11.12.11

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Kids on Computers Grows Up

  Most of the top contributors to open source projects had early access to computers as kids. But many kids live in communities where access to computers is not guaranteed. The Kids on Computers project is a non-profit using donated computers and Linux to provide access to disadvantaged kids.

• Linux poll leaves The INQUIRER’s readers divided

  THE LATEST POLL we’ve run at The INQUIRER on Linux left readers divided on what they thought a world without the UNIX-like operating system would be like.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • CAOS Theory Podcast 2011.11.11

• Kernel Space

  • More Linux Kernel Patches To Mimic Windows

    The PCI-E ASPM patch that went out yesterday and was written about on Phoronix over the night has addressed the ASPM issue on all hardware I have tested so far. It changes when ASPM is enabled/disabled, so that this PCI Express power management feature should be restored on most hardware like it was in pre-2.6.38 kernels while being switched off for problematic hardware.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Matrox extends Extio series support

      The Extio F2208 and Extio F2408 KVM extenders and Extio F2408E Expander units from Matrox Graphics support a range of Linux operating systems with remote multi-display flexibility using a minimum of fibre-optic cabling.

• Applications

  • The Best Terminal Emulator for Linux

  • Give Your Computer A Voice With eSpeak [Windows & Linux]

  • Cognex CVL 7.0 vision library now runs on Linux

    In a move to open new markets for its machine-vision products, Cognex has added Linux support to the CVL (Cognex Vision Library) software developer’s kit. The new CVL 7.0 CR7 release works with Linux kernel versions 2.6 and later and can be used with Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu Linux distributions.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Deploy a Private PaaS to Get the Best for Your Enterprise Cloud

    • AES Counter Mode details (Intel AES-NI implementation)

    • How to Debug Bash Scripts

    • Book Excerpt: A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

    • Using Adminer to Manage your Databases

    • OpenSSL Expert Tips and Tricks: Test and Benchmark Servers

    • How To Activate Screen Saver In Ubuntu 11.10

    • How to Burn an XDG3 Formatted Xbox 360 Game ISO with Linux

    • Linux/Windows Dual Boot Configuration

  • Wine

    • Infos: Wine 1.3.32 released

      What’s new in this release (see below for details):
      – BiDi text support in the multi-line edit control.
      – Support for pattern brushes in the DIB engine.
      – A number of MSXML fixes.
      – Improvements to the PostScript driver.
      – Various bug fixes.

  • Games

    • The Humble Voxatron Debut adds more games!

    • Desura Linux Client Can be Open Sourced

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME Desktop

    • New / Updated GNOME Application Designs (Mockups)

      The GNOME developers are working on new application designs for Music, Photos, Chat, Transfers, Weather, Web, Mail, Calendar, Videos, Maps, Boxes (application for accessing other computer systems or images) and Notes as well as a redesign for Documents and Contacts. Here are a few very interesting mockups:

• Distributions

  • The Chakra Project – A Linux Distribution

    The Chakra project linux distribution is originally forked from Arch linux. And The Chakra linux is based on K-I-S-S [keep it simple, stupid!] principle. This comes with the KDE desktop environment with better PLASMA desktop. It also available for 32-bit and 64-bit architecture.

  • Gentoo Family

    • Sabayon Linux 7 LXDE, E17 and Awesome Released

      Fabio Erculiani proudly announced last evening, November 9th, the immediate availability for download of three new Sabayon Linux 7 editions, for the LXDE, Enlightenment 17 and Awesome desktop environments.

  • Red Hat Family

    • At Red Hat, Open Communication Means Helpful Workers

      To lead people, listen first to their ideas and concerns. Then let them propose steps they can take to follow through.

      At Red Hat (RHT), a provider of open-source technology based in Raleigh, N.C., employees collaborate with colleagues in other departments to achieve company objectives. This fosters a lively, problem-solving culture.

      “I like to make sure people have a voice,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s “middleware” business unit which makes software that helps build applications. “But it’s not just having a voice. It’s having a recommendation or plan on how to improve or change things and taking ownership of particular issues.”

    • Red Hat Shares Up 15.1% Since SmarTrend’s Buy Recommendation (RHT)

      Nov 11, 2011 (SmarTrend(R) Spotlight via COMTEX) — SmarTrend identified an Uptrend for Red Hat (RHT) on October 10th, 2011 at $43.82. In approximately 1 month, Red Hat has returned 15.11% as of today’s recent price of $50.44.

    • Sabeo Technologies to Host Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Free Breakfast Seminar

      9th November 2011, Sabeo Technologies, an Ireland based IT services provider, systems integrator and Consultancy Company that works with clients to maximise their business efficiency through the optimisation of their IT environments, is hosting a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 – Breakfast Seminar, in conjunction with Red Hat, on the Wednesday 23rd November 2011 at The Westin Dublin Hotel, Ireland.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Two new kernels for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

          Canonical is distributing two new kernels – 2.6.32-35 and 2.6.38-12 – for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS via the Ubuntu repositories. Kernel 2.6.32, the kernel used when Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was first released in April 2010, remains the default kernel.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • First Look: Linux Mint 12

            Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few days ago that the upcoming Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) operating system will feature a new desktop interface built on top of the GNOME 3 desktop environment.

            So, we’ve downloaded a development version of the Linux Mint 12 distribution and took it for a test drive, to see that amazing new interface everyone is talking about, that Unity killer.

            To our surprise, it appears that Linux Mint 12′s new interface, called MGSE (Mint Gnime Shell Extensions) is actually a small modification of the GNOME 3′s GNOME Shell interface.

            You have two panels: the one on top is GNOME 3′s one, which can’t be removed (but it can be improved), and the bottom panel was added by the Linux Mint developers, providing a stylish Launcher Menu with built-in search and favorites, as well as a desktop switcher and notification center.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Gorilla Logic Launches FoneMonkey for Android, a New Automated Open Source Testing Tool for Android Applications and Devices

      • Review: Motorola’s Droid Razr is thin, beautiful, pricey

        Motorola’s $300 Droid Razr is pricey, and its non-removable battery doesn’t last long. But in every other way, this thin, cutting-edge design breathes new life into its manufacturer’s legacy, according to this eWEEK review.

      • MIPS uses Sysgo RTOS to secure Android and Linux

        MIPS Technologies is collaborating with OS developer Sysgo to port its embedded virtualization technology to MIPS32 processor cores, writes Richard Wilson.

        Sysgo has a novel combination of real-time operating system (RTOS) and virtualization layer.

        Its PikeOS RTOS is a hypervisor virtualization platform that allows several applications and operating systems such as Android and Linux to run securely in parallel on a single hardware platform.

      • Retail Motorola Droid RAZR rooted: Windows, Linux and OS X instructions included

Free Software/Open Source

• On the Jobs Front, Open Source Skills Remain in Demand

• MapR Technologies and Lucid Imagination Partner to Accelerate Enterprise Search Using Open Source Apache Lucene/Solr

• Matrix Algebra on GPU: An interview with MAGMA lead developers

• Events

  • Scaling up for SCALE 10X

    The Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 10X — celebrates its 10th year when it opens on the Martin Luther King holiday weekend (Jan. 20-22). As this is a month ahead of the usual February date for SCALE, things seem to be coming together for the event.

    SCALE started 10 years ago with a single day event at the University of Southern California with two tracks and 400 attendees. Considering that SCALE 10X will be a three day event, with as many as a half-dozen tracks and possibly as many as 2,000 attendees, it’s clear that FOSS is alive and thriving.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla’s Boot 2 Gecko Mobile OS to Land 2012

    • At long last, Mozilla Releases Lightning 1.0 Calendar

      Back in September, I wrote about the pending release of the Mozilla Lightning Calendar. At the time, I had expected the 1.0 release to come out at the end of September – as it runs out I was off by over a month.

      But hey, when we’ve all waited years, what’s another few weeks between friends?

    • Early Previews of Next Versions of Firefox Are Ready for Poke-Arounds

      Without a doubt, many people reading this are already using Firefox 8, a significant update to Mozilla’s widely used browser. Version 8 features Twitter searches you can do directly from your toolbar, and runs significantly faster than previous versions. Firefox 8 also works more efficiently with tabs, and facility with tabs is one reason that many people favor Firefox. In keeping with Mozilla’s rapid release cycle for its browser, though, you can now get early preview versions of the next versions of Firefox.

    • Speedy Firefox 9 Beta Versions Take Their Place in Line

      The desktop beta version of Firefox 9, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, offers enhanced JavaScript performance and new developer tools that make browsing the Web much faster, Mozilla says.

    • Orion Editor Ships in Firefox 8

• SaaS

  • Rackspace Brings OpenStack to Datacenters

  • Dell is open sourcing Crowbar Apache Hadoop barclamps!

    Included in the Hadoop barclamp suite are Hadoop Map Reduce, Hive, Pig, ZooKeeper and Sqoop running on RHEL 5.7. These barclamps cover the core parts of the Hadoop suite. Like other Crowbar deployments (see OpenStack), the barclamps automatically discover the service configurations and interoperate. One of our team members (call him Scott Jensen) said it very simply “I can deploy a fully an integrated Hadoop cluster in a few hours. That friggin’ rocks!” I just can’t put it more eloquently than that!

  • HStreaming Enables Continuous Real-time Analytics on All Hadoop Distributions

  • Karmasphere and Cloudera Form Strategic Big Data Partnership

  • StackIQ Solves the Big Infrastructure Management Problem with Release of Rocks+ 6.0 featuring Hadoop

  • Hadapt Announces Early Access for Hadapt 1.0, the First Big Data Platform to Combine Hadoop with Relational Databases

  • Enterprise Customers Gain Business Insight and Competitive Advantage With NetApp and Cloudera

  • Splunk to Provide Integration with Apache Hadoop

  • Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition Bringing OpenStack with Fanatical Support to Datacenters Worldwide

• Databases

  • Continuent Announces Supported MySQL-To-Oracle Replication With Tungsten Replicator

  • Quest Software Addresses Big Data Skills Shortage with Release of Toad for Cloud Databases

  • EnterpriseDB Announces Postgres Plus Connector for Hadoop

    EnterpriseDB, the leading worldwide provider of PostgreSQL and Oracle compatibility products and services, today announced Postgres Plus® Connector for Hadoop, which allows massive amounts of data from a Postgres Plus® Advanced Server (PPAS) or PostgreSQL database to be accessed, processed and analyzed in a Hadoop cluster. The Postgres Plus Connector for Hadoop allows programmers to process large amounts of SQL-based data using their familiar MapReduce constructs.

• Semi-Open Source

  • Talend’s New Community Coders Program Highlights Vendor’s Open Source Contributions

• Project Releases

  • Open64 5.0 released

    Open64 is a GPLv2-licensed compiler for the x86 and Itanium architectures…

• Public Services/Government

  • To Ghana’s Minister of Education- Can we please Open Source the CSSPS?

    Hello Madam Betty, this mail is being written to you on an OS called Xubuntu, it’s open source and developed by people from all walks of life. The underlying skeleton, or code as it’s called, is open for anybody’s inspection. Anybody who thinks there’s something wrong with it can have a look at the code and if need be, suggest changes that will better the OS for all who use it.

• Licensing

  • German court confirms ADSL router is a computer like any other

    ADSL modems are PCs, ruled the Regional Court of Berlin last Tuesday, and their owners can do with it whatever they like. That includes installing software on it, says Cybits, a software maker selling applications to make Internet connections at home and at school safe for children.

    The company has been fighting in court since 2010, battling with AVM, manufacturer of ADSL terminals such as the Fritz!Boxen, popular with many Europeans. AVM wants Cybits to stop modifying the Linux-based firmware that is ships with these Fritz!Boxen. In January this year, the court preliminary agreed with AVM.

  • German Court Rules That Free Software Can Be Modified as Users Wish

    German DSL router vendor AVM had attempted to stop Cybits, which produces children’s Web-filtering software, from modifying any part of the firmware used in its routers, including a key piece of Linux-based free software.

    Both companies use the Linux kernel, which is licensed under the General Public License (GPL). In order for the Cybits filtering program to work, it needs to alter certain parts of this kernel (removing some updates that were added by AVM). AVM claimed that changing the kernel infringed AVM’s copyright.

    However, in its ruling the court apparently sided with Cybits, saying that users of embedded devices with pre-installed free software have the legal freedom to make, install, run and distribute modifications to this free software.

• Programming

  • Key Success Factors for Open Source Strategies

    Last week at EclipseCon Europe, John Swainson gave a keynote address that reflected on IBM’s decision to start Eclipse as an open source project and consortium. During his speech, John identified 5 key things IBM thought they needed to be successful. These success factors are still relevant today for any company interested in an open source strategy, so I think they warrant repeating:

  • ActiveState Enhances Stackato with More Management, Monitoring for Private PaaS

  • Apache Harmony is Dead. OpenJDK Wins Open Source Java Battle.

    Remember Apache Harmony? The Apache Software Foundation led effort to build a fully open source implementation of Java?

    Guess what? The project is now (mostly) dead and that’s not good news.

    In a vote, Apache Harmony developers decided to move Harmony to the Attic, essentially shelving the project that once held the prospect of being the leading light in the open source Java world.

  • Programming in Lua

    For example, the user interface of Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom is written in Lua (I raved about this app when it was first released in 2006), as is Logitech’s Squeezebox music player and Damn Small Linux. According to Wikipedia, DSL uses “Lua to provide desktop-friendly interfaces for command-line utilities without sacrificing lots of disk space.” (I reviewed DSL in 2005.)

Leftovers

• Goodbye BIOS, hello UEFI

  When you turn on your computer, a primitive system that dates back more than 30 years, the basic input/output system (BIOS), turns your cold hardware into a functioning system that your operating system can then boot from. Alas, it’s sadly out of date. PC makers have slowly been replacing BIOS with the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). That’s all well and good, but one UEFI feature, Secure Boot, could be used to lock PCs into being only able to boot one operating system: Windows 8.

• iOS upgrade swells iPhone battery-suckage grief

• Security

  • More Kernel Vulnerabilities Affect Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

  • Flash Player dirty dozen: Adobe plugs code execution holes

• Finance

  • For Bank Of America, Debit Fees Extend To Unemployment Benefits

    usiness plan. Out of work for much of the last three years, she depends upon a $264-a-week unemployment check from the state of South Carolina. But the state has contracted with Bank of America to administer its unemployment benefits, and Busby has frequently found herself incurring bank fees to get her money.

    To withdraw her benefits, Busby, 33, uses a Bank of America prepaid debit card on which the state deposits her funds. She could visit a Bank of America ATM free of charge. But this small community in the state’s rural center, her hometown, does not have a Bank of America branch. Neither do the surrounding towns where she drops off her kids at school and attends church.

  • TOM THE DANCING BUG: Whose Encampment Should Crowd-Control Police Be Breaking Up?

• Civil Rights

  • The WikiLeaks-Fueled Erosion of Civil Liberties Has Begun

    When a federal judge ruled that Twitter must reveal the private data of three WikiLeaks associates on Thursday, privacy advocates died a little inside. The two organizations that had defended the three users, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundations (EFF), immediately filed mournful blog posts that respectively raised doubts about the United States government’s secretive handling of the case and highlighted grave message the ruling sends about the future of privacy on the internet. But Wall Street Journal reporter Jennifer Valentine-DeVries sums up the implications of the case best with a leading question: “Should the government be able to collect information related to your Internet use without a warrant?” We now know that the federal court’s answer is, “Yes.”

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Turncoat EU Parliament Gives Up on Defending Free Wireless Communications

    In discussions on the future of wireless communications policies, the EU Parliament is giving in to Member States by accepting a watered-down version1 of the Radio Spectrum Policy Programme. Last Spring, the Parliament had made very constructive proposals in favour of open spectrum policies, calling2 for citizen-controlled wireless communications. Sadly, the first major effort to harmonise spectrum policy in Europe is being held back by EU governments’ conservatism and the Parliament’s surrender.

  • Digital Divide Persists Even as Broadband Adoption Grows

    Broadband Internet adoption has skyrocketed over the last decade in the U.S, though adoption hasn’t been entirely evenly spread across all Americans. That’s the conclusion from a new Exploring the Digital Nation report from The Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

    The report is a followup to one released in 2010 that came to a similar set of conclusions about the so-called digital divide between those that have broadband Internet access and those that do not.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Proudhon: if IP is property, is it theft?

    Here is a thought provoking article on how the distribution of income gives the top one percent such a disproportionate share of output link here. It finds the source in French anarchist Proudhon’s cry that “Property is theft,” and asserts “The biggest “theft” by the [richest] 1 percent has been of the primary source of wealth – knowledge – for its own benefit.”