• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux is a tortoise.

Lets face it. Modern day Linux installations are nowhere near as fast as they were a few years ago. It seems that they have been adding in everything, including the kitchen sink. To be fair, the kitchen sink will be used somewhere down the line. Actually, the standard desktop Linux installation generally has everything already installed to do ninety five percent of all needed tasks. Without having to install anything else.

This means that you have a fully capable word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation program, graphics program, music player, cd burner, chat, mail, web browser and kitchen sink. Right out of the box so to speak. This is so much more than proprietary offerings can give. Even if those proprietary systems do supply some functionality out of the box. It is nowhere near the functionality of the add ons which you absolutely must have to be able to do any work.

Why Linux Isn’t Only for Geeks

If you’ve ever owned a Windows computer chances are your computer was at one point infected with a virus. The solution to this problem is not purchasing antivirus software.

The answer to this problem is abandoning Windows as your main operating system, however to some this might seem an impossible thing to do. Apple computers are rather expensive and while they can run Windows as a secondary operating system most people would prefer to be able to run Windows applications on their primary operating system without a noticeable slowdown.

This is where Linuxcomes in as an all around great performer. Linux has very few viruses written for it and due to the many different versions and “flavors” of Linux it is hard to write a virus for this platform. Linux is still not perfect and does have security features implemented to protect you from the few threats that are present or any threats that may arise in the future.

Kernel Space

• The Journal – a proposed syslog replacement

• Linus Torvalds: Locked Down Technologies Lose in the End

  “Technologies that lock things down tend to lose in the end,” said Torvalds when asked about Microsoft’s secure boot feature, which he likened to Apple’s use of DRM technology. “People want freedom and markets want freedom,” he added.

  Secure boot is a feature in Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system designed to protect against low-level hacker attacks, but it could also end up preventing users from installing Linux on a PC shipped with a pre-loaded copy of Windows 8.

Applications

• Lightweight Programs You Should Use for a Faster Linux

  Some people are what is labeled a power user. I am one of these people. No matter how fast I get my system, or how quick of programs I have, it is never good enough. There is always at least one program that I could swap out for a more advanced, text-based counterpart that increases performance just a bit. Luckily, you don’t have to use text-based programs without graphical user interfaces to get blazing fast speeds on Linux. There are tons of open source alternatives to the mainstream programs that cost loads of money.

• Learn More About Gedit

  Although Gedit is the default desktop text editor for Ubuntu and Gnome systems, many users are still unaware of some features Gedit has to offer. Gedit offers many of the same options found in common text editors but is expandable with the use of plugins. And many users never bother to learn the shortcut keys or experiment with the preferences. So if you want a user-friendly text editor that has lots of options and is easy to use give Gedit a try. If you don’t have Gedit on your system you can install it from the command line using these commands.

• Chat From The Linux Command Line With CenterIM

  Chat from the command line. Whether you use Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Chat, AIM, Jabber or some combination of the above, CenterIM lets you talk with your buddies in your Linux terminal. We’ve previously highlighted a few instant messaging programs, but nothing quite like CenterIM. That’s because this Linux chat program runs entirely from the command line, but still gives you access to the features you expect.

• Linux Live USB Creator Review

• Why Emacs?

• Lightweight Programs You Should Use for a Faster Linux

  Some people are what is labeled a power user. I am one of these people. No matter how fast I get my system, or how quick of programs I have, it is never good enough. There is always at least one program that I could swap out for a more advanced, text-based counterpart that increases performance just a bit. Luckily, you don’t have to use text-based programs without graphical user interfaces to get blazing fast speeds on Linux. There are tons of open source alternatives to the mainstream programs that cost loads of money.

• loud Will Be Open Source And Ubiqu

  Since we last looked at open source backup software in 2009, clear trends have emerged in enterprise IT that have affected backup. In particular, server virtualisation has become ubiquitous in production environments while the cloud has become firmly established on most organisations’ IT radars.

  The key enterprise backup players have responded to these developments with support for virtual server backup and the addition of the cloud as a backup target. The response from the open source backup software community and commercial supporters has been relatively uneven, however.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How do i get the ethernet cards to come up automatically on CentOS/RedHat/Fedora ?

  • HowTo: Use Amarok as an Alarm

  • Announcement: Patch for RapidDisk (rxdsk) 1.2 to build for 2.6.18 and more

  • Hidden Linux : Divide and Conky

  • Get iPhone Like Icons For Ubuntu 11.10

  • Virtualization With KVM On Ubuntu 11.10

  • Virt-install Oneiric PV DomU at Xen 4.1.2 Oneiric Dom0 via remote HTTP mirror

  • Weekend Project: Control Your Configuration with Etckeeper

  • How to Remove a Windows Password with a Linux Live CD

  • How to Run an FTP Server from Home with Linux

  • Hidden Linux : Divide and Conky

  • Performance Hacks & Tweaks for Linux

  • CenterIM is a Linux Command Line Chat Program

• Games

  • Steel Storm 2 announced – A new FPS game coming!

    For those of you who like the Steel Storm series of games you may or may not have noticed that the official website has changed to give a teaser of Steel Storm 2!

  • Native Linux Games on Self Made Arcade Machine Running Ubuntu

    It is always a delight to see native Linux games running on different types of machines/ hardware. Last week I stumbled on this article by Pat Regan showing native Linux games from latest Humble Indie Bundle running on a self made Arcade Cabinet.

    He has kept a log of how he built this fabulous machine in a series of blog posts and they are quite interesting read. The machine sports a 24 inch LCD Monitor, an Athlon X2 3800+ with 1 GB of RAM, a 320 GB SATA disk, an I-PAC 4 board and a 64MB NVIDIA 6200 LE PCIe video card. The system runs 32 bit Ubuntu 10.10.

  • Steel Storm 2 Game Coming For Linux

    There’s going to be a successor to Steel Storm, an indie action shooter game. Steel Storm 2, however, will be a first person shooter.

  • Desura digital game distribution platform embraces Linux

    Desura a digital game distribution similar to Valve’s Steam has now officially launched a public Linux client after a period of closed beta testing.

    Like Steam Desura is a client software Desura’s online store that users need to install in order to download, install and play games. Like Steam it also manages game updates and has integrated community features. Desura is however unique in its community features that try to integrate game developers and players into the same network. It has brilliant modding support, using which one can even download and install mods for games not installed / purchased through Desura.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Krita 2.4 reviewed

    We still haven’t released, and at the Calligra sprint we decided to have at least one more beta, but that hasn’t prevented Linux Format to give Krita as their “hottest pick” award in their Christmas issue, issue 152, which you can get from good news agents everywhere!

  • The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part II – Klipper

    Today I’d like to introduce Klipper, easy, small and very useful tool included in KDE Workspace since…well, always. That’s the scissors icon sitting in the systray area. Basically it is a history of your clipboard but it can do much more. Very important thing is that the contents persist between sessions, so if you have something in your clipboard, you log off/reboot/shutdown and then you log back in, you still have your whole clipboard history ready and the most recent entry already in clipboard, so you can paste it immediately.

  • Kstars, a desktop Planetarium that’s not just an Educational “Toy”

    Have you ever wondered what that bright object in the pre-dawn morning was that you couldn’t help notice? Or is that reddish star Mars? Is that fuzzy mass of white a wispy cloud or a galaxy?

  • Plasma Workspaces Wallpaper Contest

    With the KDE 4.8 releases drawing near, it’s time to change the look of the default desktop. Every two major releases, the main wallpaper of the Plasma Workspaces changes to maintain a fresh style.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME mentoring program for women continues

    As part of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, the Foundation has announced the twelve women who will be sponsored and mentored to work on open source projects. The internships will run from 12 December 2011 to 12 March 2012. The programme builds on previous successful internships which have seen participants work on on-screen keyboards for the GNOME Shell, Empathy avatars, educational Braille software and many other applications.

Distributions

• Commodore OS Vision Beta 6

  Last night i was searching for a new Linux OS to install on my laptop and when i was looking on distrowatch i found the Commodore OS Vision. Commodore OS Vision is based on Linux Mint 10 (Ubuntu 10.10) and is still under development. It comes with GNOME 2 so all the desktop effects are there and installed by default… just watch the video!!

• Top 6 Linux and BSD graphical installation programs

• New Releases

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 174

    Summary:
    · Announced Distro: Linux Mint 12 Release Candidate
    · Announced Distro: openSUSE 12.1

  • Tiny Core Linux v4.1

    Continued upgrades to the base system including pcmciautils, sudo, freetype, imlib,libpng, and busybox. New boot codes of “cde” and “pretce”. cde for easy remastering. pretce for raid and lvm support. Improved support for Microcore which includes Ondemand, and icon options when used with the X extensions. Several bug fixes and enhancements as requested by the community. See change log for all the details.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva Powerpack 2011 released

    Mandriva has released Powerpack 2011, a commercially enhanced version of the company’s Mandriva Linux distribution. The system comes with the Linux kernel 2.6.39 and uses KDE 4.6.5 as the default desktop.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Summit & JBoss World 2012 Call for Papers

  • Public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0

  • OpenMama and AMQP: Open Collaboration in Action

    Two weeks ago, The Linux Foundation announced a new Labs project — OpenMama. This project was the result of a relationship forged with NYSE Technologies years ago at our Enterprise End User Summit held in New York every year.

  • Red Hat (RHT) Hits New 52-Week High at $52.85

  • Students can now apply for Red Hat scholarship

    Open source solutions provider, Red Hat, has now opened its 2012 Fedora Scholarship program for submissions. The program recognises college students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration.

• Debian Family

  • Why I’m quitting the Debian Lineup

    Being an advocate of Linux Mint, which is a derivative based on Ubuntu, which is a derivative of Debian; I noticed a nasty bug back in July of 2011. Ubuntu 11.04 was released in April of that year and I waited for the bugs to be shaken out of the rug and finally installed it.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • 7 Hidden Features Of Ubuntu 11.10 You Might Not Know Of

        As the latest version of Ubuntu was released, the team of developers have been hard at work adding some convenient features. However, some are more known than others, while others will surprise you when they pop up. Some aren’t even installed by default but can be very useful. So what are these features that can make a major difference?

      • Bringing The PackageKit Interface To Ubuntu

        The PackageKit DBus Interface is coming to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but it’s not full PackageKit support and integration.

        Back during the Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit in Orlando, PackageKit integration was talked about. However, it’s not bringing PackageKit to Ubuntu Linux, but rather just their interfaces and they will interact with Canonical’s own design.

        Sebastian Heinlein yesterday wrote to PackageKit DBus Interface in Ubuntu – It is the API that matters! to the Ubuntu development mailing list. He’s the developer working on bringing the PackageKit system D-Bus interface to the Ubuntu desktop by adding a compatibility layer that in turn will make it poke AptDaemon, which is Canonical’s preferred software management service for Ubuntu.

      • death by a thousand cuts

        It’s amazing to me what features drive decisions when choosing a technology. In my case, it’s a clock applet, but let me set a little bit of a context first.

        I stopped configuring my UI environment several years ago, opting instead to use the experience that had been designed for me by the fine folks at Ubuntu. This wasn’t entirely just blind trust or pleasure – but rather that the defaults were sensible enough, and I wanted to be in the business of doing things, not spending an hour deciding what font I wanted my desktop to display. I believe I’ve been doing this since dapper, if not earlier.

        Until now.

        I tried. I mean, I’ve bitched at Jorge some in person, but I ran Unity starting with Natty up until last week. I ran it as provided, as intended, and I tried to learn to think about things in the way it was asking me to.

      • Ubuntu’s Global Menu Is A Stupid Idea

        I have been using Fedora 16 for a week now and since its quite stable I have been using it instead of my trusted and much loved Ubuntu. One of the reason behind using Fedora over Ubuntu is Unity. I love Unity, but at the moment there is very little customization possible, which makes it a bit hard to reshuffle things around according to one’s needs. Gnome 3, on the contrary, offers much more customizations, thanks to Gnome-Shell Extensions. Before trying Fedora I was using Gnome 3 Shell in Ubuntu, instead of Unity.

        I must also add that I love Ubuntu. No other distro can match the work Ubuntu team has done to make GNU/Linux useful for an average user. Even if I am using Fedora, there is no denying the fact that Ubuntu has a very important place in the consumer desktop space — which presumably is not the market of Fedora.

Devices/Embedded

• USB stick packs ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, runs Android or Ubuntu

  FXI Technologies announced a USB stick-sized computer that can run Android or Ubuntu on a 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor. The “Cotton Candy” will include 1GB of RAM, a microSD slot, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and an HDMI port, the company says.

• Tiny USB Stick Brings Android to PCs, TVs

  Google has made no secret about its plans for Android. Smartphones and tablets are just the beginning — the company wants Android everywhere. And thanks to FXI Technologies’ Cotton Candy USB device, we may not have to wait long to see Android on more than just our mobile devices.

  FXI essentially built an ultra-lean computer inside a small USB stick. Stick it into any device that supports USB storage, and Cotton Candy will register as a USB drive. From there, you can run the Android OS in a secure environment inside your desktop, courtesy of a Windows/OSX/Linux-compatible virtualization client embedded in the device.

• Phones

  • A Promise Kept – Never Again Nokia

    A few months ago, when the Trojan Horse from Microsoft made the decision to switch Nokia to Windows Phone, I swore that I would never buy another Nokia product. Yesterday was the first time that I put that promise into action.

  • Android

    • Motorola Mobility shareholders approve Google merger

      Motorola Mobility shareholders have approved the sale of the company to Google. However, it will be federal regulators who have the final word on whether the deal will go through, and they have yet to make their decisions.

    • Android 4.0 arrives as Galaxy Nexus goes on sale

      Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus, the first phone with Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android, has gone on sale in the United Kingdom.

    • Amazon planning Kindle smartphone in 2012?

      Amazon looks like it’s not content with just having a shot at the e-reader and tablet market, with reports emanating from Asia that it wants a smartphone too.

      According to CitiGroup, Amazon is looking to launch a smartphone in Q4 2012 in association with Foxconn International Holdings, and will aim it at the cheaper end of the market.

    • Motorola Mobility sued for allegedly stealing source code

    • Top 5 Audiobook Players for Android

      Unlike iOS, Android doesn’t come with a dedicated Audiobook player. However, that shouldn’t stop you from listening to your favorite books. The Android Marketplace offers some great apps that can play and manage audiobooks really well. Not only will these apps let you play audiobooks in MP3, OGG and M4B formats, they’ll also allow you to manage, tag and organize your favorite books easily. So, if you’re itching to listen to that nail-biting bestseller you just downloaded, here’s a list of five of the best audiobook players and managers for Android.

    • Small Taiwanese Firms Finally Get Some New Android Code

      Google had pledged to release the source code for Honeycomb, also known as Android 3.0, but then delayed its release indefinitely. It provided Honeycomb only to bigger manufacturers, such as Acer and Motorola, while smaller companies had to stick with earlier versions of the software.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Android tablet mimics iPad display specs

    Archos announced an Android 2.3 tablet with an iPad-like display: 9.7 inches, 1024 x 768 pixels, and IPS (in-plane switching). The Arnova 9 G2 is equipped with a single-core 1GHz processor, 8GB of storage, a front-facing videocam, plus micro-USB, USB, and microSD connections — but so far, no price tag.

  • HTC Launching Quad-Core Tablet at MWC? (Update – it’s called Quatro)

  • Nook Tablet starts shipping a day early

    Barnes & Noble has begun shipping their latest product, the Nook Tablet, one day ahead of schedule. While it might not seem like much of a deal on the surface, it puts the tablet in stores and, more importantly, in hands earlier than expected. The sooner these are in a retail environment, the better as the next few weeks will be heated to say the least.

  • Nook Tablet Now Runs Kindle, Aldiko, & More – No Hack Required

    Earlier today I was griping about how Amazon had quietly made it difficult to install competing reading apps; today I get to dance for joy because I’ve learned how to install third party apps on the Nook Tablet.

    A reader tipped me to the secret (Thanks, Geert). There’s a thread over on the XDA-Forums where someone discovered a loophole in the Nook Tablet firmware.

  • Amazon Posts Kindle Fire’s Open Source Code

    Unlike some vendors which shall remain unnamed (*cough*, HTC, *cough*), Amazon didn’t make us wait for the mandatory open source bits of the Android Fire’s kernel and released them over at their Source Code page the same day the tablets themselves started arriving in consumers’ hands. The download, which comes as a compressed tar.gz, weighs in at a whopping 809MB.

Google’s Eclipse Plugin open sourced

Google’s IDE integration for GWT, Speed Tracer and App Engine, which is known as Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE), has been open sourced under the Eclipse Public Licence. The tools had previously been proprietary, but Google said in a blog posting that the size of the ecosystem around GWT, App Engine and the company’s cloud services meant the idea of open sourcing the tools made “a lot of sense for us” as it was easier for the community to improve the tools.

jQuery Mobile 1.0 finalised

After a “year of refinements” the jQuery Mobile developers have finalised version 1.0 of the HTML5-based user interface libraries and framework for mobile platforms. Based on jQuery core and jQuery’s UI library, the platform has been developed to work with Apple iOS, Android 2.1-2.3 and Honeycomb, Windows Phone 7 and 7.5, Blackberry 6.0, 7 and Playbook, Palm WebOS, Firefox Mobile, Opera Mobile, MeeGo 1.2, Kindle 3 and Fire, and the desktop versions of Chrome 11-15, Firefox 4-8, Internet Explorer 7-9 and Opera 10-11.

Commercial, Open Source App Suites Offer Alternatives To Microsoft Office

“Microsoft Office doesn’t dominate the way it used to,” said Doug Heintzman, strategy director for IBM collaboration solutions, including the company’s free Lotus Symphony personal productivity application suite. “This is a very dynamic and changing landscape.”

Typesafe to integrate Play 2.0 into its Scala stack

The open source Java/Scala web framework Play 2.0, recently released as a beta, will be integrated into Typesafe’s Scala based application stack. Typesafe, which launched in May, has built its Typesafe Stack, aimed at providing all the tools needed for Scala developers to create applications which address multi-core and cloud-scale computing workloads. The announcement by Typesafe notes that the addition of Play will make the stack “a complete web platform”.

Open Source Nurtures Innovation

With his usual rigour, Stephen O’Grady considers whether open source is innovative over on his blog. As ever, his view – that “innovation is a function of incentive, not the software development model” – is worth understanding and accepting, but I think there’s more to consider here. While it provides no guarantees, I believe an open source environment potentially makes software innovation cheaper and easier.

As a proprietary developer, you are responsible for the eternal care of every line of code you add to your software. In the early days, you can be very productive, creating clean, fresh software that is compelling and doing so fast because you’re in complete control of the process. But the code you create is your sole responsibility, and as it gets more and more substantial – and as you have more and more paying customers depending on it – the burden of sustaining it grows.

Open source backup software lags in the cloud and VM backup

Events

• Open Source India 2011 Kick-Starts Today!

  Gear yourself up for three consecutive days of learning and exciting time with 3,000+ open source innovators, enthusiasts, and gurus at Bengaluru’s NIMHANS Convention Centre. The technology world is looking at open source technology for future innovations. Thus, the 8th edition of OSI Days, which will run through 22 November 2011, becomes even more important. It aims to commemorate and celebrate the true spirit of open source, and aims to strengthen and consolidate the Indian open source community.

• More Linux lessons at hub

  Linux Users Victoria is holding a second, free information session for people keen to learn more about the original computer operating system, similar to Windows and Android, but with one major exception ? there is no cost.

• Lucene Eurocon 2011: Day Two

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Is Firefox Killing Publishers On Mobile Devices?

    Mozilla’s Firefox automatically blocks Google Adsense from such sites and shows blank box instead. Most medium sized websites depend on display ads and blocking ads in mobile devices means major revenue loss for such websites.

  • Lessons from #Mozfest: How the Knight and Mozilla Foundations are thinking about open source

SaaS

• Own Your Cloud: Interview With PageKite Founder

  Cloud computing is the buzz word, even if most users don’t even fully understand what it is. One thing is for sure, putting all your eggs in one basket is always a bad idea, especially when someone else is holding the basket. So, the best cloud is the one that you own. We are aware of ownCloud, which you can easily run on your local server. But your ISP doesn’t let you assign an IP to your network, so you can’t access your ownCloud from outside your network. That’s the problem that PageKite solves. We interviewed the CEO and founder of PageKit,e Bjarni R. Einarsson, and discussed various aspects of the Cloud computing and how a user can take control of his/her own cloud.

CMS

• Dr Dre of the Internet

  Dr Dries Buytaer, the Dr Dre of the Internet and founder of Drupal, the world’s most used open source Content Management System (CMS), was in the city on a visit to ISB and IIIT-Hyderabad.

  While the passion of developers came as a pleasant surprise, what made his “eyes pop” was, all of India.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • SugarCRM: More Business Partners, Less Open Source Talk

    Like so many open source software companies, SugarCRM seems to be talking more about business growth and partner momentum, and less about open source technologies. The latest example: SugarCRM’s Q3 billings rose 69 percent vs. Q3 2010. Moreover, SugarCRM recruited 38 new partners during Q3, raising its worldwide partner engagements to 343 companies. Impressive. Here’s how SugarCRM has been evolving to deliver that type of growth.

    First, The VAR Guy needs to be clear: SguarCRM certainly isn’t abandoning open source. The company continues to promote its open source community and open source values. And CEO Larry Augustin has carefully described his views on open source.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Linux super-duper admin tools: gdb

  Let’s talk debug. So you wrote a piece of code and you want to compile it and run it. Or you have a binary and you just run it. The only problem is, the execution fails with a segmentation fault. For all practical purposes, you call it a day.

Project Releases

• ColorHug open source colour management announced

  Developer Richard Hughes has announced the development of ColorHug, an open source colorimeter for measuring the colours displayed on a screen and creating a colour profile. Hughes began working on colour management in Linux two years ago and decided to create the device after finding that existing hardware was closed and proprietary. He wanted to make colour management accessible to end users and, with a background in electronics, set about designing the hardware.

Public Services/Government

• Open government leaders support funding for key transparency initiatives

  OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation today [November 16, 2011] released an open letter to the U.S. Senate supporting continued funding for the Electronic Government Fund’s important transparency projects. The letter echoes the Obama administration’s policy statement issued Nov. 10.

  The letter calls for full funding for the E-Gov Fund, which pays for flagship projects such as USAspending.gov and Data.gov. In April, Congress short-sightedly slashed the E-Gov Fund by 75 percent, from $34 million to $8 million, drastically reducing the fund’s ability to maintain current transparency tools or develop new ones. The House Appropriations Committee has proposed a slight increase for the fund next year, but Senate appropriators proposed an additional cut.

Licensing

• Interview with Andrew Tanenbaum: Original version

  LinuxFr.org : Do you still hack on MINIX today or do you only supervise your PhD students?

Openness/Sharing

• Feds launch open-source ‘Learning Registry’

  A new federal resource will help groups share learning materials and policy recommendations as they strive to improve the quality and availability of learning resources in education.

  Launched by the U.S. Departments of Education and Defense, the new “Learning Registry” is an open-source community that takes advantage of technology tools to help users share information about learning resources more effectively among a broad set of education stakeholders.

• Open Source Desktop GIS: Let’s Get Started

• Open source team creates apocalypse survival kit

  The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is being developed by the Open Source Ecology (OSE) group, and includes such basic tools as a well drill, steam engine, and brick making machine, along with more complicated devices such as a bulldozer, 3D printer, and 50kW wind turbine. These can be built from scrap or recycled materials at a fraction of the cost of commercial machinery.

• Open Access/Content

  • Access to research library resources expands with OLE release from Kuali collaboration

Programming

• Google Code-In 2011 about to start

  Eighteen open source organisations have been selected for this year’s Google Code-In contest for pre-university students. The contest starts on November 21st so it’s time for students to select the tasks they want to work on.

• Five years of open-source Java: Freedom isn’t (quite) free

  Open source Java has a long and torrid history, rife with corporate rivalry, very public fallings-out, and ideological misgivings. But has all the effort and rumpus that went into creating an officially sanctioned open JDK been worth it?

  Java co-creator James Gosling certainly thinks so – although he didn’t seem entirely open to the idea in the early days.

• Version 5.0 of Open64 compiler improves performance

  The developers of the Open64 compilers have released version 5.0 of the tool, with improved performance, bug fixes and changes to the infrastructure of the compilation system. Open64 is an open source optimising compiler for x86-64, IA-32 and IA-64 platforms. Historically, Open64 is derived from SGI’s Pro64 compiler for MIPS architectures; versions of the compiler for MIPS and other architectures such as CUDA and PowerPC are available from other sources. The main release of Open64 concentrates on Intel and AMD architectures and offers pre-built C, C++ and Fortran 95 compilers.

• Java’s ‘Steve Jobs’ moment in 2012?

  The OpenJDK project followed shortly after Sun’s open-sourcing of Java in November 2005; it’s both a free-and-open-source implementation of Java Standard Edition (Java SE).

  The project has seen a fresh lease of life under Oracle, Sun’s buyer, who has tempted IBM away from the Apache Software Foundation’s Harmony Java SE project and who also recruited Apple to OpenJDK. OpenJDK also has a new set of governance rules, albeit rules that hand Oracle and IBM a duopoly over ultimate control of the project and, therefore, the roadmap.

• Why devops is no silver bullet for developers

  In the survey, Puppet Labs finds that 55 percent of respondents ranked the automation of configuration and management tasks as the top benefit expected from the devops movement. Another 13 percent ranked it in their top three expected benefits.

Standards/Consortia

• The trials and tribulations of HTML video in the post-Flash era

  Adobe reversed course on its Flash strategy after a recent round of layoffs and restructuring, concluding that HTML5 is the future of rich Internet content on mobile devices. Adobe now says it doesn’t intend to develop new mobile ports of its Flash player browser plugin, though existing implementations will continue to be maintained.

  Adobe’s withdrawal from the mobile browser space means that HTML5 is now the path forward for developers who want to reach everyone and deliver an experience that works across all screens. The strengths and limitations of existing standards will now have significant implications for content creators who want to deliver video content on the post-flash Web.

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures and M$ Is Oh So Desperate

In the marketing wars over cloudy documents M$ has launched a campaign to get back the defectors from Office 365 to Google Docs. A sign of their desperation is a blog post in which they trot out US advertisements by Google requiring skills with Excel. They find 88 such ads. When I look I find Google has 1500 ads out there without any need for Excel, suggesting Google’s use of Excel is less than 10% of desktops… Ouch! Thank you, M$, for advertising Google Docs.

Google enhances WebP to take on PNG

Google has enhanced its open source image format WebP. The latest update adds a new lossless compression technology and supports transparency information for images. This, the developers say, allows the format to be an alternative to PNG; it was originally introduced as an alternative to JPEG, with its lossy compression of image files promising files up to 39 per cent smaller but retaining the same quality. PNG, a very popular image format for the web, is the target for the Google developers now, especially with the support for transparency.

Security

• ISC Announces Major BIND 9 Vulnerability

Finance

• Bureau Recommends: ‘Vulture Fund’ sues Congo for $100m over $3m debt

  Peter Grossman runs a ‘vulture fund’, which purchases the debt of poorer nations before suing for many times their original value. Although such funds are illegal in the UK, Mr Grossman’s fund is pursuing the debt through Jersey, which is not covered by the ban.

Copyrights

• Pirate To Join European Parliament As Youngest Member

  In a few weeks Amelia Andersdotter will be the second Pirate Party member to take a seat at the European Parliament in Brussels. The 24-year-old Swede was voted in more than two years ago, but due to bureaucratic quibbles her official appointment was delayed. TorrentFreak catches up with the soon-to-be youngest MEP to hear about her plans and expectations.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Clarifying the “secure boot attack”

Obviously, this protection is based on all the components of secure boot (ie, everything that runs before ExitBootServices() is called) being perfect. As I said, if any of them accept untrusted input and misinterpret it in such a way that they can be tricked into running arbitrary code, you’ll still have problems. But when discussing the pros and cons of secure boot, it’s important to make sure that we’re talking about reality rather than making provably false assertions.

The Linux Week In Review 25

Desktop

• New built PC unable to use 64bit Linux

  I just built an AMD A8-3850 APU on TA75M MB with 8GB PC3 Seagate Barracuda 1TB and LG DVD/CD/RW [suppose to be cd+- and DVD+- compatible]. I can download and burn 64bit Distros

• 60 Days as a Linux user by a recovering Windows Guy.

  If your not working on Linux, maybe its a good time to give it a try.

• Tamil Nadu Goes With GNU/Linux

  There was a bit of dithering, but Tamil Nadu has decided to use GNU/Linux on students’ computers and all computers run by the state, effective Nov. 14, 2011.

Server

• TOP500 List of Supercomputers Released

  Linux has dominated the list so long, it’s not even broken out in the statistics when TOP500 lists are announced. With the November 2011 list, Linux holds steady at 457 of the 500. That’s right – 91.4% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world are Linux-based.

Kernel Space

• A Journal Comes To systemd

  The new feature to systemd is the “journal”, which for providing new system logging functionality. From a quick glance, a replacement for syslog.

• How does Linux kernel detect and plug in your hardware? Kernel, sysfs, udev and dbus collaboration.

  I have been administrating Linux systems for a while now and were always strugling to „dig deeper“. Today I found myself wondering how does Linux detect, plug in my hardware and show that pop-up window asking me to choose what I want to do with my flash drive. So I launched my web browser and began to search for an answers in forums, tutorials and how-tos which almost ended in complete failure. I say „almost“ because I did find some of the answers but they all were scattered and incomplete or too old. So I had to use „heavy artillery“ and read through all those manuals… And I think I finally get it how it works This is what I will try to explain further. *I really hope I didn’t misunderstand something*

Applications

• Cool Tools: VIM

  One thing that I cannot live without is a text editor, namely VIM. VIM was first released as free and extended version of the VI program found on all Unix machines. I first cut my teeth on VI when I started my sysadmin career, and switched to VIM a couple of years later. VIM by default works mostly like VI, but i’ts highly configurable, and has a lot of power, especially when you start working with your .vimrc. Since starting with the editor, I’ve carried my .vimrc from machine to machine, and company to company.

• Social Media Player for Linux, Windows and MAC OSX – Tomahawk

• Set Wallpaper from Command-line in KDE4

• Krusader The Ultimate Two Panel File Manager

  If you are looking for a fast, effective, and powerful file manager that is loaded with features, Krusader might be the right choice for you. Krusader is a twin panel file manager that will work on most Linux desktops, Krusader will also help you perform many daily tasks. You can also create your own customized user menu for functions you use most often. Krusader can even function with an optional terminal emulator below the main window. You can connect to remote file systems, work with archives, and much more. To install Krusader on your system just use these commands in your terminal.

• Free Tools for Getting Started with the Mighty GIMP Graphics Editor

  If you’ve spent any time working with graphics–whether you favor open source software or not–you’re probably familiar with the power of GIMP, one of the very best open source graphics applications. And, if you know your way around GIMP, you’re probably also familiar with the many effects you can execute with it. This particular open source graphics program is so powerful that it can be daunting for new users, so we regularly update our collection of accessible, free resources for learning GIMP and making using it easier. Here is our latest roundup, including a great, free online GIMP book.

• Proprietary

  • The Campaign Against Adobe Flash and the Counterattack

    Last week a group of people came together to launch a website Occupy Flash and started a campaign against Adobe Flash plugin.

    Identities of these people are not known and they have no corporate backing but they have said the Goal of this campaign is to see Flash plugin dead on desktop browsers and they want everyone to uninstall it.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • MySQL migrate to MariaDB

  • Getting SSH fingerprints for machines in your network

  • Capture and report (Bash Scripting)

  • HowTo: Using Aptitude to Minimize Software Bloat in Debian, Ubuntu

  • How to get GNOME version from the command line

  • HowTo: Use APT or Aptitude to install specific packages (Debian, Ubuntu)

  • Manage A Task List From The Command Line

  • Keep ssh alive

  • How To Use pfSense To Load Balance Your Web Servers

  • How to Install Firefox 9 in Ubuntu 11.10 and 11.04

  • Apache failing to read .htaccess file? This fix worked for me!

  • How to search for text in files using Linux command line

  • New Books

  • How To Use pfSense To Load Balance Your Web Servers

• Wine

  • Wine 1.3.33 Has Been Released | What’s New | Download

• Games

  • Humble Voxatron Debut is over + Info on the next Bundle!

  • Minecon and Minecraft 1.0 official out today!

  • Gaming on Linux, Now a Reality with Desura

  • Minecon and Minecraft 1.0 official out today!

  • 5 great FPS game for Linux

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 6th November 2011

  • Google CodeIn 2011: A Chance for the Next Generation to Join KDE

    KDE is honored to be chosen again this year to be part of Google Code-In. Pre-university students aged between 13 and 17 are offered a great chance to contribute to KDE by choosing from a large pool of tasks, depending on their skills—code, translation, videography, user interfaces, research and more. Spread the word about the contest to any students and parents you know.

  • KDE and Colour Management

    Colour Management has a long way to come to the Linux desktop. Like on other computing environments first came single applications like Scribus, CinePaint or Krita and proved colour management be useful and mature. Now the open source Desktop stacks are following. Most advanced and wide spread inside colour managed applications is colour correction for monitors.

  • Debugging nepomuk/virtuoso’s CPU usage

  • Kraft 0.44 released

• GNOME Desktop

  • Gnome Pie Is A Slick Application Launcher For Gnome [Linux]

    There are thousand and one ways to launch application in Linux. You can use the Application menu, via the dock, use a app launcher like Synapse or Gnome Do or simply press “Alt + F2″ and type the name of the application. Gnome Pie is yet another application launcher that allows you to quickly launch your applications, except that it is slick and highly configurable.

  • GNOME 3.2.2 Released

    A lot of bugs have been fixed in this new release along with some static analysis bugs. Some of the existing modules have new versions too. The “Forgotten Release” release is new to this new version which fixes a lot of memory leaks in the log viewer. In addition, this new release has updated translations as well.

  • Gnome Shell Introduction

    Now finally the Gnome Shell guide you have waited for. Surely some users are still broken-hearted about the loss of the Gnome panel and other components of Gnome 2. Gnome Shell is getting better every day, and there are certainly some features that are becoming quite popular. Gnome Shell is designed to be even more user-friendly than Gnome 2. Not only that, Gnome shell was created to look absolutely stylish and offer users a fun experience. New integrated instant messaging and advanced system notifications are reported to be some of the most popular upgrades. But more on that soon!

  • Overlay Scrollbars, No Maximized Window Titlebar By Default In GNOME?

  • Using the GNOME file manager’s FTP capabilities to manage my Ode site

  • What People Are Saying About GNOME [Part 3]

    The GNOME 2011 User Survey is still going on, so be sure to participate. For those wanting to know what other Linux desktop users are saying about the GNOME3 desktop environment, here’s one thousand more comments. (After publishing part 1 and part 2 previously.)

Distributions

• Ubuntu Alternatives, Xfce, & Having A Go With Fedora 16!

  A little over a year ago I fired up the then latest version of Fedora (13) and found much that I liked. Ultimately though, it just wasn’t the right tool for the job and I ended up going back to Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

  Fast forward another year, a few more releases have come out from Fedora, and Canonical has been making some choices that, while likely great long-term for Ubuntu, are a bit awkward currently for some of its user base.

• Red Hat Family

  • A new lover… RHEL 6.1 Desktop

    There’s Community Linux… and Enterprise Linux… which is one the best? I don’t know and I don’t care, for a tinkerer anything works out… For a long time that I wanted to move back to Enterprise Linux and there were two choices to contemplate, and I’ve picked the red one… My laptop count still does weight in favor of green (2 vs 1)…

  • The Cloud Will Be Open Source And Ubiquitous

    When you architect servers with virtualization, distributed computing and the ability to handle big data, so a single Web site or job can take power of the whole system when needed, that’s a cloud.

    Salesforce.com (CRM) (whatever you may think of it) is not a cloud. It is Software as a Service (SaaS), something that can result from a cloud architecture but does not require a cloud. The same can be said for Apple’s (AAPL) iCloud. It too is SaaS, which could come from a cloud or from a standard enterprise set-up.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 KDE Review: Gnome 3 vs KDE 4

      After playing with Gnome 3 under Fedora 16 and openSUSE 12.1, which made me a happy GNU/Linux user. I tried to see the issues people have with Gnome 3, most issues are not about ‘status-quo’ these issues are genuine so I looked at the alternative and tried to see how suitable is the second most popular Desktop Environment, KDE, for a Gnome user. I am writing this review as an average user. Advanced users know what they need – they are like mountaineers, they don’t much care about such things. So, let’s see how good is Fedora 16 KDE for an average Gnome user.

      Gnome 3 Is In The Same Boat As KDE
      The beauty of Linux is ‘diversity’. You can have what you want as you are not stuck in the one-size-fits all model. There are couple of DEs (desktop environments) you can try if you are not happy with the one that comes with your OS. Fortunately, most leading distros, including Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE come with almost all the top DEs to choose from. Gnome and KDE are the most popular ones.

• Debian Family

  • Debian, World’s Easiest GNU/Linux Distro You Can Install

    Here’s how to do it and here’s where to find the CD or USB drive image. These links point to the squeeze/stable branch of Debian GNU/Linux so there could be a few less bugs than you expect with Ubuntu.

  • Derivatives

    • Unexpected uses of a knoppix thumbdrive system.

      Knoppix is pretty cool. It’s a linux live system on a USB stick, which by itself is not something too impressive anymore. This is something that’s been done for years now, with other systems like Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, based off the original Knoppix I believe.

      But the Knoppix guys really have a good setup. You can encrypt local storage on the stick so that someone else can’t get to your data if you lose the drive. You can install applications that are persistent and available the next time you boot the stick. In essence, you have a portable computer that just borrows whatever hardware you boot it on.

    • Tails, the incognito live system, gets 0.9 release

      Tails, “The Amnesic Incognito Live System”, a live CD or USB distribution of Linux which is designed to preserve privacy and anonymity, has been updated to version 0.9. The developers also urge users of the previous version, 0.8.1, to upgrade due to “numerous security holes” in that release.

      Tails is based on Debian GNU/Linux and comes with several built-in applications which have been configured with security in mind. For example, it relies on the Tor anonymity network to protect the user’s privacy online, and all outgoing connections are forced to make use of its ability to bounce internet traffic between multiple nodes. As a live CD or USB, Tails can be booted on a machine without being installed on the hard disk. It is configured to never use the hard disk even if, for example, there is some free swap space on it. It also attempts to wipe the RAM memory of the computer system as it is shutdown. Despite these capabilities, the developers do warn prospective users of the limitations of the technology.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 live from USB — first impressions

        Since I spent some time running Fedora 16 with GNOME 3/GNOME Shell via a live image, and I judged it as working well but not as polished in the design department as Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 with Unity, I figured I should give Ubuntu 11.10 a try with its live image and see what I thought.

        So I grabbed a 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 ISO. Since I was already in Debian Squeeze, and Debian and Ubuntu ISO images these days are “hybrid” images that can be burned to CD the usual way, or easily (very easily!) dropped onto a USB thumb drive, I found the 4 GB drive I used for my Ubuntu 11.04 test and put 11.10 on it. It’s this easy (use the filename of the ISO you downloaded and the filesystem location of your USB drive):

      • Welcoming Our New Horseman: Michael Hall

Devices/Embedded

• Cortex-A8 dev board takes on the BeagleBoard-xM

  Embest is shipping a single board computer based on the Texas Instruments Cortex-A8-based DM3730 or AM3715 system on chips. The DevKit8500D — also available from Premier Farnell’s Element14 engineering community as the DM3730-EVK Evaluation Kit — is equipped with DVI-D, Ethernet, USB 2.0, and serial expansion interfaces, plus options including touchscreens, wireless modules, and cameras.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google Activates 200 Million Android Phones, Closes Gap With Apple

      The Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s new number doubles the 100 million devices it claimed to have activated in May. From May through June, the company has activated roughly 500,000 devices a day.

    • Android, Android, Android!

    • 50 Good Android Apps: Utilities, Games, Productivity

      Android apps are plentiful – no doubt about it. So owners of Android devices aren’t starved for choice when it comes to apps. Yet it is this sheer variety of apps that makes it difficult to select the best apps for your handheld. Hopefully this list of 50 good Android apps will help you find the most worthy apps – let the downloading begin.

    • Dropping The Bomb on Usage

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Microsoft Surface Beaten By 65 Inch Android Tablet

    Microsoft has been playing with the concept of touch-screen for ages without having developed any product that can be used by ordinary user or which targets a mass market.

    The company is now working with Samsung (the leading Android phone maker who are wrongly paying Microsoft Android taxes) to release their 40 inch Surface tablet running on Windows 7 and Surface 2.0 software.

    Ironically, within a week of the announcement an Android tablet has beaten Microsoft’s surface by creating a bigger — 65-inch — tablet running on Android.

  • Amazon Kindle Fire shipments upped to 6 million in quarter

    A market research firm has boosted its projection for Kindle Fire shipments in the current quarter, as the Amazon tablet is proving to be one of the hottest consumer devices this holiday season.

  • Kindle tablet? Check. Kindle smartphone? Maybe next year

    The Kindle Fire tablet has only been available for a few days, but already Amazon could be looking to launch a smartphone, according to a new report.

    According to a note from Citigroup analysts obtained by All Things Digital, Amazon is believed to be currently working with well-known manufacturer Foxconn to develop a smartphone slated to be released in the fourth quarter of 2012.

An other Open Source Colorimeter

Richard Hughes, the author of colord, developed in the recent months new hardware for measuring monitor colours. The ColorHug called device shall come at a relatively low price. It shall be useable for LCD/LED monitors providing input to calibration and profiling software. The most wide spread open source colour management system, which can create ICC profiles from colour measurements, is Argyll.

Open Source WYSIWYG Visual Editor for UI Mockups

Maqetta is an open source project that provides WYSIWYG visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces. The Maqetta application itself is authored in HTML, and therefore runs in the browser without requiring additional plugins or downloads.

Maqetta allows User Experience Designers (UXD) to perform drag/drop assembly of live UI mockups. One of Maqetta’s key design goals is to create developer-ready UI mockups that promote efficient hand-off from designers to developers. The user interfaces created by Maqetta are real-life web applications that can be handed off to developers, who can then transform the application incrementally from UI mockup into final shipping application.

Adobe Donates Flex to Apache

In a move that appears to be another step away from its Flash platform, Adobe has submitted the code for its Flash-based Flex framework to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to be managed as an independent project.

Events

• OpenICC @ FOSDEM 4 + 5 February 2012 in Brussels, Belgium

  OpenICC can next year use a DevRoom at FOSDEM on Sunday together with Xorg people. The goal is to provide a meeting space for colour management topics.

• Speaking about Linux at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg next week

• FOSDEM 2012: announcing the devrooms

  Just sent out the ack/nack emails for the developer rooms at FOSDEM 2012, the latter part always being pretty tough, but we have to make choices.

• ABLEconf CfP early bird deadline approaches

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Introducing Mozilla Conductors

    In the last couple of months I’ve be involved in a surprising number of conversations about how to make communication through Mozilla bugs and
    discussion threads more productive. This ranges from how to keep the discussion on point, how to keep the discussions about the substance and not the people, and what to do if one feels uncomfortable. The topic is raised by both long time contributors and new participants, and ranges from asking for help in how to deal with the topic, to noting how much poor communications makes it difficult to work effectively.

SaaS

• Big Data Attracts Big Money

  More than $350 million has been invested in Hadoop and NoSQL technology to date. A top VC tells us why.

  The move towards Big Data and NoSQL is being fuelled by big money, as investors bet on the next big thing in technology.

  One of those venture capitalists is Frank Artale, a partner with Ignition Partners and an investor in Apache Hadoop startup Cloudera and NoSQL vendor Couchbase. In an exclusive interview with InternetNews.com, Artale explained that Ignition wanted to have a footprint in cloud and Big Data for a variety of reasons.

  In his view, there is the potential for several large multi-billion dollar companies to exist in the Big Data space, which is one of the reasons the firm invested in Cloudera.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Visio Import filter: the goodness soon on your desktop

  It has been a long time since I last time blogged about the LibreOffice Visio import filter. My silence did not prevent a pretty cool code from falling gradually into our git repository. To the point where now we are working on the last 5% of features that normally take the 95% of development time. But, let us see what happened since my July blog:

• Trying to visualise Open Source OpenOffice.org derivatives

  The caveats. As to my motivation (please remember to play the man not the ball): I do not intend to make anyone afraid, uncertain or doubtful. If graphs scare you – please look away at this point. These graphs are built from estimates, hopefully they are fairly un-controversial ones, I detail them at the bottom. This is probably misleading in all sorts ways I didn’t discover yet. My hope is that it provides a more helpful picture of the world today than this history graph that gets a frequent airing. By rendering only the last two years, we de-clutter lots of lapsed projects, and by not rendering version numbers we can use perceptual area for showing something more useful: an estimate of user-base. As/when I discover major bugs I’ll update this, it is a work in progress:

CMS

• Zynga using Drupal

Semi-Open Source

• New admin GUI for Zarafa

  Internally, Z-Admin is based on Yaffas with a customised ZCP theme and several Zarafa-specific modules. The modules are developed on the Zarafa Community Hub, while Yaffas is hosted on SourceForge.

BSD

• A Simple OpenBSD Router For Your Virtual Machines

  I tend to use VirtualBox a lot at home for experimenting with different operating systems or trying out scenarios that are too dangerous to “do it live”. While I could just give these virtual machines a bridged connection, I like to try to keep things as close as possible to the original environment, especially for “forensic” inspections.

• FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 Arrives Late, Pushes Back Final

  The good news: FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 is now available. The bad news with that announcement: FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 is late, which also means the third (and last) release candidate has been pushed back along with the final release. Hopefully FreeBSD 9.0 will arrive in time for Christmas.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Richard Stallman saga, redux

  But the commentary was by no means all negative. Several readers wrote in to express their own appreciation of Stallman. Chris Hanson, a research scientist at MIT who says he has known Stallman for 20 years, contributed the most telling appraisal.

  “Most people that I know are seriously alienated by Richard’s politics and by his uncompromising attitude; I’m often uncomfortable around him as well,” wrote Hanson. “But he has a knack for getting to the heart of things, and once you understand where he’s coming from, the things he does make perfect sense. In fact, it’s hard to understand how else they could be done. It’s sad that so many people reject him out of hand, often while mouthing some empty boilerplate phrase about how they admire him for his programming skill or something. As if one part of him could be separated from the other.”

  “I don’t always agree with him,” added Hanson, “but I always listen carefully to what he has to say. Richard is a genius, a man with a clear and unusual vision, and like others before him, he comes in a quirky and difficult package. Mozart wasn’t too well-liked among the cultured people of his day, either; perhaps someday someone will make a movie about RMS, his dry humor, temper tantrums, and beautiful vision of people working together.”

Programming

• new avr-gcc packages

• Strangest line of python you have ever seen

Standards/Consortia

• 7th ODF Plugfest in Gouda

• Khronos Group releases OpenCL 1.2

  The Khronos Group has announced the ratification of version 1.2 of the OpenCL (Open Computing Language) standard. Developed under the industry panel’s leadership, the standard defines parallel programming interfaces for applications that run on different OpenCL-compatible processors. The OpenCL standard is designed to enable other general applications to harness the computing power of graphics processors by allowing computations to be distributed across multiple graphics processors and CPUs. OpenCL uses a subset of the ISO-certified C99 C dialect with added parallel programming extensions.

Health/Nutrition

• The Supreme Court Will Uphold Health Care Reform, and Here’s Why

  Opponents of the Affordable Care Act who believe the Supreme Court will declare the law unconstitutional are going to be disappointed next year when a majority of the nine justices vote to uphold it. It will likely be a 5-4 decision, but moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy will, I’m confident, recognize that without the law, the free-market system of health insurance, so highly valued by conservatives, will implode, sooner rather than later.

  The high court announced earlier this week that it will hear oral arguments on the constitutionality of the law next March. A decision is expected in June, just a few weeks before the parties hold their conventions. Regardless of which way the justices go, the decision will ensure that health care reform will be as contentious a campaign issue as it was in 2008.

• CMD Opposes Gutting of Telemarketing Regulations

  The Center for Media and Democracy is asking Congress to reject a bill that could “open up everyone’s cell phones, land lines, and business phone numbers, without their consent, to a flood of commercial, marketing and debt collection calls,” according to a letter signed by the Center and a number of public interest groups. The Mobile International Call Act of 2011 amends the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a statute that regulates telemarketing and limits telephone solicitations and robo-calls. The bill purportedly makes sensible updates to the TCPA to allow consumers to be notified about fraud, appointment cancellations, drug recalls, late payments, and the like. However, other provisions of the bill would allow businesses to make pre-recorded robo-calls “for any commercial purpose that is not a solicitation.” This applies to any consumer’s cell phone, even for those that have placed themselves on the Do-Not-Call list. The bill also exempts modern automated predictive dialers from the TCPA, “permitting repetitive ‘phantom’ calls to cell phones doctor’s offices, hospital rooms and pagers.”

Security

• BIND 9 denial of service being seen in the wild

Finance

• What price the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe

  The ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for more reasons than it is possible to count. By replacing the scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has suspended the normal rules of democracy, and maybe democracy itself. And by putting a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs in charge of a Western nation, it has taken to new heights the political power of an investment bank that you might have thought was prohibitively politically toxic.

• JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs Sued for Alleged MF Global Misstatements

  JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. units were sued by two pension funds over claims they made misleading statements about the exposure of MF Global Holdings Ltd. securities to European sovereign debt.

  As a result of the misstatements, MF Global’s stock traded at “artificially inflated prices,” the funds said in the complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Manhattan. “While the extent of MF Global’s exposure to European sovereign debt was concealed, the defendants were able to raise some $900 million in the offerings.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Abramoff, Released from Prison, Rebrands Himself as Against Corruption

Intellectual Monopolies

• Infographic: Effects of the Internet Blacklist Bill (SOPA)

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’

Yes, the story is true. At least according to Lucovsky. Microsoft calls it a “gross exaggeration,” but Lucovsky says that when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and chucked it across the room. “Why does that surprise anyone?” Lucovsky tells Wired.com, seven years later. “If you play golf with Steve and he loses a five-cent bet, he’s pissy for the next week. Should it surprise you that when I tell Steve I’m quitting and going to work for Google, he would get animated?”

The famous flying chair shows just how volatile Steve Ballmer can be, but it also underlines the talent Mark Lucovsky brings to the art of software engineering. Lucovsky joined Microsoft in 1988 as part of the team that designed and built the company’s Windows NT operating system — which still provides the core code for all Windows releases — and after joining Google, he was one of three engineers who created the search giant’s AJAX APIs, online programming tools that drew more traffic than almost any other service at Google. “[He's] probably in the top 99.9 percentile when it comes to engineers,” says Paul Maritz, the CEO of virtualization kingpin VMware, who worked with Lucovsky as a top exec at Microsoft.

Desktop

• Chrome OS Linux 1.7.932 Has Google Music Manager

  The Chrome OS developers announced today, November 17th, the immediate availability for download of the Chrome OS 1.7.932 Live CD operating system, which brings the new Google Music Manager.

• Life with a ChromeBook

  During May’s Google IO developer conference, the first netbooks using the Linux-based ChromeOS were announced from Acer and Samsung. This was a public follow up from the very public beta of ChromeOS netbooks kicked off in December. One of the morning keynotes was dedicated to describing the new netbooks and their features. In June, the ChromeBooks finally shipped and were available for purchase from Amazon and Best Buy. Amazon actually sold out of Samsung Chromebooks in the first week.

  ChromeOS was the cover topic 2 years ago on the July 20th (2009) issue of Information Week. In that article, the bottom line was “… Google has a shot at gaining respectable consumer market share if it produces a slick, fast, secure OS that delivers a great web experience. And if Google succeeds with consumers, it is logical to expect it to steer that momentum toward the enterprise.”

Kernel Space

• New Kernel Patch Slashes Linux’s Power Appetite

  Linux users working on laptops and other portable devices may soon have cause to rejoice thanks to a new kernel patch that finally promises to fix power regression problems associated with recent versions of the software.

• Linus Torvalds Takes Aim at Proprietary Tech, and Apple

  (Brazil has recently squared off with Apple over policies on iTunes.) Apple co-founder Steve Jobs delivered a defense of the company’s tendency to deliver proprietary tools in Walter Isaacson’s biography of him. He told Isaacson that “people are busy” and don’t want to be bothered with incompatible products and products that don’t just seamlessly work. “They’re busy doing whatever they do best,” Jobs said “and they want us to do what we do best. Their lives are crowded; they have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices.”

  It seems that that explanation is not good enough for Linus Torvalds.

Applications

• The Best Disc Burning App for Linux

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Mailuils 2.99.94 [alpha]

Distributions

• Comparison of major Linux package management systems

• New Releases

  • Incognito 0.9

  • IPCop 2.0.2

  • CAINE 2.5.1 – SUPERNOVA is out!

    CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is an Italian GNU/Linux live distribution created as a project of Digital Forensics
    Currently the project manager is Nanni Bassetti.

  • Announcement and release notes for Wary (and Racy) Puppy 5.2.2

    Wary Puppy is built from a “Puppy builder” system named Woof (http://bkhome.org/woof), which can build a Puppy Linux distribution from the binary packages of any other distro. There are many “puppies” built with Woof, including Lucid, Wary, Racy, FatDog, and Slacko.

• Gentoo Family

  • Sabayon 7 on Acer Aspire One D255

    The Acer Aspire one is a a 1Gb, Intel Atom Netbook PC, and while you may think the netbook is dead, having a low powered throw in the bag computer is never a bad thing. However even in these heady days when Microsoft are willing to convince you that Windows 7 will happily run on devices such as this, and then effectively killed the market a customers just couldn’t figure out why their £200 netbook ran like a dog there is still hope with the Gnome 3 based Distro..

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Getting the Blooming Flavor of Fedora 16 KDE

      If you have read my review of Fedora 16 KDE Live, you should understand that I liked this Operating System. That’s why I decided to give it a chance to show all bloom in installed version of Fedora.
      In order to run installer, I booted my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop using same Live USB as before.
      Before running the installation, I activated WiFi connection.

    • Fedora 16: A GNOME lover’s paradise

      After several delays, Fedora 16 has been delivered. While hold-ups are a characteristic of the distro’s release cycle, these latest ditherings have put the latest version of Fedora a few weeks behind its main competitor, Ubuntu.

      Fortunately for Fedora fans this release is well worth the extended waiting time, offering an updated GNOME Shell, the Linux 3.0 kernel and plenty of the under-the-hood improvements that Fedora is known for.

• Debian Family

  • I’m back home with Debian

    I have been struggling with my conscience recently over using Ubuntu as a server. From a technical perspective, it’s an excellent choice. It has regular releases, can be both stable and cutting edge, has thousands upon thousands of packages, supports a lot of hardware, has a very pragmatic approach to enterprise server requirements, and much, much more. With all these benefits Ubuntu has been a favorite of mine for a long time. But recently I have been thinking more philosophically.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • 3 Interesting Ubuntu Unity Mobile Mockups

        User created ideas and concepts have always been an hallmark of popular Linux based distors like Ubuntu. We have featured such awesome works by loyal users, ranging from awe inspiring Ubuntu Unity mockups to professional looking LibreOffice mockups. Shuttleworth, during the recently concluded Ubuntu Developer Summit(UDS), made it clear that they will be taking Ubuntu to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. Inspired from that, some users have already created interesting mockups based on the idea of mobile Ubuntu Unity.

      • Ubuntu launches at retail in Portugal with ASUS

        As of this week, Ubuntu is now on sale in over 100 retail outlets in Portugal.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Kubuntu 11.10 review

          Kubuntu 11.10 is the latest stable release of the desktop Linux distribution sponsored by Canonical Ltd., a Linux software provider based in London, UK. It is based on Ubuntu, but uses KDE, the K Desktop Environment. According to the Release announcement, Kubuntu is a “perfect OS for casual users, social butterflies, Linux gamers, software developers, professionals, and anyone interested in a free, open platform that is both beautiful and useful.”

          That statement, by the way, applies to every (desktop) Linux distribution.

        • Lubuntu 11.10 review – Alternative to Unity?

          I just figured out I never did give the LXDE desktop paired with Ubuntu a proper review. We did have several stabs at Kubuntu, Ubuntu with Gnome classic and Unity, even the Xfce-flavored Xubuntu, but not this one. Now that it is officially endorsed by the company shipping the most popular Linux distro, it’s time to dig in and see whether Lubuntu can deliver the missing zen lost in the Gnome 2 and Unity guard change.

          Lubuntu is supposed to be a simple, lightweight alternative to heavier, more fully featured desktops, so it seems like a logical choice for older hardware. But then, all my past experience shows that these dietary environments are always lacking in something, never quite as good as the top two or perhaps top three desktops. And there’s the matter of spotlight and quality assurance. That said, maybe Lubuntu can deliver?

        • The most popular Linux is…

          Trying to figure out what the most popular Linux distribution is isn’t easy. We can safely say that Red Hat’s Rat Hat Enterprise Linux is almost certainly popular server Linux. You don’t close in on a billion in annual revenue without a lot of users. You could argue that it’s Android since there are over two hundred million Android smartphones out there, but I was thinking of PCs. So, which distribution do most individual people use on their computers?

          For years, Ubuntu has been the number one end-user Linux, but, somewhat to my surprise, it looks like Ubuntu has to face not just a challenger, but indeed it appears that Ubuntu has already been dethroned by Linux Mint, my own current favorite Linux desktop distribution.

        • Linux Mint 12

          Linux Mint was officially released on November 12, for almost a week now. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. For those not familiar with the Mint distro, Linux Mint is based on the latest release of Ubuntu, but with a few wrinkles. For starters, it works out of the box with full multimedia support.

          So, no more hassles in trying to get your DVD movies and other multimedia formats to work, which is a common problem for people starting out with Ubuntu. You also get a Windows-like menu system. Hey, anything helps to smooth out the transition when switching from Windows to Linux.

        • How to make Linux Mint look like OS X

          You might be wondering why we’d spend time morphing elements of the Linux Mint desktop into the shape of OS X, but there are several great reasons.

          Firstly, while recent Linux desktops like Unity and Gnome Shell take many of their cues from OS X, they don’t give you the option of only changing what you want to. Our piecemeal modifications will let you add only the features you want, while getting some of that OS X eye candy and usability. This isn’t a betrayal – it’s an example of Linux’s adaptability.

        • Linux Mint 12

        • Review: Pinguy OS 11.10 Beta

          For those who don’t know, Pinguy OS is basically Ubuntu plus everything and the kitchen sink. Also, the interface is made to look much more like Apple’s Mac OS X, with a top panel featuring a global menu, along with docks and similar themes. However, there have been some changes out of necessity because as of version 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”, Ubuntu no longer officially supports GNOME 2, so Pinguy OS has also had to upgrade to GNOME 3. As a result, the whole “Apple Mac OS X” look has had to be adapted to the new interface and restrictions (and there are many such restrictions) of GNOME 3. I’d like to see if it still remains as usable and friendly as before.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Amazon will launch a Kindle phone next year

      ONLINE DEPARTMENT STORE Amazon already has its Kindle e-reader and its Kindle Fire tablet, and it could branch out into Kindle smartphones too.

      The device, so far dubbed the Kindle Phone for want of another name, will be launched around this time next year in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to All Things D. The information comes from Citigroup’s research department which bases its theory on intelligence gathered from supply chains.

Women in FOSS: men need to do more, says senior dev

A long-time member of the FOSS community believes that men need to do much more about increasing the participation of women in the community and improving their experience of being part of the community.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Silent installation – following up

  In my earlier post about administrative installation of LibreOffice i described how its possible to use the program ORCA to manipulate the msi-file by creating a new mst-file.

  Unfortunately this subject is not very well documented from the developers. if you are a developer and find that I am giving wrong or inaccurate information then please notify me ASAP.

  Lately I have investigated some more details and possibilities in the installation process.

• Now you can buy LibreOffice merchandise

• Oracle v. Google – Oracle Names Final Three Deponents

  On Monday of this week Judge Alsup settled the issue of whether Oracle would be permitted to depose any or all of the technical witnesses on which Drs. Leonard and Cox relied in preparing their damages reports by granting Oracle the right to depose any three of seven such witnesses. (Copyright Fight Moves To Trial; Oracle Gains Some Depos) Oracle had already identified Tim Bray and John Rizzo as two of those deponents, and Google had agreed to produce them. So what the judge’s ruling really did was to limit Oracle to one additional deponent out of the remaining five witnesses. Oracle has decided that deponent will be Dan Bornstein, a witness Oracle has already deposed for two full days.

• Oracle v. Google – Google Wins One and Has a Second Deferred

  Google won a victory on its motion to strike the “rebuttal” report of Dr. Serwin. In an order issued yesterday Judge Alsup sided with Google, granted the motion, struck Dr. Serwin’s report, and ordered that Dr. Serwin could not testify at trial. (622 [PDF; Text]) This means that Dr. Serwin’s survey is out the window, as well.

  Judge Alsup not only granted Google’s motion, he appeared to level a good bit of criticism at Oracle’s counsel, calling the attempt to introduce the Serwin report a “highly unusual maneuver.” Judge Alsup also said that “in twelve years of using this form of case management scheduling order, this is the first time anyone has suggested [that reply reports were not explicitly limited to the authors of the opening reports].” He went on to say: “Oracle’s argument that Google has not been prejudiced is meritless. As explained above, the practice urged by Oracle is inherently unfair and frustrates important case-management objectives.” Turn out the lights, the Serwin party is over.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This holiday season donate support to free software!

  Are you dreading the end of this month and all it entails in terms of mall-parking expeditions and frenzied spending amidst crowds of other buyers? Are you looking for a break from the gimmes and some respite from advertisers’ leitmotif that “you have needs”? Break with the year end’s usual rampant consumerism and give your loved ones a gift that makes a social difference: give back to the community by giving a membership as a gift, and make a positive change for you and your gift recipient.

Project Releases

• wdiff 1.1.0 released

  Translations can now make use of plural forms. While this means a drastic improvement for some languages, it may also mean that some languages for which no such plural forms are available yet might be lacking user visible message strings, not only error messages, but also for e.g. statistics. You might want to check the translation status if your users have problems with English.

• gnutls 3.0.8

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Mexico’s Largest University to Post Online Nearly All Publications and Course Materials

    The National Autonomous University of Mexico, better known as UNAM, has said it will make virtually all of its publications, databases, and course materials freely available on the Internet over the next few years—a move that some academics speculated could push other universities in the region to follow suit.

    Campus officials at UNAM, Mexico’s largest university, said the program, known as All of UNAM Online, could double or triple the institution’s 3.5 million publicly available Web pages, as the largest collection of its kind in Latin America.

Programming

• [Bazaar developers' blog] What I did on my Rotation

  Bazaar is the version control system used by top open source project hosting site Launchpad so I was surprised to come across a bug which prevented bzr from talking to Launchpad properly on errors. “This is really important to fix. We need error reporting.” said Jonathan Lange over 2 years before. Pleasingly I could fix it, very satisfying. I had to learn about the hooks mechanism in bzr which shows up some of the downside of Python, you have to guess the arguments to send the hook. But who needs API documentation when you can just read the code?

What is Usenet and How Does it Work?

Have you heard of Usenet? Maybe your father once mentioned something about his Usenet account in college. If you are unaware of what Usenet is, don’t worry. You are about to find out.

Usenet was initially an idea hatched by 2 Duke University students in 1979. It was soon available on college campuses around the world. Access was eventually granted to early internet service providers who gave free access to their subscribers.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Digital divides: UBB as part of a much bigger broadband mess

  1) Leadership. The FCC has been making headway with a real broadband strategy over the last 18 months, along with a set of network neutrality rules, because the vision comes from the top – the White House. Harper and his cabinet have never cared about world-class retail broadband, because that would put them on the wrong side of the consumer vs business divide.

• CRTC goes REM on UBB: everybody hurts, sometimes

  The CRTC’s usage-based billing decision is in and boy is it a lot to digest, which is perhaps why there were so many conflicting reports in the media as to who exactly the winners and losers are or will be. After reading and digesting the long document and speaking to a number of the small internet providers that will be affected by it at the ISP Summit dinner on Tuesday night, it’s hard to see how anybody really wins with this decision. Burdened with the impossible task of trying to make everybody happy, perhaps this was the CRTC’s desired outcome.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Universal Music Sues Insurer To Pay For Its Copyright Infringement

    Earlier this year, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association (now Music Canada) – Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada – settled the largest copyright class action lawsuit in Canadian history by agreeing to pay over $50 million to compensate for hundreds of thousands of infringing uses of sound recordings. While the record labels did not admit liability, the massive settlement spoke for itself.

  • Creative Commons at WIPO

    This week, Andres Guadamuz (CC Costa Rica) is representing Creative Commons at the 8th Session of the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The agenda [PDF] promises review of several pending recommendations as well as a discussion of future work by the CDIP. Consistent with protocol, Creative Commons prepared a statement for the opening session, which you can read here, as well as find CC’s prior statements and presentations at the CDIP and other WIPO meetings and conferences.

  • File Sharing Lawsuits Progress in Canada as Dozens Face Payment Demands

    Earlier this fall, I wrote about the return of file sharing lawsuits to Canada as the copyright owners of the film the Hurt Locker obtained a court order requiring three major ISPs – Bell, Videotron, and Cogeco – to reveal the identities of dozens of subscribers alleged to have downloaded the movie. I noted that the targeted Canadians would likely face the prospect of demands to pay thousands of dollars in order to settle the case (or spend thousands in legal fees fighting the claims in court).

  • ACTA

    • Confirmatory application for legal service’s opinion on ACTA

    • 7 civil society groups ask for European Parliament transparency on ACTA

    • ACTA Secrecy Continues in the EU

      The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure has just released the response it got from the EU INTA committee to the request to disclose the legal opinion the Committee recently received on ACTA. In what would be a shocking response, if it was not so common in the history of ACTA, the Committee released a 16 page legal opinion with everything blotted out except for the legal conclusion that the EU is not required to publicly release any preparatory materials from the ACTA negotiation (ie the previous drafts).