• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Computer-Aided Engineering in Linux

Engineers are some of the heaviest number-crunchers around. If you are a grad student, post doc or undergrad, you usually get whatever is lying around as your work machine. Also, depending on how inflexible your local IT department is, you may be forced to use one of the commercial operating systems around these days. What are lowly students to do when they need to do heavy computational work? You may be interested in looking at CAELinux (Computer Assisted Engineering). This project provides a live CD that gives you all the open-source tools you might need for your engineering work. And, because it is a live CD, you can use it without touching the local drive of the machine you are using.

Desktop

• The Linux Desktop Advances

  Many different things make the Linux Planet go around, and one of them is the desktop. This past week, two key Linux desktop technologies advanced — the new GNOME 3.2 release and the 1.0 release of PulseAudio.

Server

• Dell building its own Exadata killer

  Way back when, before Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, and even before Hewlett-Packard became hardware buddies with Big Red with the original Exadata Database Machine, Dell was Oracle’s chosen buddy for running parallel Oracle databases using Real Application Cluster on top of Linux. But now Oracle is in the hardware business, and it looks like Dell is fixing to take the parallel Oracle database fight to Oracle.

• Oracle Big Data Appliance stakes big claim

  With its latest appliance, Oracle has officially embraced big data, including Hadoop and NoSQL.

Kernel Space

• Kernel.org partially back online

  The kernel.org web servers are back on line and are once again delivering the Git repositories of some Linux developers – including the main repository of the development branch of Linux maintained by Linus Torvalds. However, the frontpage links to the archives with the sources for the Linux kernel point to files that have yet to be uploaded. Following four weeks of downtime, kernel.org is thus at least partially back in business. The administrators took the servers offline for maintenance work around a month ago, following the discovery in late August that an attacker had obtained access to some servers.

• Changes in Enterprise Computing Bring New Members to Linux Foundation

  Eucalyptus Systems, Nebula and Virtual Bridges look to Linux to enable innovation in the new enterprise

  SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., October 5, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that three new members have joined the organization: Eucalyptus Systems, Nebula and Virtual Bridges.

• There’s A Linux 3.1-rc9 Kernel Release

Applications

• OpenShot Video Editor

  The OpenShot video editor for Linux is easy to use and very powerful. You can work with audio, video, or images to create cool video projects with amazing effects. OpenShot will let you add subtitles to your videos, and you can export your videos to many popular video formats. This is a fantastic video editor with many effective features. You can even use OpenShot to adjust the gamma, hue, and brightness of your videos. Real-time previews are also available when working with your video. If you want to install OpenShot just use the following commands from the Linux command line.
  $ sudo apt-get install openshot

• Proprietary

  • The Flashless Future

    Those two words have driven fear, annoyance and hate into the hearts of many users and developers for some time now. I am here to say today, in case you had not noticed, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I say with certainty that the days Adobe Flash enjoys as a dominant web development tool are numbered.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Serving CGI Scripts With Nginx On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04

  • How to play Blu-ray in Linux

  • A better way to use xclip (clipboard from the command line)

  • How to Hide data (Steganography) into MP3 file – mp3stego

  • Using less

  • Introduction to Cgroups, the Linux Control Group

  • Network booting with Linux – PXE

  • Ripping An MP3 CD On Linux Mint 11

• Games

  • REVIEW: Altitude – Linux flies with multiplayer retro-style plane combat!

    Anyone who is old enough to remember the Atari 2600 will recall the plane warfare game which provided hours of fun for two players and you fought it out. It also spawned numerous clones on the same system, with tanks and a plethora of others my failing memory has chosen to forget. Happier times.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • New Screen Locker

  • Desktop-per-screen (multiple monitors improvements)

  • Make KDE feel like home for the Firefox

    Yes, pretty much anybody using KDE probably agrees that Firefox sticks out inside the K desktop like a drop of milk on black coffee. It is a superb browser and the quick development pace Mozilla has adopted is only making it better in a much faster fashion, but looks are also very important, aren’t they? How about making Firefox look like a native KDE app? Check out the screenshot below!

• GNOME Desktop

  • Top 8 Gnome Shell Extensions

    The power of Gnome Shell lies in its extensionability. It is this power that transforms the barely unusable vanilla Gnome Shell desktop environement into a powerful and extremely usable and productive desktop environment. Gnome shell has a number of useful installations to enhance the user experience. To learn how to install and enable them using the Gnome Tweak tool check out our post on Installing and using Gnome Shell. In this post we will look at some must have Gnome shell extensions

Distributions

• Deep in the heart of TexOS

  The link in question is for TexOS, the Texas Open Source Project. The Texas Open Source Project, according to its site, “is working with local, non-profits in the San Angelo, Texas, area to provide technology to students who don’t have access to it at home.”

• New Releases

  • AgiliaLinux 8.0.0

  • Clonezilla 1.2.10-16

  • Salix Ratpoison 13.37

    Salix Ratpoison 13.37 is released! This is probably the first ever linux distribution release featuring Ratpoison as the main window manager. The aim of the Ratpoison edition is to create a system that is fully usable with the keyboard only, no mouse required! For everyone that is not familiar with Ratpoison, Ratpoison is a window manager for X “with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence”. Ratpoison uses a workflow that is similar to that of GNU screen, which is very popular in the terminal world. All interaction with the window manager is done through keystrokes.

  • 10/2/2011: Parted Magic 6.7

    Major enhancement release with many updates. Most notable updates include, Linux 3.0.4 and GParted 0.9.1. We have dropped the legacy PCManFM for PCMan-Mod, and man is it nice. Lots a little PCManfm bugs that have existed for years are now quashed. Xfburn replaces SimpleBurn for burning CDROM/DVD media. Chntpw was added to the boot menu. Adding Luxi fonts improved international language support. Although it’s not the newest released, Firefox is updated to firefox-6.0.2 and is compiled for i486 (official branding included) with permission from the Mozilla Foundation. OpenSSH is updated to 5.9p1 with the ecdsa key created by default. People have been complaining about Parted Magic being hard on laptop batteries, so CPU frequency scaling on anything with a battery is now set to “on-demand” at boot. See the changelog for all the updates. There are many.

  • Now, pay attention to the latest Calculate Linux 11.9

    typically ‘calculates’ the necessary utilities for configuration, building and installation of systems.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia, Mandriva and IBM: Battle of Giants

    My laptop is very old, so old that many people don’t even remember the model. This is one of the last models designed and actually produced by IBM before it was sold to Lenovo – a good old IBM X31, upgraded to 2Gb RAM at the day of purchase in 2005. There is no single thing it cannot do for me – it works just perfectly for many years, and, perhaps, for a few years to come.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat snatches storage Gluster file system for $136m

    Gluster is a spin-off from California Digital Corp, a supercomputer maker that was tapped by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to build its Itanium-based “Thunder” parallel supercomputer in 2003, which at one point was the second fastest supercomputer in the world. The techies behind it, led by Anand Babu Periasamy, Gluster’s CTO, founded Gluster in 2005 to build a better file system.

  • Red Hat to Buy Gluster for $136 Million, Add Open Source Storage

  • Red Hat Acquires Gluster Cloud-Ready Storage System

  • Red Hat buys Gluster storage company, OpenStack support included

  • Ascending Open Virtualization Alliance aims to bolster KVM usage

    The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) recently announced it has increased its membership by adding 134 new members, bringing the group’s total to more than 200 members since its formation back in May of this year. That’s a 20-fold increase in membership since its launch, signaling a strong growth of interest in KVM’s core technology and a growing number of companies hungry to partner and build an ecosystem of solutions around an open source platform.

  • Piper Jaffray Reiterates Overweight on Red Hat

    In its report, Piper Jaffray writes, “Red Hat is the market-leading provider of Linux and open source software and solutions. We believe the open source movement represents a tectonic shift in the way software is developed, licensed, and consumed. Red Hat’s early-mover advantage, market share leadership, and execution capability should enable it to grow at two to three times the rate of the broader software industry over a multi-year horizon, in our view.”

  • Analysts Reduce These Share Price Targets Today

    Red Hat (NYSE:RHT): UBS reiterated its rating of Buy for this company and changed its price target from $54 to $50. About the company: Red Hat, Inc. develops and provides open source software and services, including the Red Hat Linux operating system. The Company’s Web site offers information and news about open source software and provides an online community of open source software users and developers.

  • Fedora

    • Source view in Fedora Packages

    • Going Back to eth0 & eth1 in Fedora 15

• Debian Family

  • Help release Debian from the French!

    Debian gurus Raphael Hertzog and Roland Mas, are looking to raise money to fund the translation of their seminal Debian book “Cahiers de l’Admin Debian Squeeze” into English. The pair have set up a crowdfunding campaign here to finance the three-month task of translating the book’s 450 pages.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • uBuntu 11.10 aka Oneiric Ocelot: This Is The Countdown!

      • Official Oneiric T-Shirts Appear in Ubuntu Shop

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint – The Trio

          Linux Mint’s claim to fame is usability and the search for the perfect Linux desktop. As a distribution Mint arrived on the scene in 2006 with release 1.0 code named “Ada”. It never formally made it as a stable release, resulting in little fan fare. However with release 2.0 codenamed “Barbara” Linux Mint made its mark on the community. Over the next 2 years Mint released 5 versions and if you haven’t guessed it already they were all codenamed after feminine first names.

Devices/Embedded

• RoweBots Transforms Medical Equipment Design – Unison Ultra Tiny Linux Supports Xilinx FPGA Microblaze Softcore

  RoweBots Inc., the leading supplier of tiny embedded Linux-compatible real-time operating systems (RTOS) products, today announced that the Unison™ Operating System (OS) is a core component in a variety of medical equipment. The Unison OS controls operating room equipment, intelligent eyewear and other advanced medical devices for the home, physician’s offices and hospitals.

• Phones

  • Will the Mer Project Keep MeeGo Alive?

    In a message on the MeeGo email list today, Carsten Munk proposes the Mer project as a sustainable way for MeeGo and other communities to work with Tizen. Munk explains that many MeeGo project contributors originated from the Mer project, which stood for Maemo Reconstructed. “We were big on open governance, open development and open source,” he says.

  • The Power of Asterisk Revealed: What the Open Source Software Can Do for You

    Nokia is rumored to be developing an open-source OS for its low-end handsets, codenamed Meltemi, despite having failed to drive MeeGo to the point where it could save the company’s smartphones. Apparently being led by Nokia EVP of Mobile Phones Mary McDowell, so the WSJ‘s sources tell them, Meltemi named after “the Greek word for dry summer winds that blow across the Aegean Sea from the north.”

  • Linux is just good for Nokia business

    So why would Nokia appear to do a 180 and try a product release based on another form of Linux, codenamed “Meltemi”? Wasn’t MeeGo good enough? And what about Symbian, which Nokia just completed outsourcing development and support to Accenture?

    Like any detective, I started out making a list of possibilities.

  • Nokia working on new Linux OS for low end smartphones

    By going for the Windows Phone platform, Nokia has put itself in a difficult spot as far as low end phone segment is concerned.

  • From Moblin to MeeGo to Tizen, Oh My!

  • Android

    • World of Goo game coming to Android soon

    • 4.5-inch Android phone boasts 1280 x 720-pixel display

      LG announced an Optimus LTE phone that runs Android 2.3 on a dual-core, 1.5GHz processor, sports a 4.5-inch “True HD” IPS display with an unprecedented resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, and an LTE modem. Meanwhile, T-Mobile posted — and then hid — a web page showing two LG-manufactured MyTouch-branded phones said to be “coming soon.”

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • The $35 android tablet, a snip at $50

    The Aakash is designed and built by UK firm Datawind, known for their cheapo web-browsing kit. It features a resistive screen, a 366MHz processor and 2GB of storage, along with a couple of USB ports and space for a micro SD card. Connectivity is Wi-Fi, though cellular is already in production, and the government will be selling it to students for a shade under £20 a pop.

  • OLPC India head disappointed with govt’s $35 tablet

  • India’s $35 tablet computer meant for students to be launched today

    India’s Human Resources minister Kapil Sibal will unveil the country’s $35 tablet computer meant for students, officially on Wednesday.

    The tablet was developed as part of the National Mission on Education as a low cost alternative to high-end tablets which were available at $200. Even the latest tablet made by an Indian company called Pepper was priced $99.

  • Linux Tablet Will Be Fully Open Source

    It’s possible the launch of Tizen will eventually add some more variety to the mix, but in the meantime a California vendor of Linux PCs has set its sights on delivering what it believes will be the first fully open source tablet.

PhoneGap Build in Open Beta

Adobe Acquires Developer Of HTML5 Mobile App Framework PhoneGap Nitobi

Adobe buys PhoneGap, TypeKit for better Web tools

PhoneGap Creator Nitobi Acquired by Adobe

PhoneGap Applies to Apache Software Foundation, Contemplates Name Change

PhoneGap to become an Apache project as Adobe acquires Nitobi

Adobe has entered an agreement to acquire Nitobi, the startup behind PhoneGap. Alongside news of the acquisition, Adobe and Nitobi have jointly announced plans to donate the PhoneGap project to the Apache Software Foundation.

PhoneGap is an open source mobile development framework for building applications with standards-based Web technologies. The project provides a cross-platform Web runtime that allows application developers to reach multiple mobile operating systems with a single code base. It includes a custom API stack that enables platform integration and exposes device capabilities.

Adobe Announces Agreement to Acquire Nitobi, Creator of PhoneGap

IBM open sources Blue Spruce to aid medical research

Big Blue has passed the code to the Dojo Foundation’s Open Cooperative Web Framework (OpenCoweb), where it is already being used in a National Institutes of Health funded study of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPDGeneR). The COPDGeneR team is studying the CT scans and medical records of over 10,000 patents in an attempt to understand causation factors and find cures.

The open source code “provenance” audit concept

Proprietary software vendors like to scaremonger over the use of open source software. They like to highlight the “inherent dynamism” that exists in open source libraries that are exposed to community development at all times.

26 helpful open source network management tools

Gnucash accounts for a successful summer

Events

• The art of the Linux conference

  When Ballarat makes its debut in January 2012 as the first regional centre to host Australia’s national Linux conference, it will also see a number of first-timers involved on the organisational front.

Web Browsers

• For Fast, Light Web Browsing, Dillo’s No Dallier

  First things first: Unless you visit only very simple websites, Dillo will probably not be your one and only Web browser. However, you may find it very useful as a secondary browser because of its speed. It loads in under a second and renders just as quickly. It can be your go-to tool when you want a fast means to enter a site and find key information.

• Chrome

  • Google’s Chrome browser: Coming soon to an Android near you?

• Mozilla

  • The current (and poor) state of Firefox

    Firefox 7 was recently released. That’s right, less than a month after the release of Firefox 6 comes numero 7. But why? Why would one of the most popular browsers out there put out major releases so close together? Could it be the fact that 6 was so bad they wanted to call “do-over!” to try to make things right?

  • Mozilla aims to add silent updating to Firefox 10

    A year after it pulled the plug on silent updates in Firefox 4, Mozilla said it will debut most of the behind-the-scenes feature by early next year.

  • Firefox developer reveals changes and new update service

    In a post on his blog, developer Brian R. Bondy says that, while Mozilla’s rapid release process has allowed the development team to release a new version of the Firefox browser every six weeks, modifying restricted files under Windows has been difficult due to the introduction of User Account Control (UAC). By default, UAC prevents software from making changes to c:\Program Files\ without the user’s permission, in the form of a confirmation dialogue box. Bondy argues that “if a user with administrative access gives permissions to Firefox one time via a UAC prompt, and that user has automatic updates on, then there is no reason we should continue to ask them to elevate the permissions each and every time we want to apply an update.”

  • Firefox 3.6 Update To 7.0

    Firefox users who are still running a 3.6 version of the web browser should prepare themselves for receiving an advertised update on Thursday. Users will receive a prompt with the option to update the browser from their version to the very latest. Mozilla is quick to note that this has “no bearing on support levels”, which means that Firefox 3.6 will continue to receive updates after the update prompt has been launched.

SaaS

• The Community Effect

  Owen O’Malley recently collected and analyzed information in the Apache Hadoop project commit logs and its JIRA repository. That data describes the history of development for Hadoop and the contributions of the individuals who have worked on it.

• OpenNebula 3.0 features ACLs and updated interface

  Version 3.0 of the open source cloud toolkit OpenNebula has been launched; according to its developers this is used by thousands of organisations to build IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) clouds. The release includes “new innovative features” which have been “developed to fulfill the needs of leading IT organizations running production environments”.

• Mirantis Establishes Center of Excellence for OpenStack

Databases

• Firebird 2.5.1 is officially released

  Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 2.5.1 This sub-release introduces several bug fixes and many important improvements – for example, performance improvements during a database restore, the ability to write to global temporary tables in read-only databases, etc. For the full list of changes please refer to the Release Notes, Chapter 2 “New in Firebird 2.5″. Firebird 2.5.1 has 100% compatible on-disk structure with Firebird 2.5.0, so it is recommended to migrate to 2.5.1 as soon as possible.

• Amid NoSQL hubbub, Oracle tweaks fan-fave MySQL

  Oracle’s rumored NoSQL database made its splashy debut, along with Oracle’s Big Data Appliance, on the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 main stage Monday. Less trumpeted was news that MySQL, the venerable open-source database, got an update that vows to speed query and improve cluster capabilities.

• Oracle Defies Self With ‘NoSQL’ Database

  Oracle’s extended diatribe against the NoSQL crowd — including Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, and Redis — sought to expose their limitations and sow some serious doubt over their open-source roots. But the white paper has now vanished from Oracle’s website, surviving only through Google’s search cache, and Oracle has launched a new attack on the NoSQL movement. On Monday, at its massive Oracle OpenWorld conference in downtown San Francisco, Oracle unveiled its own NoSQL database.

• Oracle tweaks MySQL with milestone update

  While the news about NoSQL has garnered much attention, Oracle has quietly published a development milestone release (DMR) for MySQL.

  The MySQL 5.6.3 DMR includes a major revision of the software’s optimizer, which the company claims will make file-sort optimizations up to three times faster by searching more intelligently and dumping unneeded data during the process.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• VirtualBox 4.1.4 for Linux Supports X.Org Server 1.11

  Oracle announced last night, October 3rd, a new maintenance version to its popular and powerful VirtualBox virtualization software, VirtualBox 4.1.4, which brings many improvements and lots of bugfixes.

• ODF 1.2 has been approved as an OASIS standard

  Standard document formats are key for liberating the user from the lock in of proprietary formats. ODF has been developed by OASIS based on OOo document format, and is now supported by most personal productivity software and many other computer programs. TDF is committed to supporting ODF and contribute to its development. ODF will be one of four main topics at the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in Paris.

• Java FX 2.0 tries again

  The first time round, JavaFX was a closed source attempt to dislodge Flash, Silverlight and the other plugin runtimes from being the way that people delivered rich applications on the internet. This time around, Oracle has released version 2.0 of its JavaFX RIA (rich internet application) technology as an open source based platform. The release was announced at JavaOne, which is being held in parallel with the company’s in-house OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

  In contrast to previous attempts, in the opinion of many of the Java experts who have been testing the beta since February, it comes across as a much more rounded product. Whether Oracle will be able to compete with alternatives such as Microsoft’s Silverlight or Adobe’s AIR/Flex is, however, open to question, especially as those platforms are already under pressure from the emerging HTML5 ecosystem.

• Oracle v. Google – Settlement Discussions Continue

• Oracle v. Google – Google Files Case Management Statement

  Oracle filed its case management statement last Friday specifying the claims it would assert. (Oracle v. Google – Oracle Specifies Claims It Will Assert) In its statement Oracle identified 26 claims it would be asserting, although it also suggested that there were only 15 unique sets of claims because of what Oracle described as “claim mirroring.” Monday Google responded with its own case management statement identifying the grounds for invalidity it would assert against each of Oracle’s asserted claims.

• Oracle v. Google – Stay or Not to Stay, That Is the Question – Redux

  Each of the parties has now come forward and filed an additional Case Management Statement (Google Statement – 480 [PDF]; Oracle Statement – 481 [PDF]) on the issues of the patent reexaminations; whether the case should be stayed pending those reexaminations; the amount of time required for direct and cross-examination at trial, and the issue of damages. Not surprisingly, the positions of the parties are diametrically opposed.

Education

• iSchools bats for open-source in Software Freedom Day

  The iSchools Project, a government-funded ICT for education integration initiative, recently made a push for open-source software during the Software Freedom Day (SFD) 2011 held at St. Paul’s University in Tuguegarao, Cagayan Valley last September.

  Working on the theme “Smarter Communities Choose to be Free”, this year’s SFD aimed to educate and convince technology users to choose open-source software instead of using proprietary software or unlicensed software.

Business

• CIO/CTO Ghan Desai Leverages Open Source at Team Capital Bank

  A developer at heart, Team Capital Bank EVP and CIO/CTO Ghan Desai takes a hands-on approach to technology development while taking advantage of free, open source solutions.

• OSS adoption guidelines for SMBs

  For most small and midsize businesses (SMBs), costs and availability of in-house IT resources dictate the type of software they procure. This is why industry insiders are urging these companies to consider open source software (OSS) and leverage the low start-up expenditure and availability of support offered by market players.

• The Power of Asterisk Revealed: What the Open Source Software Can Do for You

  Small businesses, enterprises and even governments use Asterisk-based technologies to enable feature-rich voice communications over a Web connection. But not all current and prospective Asterisk (News – Alert) users know the true power of the open source software.

• The uneasy relationship between open source and profit

  Richard Stallman’s FOSS idea was anti-capitalist. Eric Raymond’s open source attitude is profoundly pro-capitalist.

  Yet the first open source companies to emerge in the early part of the last decade used FOSS licenses, not the “permissive” BSD-type licenses Raymond favors. They wanted community support, and an equal relationship among developers encouraged it.

• Semi-Open Source

  • Opscode Releases New Chef Software to Rapidly Deploy and Automate OpenStack Clouds

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Nominations are open for the 14th annual Free Software Awards

  The Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software is presented annually by FSF president Richard Stallman to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

  Last year, Rob Savoye was recognized with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his contributions to compiler and testing tools, and his leadership of the GNU Gnash project, a fully-free replacement for Adobe Flash. Savoye joined a prestigious list of previous winners including John Gilmore, Wietse Venema, Harald Welte, Ted Ts’o, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Alan Cox, Larry Lessig, Guido van Rossum, Brian Paul, Miguel de Icaza and Larry Wall.

• Merging In The GNU D Language Compiler To GCC

  Nearly one year ago I wrote about Digital Mars wanting to merge the GNU D Compiler into GCC. Finally it looks like merging the compiler for the D programming language is nearing a point of reality.

Public Services/Government

• The Kerala State Electricity Board Saves a Whopping Rs 8 Crore, Using FOSS

  For the last four years, KSEB has created over 840 databases across the state. Almost all its applications in major functional areas, operating either in a centralised or local architecture, use PostgreSQL. About 700 PostgreSQL databases have been used in the Oruma project, and over 4,000 employees of KSEB access these databases on a daily basis. Saras has about 140 databases, which are used by about 1,000 users for daily transactions. Three projects under implementation (the Human Resource Information System or HRIS, the Supply Chain Management or SCM, and HT/EHT billing software) also use PostgreSQL databases. The HRIS will have a single database, and over 500 users are expected to use it on a daily basis. The SCM system uses PostgreSQL, and about 1,000 users are expected to access this centralised database for daily transactions. And about 30 people will use the HT/EHT billing software, every day.

Openness/Sharing

• OCCUPY WALL STREET (the theory)

  Occupy Wall Street is an open source protest.

• Open Data

  • Synchronously Replicating Databases Across Data Centers – Are you Insane?

    Well actually….no. The second Development Milestone Release of MySQL Cluster 7.2 introduces support for what we call “Multi-Site Clustering”. In this post, I’ll provide an overview of this new capability, and considerations you need to make when considering it as a deployment option to scale geographically dispersed database services.

    You can read more about MySQL Cluster 7.2.1 in the article posted on the MySQL Developer Zone.

    MySQL Cluster has long offered Geographic Replication, distributing clusters to remote data centers to reduce the affects of geographic latency by pushing data closer to the user, as well as providing a capability for disaster recovery.

• Open Access/Content

  • Open-access R&D for drug industry

    LONDON: Drug companies are learning how to share. In a bid to save both time and money, some of the industry’s biggest names are experimenting with new ways to pool early-stage research, effectively taking a leaf out of the “open-source” manual that gave the world Linux software.

Programming

• Put down the Java manual

• Typesafe Updates Scala and Akka

  Typesafe Stack 1.1 includes latest versions of the open source Scala language and Akka middleware

Standards/Consortia

• UK.gov coder defines open standards: ‘A lot like porn’

  As the government works on drawing up yet another definition for open standards, the man in charge of the Cabinet Office’s team of IT coders is keen to talk about a future where all government tech is based on, well, open standards.

Health/Nutrition

• Food Rights Network Interviews Food & Farm Hero John Kinsman

  This month, the Center for Media and Democracy’s new Food Rights Network launches a series of interviews with “food and farm heroes.” It’s easy for an organization dedicated to exposing corporate spin to focus on negative corporate propaganda with its ubiquity, but we would be remiss not to highlight courageous people who fight corporate agendas and spin in other ways, large and small. Some devote their lives to it.

• Los Angeles and Kern County’s Epic Sewage Sludge Battle

  Sewage sludge can contain heavy metals, pesticides, dioxins, flame retardants, pharmaceuticals, perfluorinated compounds, nanoparticles, pathogens, known endocrine disruptors, and more. Of those, only 10 heavy metals out of dozens are regulated in sewage sludge that is applied to land where animal feed is grown as fertilizer. The strictest regulation, which the EPA calls “Class A Biosolids” (“biosolids” is a term the sewage industry made up to make sludge sound more palatable), has the same restrictions on heavy metals, plus two other criteria: it must have no detectable salmonella or fecal coliform, and it must be treated so that it is not attractive to disease-carrying organisms like rats or flies. But this leaves in and unaccounted for numerous other pathogens, as well as an array of heavy metals and other substances like PBDEs concentrated in the resulting sludge.

Finance

• O.co aka Overstock.com vs. Goldman Sachs: A True David & Goliath Story

  For six years Overstock.com has waged a war to expose Wall Street mischief. We did not go looking for a fight, but our company was attacked, and we learned we were not alone: the same manipulation-for-profit tools that Wall Street had deployed against us had also been deployed against many American companies, harming job creation, innovation, and economic growth. We knew that if left unchecked and unexposed, Wall Street’s games could ultimately damage U.S. capital markets.

  So in 2005 and 2007 we filed two lawsuits. The first case was against a hedge fund (Rocker Partners) and hatchet-job-for-hire research team (Gradient Analytics), both with ties to Jim Cramer. The second case was against a group of eleven Wall Street prime brokers, culminating in Goldman Sachs. The hedge fund in question (Rocker Partners) hired famed lawyer David Boies, and the prime brokers showed up with an army of the most prestigious law firms in America. Our lawyers were Dore Griffinger, Ellen Cirangle, Jonathan Sommer and Catherine Jackson of Stein & Lubin, a small but excellent San Francisco law firm.

• Ratigan With Denninger: How To Get Money Out Of Politics

  Three years ago, I left my 15-year career as a financial professional, because I was disgusted and disturbed by the rampant evidence of corruption in the relationship between our banking system and our government.

  At the time the Tea Party was emerging and I was confident that between their exploding wave of anger and our newly minted president’s soaring aspirations for all of us — we would align to confront and resolve the blatantly corrupt relation ship between banking and our government and more broadly BUSINESS and STATE.

• Molly Crabapple’s Occupy Wall Street “Vampire Squid” poster, for your printing/stenciling pleasure

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Koch Industries Exposed for Bribery, Secret Iran Sales and More

  Late Sunday night, after a flurry of PR flack-directed prebuttals that had eyebrows arching and anticipation building, Bloomberg Markets Magazine released an epic exposé about Koch Industries’ misdeeds during the last three decades.

  Fifteen Bloomberg journalists from around the world contributed to the story.

• U.S. House Passes ALEC-Inspired TRAIN Act

  The TRAIN Act, introduced by ALEC alumnus Rep. John Sullivan (R-OK), “would create a special committee to oversee the EPA’s rules and regulations, and require the agency to consider economic impacts on polluters when it sets standards concerning how much air pollution is too much.”

Censorship

• Italian-language Wikipedia hidden, may shut down

  In a message it posted today, Wikipedia said it has hidden the Italian-language portion of the site due to a new law proposed by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s administration.

DRM

• The Daily Digital Lock Dissenter, Day 3: Retail Council of Canada

  The Retail Council of Canada represents more than 43,000 store fronts of all retail formats across Canada, including department, specialty, discount, and independent stores, and online merchants. It board of directors include representation from Canada’s largest retailers. The RCC’s comments on digital locks in Bill C-32:

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 231 – Engage the Noise Gate!

Kernel Space

• Kernel.org is back

  The restored kernel.org is back on line – partially. It holds the mainline tree, the stable tree, and linux-next; as of this writing, all hold their pre-shutdown contents. Expect those trees to be updated soon; other trees will slowly reappear as their developers obtain new credentials on the site. Services other than git and FTP (the wiki, mirrors, etc.) remain offline. (Note that there appears to be some residual weirdness around the site’s SSL certificate, leading to “untrusted connection” warnings if you try to use HTTPS).

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA 285.05.09 Linux Driver Pre-Release

    As was pointed out in the forums, new binary NVIDIA Linux drivers were pushed out today. The new version is the 285.05.09 pre-release.

  • A first post about Intel Linux Graphics and their friends

    As you already know, since August I am working at Intel, within the Intel Linux Graphics group. And, as many of you know as well, the news about Intel Linux graphics out there vary a lot, but usually just between the “it just works” and “nothing works” states, with few intermediate points in between (many of which are usually covered by phoronix news).

Applications

• 4 programs to update your Blog from Linux

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Change Default Browser, Mail, Music/Movie Player in Ubuntu 11.10

  • Generate and/or Encrypt Passwords – makepasswd

  • How to lock down Linux

  • Recording and Replaying Web Interaction Using Perl Modules

  • Python for systems administrators – Repetitive tasks

  • Fix for mount error(12): Cannot allocate memory

  • Linux security tips

  • Tech Tip – Touchscreen Calibration In Linux

  • Add a ‘Force Quit’ Applet to Ubuntu’s Unity Launcher

  • How to analyse Network Protocols using Wireshark in Ubuntu

  • Configuring Your Kubuntu Panels

  • Increased Performance In Linux With zRam (Virtual Swap Compressed in RAM)

  • How to Find Anything Under Linux

  • Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Fedora 15

  • Install Epiphany 3.2.0 With Web Application Mode In Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

  • PyLogsParser: how to write a normalizer

  • Free Online security course (LearnSIA) – A Call for Help

• Games

  • Let’s Play: SuperTuxKart

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 25th September 2011

    In this week’s KDE Commit-Digest:

    * New sorting options in KDEBase
    * Work on screen locking as an effect
    * Optimization of message list update in KMail
    * VPN status overlay icon reworked in Network Management
    * Optimization of QVector usage in Undo manager in KDElibs
    * Optimization of item addition and deletion to a project in K3B
    * Bugfixes in Calligra, including date entering in Kexi forms.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Fedora, OpenSuse betas embrace GNOME 3.2

    The Attachmate/SUSE-backed OpenSUSE and Red Hat-backed Fedora community Linux projects have been released in beta versions that include the GNOME 3.2 desktop environment. The Fedora 16 (“Verne”) beta also adds support for the GRUB2 bootloader, as well as updates to applications including Firefox, Blender, Perl, and Python, while the OpenSUSE 12.1 (“Asparagus”) beta to be more of a developers alpha release masquerading as a beta.

Distributions

• One CD disk, multiple Linux distributions: Netboot CD

• An Arch Tale

  Dave needs a new 64-bit Linux for his primary audio production machine. What shall he do ? Read on to learn how and why he decided upon the Arch Linux distribution.

• New Releases

  • Parted Magic 6.7 Comes with Linux 3.0.4 Kernel, GParted 0.9.1

    Parted Magic 6.7 has been released. The latest update to the partitioning tool and distro comes with some rather big changes. A couple of big components have been updated to their latest version, both the Linux kernel and GParted, the main tool in the suite.

  • Parted Magic 6.7 adds Xfburn CD/DVD burner tool

    Version 6.7 of the Parted Magic open source, multi-platform partitioning tool has been released. According to lead developer Patrick J. Verner, the update is a “major enhancement release” that has a number of notable improvements and updates.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat to pay $136M for data-storage firm

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16: Linux home for lost Ubuntu GNOMEs

      Dubbed “Verne” and sporting desktop artwork that echoes Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Fedora 16 is shaping up to be a worthwhile alternative to Ubuntu 11.10, particularly for those that aren’t happy with Canonical’s home-brewed Unity shell.

      Among the big changes in Fedora 16 is GNOME 3.2, the latest version of the GNOME 3 shell Ubuntu ditched for Unity.

    • Fedora 16 ‘Verne’ beta released

      The Fedora Project has made the first and only beta of Fedora 16 available for download. It should include all of the major changes for the new distribution, code-named “Verne”. Over the next five weeks leading up to the final release, development will focus on fine tuning and bug fixes.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 235

      • The New Wallpapers of Ubuntu 11.10

        Canonical introduced this weekend the new wallpapers that will be part of the final release of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system.

        There are fourteen new wallpapers in total, for the new Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system, due for release on October 13th, 2011.

        In order of appearance, their names are: Buck off!, Darkening Clockwork, Dybbølsbro Station, JardinPolar, Langelinie Allé, Momiji Dream, Mount Snowdon – Wales, Not Alone, Power of Words, PurpleDancers, Small flowers, Stalking Ocelot, The Grass ain’t Greener and WildWheat.

      • Ubuntu Version 11.10: Days Away Now

        As we’ve reported before, the official release of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot, is due on October 13th. In addition, many people are already using the beta releases. In case you missed it, at ThisisTheCountdown.com you can track the minutes and seconds leading up to the next major release of Ubuntu, and get QR codes and URL strips. The previous release of Ubuntu, Natty Narwhal, provoked some controversy among users, especially due to its desktop interface, but version 11.10 has some much desired improvements. Here’s an updated look at what’s under the hood.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Android Smartphone USB Tethering (Linux Mint 11)

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Amazon rumored to be negotiating for WebOS

    Amazon is rumored to be negotiating with HP to buy its Palm division, including its WebOS assets — either to create an update to the Kindle Fire tablet, or just to gain patents. Meanwhile, an IHD iSuppli analysis suggests Amazon is selling each Quanta-manufactured Fire for $10 less than it costs to build.

  • Sony Ericsson camera phone debuts unlocked on NewEgg.com

    NewEgg.com has begun shipping an unlocked, camera-focused Sony Ericsson Android 2.3 smartphone for $380. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray is equipped with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a 3.3-inch display, both 8.1-megapixel and VGA cameras, plus a 3G radio said to be suitable for AT&T’s network.

  • Android

    • Replicant: Making Android truly free

      Since Linux is released under the GNU Public license, Google is forced to release the source code for the Linux kernel that Android runs on.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Solar-powered I-slate tablet heading for Indian schools in 2012

    An Android-based “I-slate” tablet prototype developed in part by Rice University has completed year-long trials in Indian public schools, and a $50 solar-powered version with a new power-sipping processor is set to enter full production for a mid-2012 release. Meanwhile, the much-delayed “$35 Indian Tablet” aimed at Indian students will launch Oct. 5, the Indian government now claims.

  • Will the Kindle Fire Light a Fire Under Android?

    Since releasing its new Kindle Fire tablet last week, which is based on the Android mobile operating system, Amazon hasn’t released official numbers for how many of the units it is selling, but there are some reports that the Kindle Fire could become one of the biggest selling Android hardware devices ever. The Cult of Android blog is running a screenshot that it claims is leaked from Amazon and shows that the units are selling “at an average rate of over 2,000 units per hour, or over 50,000 per day.” If the sales numbers are correct, that would put the Kindle Fire on track to be a bigger seller than the iPad was fresh out of the gate. It goes to show that Amazon’s big bet on open source is paying off.

  • Toshiba Regza AT700 tablet announced

    Toshiba kicked off proceeding’s at this year’s CEATEC with news that it has created the world’s thinnest tablet – the Toshiba Regza AT700.

    TechRadar was in Japan to get a first glimpse of the tablet, which looks mightily similar to the one it announced in IFA in September – the AT200.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Telepathic Flirt With Chromium

• Mozilla

  • Rapid Release Follow-Up

    My recent post on the rapid release cycle generated a lot of response, some very thoughtful and some also very frustrated. Many of the comments focus on a few key issues listed below. We’ve been working on how to address these issues; I’ll outline our progress and plans here.

  • Mozilla releases Rescuefox prototype

    Mozilla’s Gladius game engine is part of the outfit’s Paladin project, which is trying to push 3D gaming in the Firefox web browser. The Rescuefox prototype was used to highlight any problems between the Gladius game engine and Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine, and it also works on Google’s Chrome.

  • RescueFox: The Value of a Prototype

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Is One

  Once in the mists of time, I was the head of open source at Sun Microsystems. One of my chief delights in that role was the OpenOffice.org project. I attended the Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Monterey, California in 2000 where the project was created out of a product Sun had acquired the previous year, StarOffice. I watched as it grew in polish and capability. I also helped as it submitted its ideas to the OASIS standards group for an “Open Office Document Format”, a project that evolved into ODF and changed the world of enterprise document handling.

Education

• On the University migration to Free Software

  Megatotoro described here how the recently announced University migration to free software made a big splash in national newspapers and even on TV news. The idea is to start by replacing MS Office suites by free software equivalents (Open Office.org/Libre Office) and, eventually, dump Windows and implement Linux.

  I visited the online page of one of those newspapers to see the coverage and the comments I read were, for the most part, very encouraging and positive. Of course, the public is congratulating the University for the initiative of saving a LOT OF MONEY (that was used to pay MS licenses) through the use of Free Software and to invest this growing amount on improving the campus and on resources available to students.

Funding

• VC funding for open source – existential question time

  I tweeted last week that VC funding for open source related vendors was up 95% in Q3, driving by significant investment in ‘big data’ related vendors.

Project Releases

• Airtime radio software updated with new DEB packages

  The Sourcefabric development team has released version 1.9.4 of its open source Airtime radio software. 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.

• New Zentyal 2.2-1 installer available!

Openness/Sharing

• Project Mango kick-off
  [Blender project]

Programming

• Sinatra 1.3 adds streaming

  The developers of Sinatra, the light-weight web framework for Ruby programmers, have announced the availability of a new feature release, Sinatra 1.3.0, which allows applications to keep connections open over time while still delivering data over the connection.

Finance

• The Occupation Is On The Move, Find a Big Bank Protest Near You

  U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone used to say “sometimes you have to pick a fight to win one.”

  Now Occupy Wall Street has picked one, right in Jamie Dimon’s backyard.

  But it won’t stay contained in Zuccotti Park. While Brookfield Properties called the park a “public sanctuary” in 2005, they have apparently changed their minds. Mr. Zuccotti wants his park back and the police are preparing to clear it with new rules barring camping, sleeping and breathing.

• World is heading for ‘Great Stagnation’, says Goldman

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Synagro’s Shiny New Patina

  Synagro is in the business of marketing sewage sludge as “compost,” or, as the company’s new, PR-approved website puts it, “Transforming natural waste challenges into sustainable, planet-friendly solutions.” The company is a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group, the largest private equity firm in the world. Carlyle is also a sizeable part of the military-industrial complex with ties to numerous national politicians, including former British Prime Minister John Major, Alice Albright (daughter of former Secretary of State Madelyn Albright), and both George W. and George H.W. Bush.

Privacy

• Open Data Community Demands a Real Debate on Public Data Corporation

  Earlier this week dozens of people from the loose open data movement gathered in London to discuss the current government consultations on this policy area. Open Rights Group had organised these workshops to present the policy proposals and our initial views, but also to gather feedback from the community. The main message we took home is that the Public Data Corporation in is current shape is widely perceived as a missed opportunity and huge step backwards, while the Making Open Data Real paper got a much more nuanced response.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Red Hat

    I am happy to announce that today the party is kicking off its public policy process. To get involved simply take a look at www.pirateparty.org.uk/policy2011 and then go to piratethispolicy.co.uk to let us know what you think.

    As you know, over the last year I have been listening to members, voters and the public as well as going out and speaking to the people who had an opportunity to vote for one of our candidates in Gorton, Oldham and Bury. I watched as our brothers and sisters in Berlin reinvigorated their voters and overturned a legacy of decline and apathy. I saw that it was not just because they had money, not just because the electoral system in Berlin is fairer, but because they had ideas that people could vote for; ideas that came from the same guiding principles as our own, ideas that were well presented, sensible and relevant. They were ideas that won 8.9% of an election and they were good ideas.