Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Five Chromebook concerns for businesses

    Make no mistake about it. I like my Samsung Series 5 Chromebook a lot. I think it will become a major challenge to Windows on light-duty business desktops… eventually.

  • Counting PCs and Their OS

    This looks promising for GNU/Linux even in business.

• Server

  • ARM server startup tries jumpstarting datacenter software ecosystem

    The ARM onslaught attack on the datacenter proceeds apace, as ARM server vendor Calxeda (formerly Smooth Stone) announces that it’s teaming up with Canonical and nine other software vendors to form a “Trailblazer Initiative” aimed at creating a full-blown ARM server ecosystem.

  • Canonical: Ubuntu Server Embracing ARM Architectures

• Kernel Space/Compilers

  • More Details From The EKOPath Open-Source Launch

    Yesterday we delivered the news that PathScale was open-sourcing their high-performance EKOPath compiler suite, which in previous days was talked about on Phoronix under the Dirndl codename when showing how fast this compiler was in relation to GCC. The community indeed is excited for EKOPath now being open-source (GPLv3) and in the Phoronix Forums are currently 15+ pages of comments. In this news posting are some more EKOPath details from the forums and some of what Christopher Bergström, PathScale’s CTO, has relayed in our community portal.

  • Linux 3.1 with new KVM tool?

    Pekka Enberg has announced the release of the second version of the “Native Linux KVM Tool”. It offers SMP support, Virtio network communication via TAP-based interfaces and access to the host file system via Virtio-9p. Experimental GUI support using SDL and VNC has also been added.

    With these additions the KVM tool has, in a short time, acquired many functions that are needed in typical scenarios and were still missing in the first version. Like Qemu-Kvm, the Native Linux KVM Tool handles the emulation of hardware components such as graphics and network chips, because the KVM hypervisor itself doesn’t deal with those tasks.

  • Xen lets KVM overtake

    Xen made virtualisation a popular issue on Linux servers and seemed for a long time to be the open source virtualisation technology of choice. But the Xen developers lost that advantage by setting the wrong priorities. KVM was able to take over some key positions and, with a large number of promoters, is now in a better position.

    Originally created as part of a research project in the late 1990s, the Xen hypervisor was open sourced in 2002; the first official release of Xen 1.0 was made in 2004. From then on, virtualisation on Linux servers quickly moved into the centre of attention. Soon, there were the first serious indications that it would not be long before Xen support became part of the Linux kernel. Virtualisation was considered a important future market.

  • Test Plan for Linux File System Fsck Testing

    Testing storage systems or any aspect of IT systems is definitely not an easy task. It takes careful planning, testing and hardware for proper benchmarks. Even if we are trying to be careful, it can be easy to forget, omit (either by design or as an accident), or misconfigure systems and benchmarks. Hence, the results are, unfortunately, less useful and maybe don’t meet the original requirements. Henry and I often call these Slimy Benchmarking Tricks (SBTs). The end result is that good tests or benchmarks are difficult to do well. Perhaps as a consequence, much of the benchmarking we see today is of very poor quality, to the degree that it is virtually useless and more often than not, entertaining (and sometime frustrating).

  • LexisNexis Joins Linux Foundation

  • More Linux Benchmarks Of The AMD A8-3500M Fusion APU

    Earlier this week we delivered launch-day Linux benchmarks of the AMD A8-3500M “Llano” Fusion APU. The results for this next-generation, quad-core Fusion chip were impressive with the graphics and compute power being several times faster than the common AMD E-350 Fusion APU. In that article we just had two other systems the A8-3500M performance was being compared to, but here are some more Linux benchmarks comparing Llano to other systems running Ubuntu 11.04.

• Applications

  • 10 More Great Tools for the Terminal

  • FOFF – a lightweight graphical FTP client

    Free Open FTP Face is a lightweight graphical (GTK+) FTP client written in python. It is multiplatform, emphasizes on simplicity and ease of use, while providing a rich set of convenience features.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • 7 Linux Shell Tips For Increased Productivity

    • Things You Can’t Do With a GUI: Finding Stuff on Linux

    • Installing the Theme Selector Gnome Shell Extension

    • Using a Rewrite in Nginx to send WordPress feeds to feedburner

    • Book Overview: Ubuntu Unleashed 2011 Edition

    • Debian Squeeze, Squid, Kerberos/LDAP Authentication, Active Directory Integration And Cyfin Reporter

    • Things You Can’t Do With a GUI: Finding Stuff on Linux

    • Display files information with stat

    • Using a Rewrite in Nginx to send WordPress feeds to feedburner

    • Encrypting an Enterprise Desktop with TrueCrypt

    • ufw – Iptables under Ubuntu

    • How to: Quick and Dirty Web Server Load Balancing with IPTables in Linux

  • Wine

    • q4wine 0.121 released

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Oxygen-gtk 1.1 is out

      The first major release of Oxygen-gtk has been uploaded to kde ftp servers on Wednesday June 15 and is available for download here.

      This release comes with many improvements over the 1.0 series, which include:

      * animations (smooth glow on mouse-over and focus for virtually all widgets, similar with what exists for the Qt version), controlled using the same configuration options as the Qt version, via oxygen-settings;

    • Beware of KDE 4.6.4

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 12th June 2011

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME 3 install-fest took place in Beijing, too

• Distributions

  • Puredyne: pure creativity

    Actually, Puredyne is not a project grown on the empty space. I would say it has dad and even granddad.
    Dad is… dynebolic. Yes, Puredyne project was inspired by Dynebolic. They have lots in common. And most important, both are oriented to creative people.

  • Debian Family

    • New round of Debian IRC Training Sessions

      The Debian project is pleased to announce the forthcoming start of a new round of IRC Training Sessions, which will be held on IRC by experienced community members. There will be two different series of sessions:

    • Derivatives

      • Announcing Planet Debian Derivatives!

        The first concrete outcome from the Debian derivatives census is the creation of Planet Debian Derivatives. For those of you who are interested in the activites of distributions derived from Debian, it aggregates the blogs and planets of all the distributions represented in the derivatives census. The list of feeds will be expanded semi-automatically as more distributions participate in the census and maintainers of census pages add new blog and planet URLs. Many thanks to Joerg Jaspert for doing the nessecary setup procedures for the addition of the new sub-planet to Planet Debian. I’m glad that it was accepted alongside the sole language-based sub-planet (Planet Debian Spanish).

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Community Proposed Unity Design

          Arian van Gend is an Ubuntu user who has started a project to gather community ideas for Unity with the intent to present it to the Unity design team. But before doing that, he wants some feedback from you.

        • Sharing Ubuntu with the world

        • Flavours and Variants

          • FOLLOW-UP: Poll: Should I Switch away from Linux Mint?

            So yesterday, I wrote a post asking if I should switch away from Linux Mint to a different distribution. Many comments suggested that I stay with Linux Mint, but upgrade to the newest version. A few others suggested Pinguy OS or Ultimate Edition. Still others suggested…Slackware, of all things.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • One Laptop Per Child Infographic

Free Software/Open Source

• Airtime: open source software for radio stations

  The Sourcefabric developers have released an update to their open source Airtime radio software that adds a number of improvements which make it easier to install and upgrade to new versions. Airtime is a server application which allows users, from any modern web browser, to upload audio, create playlists with drag and drop, incorporate track transitions, build complete shows and then schedule them for transmission.

  [...]

  The developers recommend using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a computer with at least 512 MB RAM and a 1 GHz processor.

• Second “Win a Boxee Box” contest kicks off!

  BoxeeBoxTips.com is pleased to announce our second “Win a Boxee Box” contest. The contest begins immediately and runs through midnight (PDT) on July 31, 2011.

• Tomahawk releases its sleek new avatar

  Hope this name is not too unfamiliar! Just for those hearing this for the first time, Tomahawk is a cross platform open source media player and it can play music regardless of where the music content is stored. It is gaining popularity as a media player among the Ubuntu community too. Tomahawk recently announced the release of a new version –the Tomahawk Media Player 0.1.

• Open Source Could Change the Future of E-Discovery

  Software developers on the outskirts of the e-discovery field are working on several open-source projects to make the electronic search-and-analysis process into a cost-free, standards-based proposition.

  Independent projects are underway from a contract programmer in Houston, a team of information management experts throughout Europe and Australia, and a search engine consulting firm in Virginia. Their mutual goal: to help companies get respectable e-discovery software and make the technology feasible for every size of lawsuit and budget.

  [...]

  Starting points for that kind of software stack are Apache-licensed components such as the Lucene indexing and searching program interface, Mahout machine-learning tool, Nutch data crawler, Solr enterprise search package and Tika document filtering utility, he explained.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 5 RC Updates Version Number and Little Else

      Over the past seven years, we’ve come to expect Firefox Web browser releases to bring major new interface changes, improved performance, and browsing tools. But since Mozilla decided to follow Google’s frequent release strategy, we’ll have to temper our expectations for new Firefox releases. Version 5 of Mozilla’s volunteer-crafted browser software brings a lot of fixes, but pretty much zilch when it comes to interface advancements or new user tools.

• Databases

  • Couchbase Improves NoSQL Performance

    The open source NoSQL Apache CouchDB database is set to get a major performance boost thanks to commercial services vendor Couchbase.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice 3.4 released: Is it a worthy replacement for premium Office Suites?

    Microsoft seems to have a tough ride ahead, they seem to have lost the patent case for its Office suite. Now open source tools from Open Office.Org and LibreOffice Suites are competing aggressively with MS Office for market share. The main reason is the Open Source tag associated with the first two choices. It is inexpensive and enjoys backing from a large community of developers. Today let us take a look at the latest release from the LibreOffice Suite- the LibreOffice 3.4.

  • LibreOffice gets serious with new release and Advisory Board

    This week we saw the release of a stable version of LibreOffice with the 3.3.3 release, which in my mind is a big deal. Sure they just put out LibreOffice 3.4 recently, but putting out new releases (in a way) is almost easier than doing the nitty, gritty of maintaining ‘older’ releases.

    Keeping two (or more) software tracks on track is no easy task for any open source project, but it seems to be one that the Document Foundation is pulling off with flying colors.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Manual Override

  • Evergreen Joins the Software Freedom Conservancy

    The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has added another organization — the Evergreen project joins the SFC as the 27th member project. Since we’re halfway through 2011, I took the opportunity to check in with Conservancy executive director Bradley Kuhn to see how things are going with the organization.

• Licensing

  • Hadoop alternative to be open sourced

    The community edition will be released under the GNU Affero GPL v3 license.

• Programming

  • EGit and JGit 1.0 Released

    In the end, we are happy to bring Git tooling to the Eclipse community and the Indigo release. I hope by the time this next year, the eclipse.org community has fully migrated to Git. It should be a hard requirement to join the Juno simultaneous release in my opinion.

Leftovers

• Science

  • How Republicans Talk About Climate When No One’s Listening

    Sarah Palin may now dismiss global warming as a “bunch of snake oil science,” but just a few years ago, back when she was governor of the state melting into the sea, she was inclined to care about the subject. It’s well-known that she established a task force to address climate change in the state, but later flip-flopped on the issue. Yet as one exchange in the trove of emails released by the state of Alaska last week shows, Palin at one point actually took climate science quite seriously.

    In an email exchange from July 2007, Palin discussed global warming with her brother, Chuck Heath Jr., who was taking part in a climate change study program for science teachers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the state’s environment commissioner. Heath wrote:

    Sarah, I’m just about done with my 80 hour course on global climate change. Most of it has been focused on coastal erosion which is probably a bigger deal than you’re aware of … I have met some of the top scientists in the world on the subject and if you’d like, I can organize another advisory task force (which would include scientists, economists, citizens who live in these areas) who can give recommendations to the state. The problem is accelerating quickly so it would be good to get a handle on it now.

• Security

  • A risky currency? Alleged $500,000 Bitcoin heist raises questions

    Bitcoin, the decentralized virtual currency whose value has skyrocketed in recent weeks, faced a key test Monday as a veteran user reported that Bitcoins worth hundreds of thousands of dollars had been stolen from his computer.

• Cablegate

  • Exposure Of Information v. Exposure To Information

    The government’s recent declassification of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers corrects a 40-year mistake. But the motive may have had more to do with defending a current wrong than righting an old one.

    Several months ago, the White House directed federal agencies to warn employees and contractors that viewing classified documents made public via WikiLeaks violated “applicable laws and…policies.”

    After it was pointed out that this notice could be equally applied to the Pentagon Papers – long available on public bookshelves and a staple of modern history courses despite their continued “secret” status – the government announced that they would be declassified.

    (Most Americans probably didn’t even realize the Pentagon Papers still were officially secret. Until that announcement, people familiar with the case expressed surprise to me that this was so.)

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Fukushima: It’s much worse than you think

    “Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.

    Japan’s 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.

    Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Usage based billing is a joke and a major scam.

    It always amazes me how large corporations can never get enough money and constantly surpass the line between good business sense to complete corporate greed. For over a decade, Internet Service Providers have been providing unlimited Internet usage at a relatively reasonable price. Today, these same corporations no longer provide unlimited Internet usage and have imposed draconian data caps. They have moved from unlimited data transfer to a mere 80 gigabyte limit for $65 per month and an additional 1 gigabyte will cost you $1.50, even though it only costs $0.03 for the ISP to transfer it over their networks.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Non paper distributed at SCCR 22 at 1pm on Friday, on disabilities

    In a major breakthrough on the WIPO negotiations on copyright exceptions for persons with disabilities, at around 1pm today, a non-paper “resulting from informal discussions among Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, the European Union and its Member States, Mexico, Paraguay and the United States of America” was distributed at the WIPO SCCR 22.

  • Copyrights

    • Access Copyright Backlash Grows: Canadian Poets Pass Resolution Supporting TWUC Motion

      The League of Canadian Poets has lined up in support of the recent Writers’ Union of Canada resolution recognizing the lack of control over how licensing revenue is managed and the inability of Access Copyright to represent creator interests. As a result, the TWUC plans to investigate operational separation of creators’ and publishers’ interests in collective licensing. The LCP passed a resolution expressing support for the TWUC motion with plans to send a representative to the joint signatory committee investigating creator copyright.

    • Fair Dealing in the Post-Secondary Environment

    • Access Copyright’s Desperation: From Fair Dealing Allows Everything to It’s Too Risky to Rely Upon

      The battle over competing visions of educational copyright licensing in Canada is coming to a conclusion. One on side, there is Access Copyright, which argues that a comprehensive collective licence is an essential part of an institutional copyright policy. On the other, are the Canadian education institutions, who believe that a more flexible, cost-effective alternative lies in relying on the combination of purchasing works, site licences, open access, fair dealing, and transactional licensing. Having first faced a proposal for a massive increase in Access Copyright licensing fees and later weeks of costly, unnecessary Copyright Board interrogatories, the educational institutions are clearly ready to break away from the Access Copyright comprehensive licence.

    • ACTA

      • Europe Considers Using CETA To Create “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Plus”

        As Canada and the European Union continue their negotiations on a trade deal, a source has provided a copy of the EU proposal for the criminal intellectual property provisions. The IP criminal provisions was the one aspect left out of early drafts (the CETA leak from last year is available here). The initial EU proposal uses the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’s criminal provisions as the model. This includes ACTA Article 23 on Criminal Offences (criminal provisions for wilful trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy on a commercial scale), ACTA Article 24 on Penalties (including imprisonment), ACTA Article 25 on Seizure, Forfeiture, and Destruction, and ACTA Article 26 on Ex Officio Criminal Enforcement. Several of these provisions would require domestic legislative change in Canada that were not found in Bill C-32 (suggesting that an IP enforcement bill will be introduced sometime in the near future).

      • Mexican Senator Drafts Resolution Asking Government To Reject ACTA

        We’re now a few weeks into “open season” on the final final version of ACTA, so expect to see random stories planted by certain folks about how “important” it is to sign the document and “live up to our international obligations.”

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Linux-ready keyboard PC’s under an inch thick

  Cybernet announced a “zero footprint” computer built into a keyboard, featuring a dual-core Atom processor and a multi-touch trackpad. The Linux-ready ZPC-D45 is under one inch thick, but it provides features such as a CD/DVD drive, both VGA and HDMI outputs, stereo speakers, and dual Mini PCI Express slots, the company says.

• Post-MacDefender, Linux Looks Better Than Ever

  Until recently, it was a commonly held belief in the mainstream computing world that Macs are more secure than Windows PCs are.

• Alternate and Harmless Ways of Trying out Linux

  Whether you are a fanatic Windows user or another Apple fan boy hypnotized by Uncle Steve’s charm, there is no excuse for you to not try Linux. Contrary to what you may believe, you don’t have to go through all those complex command-line acrobatics in order to get a glimpse of the penguin. In fact, you don’t even have to install that blasted thing on your computer. In this article, we’ll show you how you can get a taste of the most-talked about operating system in town (yeah, we fanboys do tend to exaggerate sometimes), without the fear of crashing your computer.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • KDEMU with Volker Krauseinator

    On this release of KDEMU! Pawly and I chat with Volker Krause and many other KDABians. Enjoy this beer filled episode.

• Kernel Space

  • The Linux Foundation Announces LinuxCon Program, Confirms Linux Creator Linus Torvalds to Mark 20th Anniversary of Linux in Vancouver

  • Keeping the Desktop Dream Alive: Q&A With Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin, Part 1

    What happened, and where is Linux going? LinuxInsider sat down with Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin for an exclusive interview to get to the bottom of things.

  • Graphics Stack

    • GLSL IR To TGSI Translator Ready To Be Merged Into Mesa

    • A Fresh Look At The Nouveau Gallium3D Performance

• Applications

  • Download of the Day: Pidgin 2.8.0

    Our Download of the Day today is Pidgin 2.8.0.

  • Liferea – The Perfect RSS Aggregator For Your Linux Desktop

  • Watching YouTube Videos in Totem: is it worth it?

  • Adobe/Proprietary

    • Adobe Makes Rude Gesture to GNU/Linux

      Apparently, Adobe sees the future as Android/Linux and we can run Android on GNU/Linux so it may not be a huge issue, just a change in programming language. That must be much more expensive than building for GNU/Linux. That means a re-write.

      HTML5, here we come.

    • Adobe kills AIR for Linux. Seriously guys, who cares?

      In fact, I think that the Linux community will actually benefit from this decision. Here’s how.

    • Adobe: Market? What Linux market?

    • Finally, Flash on Linux as it should be!

      Adobe Flash has always been a disappointment on Linux. Poorly ported , poorly programmed, a confusion that loads the processor and, often, makes the machine hang.
      But this is the way that certain companies provide support to Linux. Very dubious quality.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 5.6 (LAMP)

    • GIMP resources to take you from newbie to power user

    • TermKit is Terminal Reimagined, Install TermKit in Ubuntu 11.04 Easily

    • checking memory usage with ps

    • Monitor Traffic Usage Using darkstat

    • Install Latest Stable Plymouth Manager and plenty of Themes in Ubuntu

    • Save Text Selection as a Tomboy Note with Autokey

    • Bind: Resolve Hostnames Only

    • Tech Tip: KDE 4: Changing the Names of the Virtual Desktops from the Command Line

    • Stupid Portage Tricks – DOC_SYMLINKS_DIR

    • Installing GNOME 3 on Debian 6.0 Squeeze? No, sorry

    • Scribus – Open source desktop publishing

    • Gold readiness obstacle #6: more versioning trouble

    • Put your webcams to good use with iSpy camera security software.

  • Games

    • Noble Master Are Working On A New RTS Game

      Noble Master the developers of the medieval Risk-like turn-based strategy game Age Of Conquest are working on a new unnamed Real Time Strategy game.

    • Prey, open source anti theft software

      Prey lets you keep track of your phone or laptop at all times, and will help you find it if it ever gets lost or stolen. It’s lightweight, open source software, and free for anyone to use. And it just works.

      Basically you install a tiny agent in your PC or phone, which silently waits for a remote signal to wake up and work its magic.

    • The racing simulator rFactor on Mac and Linux!

      Don’t get left in the dust Mac and Linux users, play rFactor today with CrossOver Games! Arguably, one of the best computer racing simulators, rFactor aims at being one of the most accurate simulator of its time. Play with a computer steering wheel, joystick or even a keyboard. To learn more about rFactor, visit the rFactor website.

    • Helena the Third – Now on kickstarter!

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Music Player Extension for Gnome 3

    • GNOME 3: what’s all the fuss about?

      The latest incarnation of the GNOME desktop, version 3. has been out for a while. I’m one of those who is late to the party, one at which there have been very few compliments and loads and loads of complaints. At times, when you get something free, you tend not to value it.

    • gnome screencasts

• Distributions

  • 10 best Linux distros for 2011

    Hardware compatibility, ease of use, the size of a software repository. These three attributes are unique to each Linux distribution. But at the same time, each Linux distribution is at liberty to take and mix whatever it wants from any other.

    This creates a rather unique situation, where good ideas quickly spread, and bad ones fail. And as a result, there are dozens of distribution updates each month, hundreds each year, in a race to leap-frog each other in the race to the top of the DistroWatch.com charts.

  • New Releases

    • Minimalist Linux distro gains easier installation, NTFS compatibility

      Team Tiny Core announced a new version of its small-footprint, in-memory Linux desktop distro. Tiny Core 3.7 now allows read access to NTFS partititions, includes new icons for Editor and Run, and introduces “starter packs” that simplify downloading tools, among other enhancements.

      Tiny Core Linux is designed to reside in RAM, and can fit into just over 10MB, according to the project. Components that are said to reside entirely in memory include: the Linux kernel, the BusyBox tool collection, as well as minimal graphics based on Tiny X.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat, Inc. First Quarter Earnings Sneak Peek

      The consensus estimate is the same as three months ago. For the year, analysts are projecting profit of 71 cents per share, a rise of 18.3% from last year.

    • Fedora

      • The Many Faces of Fedora

        Plus you can load your KDE desktop up with useful and fun widgets to enhance its functionality.

      • Opinion: On Canonical, Red Hat, and their communities

        When I can, I try to participate in The Linux Link Tech Show when it is streaming LIVE… but even when I can’t I often listen to the archived recordings. When I find something interesting I’ll sometimes shoot Dann Washko an email with my thoughts. This morning I found myself writing a long email to him on a subject they covered on their June 15 episode (#407). I thought I’d post it here too.

        It just so happens that several of TLLTS regulars had attended the Southeast Linuxfest the weekend prior and one of the conversations that Dann encountered there was about Canonical and Ubuntu. Dann spoke about the questions and opinions he heard raised and asked for everyone else’s opinions but he didn’t get a whole lot of feedback so I thought I’d provide him with some.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Why Gnome, Ubuntu and the like don’t understand “usability”

          Lately there has been some uproar about the ‘dumbing down of interfaces’..KDE4 didn’t offer the settings 3 did, Gnome dumbs everything down, and maybe Apple did the same the last decade. I couldn’t tell because I never touch anything Apple, and the only time I did the software crashed and all this dumbing down for the sake of usability! However in my opinion, they are wrong. They confuse ‘usability’ with ‘approachability’. Which leads to software which many times is not user friendly.

        • Ubuntu ISOs To Finally Double As USB Images

          A small but useful feature for the CD ISOs of Fedora, openSUSE, MeeGo, and many other Linux distributions is that they are spun as hybrid ISOs. Hybrid ISOs allow the same CD ISO to be copied directly to a USB storage device (i.e. flash drive) without needing to rely upon any external utilities. Ubuntu ISOs have not supported this feature, but they do have their easy-to-use start-up disk creator to take care of this task. However, the daily ISOs for the Ubuntu Oneiric development cycle and all official Ubuntu CD releases going forward for i386 and x86_64 platforms will be now spun as hybrid ISOs.

        • Ubuntu Gets Some Love

          Raising Linux’s visibility, generating excitement and creating name recognition are all among the ways Schroder believes Ubuntu has benefited Linux.

          Its most significant contribution of all, however, has been “building a true community infrastructure that provides a clear path for users to become contributors, and for newbies to get mentoring and support,” wrote Schroder. “The lack of this is one of the biggest shortcomings of FOSS.”

          Regardless of one’s views about Ubuntu’s latest particulars, “fostering a community and providing a space for noobs to learn and grow is a special skill set and a lot of work,” she concluded. “But for Linux and FOSS to continue to grow it’s the most important job of all, and Ubuntu and Canonical deserve credit for giving this a high priority.”

        • Interview with Alan Bell

          1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real life” like name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.

          Hi, I am Alan Bell, a 36 year old geek from Surrey in the UK, where I live with my family and pet chickens. My day job is helping organisations to use and get value from Free Software. As for education, I pursued a degree in Computer Science at Nottingham University, but never quite caught the thing.

          2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?

          My first home computer was a ZX Spectrum +2 (the one with the built in tape drive) which I loved, especially the manual which taught me programming and trigonometry and calculus and electronic logic circuits. I was quite disappointed when I got a Commodore Amiga and there were no circuit diagrams in the manual. Now computers just come with an EULA which doesn’t teach you anything useful. Kids these days don’t know what they are missing! When I first encountered Linux it didn’t have a GUI and I wasn’t that impressed (but I did like the GPL from the moment I read that). It was some years later when X worked on Linux and graphical toolkits became available that it started looking interesting to me, but it took quite a lot of additional years before I started using Ubuntu full time.

        • Ubuntu 11.10 Development Update

          This week has been busy. Lots of bits and pieces are coming together in Oneiric and the status overview might give you an idea how each feature is progressing.

          If you look at the release schedule for Ubuntu 11.10 you can see that Oneiric is still in the development phase, where most of the heavy lifting is being done and where things are still broken.

        • Ubuntu…why are you so newsworthy this week….

          There are a bunch of different stories around one of our favorite Linux Distros this week. In the podcast we talked about Shuttleworth saying he is thinking about dropping Firefox for Chrome. As with most things like this we don’t think it’s a big deal because you can always just install Firefox after you have installed the machine.

        • Ubuntu…why are you so newsworthy this week….

          Ubuntu ISO images used to require the USB startup disk creator utility to be able to write the ISO image to USB (flash) sticks.

        • New requirements for Ubuntu Certification

        • 2 Reasons Why Google Should Buy Ubuntu

          In its apocalyptic battle with both Microsoft and Apple, there is one thing that both companies have that Google does not: a desktop OS. Chrome OS at best, is just a bridge OS. No matter how one looks at things today, there are hundreds of millions of machines out there powered by Windows or Mac OSX.

        • Review—Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

          The latest and greatest version of Ubuntu, 11.04 Natty Narwhal, was released on 28th April 2011. Ubuntu is now the most popular desktop operating system, and with this release, Canonical has made some major changes—both up front, and under the hood. Read on to learn more.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint Debian Edition Updates

            Since the release of the Linux Mint Debian Edition distribution last December, and then the Linux Mint Xfce distribution which is also based on Debian rather than Ubuntu, I have found myself moving more and more toward using these Debian-based distributions rather than the Ubuntu-based Mint 11. In a lot of ways these Mint distributions seem to offer a good combination of a solid Debian base, with a choice between the standard 2.6.32 kernel (which is in the current Debian stable distribution) and the latest 2.6.38 kernel (which is in the current Mint 11 distribution), plus all of the excellent Mint utilities (such as MintMenu and MintUpdate), and the excellent software, application and utility selection that are included on all of the Mint distributions. I can’t put my finger on any specific thing that makes me prefer these Debian based distributions to the standard Mint 11, but it is a sort of general feel, consistency and reliability.

          • Bodhi Linux 1.1.0 : Ubuntu and Enlightenment based Promising Linux distribution

            Bodhi Linux is a relatively new GNU/Linux distribution being developed by Jeff Hoogland. I had read couple of reviews of Bodhi Linux earlier, but comment from the maintainer of Bodhi Linux in the review of MacPup 520 Linux ( you can read this review here ) , made me take notice of Bodhi Linux, and I decided to give Bodhi Linux a try.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android phones get Starbucks payment app

        Starbucks has introduced an application that lets users pay for coffee and other treats from the java chain via their Android smartphones. Available free, the software works at nearly 9,000 locations, according to the company.

Free Software/Open Source

• Of Open Source and Open Innovation

  I don’t think Linus gets enough credit for helping to define (albeit unintentionally) the ideas behind open innovation a decade before books started appearing about it. In terms of achievement, it’s arguably up there with the Linux kernel and Git.

• Freedom DOES Matter

  The idea that FLOSS is irrelevant in licensing collapses under its own weight when the complexity of IT systems makes the valuation of licences impossible. VDI does that. It expands the problem that already existed with virtual machines on servers and compounds it. One does not need a licensing regime as complex as one’s IT system. FLOSS rationalizes the problem of accounting for licences by trumping complexity with four simple freedoms: use, openness, modification and copying. Use FLOSS.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla planning to use HTML5 and JavaScript to render PDFs in Firefox

      This is really cool, and a really good idea. Mozilla is working on a project that will allow PDF documents to be rendered within the browser using HTML5 and JavaScript as opposed to having to rely on a separate plug-in.

    • Firefox 5 locks down, almost ready for release

    • Firefox 5 gets speedy (not SPDY)

      Firefox 5 is nearing completion and likely will be out next week. As opposed to Firefox 4 which introduced a new UI, tab panorama, jetpack, sync and apptabs, Firefox 5 sure does feel a bit ‘light’ on the big features side.

      It does however have at least on amazing under the hood feature that will make Firefox 5 the fastest Mozilla browser ever. Unfortunately Mozilla’s product people haven’t chosen to productize the feature name but that doesn’t make it any less important.

    • Firefox 5 RC: Are You Disappointed?

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • And so the duplication of efforts begins

    Except over at LibreOffice, where one of our new contributors, Pierre-André Jacquod, worked on this earlier this year. This work is present already in our 3.4.

  • LibreOffice 3.3.3 Released for the Cautious

    Speaking of The Document Foundation, Italo Vignoli of the steering committee, today announced the release of LibreOffice 3.3.3. This latest release “fixes several bugs and improves the security of the suite, to specifically address the needs of corporate deployments, where stability is more important than new features.”

  • Fork history does not favor OpenOffice.org

    The conversations about OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice these past few weeks have put forks on my mind lately.

    There are two long-standing opinions about forks in the FLOSS community: they weaken projects or they strengthen projects. There are interesting arguments on either side of the debate, but if history is any judge, there is a strong trend: the project that forked away from the mainline project tends to be the ultimate survivor.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Evergreen Joins the Software Freedom Conservancy

    Today, the Software Freedom Conservancy welcomes the Evergreen project as its newest member. Evergreen joins twenty-six other Conservancy members, who receive the benefit of aggregated non-profit status available to all Conservancy member projects.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Hardware

    • The Best-Dressed Nerds Are Wearing These Open-Source iCufflinks

      The nerds at Adafruit, our favorite open source hardware makers, have just released the iCufflinks, handsome, battery powered glowing cufflinks that pulse at the same speed as the Macbook’s “sleep” light. The circuitry inside is entirely open source (you can grab the source here) and the $128 links are made in North America.

    • Qi Hardware Releases First Batch of 6LoWPAN Wireless Devices

• Programming

  • ActiveState Expands Platform-as-a-Service Cloud Tech for Perl

    Tools vendor ActiveState is acquiring cloud startup Phenora which develops a Perl cloud platform. The Phenora platform will complement ActiveState’s Stackato Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) effort which was announced in May.

    Among the many things that make Phenora an interesting company is the fact that is it run by its 15-year-old founder, Daniil Kulchenko, who is still in high school.

  • 11 Things I’ve Learned about Git

Leftovers

• Science

  • China building world’s biggest radio telescope

    Using FAST’s unparalleled sensitivity and high surveying speed, the project is expected to enable the surveying of neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way and other galaxies, the detection of new pulsars (both galactic and extragalactic), the search for the first shining stars, and of perhaps most interest to many people, the search for extraterrestrial life. It is expected to be able to detect transmissions from over 1,000 light years away.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Sip, Spit, Grade: Coffee Experts Crown Colombia’s Best Beans

    It’s springtime in Colombia, and coffee experts from every part of the globe have convened in Santa Marta, a small city on the Caribbean coast. It is time to award the coffee industry’s most prestigious prize. The taste mavens make ready: Alberto Trujillo is deep into his pre-sip calisthenics, which consist of knee bends and alternating leg shakes. The Tijuanan has to prime his body, nose, and mouth for the so-called cupping that’s about to commence. As any java snob can tell you, to cup is to scrutinize the tastes and aromas of freshly brewed coffee. But Trujillo is no ordinary java snob, and what he’s girding for is no ordinary cupping. He has been certified by the Coffee Quality Institute as a licensed Q Grader, a person who can boast experience in everything from roast identification to sensory triangulation. And he’s about to serve as a judge in the annual Cup of Excellence competition.

• Security

  • Does The Recent Rash of Cyber Attacks on High-Profile Institutions Tell Anybody ANYTHING???

    Let’s take some inventory. The latest attack is against the IMF, the International Monetary Fund which acts as kind of an overseer of the industrial world’s economic activity. They just got hit.

    As the article goes on to list, that’s only the latest breech. There’s Sony Playstation accounts (which I just mocked here), aerospace defense contractor Lockheed Martin’s network, North American Citibank, an email database (Epsilon, an email marketing firm) related to BestBuy and Target, and an attack perpetrated through Gmail.

• Cablegate

  • 40 Years After Leak, The Pentagon Papers Are Out

    In this Jan. 17 1973 file picture, Daniel Ellsberg speaks to reporters outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles. Ellsberg’s co-defendant, Anthony Russo is at center right. Forty years after the explosive leak of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study chronicling deception and misadventure in U.S. conduct of the Vietnam War, the report is coming out in its entirety on Monday, June 13, 2011. The 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks disclosure of its time, a sensational breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon’s presidency and prompted a Supreme Court fight that advanced press freedom.

  • Why the Pentagon Papers matter now

    The declassification and online release Monday of the full original version of the Pentagon Papers – the 7,000-page top secret Pentagon study of US decision-making in Vietnam 1945-67 – comes 40 years after I gave it to 19 newspapers and to Senator Mike Gravel (minus volumes on negotiations, which I had given only to the Senate foreign relations committee). Gravel entered what I had given him in the congressional record and later published nearly all of it with Beacon Press. Together with the newspaper coverage and a government printing office (GPO) edition that was heavily redacted but overlapped the Senator Gravel edition, most of the material has been available to the public and scholars since 1971. (The negotiation volumes were declassified some years ago; the Senate, if not the Pentagon, should have released them no later than the end of the war in 1975.)

    In other words, today’s declassification of the whole study comes 36 to 40 years overdue. Yet, unfortunately, it happens to be peculiarly timely that this study gets attention and goes online just now. That’s because we’re mired again in wars – especially in Afghanistan – remarkably similar to the 30-year conflict in Vietnam, and we don’t have comparable documentation and insider analysis to enlighten us on how we got here and where it’s likely to go.

  • WikiLeaks spokesman: Guardian, NYT wanted to rush war logs

    Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson has savaged The Guardian and New York Times for attempting to rush the publication of WikiLeaks material, suggesting the issue contributed to the falling-out between the online whistleblower site and the doyens of the progressive mainstream media.

    The Guardian and The New York Times were the key English-language vehicles for the release of both the Iraq and Afghanistan “war logs” and the initial tranche of diplomatic cables WikiLeaks continues to release via over 50 outlets around the world. However, relations between the newspapers and WikiLeaks soured and both outlets and their senior staff have since launched stories highly critical of Julian Assange. The New York Times has also been revealed to have allowed the State Department to veto and censor WikiLeaks material.

    Hrafnsson told Crikey the relationship between WikiLeaks and the newspapers had been going sour from before the release of the Iraq War logs in October 2010. “[The Guardian] said they’d been promised exclusivity; Julian said, ‘no — that was only for the print media.’”

  • Return of the plumbers

    HENRY KISSINGER said he “must be stopped at all costs”. Richard Nixon was more blunt: “We got to get this son of a bitch.” And oh, how they tried, creating a team of operatives whose dirty tricks would eventually sink the president himself. But Daniel Ellsberg proved an elusive target, and anyway his work was already done. Forty years ago this week the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, the largest leak of classified documents in American history until WikiLeaks came along.

    Julian Assange’s outfit is Barack Obama’s problem, and though the current administration lacks the vindictiveness and criminality of the Nixon White House, it has pursued leakers with just as much vigour. After promising the most transparent administration in history, Mr Obama and his Justice Department have pressed criminal charges against five suspected leakers under the Espionage Act, more than all other administrations combined, including Nixon’s.

  • EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW! The “Wikileaks Truck Driver” Clark Stoeckley – Creator of “Wikileaks Top Secret Mobile Collection Unit” – Artist, Activist, Entertainer and Wiki-Prankster

    Wikileaks-Movie.com is pleased to introduce Clark Stoeckley, driver of the world’s first Wikileaks Truck called the “WikiLeaks Top Secret Mobile Information Collection Unit” and member of the Anonymous Theater Art Group. As many have remarked, when it comes to the Wikileaks story, ”You just can’t make this s__t up!” The issues are serious but there is plenty of room and an important role for levity, art and theatrics.

    And now, just as we are watching new episodes of “The Lulz Boat” and taking in our daily dose of “JuiceMedia RapNews”, here comes Clark driving along in his thought provoking “WikiLeaks Top Secret Mobile Information Collection Unit” making the White House and U.S. Secret Service a little nervous.

• Finance

  • Is it Insane to Consider Taxing the Rich in This Economy?

Reader’s Picks

• Microsoft and flunkies, including Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle, Research in Motion, Sequoia Partners, line up in favor of the ATT/TMobile merger. Current telco partners Google and Apple say nothing.

  Windows Phoney 7 will not be used as long as there’s a shred of competition in the market, so Microsoft works to destroy competition.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Forchlorfenuron alters mammalian septin assembly, organization, and dynamics. This compound is commonly used to increase fruit size, so buy organic until the long term effects are better known.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Syria represses it’s citizens with tanks, who flee and report masacares.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Jellyfish provide positive feedback for global warming.

    [global warming, overfishing and runnoff have caused an explosion in jellyfish populations] while bacteria are capable of absorbing the constituent carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and other chemicals given off by most fish when they die, they cannot do the same with jellyfish. … the bacteria breathe it out as carbon dioxide. This means more of the gas is released into the atmosphere.

  • The WTO has put an end to an already watered down and voluntary but very popular “dolphin safe” label for tuna.

• Finance

  • Envious of North Dakota’s stability, several other states persue their own public bank.

    Other banks are too big to bear.

  • Big oil put more money into dividends and stock buy backs than it did into exploration and production of oil, so subsidies and tax breaks made wealthy investors richer instead of creating promised jobs or energy security.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Scientists receive death threats for reporting global warming results

• Censorship

  • A university that brought terrorism charges against a PhD candidate who downloaded al-Qaida literature for research also filmed and harassed people who protested their mistake.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • ACTA

      • Extradition and copyright law abuse give the UK a taste of ACTA