08.24.11

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• DELL D620 power usage (Win 7 vs Mint 11)

  I recently bought a JOEL Wattforbrugsmåler.

  My laptop, a Dell D620, has both Windows and Linux (Dualboot).
  I was curious to see whether there was any difference in power consumption during idle, so I decided to put my new device to use!

  I removed the battery from the laptop and plugged the charger into my power measuring device before I made sure Windows 7 was running up-to-date drivers, while Linux ran the default drivers.
  I then disabled all non-default services and removed any third-party programs from the startup. I booted into each os, let it run for some time (to make sure it was indeed idle) before turning on the clock.

• Why have you switched to GNU/Linux?

  A long time ago when I was using Windows I realized that many applications were trying to constrain me from doing certain tasks. I was unable to play a certain format or had to install applications that I did not want on my system. I started to think critically as to why I am using Windows and if there is some kind of alternative that I could use instead. Prior to this, I used Mac OS but I knew that both operating systems are proprietary and want to limit the end user. I got tired of being manipulated to use a particular application and having bloatware already pre-installed on my computer. After searching the Internet for alternatives to Mac OS and Windows I found this really cool operating system that is called GNU/Linux.

• Kernel Space

  • Graphics Stack

    • Thoughts about Network Trancparency

• Applications

  • New GIMP Release Has Working Single-Window Mode

  • Gimp 2.7.3 Has Been Released | Key Features | Install On Ubuntu Using PPA

  • Single Window Gimp!

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Setting Up Network RAID1 With DRBD On Debian Squeeze

    • An Introduction to Find

    • How to setup Postfix with spampd on Debian Squeeze

    • Checking Password Complexity with John the Ripper

    • Using scponly To Allow SCP/SFTP Logins And Disable SSH Logins On Debian Squeeze

    • Gnome 3 shell and fglrx fixed in next driver!

• Desktop Environments

  • What GNOME Can Learn from KDE’s Recovery

    When users complain about GNOME 3, inevitably they compare its release to KDE 4.0′s. One KDE developer has told me that he dislikes the comparison, but, in the absence of other parallels, it continues to be made.

    However, one part of the analogy that hasn’t been explored is KDE’s recovery from its user revolt, and whether GNOME is in any position to emulate that as well.

    KDE’s recovery has not received much notice. It hasn’t been covered by the free software media. Often, too, it is overshadowed by those still loyal to the KDE 3 series, who continue to express their dissatisfaction at every opportunity.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Say No to Big Oil

      A 1,700-mile pipeline called the Keystone XL would carry crude oil from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast. Calling it “a bad deal for America,” Sen. Bernie Sanders urged the Obama administration to reject the proposal. “Why in the world would we ever consider approving a new Big Oil pipeline to carry dirty fuel and keep America addicted to oil, when we could save money, create jobs, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil by moving to stronger fuel economy standards?” Sanders asked. He made the case against the pipeline in a video for Tar Sands Action, an organization headed by Vermont environmentalist Bill McKibben. “The State Department will decide whether to approve or reject the pipeline by the end of the year,” The New York Times said in an editorial published on Monday. “It should acknowledge the environmental risk of the pipeline and the larger damage caused by tar sands production and block the Keystone XL.”

• Distributions

  • First Look at Poseidon Linux, the Linux For Scientists

    Poseidon Linux is designed for the international scientific community, bundling a big batch of science-oriented software into a single live DVD, plus a batch of desktop productivity and multimedia applications. Poseidon 4.0 was just released with significant changes, so let’s take it for a test drive.

  • New Releases

    • SystemRescueCd 2.3.1

    • BackTrack 5R1

    • LinuxTLE 10.0 Final

    • VYATTA CORE 6.3 – VC6.3-2011.07.21

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat considering NoSQL/Hadoop acquisition

      The article adds that Whitehurst would not specifically state whether Red Hat will or will not actually acquire anyone, as is to be expected, but the comments are the clearest indication yet that Red Hat sees value in a potential NoSQL acquisition.

      This is something that we have seen for some time, pointing out in May 2010 that “We have consistently noted that the database remains a missing layer in Red Hat’s software stack… and would see advantages in adding an open source NoSQL database to its portfolio to target MySQL users.”

    • Is Red Hat Interested in the Database Market?

      Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is perhaps best known as the leading enterprise Linux vendor. While Linux is the core of Red Hat’s business, their JBoss middleware business is also a critical component of Red Hat’s overall platform play. As Red Hat gears up for its next era of growth, the most often asked question is: Where does Red Hat needs to go next? One potential area of expansion for Red Hat could be the database market.

      “If you think about what makes up a platform, what you’re seeing is that more and more components of functionality are getting sucked in,” Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told InternetNews.com. “We basically have our data services layer. which tries to do some degree of data federation. Will there be more stuff around that? Certainly there will be.”

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 16 Alpha released

      • Alpha version of Fedora 16 “Verne” released

        The feature freeze is already in place, so that the alpha should contain all major changes in a testable form. These include the switch to the GRUB2 boot loader, which, though officially still under development, has long been used by other distributions.

      • Fedora 16 Alpha Has Been Released

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint 11 LXDE review

            Linux Mint is a desktop-centric distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, and Linux Mint LXDE is the edition that uses the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE). The latest release, Linux Mint 11 LXDE, was released August 16, 2011. This article presents a review, the first for an LXDE-based Linux Mint edition on this website.

          • Zorin OS 3.1, the First Update for the LTS Distro, Is Here

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android (Finally) Taking Steps Towards WebKit And Chromium

        Why isn’t Chrome a part of Android? It’s a question as old as time itself. Or at least a few years old. But given that the same company, Google, makes both products, it never made much sense. Now they’re finally taking steps to resolve this. A bit. Maybe.

      • Google move hints at Chrome for Android

      • Sony brings Walkman brand into the Android age

        Sony Ericsson announced a music-oriented Android 2.3 smartphone with a dedicated Walkman music button and “deep” Facebook integration. Due to ship in the fourth quarter, the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman offers a 1GHz processor, a 3.2-inch inch display with 480 x 320 pixels, a five-megapixel camera, a front-facing VGA webcam, plus Sony Qriocity music and video content services.

      • Android devs gain tools to begin Google TV 2.0 ports

        Google announced a preview release of the Google TV add-on for the Android SDK, supported on Linux with KVM emulation. The add-on lets Android app developers start preparing their software for porting to Google TV, in anticipation of the Android 3.x “Honeycomb” IPTV platform that’s expected to ship later this year.

      • Add-on for Android SDK makes Google TV 2.0 ports possible

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Top Business-Minded Tablet? The Toshiba Thrive or the Apple iPad 2?

      However, the recently released Toshiba Thrive Tablet PC line is slowly beginning to make inroads into the business tablet application niche. With a “strictly business” approach to most of its features, and a huge focus on business apps, more businesses are turning to the Thrive as opposed to the iPad 2 or any other tablet for their business plans. The Thrive offers five separate home screens, one of which is loaded with Google contacts, LogMeIn remote access, the Google calendar, QuickOffice for business file access and Toshiba’s PrinterShare and FileManager apps. This is a perfect business suite of apps all in one place.

      The native file management Toshiba provides in the Toshiba Thrive tablet is also another business advantage. And though Toshiba’s App Place (apps store) does provide entertainment and gaming apps, it is definitely heavily slanted towards business-oriented apps and software, from enterprise-oriented apps developers such as Central Desktop.

    • Why The iPad 3 Is Irrelevant

      Apple’s success with the iPad 1 and 2 doesn’t guarantee success for the third. But this shouldn’t deter long term investors. Apple’s greatest capability is its unstoppable innovation force – the release of new product lines that overshadow the previous.

    • The Asus Transformer Is Now Available For $349 At Walmart

      Remember when the Asus Eee Pad Transformer was the hottest thing since Laserdisc? Remember when it was hailed as an iPad killer with its fancy IPS screen, low price and sweet name. Autobots, unite! Well, Walmart is currently selling it for $350, which puts it at the low-end of the Honeycomb tab price scale. Jokes aside, it’s actually a great deal for an Android tablet.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source publishing helping to realise Digital Agenda aims

  One positive aspect of the Internet’s innovative capacity for rapid change has been the dawn of open access publishing that has came to prominence over the last decade. Leading the way is the non-profit organisation Creative Commons, which has just launched a new book showcasing how copyright, content sharing and collaboration can lead innovation in the digital age.

• IU Makes New Software Investment

  Bloomington, Indiana. Indiana University has replaced the software that provides its information services to mobile devices, moving to open source Kuali software created by a consortium of universities.

• New Open Source Smartphone OS Planned For South Korea

  Well now it appears that the home turf of the worlds second largest smartphone maker Samsung has plans to develop a new open source smartphone operating system just for South Korea, a new OS that will challenge rival platforms iOS and Android in the country.

• South Korean government to come up with their own smartphone platform

• Exploring Cyber Security – The Open Source Way!

  On the client desktop, running the open source Firefox Web browser is a significant win for security. Firefox alone isn’t sufficient, but it comes with a giant ecosystem of plug-ins which add to security. Adblock-plus is a plug-in which stops advertisements dead in their tracks. Scriptblock disables JavaScript and lets users enable it on a site-by-site basis. Some of the known flash plug-ins have been a source of security bugs; they are generally bad residents on your PC because they simply hog resources and make systems slow. Using flashblock will let you run flash site-by-site, and restrict them elsewhere.

• Why is Open Source Software Beneficial?

• With sense of crisis, Korea braces for software war

• 60 Open Source Tools for Protecting Your Privacy

  With the growth of social networking, blogging and the Web in general, personal privacy is becoming harder and harder to find.

  Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has argued that privacy is no longer “a social norm.” And former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once famously opined, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

• Under the Hood in Apache Lucene 4.0

• Events

  • FOSS4G 2011 in Denver Gathers Momentum

    – The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference, the premier international conference focused on open source geospatial software, is fast approaching. The event, which will take place in Denver from Sept. 12-16, has gathered a great deal of momentum, with more than 600 attendees from 31 countries and 43 states signed up so far. It’s not too late to take advantage of this unique learning opportunity that presents a world-class program at great value to attendees, and in a beautiful setting.

  • 5 Top News Items From LinuxCon

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Google patches another wave of Chrome browser holes

  • Mozilla

    • From Mozilla: WebAPI for HTML5 experience on phones

      Robert Nyman, a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla, has announced the introduction of WebAPI, a project intended to “to provide a basic HTML5 phone experience within 3 to 6 months”. The goal is to provide a set of APIs consistent across browsers, operating systems and devices, that enable common methods of access to phone functionality. The list of functions given in the announcement includes the dialer, address book, SMS, clock, camera, calculator and maps.

• SaaS

  • VMware’s open source doppelganger gets cloudy

  • Gluster Announces Apache Hadoop Storage Compatibility in Latest GlusterFS Release

  • So, want to manage a cloud with open-source software?

  • NextGen MapReduce Hits Apache Hadoop Mainline

  • Gluster Announces Apache Hadoop Storage Compatibility in Latest GlusterFS Release

• Databases

  • EnterpriseDB Sets Sights on Oracle’s MySQL

    It’s no secret that EnterpriseDB, the company that sells and supports commercial versions of the open source PostgreSQL database, is going after MySQL. The company, which says revenues are growing at a 2X annual pace, senses that Oracle is ostracizing its MySQL customers and partners–something that IBM i customers can relate to. But while PostgreSQL makes inroads in the X64 and Itanium markets, it’s not clear if the database will find a similar reception in Power Systems.

  • Oracle debuts JDK 7, MySQL 5.6 at OSCON, pledges better OS support

  • Oracle Takes on VMware with Oracle VM 3.0

    Oracle is advancing its virtualization strategy with the release of Oracle VM 3. The new virtualization technology is designed to expand on Oracle’s previous efforts with a clear focus on server virtualization.

    “We care about running big server VMs,” Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle said during a launch event for Oracle VM 3.0. “We want to enable customers to virtualize everything.”

• Business

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Netbook+Cheap Software+Handheld Recorder

• Project Releases

  • Version 0.9.8 of the free open-source 3D engine PixelLight released

  • Bootstrap from Twitter

• Programming

  • Engine Yard Joins Forces with Orchestra

Leftovers

• Lenovo Reinforces Strong Market Growth in Light of HP Woes

  Lenovo isn’t kicking HP while it’s down, but the company is taking this opportunity to let everyone know it’s doing just awesome, thanks very much. Lenovo released a statement regarding its status amid the uncertainty in the PC and tablet world. Here’s a brief highlight on the PC manufacturer’s status …

• Cablegate

  • Audio: rare interview with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange

    In the interview, he spoke at length about information’s role in democracy, and how government censorship is sometimes an opportunity. “Censorship is a signal that an organization or a government is fearful about reform effects of information release,” he said.