08.21.11

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

Posted in News Roundup at 11:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux
- Distributions
- Devices/Embedded
Free Software/Open Source
Leftovers

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
- Podcast 91 Interview with JD Horelick
- Linux Outlaws 224 – OggCamp 11 Live
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
- guiminer – An Extensive Tool For Bitcoin Mining [Windows & Linux]
  
  As of late there’s been a been a great buzz going around about Bitcoin, the latest P2P digital currency. One of the main activities of getting Bitcoins is through a process called mining.
- OpenELEC, a media center based on XBMC
  
  OpenELEC is an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub. The idea behind OpenELEC is to allow people to use their Home Theatre PC (HTPC) like any other device you might have attached to your TV, like a DVD player or Sky box.
- Wallbase – All your wallpaper are belong to us
  
  Wallpapers, such an innocent affair. Apparently not so. For most people, finding high-quality wallpapers or backgrounds for their desktop usually takes them down the image lane of Google’s highway, where they sift through tons of garbage, looking for decent high-resolution imagery of their favorite topics and avatars.
  
  A colleague of mine told me about wallbase.cc several weeks ago, a site that has a virtually infinite pool of great images plus superb navigation. My initial reaction was one of slight contempt. But then, after going through the website, I realized there’s quite a bit of useful art there, worth enough for a complete article. So here we go.
- Instructionals/Technical
- Wine
  - PlayOnLinux 4.0 Is Released
    
    PlayOnLinux is a piece of software which allows you to easily install and use numerous games and apps designed to run with Microsoft Windows.
  - The Friendly Black Screen that Talks (Espeak)
    
    Today, I had great fun with my little nephew thanks to Espeak, which I had installed from the Mandriva repositories long ago in an attempt to make my computer talk again. In Mandriva 2009, the task was performed by KTTS. However, as Mandriva 2010 kept KTTS despite KDE renamed the text-to-speech service (now it’s called Jovie), my computer became voiceless. Or so I thought.
- Games
  - Interview with Michael Bok developer of The Zod Engine
    
    So today I had the pleasure of chatting with Michael Bok of The Zod Engine via google talk. This is the most fun I’ve had chatting to developer so far (mainly because it was live and not via email, not to say the others haven’t been awesome).
  - Indie Game ‘No Time To Explain’ Released for Linux
    
    No Time To Explain is a platformer game about Time Travel, Big Jetpack Guns, Giant Enemy Crabs and Ribs in People’s Eyes. You are taken on a wild adventure of time paradoxes, things that make no sense and more things that make less sense. The game went through a Kickstarter funding project which raised more than $ 26K for the developers though the actual target was only $ 7K. So there was already a huge interest in the game even before its release.
  - [Gaming]: TeeWorlds Multiplayer Shooting Game Running On Linux | 0.6.1
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 evel branch. Conversely, this means that if you install packages from the evel 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
- Geek Software of the Week: Clonezilla!
  
  This is AWESOME! Open Source, FREE, and it handles nearly everything that you need for disk imaging! Also, there is a FREE Server Version as well as the regular PC Client Version!
- A Xubuntu Fanboi Looks at Salix OS
  
  But if Salix performs as well installed as I think it will, I may have little reason to fall back on Xubuntu.
- New Releases
  - BackTrack 5 R1 released
Devices/Embedded
- Phones
  - Android
- Sub-notebooks/Tablets
  - Fusion Garage follows JooJoo with Grid10 tablet, Grid4 smartphone
    
    Remember the JooJoo? It started out its life as the CrunchPad by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and via all sorts of legal hullabaloo, it ended up being sold only under the Fusion Garage banner when the Linux-based tablet launched in 2009. It didn’t do so well, but Fusion Garage is back with a couple of other offerings.
    
    What you see here are the Grid10 tablet and the Grid4 smartphone. While they may appear to be just your run of of the mill Android devices, they’re not. Instead, Fusion Garage has taken the Android kernel and built around it to create a custom operating system called GridOS. As if we didn’t already have enough platforms already, right? Maybe they should have just done the skin thing like HTC, Samsung, and Motorola.

Free Software/Open Source

Web Browsers
- Mozilla
  - GNU IceCat 6.0 released
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
- Alkacon Software Launches OpenCms 8.0.2
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
- Amazon and the future of the web
  
  Amazon’s HTML5 strategy shows the way forward for web publishing

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
- Julian Assange in conversation with John Pilger
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
- A Cheat Sheet That Teaches Linux Commands To Beginners
  
  A group of South Korean users of Apple Inc.’s iPhone sued the company in a local court, claiming it invaded their privacy by allowing the smartphone to collect location data without their consent.