, privately-funded, non-profit organization with a mission to launch humans into space.
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

The Evolution of My Complex Relationship with Blogging

I started blogging at the urging of colleagues at IBM. In the Spring of 2005 the company was getting ready to launch a major blogging initiative to encourage its employees to participate in the rapidly growing blogosphere. My colleagues felt that as someone closely associated with IBM’s Internet strategy, it was important that I personally become an active blogger.
Science
- DNA logic gates calculate square root using 130 different molecules
  
  Biological systems have caught the attention of computer scientists, who have been turning everything from RNA molecules to entire bacterial colonies into logic gates. So far, however, these systems have been relatively small-scale, with only a handful of gates linked up in a series. Today’s issue of Science leapfrogs past the small-scale demonstrations, and shows that a form of DNA computing can perform a calculation with up to 130 different types of DNA molecules involved. The system is so flexible that it’s also possible to use compilers and include debugging circuitry.
Security
- One in four US hackers ‘is an FBI informer’
- Sony offers successor to PSP and hacking apology
- Security firm RSA offers to replace SecurID tokens
- RSA admits SecurID tokens have been compromised
  
  RSA has finally admitted publicly that the March breach into its systems has resulted in the compromise of their SecurID two-factor authentication tokens.
Intellectual Monopolies
- Trademarks
  - ISYS Technologies Sues Google and Its Partners, Claiming Violation of Its ChromiumPC Trademark; Restraining Order Sought to Stop Launch of Chromebook and Chromebox
- Copyrights
  - Russian President Proposes Creative Commons-Style Rules Baked Directly Into Copyright
    
    But would that really be true? Does building a more flexible, more modern copyright law really mean a lack of respect for copyright? Why wouldn’t it mean a healthy respect for building a system that matches better with the times — rather than the industry’s kneejerk reaction to just keep ratcheting up the punishments, enforcements and coverage of copyright?
  - G8 Leaders Give In to Special Interests, Fail to Commit to Freedoms
    
    The most detailed part of the communiqué1 is that on copyright. It calls for an increased private censorship to prevent the sharing of culture online2, like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), just after the EU Commission announced its strategy to take on infringements “at the source” and after the U.S Protect IP Act was passed unanimously a committee vote in the Senate.
  - ACTA
    - UN Report on Freedom of Expression Bashes G8, ACTA, Hadopi.
      
      A report on Internet policy by the UN Special Rapporteur on the protection of freedom of opinion and expression will be presented today. The report’s guidelines aimed at protecting fundamental freedoms clash radically with the course set by governments of the G8. This report will be essential to help citizens hold their governments accountable for policies undermining online freedoms.

Reader’s Picks

Microsoft bungles Skype again. Microsoft boosters pretend this has nothing to do with Microsoft.
Defence/Police/Aggression
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
- “Arab Spring” inspires Canadian Global Warming Protest
  
  It’s probably one of the more exciting things I’ve seen in the Senate in a long time.
- E.coli superbug outbreak in Germany due to abuse of antibiotics in meat production
  
  Of course, virtually every report you’ll read on this in the mainstream media has the facts wrong. This isn’t about cucumbers being dangerous, because e.coli does not grow on cucumbers. E.coli is an intestinal strain of bacteria that only grows inside the guts of animals (and people). Thus, the source of all this e.coli is ANIMAL, not vegetable. …
Finance
- Banksters defeat already flimsy loan regulation in NC with racist automated calls and bought politicians.
  
  The call says the bill is essential for “hometown lenders” and to increase credit access for “small business and families.” But nowhere does it mention why financial interests are pushing it: because it increases from 25 percent to 36 percent the amount of interest lenders can charge consumers on small loans, allows for new fees, and other measures that boost lender profits.
Privacy
- Google warns against phishing, fails to call out Windows, and is smeared for their efforts.
- The PAT RIOT act lays claim to all business records without a warrant. Senators tell us government now routinely tracks people with cell phone location and a lot more that will leave the public outraged but are unable to divulge the details because they are state secrets.
  
  “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said, “they will be stunned and they will be angry.”
- The ACLU is challenging drug tests for welfare recipients.
Civil Rights
- Sharing passwords is now a Crime in the US State of Tennessee. There are as many confusions in the article as there are in the law and those who passed it.
  
  [under the expanded cable theft bill it is] a crime to use a friend’s login — even with permission — to listen to songs or watch movies from services such as Netflix or Rhapsody. … services that believe they are getting ripped off can go to law enforcement authorities and press charges. … Stealing $500 or less of entertainment would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and a fine of $2,500. Theft with a higher price tag would be a felony, with heavier penalties.
  
  Copyright infringement is not theft. The values attributed to these non crimes are as ridiculous as the law itself. Using an otherwise unused service is no more copyright infringement than lending a book to someone. The concept of “blatant offenders” is foolish for many reasons and laws should be written with more precision.