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Links 21/8/2011: Fusion Garage Makes Android Tablets, GNU IceCat 6.0 is Released





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • Crossword Puzzle of Some Linux Distros...


  • Desktop

    • Installing Linux on old PC’s Part 2
      In part one I showed you that you could install a linux distro on a new computer and transplant it into a 386 computer in a short amount of time and with little effort. Now it is time to move on to bigger and beefier machines like 486′s, Pentiums and better.

      I am going to break this quick tutorial down into sections based on installed RAM. While this won’t be a “how to” for all old PCs in the world I hope to at least send you in the right direction. I will mention a few distributions mainly for the super low ram machines. Its not my intent to start a distrubution war, and I have not personally sat down with every single one to make a educated assessment. However, you’re more than welcome to chime in.


    • Students! Don't get scammed for back to school computer shopping.
      There are only a few more weeks left before students go back to school and technology companies are gearing up for one of the most busiest seasons of the year.

      Even though having a laptop is not mandatory for college or university studies, students often justify the purchase by saying that they need it desperately for school. I have worked in several large computer stores that have back to school specials for students and let me tell you that its all about revenue and scamming the customers. These large computer stores want to extract as much money as possible from customers and are willing to go the distance in confusing students and their parents in order to make that extra profit. For example, I was told shamelessly straight to my face when buying a netbook that the company does not make a lot of money from the sale of a laptop and that I should purchase something else on top.


    • Why are we still waiting for affordable laptops / netbooks / tablets for schools?




  • Audiocasts/Shows





  • Kernel Space

    • ARM'ing Linux
      The ARM chip architecture is emerging to become an extremely popular one for embedded and mobile devices. It’s also an architecture that has had some issues when it comes to Linux.

      Speaking at the LinuxCon conference this week, Linux creator Linus Torvalds detailed his frustrations with ARM. Coincidentally this week, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu Linux, announced ARM support as part of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 release.

      “I think that ARM is very promising,” Torvalds said. “The problem is that ARM doesn't have a standard platform.”

      In Torvalds’ view, ARM is a 'hodgepodge' of companies making random pieces of hardware. He noted that on the kernel side, Linux has tried to support alot of ARM.


    • Graphics Stack

      • An Open-Source Mobile Linux Graphics Stack?
        The mobile device landscape, particularly for those devices running Linux, is quickly evolving. Just in the past few days, Google bought Motorola, Qualcomm open-sourced the remainder of their Gobi API for controlling modems, and HP ended off all their webOS devices, among other changes. But will the future mobile Linux device landscape deal with more open-source drivers, particularly when it comes to graphics?






  • Applications



  • Desktop Environments



    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Disable Akonadi in KDE SC 4.7
        How to avoid the Akonadi PIM framework of KDE is a very frequently asked question. Akonadi is started when logging into a default KDE session – and includes a mysql server – this is a bit of a waste of system resources since (in my personal estimation) the majority of KDE users won’t use Akonadi for anything at all.


      • KDE:Active:Devel introduced
        The past week, when working on the Mesa packages for Plasma Active, I might have caused some headache since I broke the compositor in Plasma Active with a few packages I uploaded for easier deployment on test devices. It was not more than an annoyance, because kwin gracefully falls back to non-composited mode in case of graphics problems. In order to get a bit more stability into our deployment process, I’ve now set up a subproject called KDE:Active:Devel under the KDE:Active project on the Open Build Service (OBS) which we use to build the Balsam packages. As we’re moving, development-wise into the stabilization phase for Plasma Active One, this makes testing new things a lot easier, just by switching to the same package from the :Devel branch. Conversely, this means that if you install packages from the :Devel subproject, you should really know what you’re doing. On the bright side, it’ll be easier to keep regressions out of the packages that are deployed on most users’ machines.


      • Plasma Active on OpenGL ES


      • For A Superior Music Player Try Amarok
        Amarok is a full featured music player that works on most popular operating systems. And now Amarok comes in over 45 different languages and counting. With Amarok you can listen to the music you love or find new music easier than ever. Amarok now has better performance, stability and speed. Automatically integrate with MusicBrainz music library and update your library information with no hassle at all. And you can discover music files on your network just as easily. Find Amarok in your Ubuntu software center or type these commands into your terminal.


      • Twinkle – KDE Soft-phone using the SIP protocol


      • Fedora 15 KDE - How to upgrade to KDE 4.7




    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome shell starting to become my favourite
        I have several different computers, running Gnome 2, Gnome 3, Unity and Mac OSX. New interfaces always take a while to get used to, so after the initial launch of Gnome 3 and Unity the “classic” Gnome 2 interface was still my favourite to get my work done.


      • Why I won't be using gnome shell or gnome 3
        When KDE4.0 was released I knew the KDE world would lose some users. I also assumed the other desktop devs would take note, but I guess my assumptions were wrong.. Gnome3 includes the exact same mistakes.






  • Distributions



  • Devices/Embedded





Free Software/Open Source



  • Web Browsers



  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle v Google
      When Oracle sued Google over Android/Linux, Oracle’s shares were around $31 and had a little uptick. Now it’s down to $25, off 20%. At that time Google was around $480, had a build to $620 and is now back where it started, even, more or less. If that’s any indication, Oracle’s claims are not worrying investors much.

      It’s a different story on the blogosphere. Detractors are claiming Google is an evil thief of ideas and worse. The facts are that Android/Linux contains little or nothing from Java and so copyright claims are weak and 88% of the patent claims of Oracle re-examined by USPTO so far have been rejected.


    • Seven Free LibreOffice Extensions You Should Know About
      When the Document Foundation released LibreOffice 3.4.2 earlier this month, the big news wasn't so much that a new version was out. Rather, the big news was that LibreOffice had officially become enterprise-ready, according to its developers.




  • CMS



  • Healthcare

    • OpenEMR achieves full ONC certification
      It's official! OpenEMR has passed all ONC certification tests as a fully qualified emr that can be used to attest for incentive moneys. The official posting: http://onc-chpl.force.com/ehrcert/EHRProductDetail?id=a0X30000003mNwTEAU&retURL= appeared on the website 2011/08/19.




  • Programming

    • The Kotlin Programming Language
      Kotlin is a new JVM language under development by JetBrains. That's the company that makes IntelliJ IDEA, the well-regarded Java IDE. According to JetBrains, the main design goals behind this project are: to make Kotlin compile as fast as Java, make it safer than Java, i.e. statically check for common pitfalls such as null pointer dereference, make it more concise than Java by supporting local type-inference, first-class functions (closures), extension functions, mixins and first-class delegation, etc; and, keeping the useful level of expressiveness; and make it way simpler than the most mature competitor—Scala.


    • Lightning: Automating An Eclipse RCP Build


    • LinuxCon: Are Application Developers 'Weanies'?
      During Linus Torvalds talk at LinuxCon he took the time to call application developers 'weanies' and said that they weren't 'real men' like kernel developers.

      It's a description that Marten Mickos, the CEO of Eucalyptus (and former CEO of MySQL) does not agree with. During a keynote presentation at LinuxCon, Mickos explained his vision of the new world order in which the cloud and virtualization dominates.




  • Standards/Consortia





Leftovers

  • Losing the HP Way
    The news of course is that HP plans to buy for $10 billion Autonomy, the UK business analytics company, while dropping the WebOS product line acquired only a year ago and eventually dumping the entire HP PC business. What this is intended to accomplish is to move HP firmly into the enterprise market, away from consumers, while shifting the company’s center of gravity in the direction of Europe. It’s the end of HP in all but name.


  • Cablegate





  • Finance

    • The Real Reason the SEC Has Been Shredding Documents For Decades
      What should we make of the new revelations by Securities and Exchange Commission attorney Darcy Flynn (background here, here and here) that the SEC has been shredding documents for decades?

      As many commentators have noted, the SEC did this to cover up fraud on Wall Street.




  • Privacy





Recent Techrights' Posts

An Illusion and Cult Worship of Magnitude (Ubiquity as "Victory")
GNU has been around for over 40 years and it'll likely continue to exist for another 40 (in some form)
Wall Street Does Not Care About Microsoft's Impending (August) Layoffs, It Believes Lies From Microsoft, Whose Debt Grows Rapidly
If Microsoft is doing so well and swimming in money, why so many cuts (about 29,000 layoffs so far this year)?
Riot for peace & Love: Catholic Influencers and Digital Missionaries welcome Jubilee of Youth
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
 
Links 31/07/2025: Spotify Collapses and Spotify Now Forcing Some Users to Undergo Face-Scanning
Links for the day
A Lot of Supposedly "Successful" Businesses Are Just Debt-Racking Vessels Without Any Prospects of Financial Sustainability
The probability of bankruptcy of any business is more than 0%
theregister.com: The Voice of Microsoft US?
It basically sold out
Yes, You Can Love and Adore Things Whilst Also Criticising Them
Is society being divided and groomed/primed to be resistant to constructive criticism?
Links 31/07/2025: War in Ukraine, Security News, and Cyberattacks Against Journalists on the Rise
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/07/2025: Fake Money and Gemini Diaries
Links for the day
Google: From Pointing to Relevant Sites to Pointing to Social Control Media to Actually Parroting Social Control Media as "Facts"
Google has become a misinformation company
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 30, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, July 30, 2025
How to Report Apple Layoffs Without Saying the "L" Word
don't look for the "L" word
Wayland Considered Harmful (to GNU/Linux Adoption)
it's not limited to games
My Experience With Judges Has been Positive, But We Must Still Pursue SLAPP Reform in the United Kingdom
We believe it'll be a "feather in the cap" if we can help change laws in the UK to better protect investigative reporters
Slopwatch Makes the Web Better
Remember what happened to BetaNews?
Slopwatch: Google News is Pumping in Lots of Web Traffic Into Fake Sites That Say "Linux"
somewhere between 30% and 40% of today's "news" about "Linux", as seen by Google News, is LLM slop
Links 30/07/2025: Climate Calamities Highlighted, Kyrgyzstan Crackdown on Expression/Freedoms
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/07/2025: Watson’s List of Limits, Lysenko 2000
Links for the day
Some People See What Others See... But Only 40 Years Later
When people deviate from "the norm" they typically get ridiculed and dismissed as "crazy"
Links 30/07/2025: Tea Class Action and Google Killing the Web With Slop
Links for the day
Last Month Our IRC Community Turned 17
Funnily enough we never missed a single day when it comes to logging
"The Unix Kernel"
Linux was inspired by MINIX
The Register Relays Microsoft Marketing, Dubs That Marketing "Research"
Hours ago they did a "Microsoft sez" piece
Dealing With Sociopaths, Liars, and Cranks
A dysfunctional society such as this would never develop
Not Owning Mobile Phones
It's not about resistance; it's common sense
Google 'Search' is Fast Becoming No Better Than Social Control Media Infested With Bots
Google emerged almost 30 years ago as a company looking to organise the Web and direct people towards informative pages. That Google is dead.
PCLinuxOS Had Functional Backups Before the House Fire, the Site Will be Restored in New Webhost
This is the direction we want for GNU/Linux, not some IBM sales strategy
Gemini Links 30/07/2025: Two Sides of Me and "Hooked on Cosmic Voyage"
Links for the day
Microsoft Will Continue Resorting to Crimes in Order to Keep GNU/Linux Usage Down
It is a real problem and we'll revisit it later this week
GAFAM 'Revolving Doors' at The Register and a "Bribe Price List"
"an analyst at Microsoft"
Microsoft Rapidly Shrinking (No, It's Not About Efficiency, It's About Unbearable Debt)
We'll soon see how much debt grew in the past quarter
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 29, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, July 29, 2025
Corruption is the Standard Operating Procedure at the European Patent Office (EPO)
The EPO is a dictatorship that stains Europe
Local Staff Committee Munich (LSCMN) at the European Patent Office (EPO) Requests an Urgent Meeting to Avoid Abolishing the Office
This is dictatorship led by the most corrupt
Slopwatch: Fake 'Linux' 'Articles' and Spamfarms/Slopfarms
at least 5 fake articles in one day
Gemini Links 29/07/2025: Wayland Unfit for Use and LLM Slop Faking One's Language Skills With Robot Communications
Links for the day
Before the OSI Was Bribed and Hijacked by Microsoft via GitHub and Compromised Management...
The OSI isn't even remotely "woke"
Nailing the "Hey Hi" (AI) Hype Bubble
So-called "hey hi" as they define it now is all about large companies or regimes remotely controlling the processes running on your machine and even your very own behaviour on your machine, which is in effect no longer your machine but some remotely controlled apparatus
The OSI Has Been Silent for Over 3 Weeks, It Has a Severe Trust Issue After Promoting Microsoft and Proprietary GitHub
OSI took a lot of money from Microsoft to become a Microsoft lobbyist
"Four decades; Four freedoms; For all users" Now as a T-shirt
That's shown along the sidebar
Bribery is OK If You Work for Microsoft (No Punishment Expected)
It's very troubling and a symptom of a broken society/system when particular laws or rules are applied and enforced against some people but not against others
Links 29/07/2025: Bad Climate and "Fair Software Licensing" Blasts Microsoft
Links for the day
Links 29/07/2025: Data Brokers Gone Wrong/Rogue and "Copyright Thicket"
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Linuxconfig.org, Linuxsecurity.com, Fagioli, The Register
Today's "Slopwatch" isn't the first article about LLM slop
Someone Should Remind Microsoft Lunduke That Microsoft Hires Many Sexual Criminals and Pedophiles as Well
Microsoft Lunduke on an "expedition" to find one or more perverts, then generalise to everyone in the "community"
Cash Machines (ATMs) Make Mistakes and They're Proprietary Software
Correcting mistakes is a colossal challenge
We Cover Topics Other Sites Are Too Afraid to Cover (Even When They Know the Facts)
It's not that they doubt the truth, they just realise there may be consequences for talking about it
They Try to Tell Us the Free Software Foundation Inc is Dying, But Its Revenue Doubled Since the Dot-Com Bubble Burst
Being in "Activism" is never easy; but it does positive things for society
Yes, Microsoft is the Problem
"I am no MS shill."
It's About the Cost of Workers, Not the Fictional Skills Shortage (That Does Not Exist, the Media Spreads False and Sometimes Self-Fulfilling Narratives)
This issue isn't limited to computing, some dub it "globalism"
Another Failed Use Case for Chatbots (LLM): Legal Advice and Analysis
They're just some self-discrediting toy that costs way too much to operate
Links 29/07/2025: More Pushbacks Against Slop and More Praises of Tom Lehrer
Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/07/2025: Purple Yarrow and Understanding Op Amps
Links for the day
This Monday WebProNews Absolutely Flooded the Web With Fake (LLM Slop) 'Articles' About "Linux", Google News Promoted Them as Legitimate
All of the following are fake articles attributed to pseudonyms or authors that don't exist; the images are also slop. Why does Google promote these?
Linuxiac is Not a Slopfarm, But at Least Some of Its Articles Are Machine-Generated Fakes
what we said about it was correct
Expect More Microsoft Layoffs
"Are more job cuts coming?"
Microsoft Behaving Like It's Running Out of Money to Pay Salaries
Does that seem like the behaviour expected from a company which claims it is "worth" trillions?
LWN Downtime Due to Linode, Not LLM Bots
"I’ve received an email letting me know that there is a potential for data loss."
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 28, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, July 28, 2025