06.29.11

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Android and Red Hat Prove Linux’s Merit on Phones and Servers

  Debate over Linux’s viability on the desktop may rage unabated in light of the recent changes made to Canonical’s Ubuntu, in particular, but there’s no questioning the operating system’s strength in the server and mobile arenas.

• Sony CEO blurs line between Linux and piracy at shareholders’ meeting

  Sony CEO Howard Stringer told shareholders that his company was the target of hacker attacks in April “because we tried to protect our IP (intellectual property), our content, in this case videogames.”

  In April Sony was forced to take its PlayStation Network (PSN) offline for several weeks after hackers broke in and stole information from more than 70 million user accounts, finally relaunching it in May. A similar attack also affected Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) servers, which control Sony’s online role-playing games. Combined, more than 100 million user accounts were affected.

• Desktop

  • Farewell to Microsoft

    To me this seems to be the perfect combination, you can use all free software out there in your Linux computer (or partition) and also run that special software you really need on the Mac computer (or partition), and at the same time you can forget about the blue screen, you can forget about the poorly done operating system that Windows is.

  • DE: Munich’s move to a vendor independent desktop “on track”

    The German city of Munich’s migration to a vendor independent IT infrastructure is “in time, in budget and on track”, says one of the external consultants involved in the project. The city aims to migrate about 80 percent of all the city’s fifteen thousand desktop PCs to Ubuntu Linux.

    That 20 percent of the city administration’s PCs will remain locked-in to a proprietary operating system has been foreseen from the start, says Andreas Heinrich, a consultant at IBM closely involved in the project, dispelling rumours that the project is missing its target.

    “The project scope is to migrate 80 percent of PCs in the administration. From the onset, it was foreseen that there will be financial or technical constraints where a move to open source is not beneficial.”

  • Munich To Migrate 15,000 PCs To Ubuntu

    The German city of Munich’s migration to a vendor independent IT infrastructure is “in time, in budget and on track”, says one of the external consultants involved in the project. The city aims to migrate about 80 percent of all the city’s fifteen thousand desktop PCs to Ubuntu Linux.

    That 20 percent of the city administration’s PCs will remain locked-in to a proprietary operating system has been foreseen from the start, says Andreas Heinrich, a consultant at IBM closely involved in the project, dispelling rumours that the project is missing its target.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 3.0-rc5

    The most noteworthy thing may be that only about a quarter of the
    changes are in drivers, filesystem changes actually account for more
    (40%): btrfs, cifs, ext4, jbd2, nfs are all present and accounted for.

    On the driver side, there’s some gpu updates, infiniband, mmc, sound
    and some SCSI target fixes.

    And the normal random smattering of changes all around. Like some
    long-standing compile failure (admittedly you need to enable some
    esoteric resource counting options and disable NUMA to trigger it, but
    still). I think there’s a few more lurking in staging, with fixes yet
    to be merged.

  • Linux Turns 3

    In case you missed it, Linux is turning 3. Well, really, it’s turning 20. 20 years of Linux have come and gone, and yet, until recently, we’ve been stuck in 2.6.x kernel hell. The kernel has been in the 2.6 phase for almost half of that 20 years, in fact. This has caused endless annoyances for developers and distribution managers, sadly.

    You see, because my laptop runs kernel 2.6.32, it is relatively up to date. It includes the Completely Fair Scheduler, and a host of other major improvements over, say, a machine running 2.6.20. One might even suggest that two machines running kernels that far apart are essentially running completely different Linuxes. It’s like the difference between Windows XP and Windows 7.

• Applications

  • 9 Good Terminal Emulators for Linux

    We have featured a few Terminal emulators before and introduced you to applications like CLI Companion that makes you more familiar with command line in Linux. Now, we want to take it to a whole new level. A collection of really good Terminal emulator apps for Linux.

  • PackageKit backend for Software Center: late week 4 report

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Implement Bidirectional Interaction of Jetspeed Portlets Using Events

    • How To Migrate From Trac To Redmine

    • Book Review: The Book of Audacity by Carla Schroder

  • Games

    • Dev-corner: How to request art for your FOSS game project (and how not to)

      By far the biggest challenge in making art for FOSS games is that projects will have artists come and go, and because of that it’s difficult to maintain consistency between pieces of art. It’s possible to have a bunch of art elements that are all individually excellent but have a game that looks horrible because the art elements don’t go together well.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Putting things together

      Putting things together
      Half a year ago there was a thread on the kde-core-devel mailing list with the topic “why kdelibs?”. I gave a potential answer and this resulted in a series of great discussions. While these discussions were very constructive, it was pretty clear, that we would need an in-person meeting to finally answer the question about the future of the KDE platform.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • RIPLinuX 13.5

    • 27/06/2011 – Vinux 3.2 cutting edge released

    • Untangle 9.0.0

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Mandriva 2011 RC 1 Released, Almost

      Eugeni Dodonov announced the release of Mandriva 2011 RC1 earlier, but I’m still waiting for it to hit mirrors. He did actually said it was “coming,” so his announcement could be considered a big ole tease. In fact, I hate it when a release is announced and we have to keep checking the mirrors for it to actually become available. But they do this every time.

      Anyway, he said, “The images are built and are undergoing an internal testing right now, and unless any critical issues are discovered, they will be pushed to the mirrors in the coming hours! Those additional testings for RC1 images before their release to the mirrors was intended in order to certify that the final changes for the RC-stage of Mandriva 2011 release, containing the (almost) final UI and Desktop experience, do not result in any unexpected issues.”

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat offers training for private cloud

  • Debian Family

    • News from Debian

    • Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.2 released

      The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 (codename “squeeze”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments to serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux industrial net-top has ARM-powered Nvidia Tegra 2

    AndersDX has introduced an ARM-based industrial net-top computer based around NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 chip. The tiny (130x94x15mm) computer is a version of CompuLab’s Trim Slice, through a joint venture between the firms, writes Steve Bush.

  • Mentor Graphics Announces Embedded Linux Platform Support for Freescale Semiconductor’s Most Advanced QorIQ Family of Multi-threaded 64-bit Processors

  • Phones

    • Android Pulls In 500,000 Pairs of Eyeballs Every Day

      Android’s daily activations are on the rise, fulfilling Google’s hopes for building a massive base of users to view its mobile ads. “Eric Schmidt once commented that ‘scale was a key to making Android a big profit center,’” recalled ABI analyst Michael Morgan. “Schmidt said, ‘If we have a billion people using Android, you think we can’t make money from that? All it would take is $10 per user per year.’”

Free Software/Open Source

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla Thunderbird 5 Finally Available For Download

      Mozilla on Tuesday made available the official download of Thunderbird 5.0, the company’s email client software that hasn’t seen a major release update in nearly 18 months.

      The free download is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems and promises faster startup times, tabs that can be reordered and even dragged into new windows and attachment sizes displayed on the program.

    • Mozilla Reportedly Not Concerned About IT Distrust of New Firefox Releases

• Project Releases

  • Zend Server 5.5 Beta Advances PHP Automation

    Enterprise PHP vendor Zend is now testing a new version of its Zend Server in an effort to improve PHP application deployment automation.

    Zend Server 5.5 will be the first major update to the PHP middleware platform since the 5.0 release in October of 2009. The Zend Server 5.5 release has a key focus on helping to improve automated PHP app deployment.

• Licensing

  • Unbelievable statements in GPL related case in the Supreme Court of Mauritius

Leftovers

• Security

  • John The Ripper Expedites Password Auditing

  • Protecting Linux Against DoS/DDoS Attacks

    When I first heard ridiculous-sounding terms like smurf attack, fraggle attack, Tribal Flood Network (TFN), Trinoo, TFN2K, and stacheldraht, I didn’t take them too seriously for a couple of reasons — I worked mainly on non-Internet facing systems and I was never a victim. I thought it was primarily a network or application administrator’s problem.

    I am not too proud to admit that I was completely wrong. The truth is that I only had a grasp of the impact of such attacks but I didn’t know anything about the methods and the things that can and should be done at the operating system level.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Competition Bureau Reaches Agreement with Bell Canada Requiring Bell to Pay $10 Million for Misleading Advertising

    The Competition Bureau announced today that Bell Canada has agreed to stop making what the Bureau had concluded were misleading representations about the prices offered for its services. Under the terms of a consent agreement filed with the Competition Tribunal, Bell is also required to pay an administrative monetary penalty of $10 million, the maximum amount allowed under the Competition Act.

• Privacy

  • Facebook spent $230,000 lobbying in 1Q

    Facebook spent $230,000 lobbying the federal government in the first quarter on issues such as online privacy, rules that aim for equitable Internet access and other issues, according to a disclosure report.

    That’s up from $130,000 Facebook spent in the fourth quarter and nearly six times the $41,390 that it spent in the first quarter of last year.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Forget “Skinny Basic”, It’s Time For the CRTC To Mandate Full Consumer Broadcast Choice

    The CRTC vertical integration hearing continues today, following several full days last week in which the Commissioners repeatedly asked whether companies such as Rogers, Bell, and Shaw should be required to offer a “skinny basic” service – a cheaper television package with limited programming. The introduction of skinny basic appears to be one of the CRTC’s preferred responses to the issue, since it is concerned that vertically integrated companies will use their broadcast distribution services to require subscribers to subscribe to their broadcast properties. The major integrated providers have opposed the idea, arguing consumers aren’t interested.

  • Ottawa to contract out spying, but who cares? It’s only the Internet

    Imagine that, because you’re pressed for time, you take a cab to the library. The cab driver is obliged by law to install a device that will monitor where he takes you. While in the cab, you call your friend to talk about your day. The phone company is obliged to track whom you talk to and for how long.

  • Civil Society Groups Reject OECD Internet Policy Principles

    The OECD is meeting this week in Paris for a meeting on the Internet economy. The meeting features many government leaders and is expected to conclude with a Communiqué on Principles for Internet Policy-Making. This builds on the June 2008 OECD meeting in Seoul, Korea that not only placed the spotlight on Internet economy issues, but opened the door to participation of civil society groups in OECD policy making. That was a big step forward, but today there was a major step back as the civil society groups – now representing over 80 organizations from around the world under the name CSISAC – announced that it was withdrawing its name from support of the draft OECD communique.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Canadian ‘Lawful Access’ laws come at too high a price, critics argue

      Hidden deep within the federal government’s comprehensive bundle of crime legislation lies a bill that opponents claim will rob Canadians their right to online privacy as well as their cash.

      During the last federal election campaign, Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed to combine 11 separate crime bills into one omnibus piece of legislation and pass it within 100 days of taking power should his Conservative Party win a majority.

    • Drake Tells Universal Music To Stop Taking Down The Music He’s Leaking

      It’s been an interesting week for Universal Music. The company was outed for their secret war on various hiphop blogs, including some of the sites of their own artists, such as 50 Cent, whose personal site was declared a “pirate” site on a list that Universal helped put together. Now, super popular Universal artist Drake is lashing out at Universal for issuing takedowns over his own music. Apparently, like many artists who value the promotion, he’s been leaking his own tracks to the various hiphop sites and blogs that Universal has declared evil. And Universal has been taking them down, leading Drake to tell them to stop…

    • The AUCC Diagnoses the Problem but Prescribes the Wrong Remedy

      Unfortunately, while the AUCC correctly diagnosed some of the problems, it asks to Board to prescribe the wrong remedy. I am not persuaded that amending the Interim Tariff to require Access Copyright to grant transactional licenses on a per copy basis—as the AUCC requests—is the optimal remedy for these issues. In fact, I am concerned that ordering Access Copyright to grant transactional licenses might actually—under some circumstances—aggravate the problem. While I am confident that this was not the AUCC’s intention, I believe that the remedy that it proposes could inadvertently backfire and serve the interests of Access Copyright to the detriment of Canadian academic institutions.