06.11.11

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• 10 things you probably did not know about SELinux.. #6

  SELinux labels are placed on disk during the installation by a combination of Anaconda and rpm. Anaconda actually includes the latest /etc/selinux/targeted/files/file_context and /etc/selinux/targeted/policy/policy.26 in its initrd. When anaconda starts rpm, rpm reads this file and proceeds to place the labels on disk. RPM has SELinux awareness built into it and asks the kernel to place the default label on the disk for every object that it creates from its payload. If an rpm post install script runs during the install, the labels are created using the standard process labelling described below. Any file system objects created by Anaconda before loading the policy into the kernel will be relabelled by Anaconda using restorecon.

• Kernel Space

  • Goodbye 2.6.x – A downloadable archive of all Linux 2.6.x kernel releases

    Linus Torvalds has announced Linux kernel 3.0-rc1, this marks the end of 2.6.x series line which has 40 releases since late 2003.

    To mark this event, Con Kolivas has made a tarball archive (163MB) of all 2.6.x releases available for download. The archive uses lrzip compression which can be installed from the standard Ubuntu apt-get repository.

  • KQ ZFS Linux Is No Longer Actively Being Worked On

    Remember KQ Infotech? KQ Infotech was the Indian company that ported the ZFS file-system to Linux as an out-of-tree kernel module (after deriving the code from the LLNL ZFS Linux work) and KQ’s interesting methods of engagement in our forums. The company was successful in delivering an open-source ZFS module for Linux that performed semi-well and didn’t depend upon FUSE (the file-systems for user-space module) like other implementations. However, this ZFS Linux code appears to no longer be worked on by KQ Infotech.

  • Graphics Stack

    • A Fresh Look At The AMD Radeon Gallium3D Performance

• Applications

  • Top 15 Avant Window Navigator “AWN” Themes | Part 3

    An infinite Avant Window Navigator AWN dock themes collections looks amazing with different styles ” Lucido, Floaty, Edgy, Curved, 3D, and Flat style”. Also you might want to check Part 1 and Part 2 AWN themes.

  • Do I need an Anti-virus program on Linux?

    This is a question often asked by new users of Linux. (See here.) The short answer often given is no, but that answer often stirs controversy. (See here.)

  • GIMPBox: Get A Single-Window Mode In Stable GIMP (2.6.x)

    GIMP from SVN (2.7.x) comes with a built-in single-window mode (can be disabled) but I find it unstable sometimes so I prefer to use the stable GIMP 2.6.x, especially since there are so many goodies you can use to enhance it, like GIMP Painter and GIMP Paint Studio, G’MIC or the GIMP Plugin Registry package.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Fixing USB Playback Issues for Video Files on LG, Samsung and other TVs – e.g. “Invalid File”

    • Unusual SSH

  • Games

    • Interview with Troy of MyGameCompany, part 2 in the replies

      The latest installement of Gaming On Linux interview time has been well spent with Troy the founder of MyGameCompany.com

    • Irukandji On Ubuntu Software Centre

• Desktop Environments

  • Enlightenment, DR17 and EFLs

    Enlightenment – This is the original name of the project. Today when it is referenced it should refer to the project as a whole – not just one particular part.

    DR17 – Also often called E17. This refers to the next major revision of the Enlightenment desktop/window manager. It is under heavy development (and has been for some time). The current stable revision of the desktop is DR16.

    EFLs – Stands for “Enlightenment Foundation Libraries”. These are the core of the Enlightenment desktop, but not the desktop itself. In simplest terms the EFLs are to the Enlightenment desktop as GTK is to Gnome and QT is to KDE.

• Distributions

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat’s Oracle shot: The Unbreakable Database?

    • Fedora

      • Fusion Linux – most popular Fedora Remix

        It looks like we are doing something right because we are most popular Fedora Remix. Just click on Smolt Stats and then on OS tab to see for yourself.

        Of course we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for great Fedora community, thank you all. Fedora has an amazing community and amazing tools that make the job of creating Fedora Remix quite easy.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • 5 Useful Unity Lenses You Can Install Right Now!

          Ubuntu 11.04 Unity brought in many important UI improvements and Ubuntu Lens has been one of the highlights. Finding and launching applications and files in Ubuntu have never been easier. But Unity Lens concept is not confined to just applications and files search, it is much bigger than that. A slew of really cool Lenses are in development and some of them are even available for installation already. Interesting list of Unity Lenses you can install right now.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Would You Use A Chromebook If You Got One For Free ?

Free Software/Open Source

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • The Decline and Fall of OpenOffice.org

    In other words, LibreOffice will be both months ahead of OpenOffice.org, and able to borrow OpenOffice.org code, and OpenOffice.org behind and unable to borrow LibreOffice code.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Emacs user at work

  • Richard Stallman Opts to Disobey Anti-Piracy Law

    In a recent interview the the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Richard Stallman says that the public should disobey Spain’s new anti-piracy law.

    “It is as unfair as Sarkozy and Berlusconi, and should be disobeyed by users,” Stallman says referring to The Sinde Act.

    “How many authors writing earn money to pay his expenses? A hundred, five hundred? Is that enough to restrict freedom of all? Collecting user’s private data should only be legal with a court order when there is suspicion that someone is preparing a crime. Non-commercial file-sharing should be legalized. It is a fundamental freedom.”

    Stallman further commented on his hair (“my long hair was a political decision”, and his baby (the Free Software Foundation), which he says accomplished more than most real kids.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Access/Content

    • The National Academies Press Makes All PDF Books Free to Download

• Programming

  • Hackers for a good cause

    In Silicon Valley, where the latest tech innovations are celebrated, a group of hackers is creating new purposes for old technology.

    The nascent movement, Random Hacks of Kindness, has, like many smart things born in the region, quickly spread around the globe. The idea sprang from a community of hackers — unlike criminals who aim to disrupt governments or steal data, these engineers work on code for the good of humanity — who met for a weekend hackathon two years ago to work on various projects. The concept is to deploy existing technology in new ways that address various challenges facing the world, such as locating missing people during a natural disaster.

  • V8 is faster than GCC

  • Gold readiness obstacle #4: libtool (part 1)

Leftovers

• Clouds Eventually Burst

• WikiLeaks: Great power rivalry at the UN

• Cablegate

  • Will Wikileaks founder Julian Assange win Nobel Peace Prize 2011?

    THE nominations for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize have been released – now it’s about time they released some of the previous winners.

• Finance

  • The ‘Big Short’ and Goldman’s New Story

    One more thing I wanted to point about about Andrew Ross Sorkin’s story defending Goldman Sachs and Lloyd Blankfein the other day, in which it was posited that Goldman did not, in fact, have a “Big Short” in 2007. Sorkin says that according to Goldman, the firm’s net short position that summer may have been as low as $5 billion, and not $16 billion as claimed, therefore Lloyd Blankfein was not lying when he told the Senate, “We did not have a massive short bet.”

    Given that Sorkin was apparently given access to a large trove of documents allowing him to make the case that Goldman didn’t have that “Big Short” on, I thought it would be instructive for readers to see what kind of answers the Senate got when it asked Goldman executives the same questions about the size of the banks’ short bet. They gave Sorkin the whole store, but Levin’s committee basically got name, rank, serial number, and a big legalese “eat me.”

    See if you can notice some consistencies in the following statements.

• Privacy

  • Regulator asked to stop Facebook face recognition

  • Facebook to Be Probed in EU for Facial Recognition in Photos

    Facebook Inc. will be probed by European Union data-protection regulators over a feature that uses face-recognition software to suggest people’s names to tag in pictures without their permission.

    A group of privacy watchdogs drawn from the EU’s 27 nations will study the measure for possible rule violations, said Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. Authorities in the U.K. and Ireland said they are also looking into the photo-tagging function on the world’s most popular social-networking service.

  • Are you up to the Tor challenge?

    You may remember that back in March at the LibrePlanet 2011 conference, we presented the 2010 Award for Projects of Social Benefit to the Tor Project — by using free software, Tor has enabled roughly 36 million people around the world to experience freedom of access and expression on the Internet while keeping them in control of their privacy and anonymity.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Judge Reconsiders Allowing US Copyright Group To Shake Down 23,322 People Over Potential Expendables Infringement

      We recently noted that a judge in one of the biggest mass copyright infringement lawsuits ever filed, representing 23,322 potential infringers of the movie The Expendables, had allowed the lawyers at US Copyright Group to issue subpoenas on those people in order to properly serve them with the lawsuit. However, it appears the judge is reconsidering — perhaps because lots of people have since raised the point that these efforts often appear more like a shakedown than any legitimate lawsuit, and the judge has taken notice. After saying that “several issues… have recently come to light regarding this case”, he goes on to berate US Copyright Group lawyers for failing to have served a single person out of the 23,322.