11.18.11

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Linux for Work

    Here is the list of software I use daily in my work:

    1. LibreOffice 4.3 Writer and sometimes Calc
    2. gEdit 3.2.1 for note-taking
    3. FireFox 7 for Internet Research and Email
    4. and Ubuntu Linux 11.10 to make it all run flawlessly

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Podcast Season 3 Episode 22

  • # The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 429 [Ogg]

  • Salt

  • #156 Computer America #44

• Applications

  • LiveUSB Install – Not Just Another Live USB Creator for #Linux

  • Wakeup: An Alarm Clock That Tells You What’s Going On [Linux]

    Wake up to your computer telling you what’s going on. Whether you want to know the weather or how many emails you need to respond to, Linux application Wakeup can start up your powered-off computer and announce a variety of things.

  • Revelation Password Manager

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Enabling Compiz On A Fedora 16 GNOME Classic Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)

    • irssi For Beginners

    • Introduction to LaTeX on Linux

    • Zero-day suspected in BIND 9 DNS server crashes

    • Using a Simple Firewall in CentOS 6

    • Test To Give When Hiring or Interviewing a Junior Linux System Administrator

    • Disable SELinux on Fedora 16 Verne

    • How To Disable Strict Add-On Compatibility In Firefox

    • Enable Gnome-shell 3D Desktop Effects in Virtualized Fedora 16

    • How to Use KVM with Virtual Machine Manager

    • How to install the Nvidia drivers manually in openSUSE 12.1

    • An Easier Way to Generate A Public/Private SSH Key Via a GUI [Linux]

    • Installing Oracle (sun) Java 1.7u1 openSUSE 12.1

    • How to become comfortable with vim

    • Install nomachine in RHEL/centos/Fedora

    • HOWTO: Use APT without the Bloat

    • LPI Announces new Master Affiliate for the UK and Ireland

      The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, has announced a new Master Affiliate for the UK and Ireland (LPI UK). LPI UK will be managed and operated by TDM Open Source Services (www.tdm.info) of Worcestershire, England.

  • Games

    • Doom 3 open-sourcing held up while Carmack writes new code

      Before it could release an open-source version of the Doom 3 engine code to all, id Software had to run it by the lawyers. But, their fierce eyes have spotted a slight problem. Chief id technomancer John Carmack is now writing new code to dodge legal issues surrounding the rendering technique, “Carmack’s Reverse,” which gave Doom 3 its lovely shadows.

    • John Carmack is the best of the best (Doom 3 source code)

    • Desura’s Public Linux Client Is Here With 65+ Games

      For those that didn’t notice yet, the public Linux client for Desura is now available and it’s out of the closed-beta process. You can now fetch some 65+ games for Linux from this Steam-like digital distribution platform.

• Desktop Environments

  • Enlightenment E17 Running On Wayland

    While the GNOME and KDE projects are still working towards making their desktops run on the Wayland Display Server rather than an X.Org Server, the Enlightenment project is also working towards bringing E17 window manager and libraries to Wayland. In fact, they have the first visible signs of success!

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Top 6 KDE distributions of 2011

      There are perhaps hundreds of KDE Linux distributions available, and like an active volcano, more are “erupting” at a rate that is tough to keep pace with.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Greg KH Is Not Happy With Gnome 3, Wants KDE 4. Ouch!

      Greg KH is not happy with Gnome 3. When I met him during LinuxCon and interviewed him (the interview is coming soon), and asked about Gnome 3, he said he was still running Gnome 2. Now, he has tried Gnome 3 and he is not a happy user. He was not as ‘harsh’ as was Linus Torvalds when he called Gnome 3 Shell a holy mess and said someone should fork it.

      Greg posted on his Google + page, “OK, after a day with GNOME 3, I’m finding that I am really not the person that the GNOME developers are trying to satisfy, and that’s fine, I don’t blame them, I know my needs are different from “normal” users.”

• Distributions

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • FrOSCon and OpenRheinRuhr: Mageia on tour

      For six years now, the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg is inviting to the Free and Open Source Software Conference (short FrOSCon) in August.

      Together with the German user community MandrivaUser.de Mageia was present there with a stand and a project room where several talks were done (and where we had the possibility to sleep).
      FrOSCon is not really targeting a public audience but is more some kind of family meeting of the German Open Source community as a whole.

      [...]

      Mageia was (again) sharing a booth with the German Mandriva user community MandrivaUser.de.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Veteran Putting Eucalyptus on the Open Source Path

      Eucalyptus was once “the” open source cloud computing project. It was the core of Ubuntu’s cloud strategy, and more or less the only game in town. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly open project. While most of the code was available under an open source license, it wasn’t developed in the open and failed to develop much of a community. Eucalyptus Systems is hoping Greg DeKoenigsberg can fix that.

    • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta Available

      Red Hat has just announced the availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 public beta. This release, open to all, brings an updated KVM hypervisor based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and scales to 128 logical CPUs and 2TB of memory for host machines.

    • Fedora

      • First impressions of the Fedora 16 GNOME 3 Live CD

        I’ve spent probably more than a year avoiding new distributions, new releases, distro reviews and the dreaded “I ran the live CD of Project X and here’s what happened” posts.

        But I’m in an inquisitive mood. And here is one of those “I ran the live CD for an hour” reviews. Take it for the proverbial what it’s worth.

      • Fedora 16 KDE – First Impressions

        This time, I had a pretty new computer at hand to try the live system on – an Intel Core i5-2310 2.9GHz Sandy Bridge processor with Intel HD Graphics 2000, 4 GB RAM and an LG DVD drive. I burnt the image on a DVD-RW and booted it. The boot process was a bit slow, the limitation being the DVD-RW. Once the live system was up, it was an absolute delight to use. It was fast and really stable, but with one problem. The supported screen resolution of 1280×1024 was not detected but rather set to 1024×768. Apart from this, there were no other problems.

        On my laptop, a 4.5+ year old Dell Inspiron 6400 with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 1.73GHz with Intel 945 GMA and 2.5GB RAM, there was an error during boot stating that a bookmark couldn’t be saved. Not sure what this was, but, the desktop loaded successfully.

  • Debian Family

    • People Behind Debian: Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder

      I probably don’t have to present Mark Shuttleworth… he was already a Debian developer when he became millionaire after having sold Thawte to Verisign in 1999. Then in 2002 he became the first African (and first Debian developer) in space. 2 years later, he found another grandiose project to pursue: bring the Microsoft monopoly to an end with a new alternative operating system named Ubuntu (see bug #1).

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Jason Warner Interview About Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop

          During the Ubuntu Development Summit for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Jason Warner, Ubuntu Desktop Manager at Canonical, gave an interview to Amber Graner, an Ubuntu contributor involved in the community since February 2009.

        • Ubuntu Phone, Tablet and TV – discussion opened

          Big thanks to everyone who turned up at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando to discuss Ubuntu’s future on new devices!

          Now, following Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote announcement and a number of initial UDS sessions on tablets, TVs and smartphones, we are setting up new channels to pick up the conversation.

        • Ubuntu loses HP cloud crown status

          The computer giant has told The Reg that, contrary to initial claims by Canonical, Ubuntu won’t be the “lead host and guest operating system”.

          An HP spokesperson contacted us to say: “While it is true that they are the first host and guest operating system powering our private beta, this does not mean that HP would not accommodate other operating systems moving forward.”

        • Ubuntu Development Update

• Devices/Embedded

  • Fingerprint recognition firmware released, including an open source ‘extractor’ package

    DigitalPersona is shipping Linux- and Android-ready fingerprint recognition software for biometric and mobile device manufacturers. FingerJet OEM provides fingerprint extraction, identification, and verification, runs in just 192KB of code space, and is compliant with NIST’s MINEX Ongoing Test standard — and the extractor function is available separately as a free, open source FingerJetFX OSE product.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Google unveils Android-based online music store

        Google has launched an online music store in the US, which will allow devices running its Android software to buy, store and stream MP3 files.

      • Samsung is the Number One Maker of Smart Phones

      • Motorola welcomes Google slurp with open arms

        Motorola shareholders have voted overwhelmingly to accept Google’s $12.5bn bid to buy the company’s mobile phone arm, and any patents it may happen to have lying around.

        Over 99 per cent of shareholders who voted approved of the deal, representing nearly three-quarters of the total shares. Google had hoped to see the purchase completed by the end of the year, but a probe by federal regulators has scotched that deadline, and the company now says it’s aiming for early 2012, barring factors outside of its control.

Free Software/Open Source

• How misinformation can still hurt FLOSS

  There seems to be a bit of confusion out there about what open source means in terms of security: specifically, there’s a pervasive notion that because software is open source, it’s inherently insecure.

  Seriously?

  Apparently these folks have completely forgotten about software like sendmail, Apache, MySQL, SSH, and oh, what’s that platform called… the one with the penguin… oh yeah: Linux. The applications and platforms are regarded in the industry has highly secure and generally free of malware in the wild.

  And yet, when Google Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona recently quoted an article that said that “critics have been pounding the table for years about open source being inherently insecure,” I decided to locate that article… I found myself running smack into what I believe is a serious error.

• Open source biometrics technology for mobile devices, PCs and servers

  DigitalPersona has open sourced its new MINEX-certified FingerJetFX fingerprint feature extraction technology.

  FingerJetFX, Open Source Edition (OSE), is free, portable software that device manufacturers and application developers can use to convert bulky fingerprint images into small, mathematical representations called fingerprint “templates” for efficient storage or comparison.

• FOSS over Miami

  Here’s a little Larry-the-Free-Software-Guy history for those of you who don’t already know it: I grew up in Miami and didn’t move to San Francisco until I was 29 (and that was the summer of 1987, so you can do the math). More specifically, I grew up in a strip of unincorporated Dade County sandwiched between North Miami and North Miami Beach. So you’ll understand why I have a tendency to pull for the Dolphins and the U on occasion, and I don’t think twice about driving 30 or so miles down Highway 1 into Monterey County to visit The Whole Enchilada because it has the only Key Lime Pie in this region close enough to be considered Miami-class. Listening to Jimmy Buffett puts me back among the palm trees, retroactively sweating in the 80 degree/90 percent humidity coziness for which South Florida is known worldwide.

• Web Browsers

  • Top 5 Alternative Web Browsers for Ubuntu Linux

    If you’re tired of everyone talking about Chrome and Firefox, it’s time to try out something new. Windows users already have tons of web browsers to choose from, but only a few of them are worth your time. Linux (particularly Ubuntu) on the other hand, doesn’t offer that many choices. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any quality browsers for our favorite distro. In fact, out of dozens of alternative browsers, we’ve chosen the best 5 so that you would be able visit our site from the browser you love rather than sticking to the mainstream ones.

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox to get faster, less intrusive updates

    • Native UI for Firefox on Android

    • Save Tabs when Quitting Firefox 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Nov. 21: Free Software’s Stallman

    Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, will present a visiting lecture from 7-9 p.m., Monday, Nov. 21, in Mitchell Hall at the University of Delaware.

• Standards/Consortia

  • All Eyes on HTML5 as Mobile Flash Fades to Black

Leftovers

• Wintel is Fragmented

  UPDATE A part of the changes to make “8″ will be a consolidation of re-re-reboots into one reboot per month where possible. The trolls here who claim re-re-reboots are no problem for competent users are again proven wrong. Even M$ admits re-re-reboots are a problem that needs fixing. Of course re-re-reboots don’t bother those of us who use GNU/Linux because we get to choose when and if we reboot. I have enjoyed that capability for a decade and love it.

• The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

  You would not have shown your face at, say, ApacheCon, with a MacBook.

• Google’s Brin and wife plop half-million into Wikipedia’s hat

  The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit publisher of Wikipedia and its affiliate sites, has received a $500,000 grant from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, a philanthropic organization set up by Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of “personal genetic information” website 23andMe.

• Security/BIOS

  • Attacks on secure boot

    This is interesting. It’s obviously lacking in details yet, but it does highlight one weakness of secure boot. The security for secure boot is all rooted in the firmware – there’s no external measurement to validate that everything functioned as expected. That means that if you can cause any trusted component to execute arbitrary code then you’ve won. So, what reads arbitrary user data? The most obvious components are any driver that binds to user-controlled hardware, any filesystem driver that reads user-provided filesystems and any signed bootloader that reads user-configured data. A USB drive could potentially trigger a bug in the USB stack and run arbitrary code. A malformed FAT filesystem could potentially trigger a bug in the FAT driver and run arbitrary code. A malformed bootloader configuration file or kernel could potentially trigger a bug in the bootloader and run arbitrary code. It may even be possible to find bugs in the PE-COFF binary loader. And once you have the ability to run arbitrary code, you can replace all the EFI entry points and convince the OS that everything is fine anyway.

  • UEFI Debugging Tools

    One of the many things I work on is UEFI support. It’s an interesting thing to work on, in part because there’s a lot of new development and it’s at a fairly low level, which is just the sort of thing I like.

    Often during UEFI development, we’ll see a bug and need to diagnose whether it’s a problem with the hardware, the firmware, the bootloader, the OS kernel, or even a userland program. One case of this is when console graphics don’t work right.

  • GPT disks in a BIOS world

    Starting with Fedora 16 we’re installing using GPT disklabels by default, even on BIOS-based systems. This is worth noting because most BIOSes have absolutely no idea what GPT is, which you’d think would create some problems. And, unsurprisingly, it does. Shock. But let’s have an overview.

• Finance

  • State orders Goldman Sachs to repay investors for misleading sales tactics

    Florida’s securities regulators announced a settlement agreement with Goldman, Sach & Co. that has required the investment firm to back back an estimate $20 million in so-called “auction rate securities” because the company claimed they were liquid and secure when they were not.

  • Middle-class areas shrink as America divides into ‘two-tiered society’ of rich and poor

    The portion of American families living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined significantly since 1970, according to a new study, as rising income inequality left a growing share of families in neighborhoods that are mostly low-income or mostly affluent.

  • Our friends from Goldman Sachs…

    Serious and competent, they weigh up the pros and cons and study all of the documents before giving an opinion. They have a fondness for economics, but these luminaries who enter into the temple only after a long and meticulous recruitment process prefer to remain discreet.

    Collectively they form an entity that is part pressure group, part fraternal association for the collection of information, and part mutual aid network. They are the craftsmen, masters and grandmasters whose mission is “to spread the truth acquired in the lodge to the rest of the world.”

    According to its detractors, the European network of influence woven by American bank Goldman Sachs (GS) functions like a freemasonry. To diverse degrees, the new European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi, the newly designated Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Monti, and the freshly appointed Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos are totemic figures in this carefully constructed web.

• Privacy

  • Wintel is Fragmented

    When I wrote about Google making it possible to opt-out of their Wi-Fi access point mapping program, I made a mistake. I thought Google was still using its StreetView cars to pick up Wi-Fi locations. Nope, Eitan Bencuya, a Google spokesperson, tells me that Google no longer uses StreetView cars to collect location information. So, how does Google collect Wi-Fi location data? They use you.

• Civil Rights

  • Going Incognito

    The Internet can be a dangerous place. Once it was the scam artists and the damage they wrought that users had to watch. These days it seems it’s more governments trying to oppress citizens and so-called respectable companies looking to track and sell your movements that strike fear in the hearts of Penguistas. Perhaps it’s time to go Incognito.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • EU Adopts Resolution Against US Domain Seizures

    The European Parliament has adopted a resolution which criticizes domain name seizures of “infringing” websites by US authorities. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.” With this stance the European Parliament joins an ever-growing list of opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act .