12.04.11

Links 4/12/2011: GNOME 3.4 and Torvalds, More GNU/Linux Games

Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

[I’m on vacation for a week starting now]

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

GNU/Linux

Applications
- 5 Online Backup Solutions for Ubuntu Linux
  
  As the digital age progresses, the amount of data we produce each year is growing quickly. There was a time when we could fit all of our personal digital data on a few floppy disks, but many of us now have hundreds of gigabytes or photos, music and documents that we need to backup and protect. Backing up our data locally is important, but any good backup plan should also include off-site backups. “The Cloud” has promised us infinite, cheap storage where we can save our ever-growing data. Online cloud backups should be a part of your overall backup plan, but it’s important that your data is secure, encrypted, and backed up automatically. Here are a few online backup tools that aim to make cloud backups easy for users.
- 10 Console Music Players for Linux
- Instructionals/Technical
  - Using diff to Compare Directories
  - How to Mount a SMB/CIFS Share as an Automount on CentOS/Fedora/RHEL
  - How to install and use Tor for anonymous browsing or to access country-restricted content from another country
  - How to Easily Encrypt/Decrypt Files In Ubuntu One
  - Try kismet for detecting hidden 802.11 wireless networks
  - Adding Software to Arch Linux from the AUR
  - How To Fix A Slow Wireless Connection With The Intel Pro 5100 ABGN Wireless Adapter in Linux
  - [How to] Move Nautilus Navigation Buttons back to the Left in Ubuntu
  - Dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 7
  - Automating Linux installations with Kickstart
  - How to Use Custom Tray Icons in KDE
  - FLOSS: Making Crazy Remote Connections Possible
  - Vim Tip: Converting to a Beamer frame
  - Install Linux Mint 12 in VirtualBox
  - Install & Tweak Classic Gnome Desktop in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise
  - The Ultimate Collection of Emacs Resources
  - Update Linux Mint 12
  - How to: Active Directory Integration with Centrify DirectControl Express on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)
  - Running Contao 2.10.2 On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10
  - UNetbootin – A tool for creating Live USB drives
  - Auto Hide Top Panel In Gnome 3, Can Ubuntu Unity Catch Up?
  - GNOME 3: How to Change the Wallpaper from Command-Line
  - Linux for Users: Notes on Your Desktop
  - Setting up a Password Cracking Server
  - The Perfect Server – OpenSUSE 12.1 x86_64 With Nginx [ISPConfig 3]
  - Guide to rsnapshot and incremental backups on Linux
    
    rsnapshot is a backup tool written in Perl that utilizes rsync as its back-end. rsnapshot allows users to create customized incremental backup solutions. This article will discuss the following: the benefits of an incremental backup solution, rsnapshot’s installation, its configuration, and usage examples.
- Games
  - Linux Games: Dungeons of Dredmor
    
    Thanks to the Humble Bundle i’ve discovered also this nice game: Dungeons of Dredmor.
    It’s a classic Rogue-like game, you have to move your hero in 10 level of dungeons where you’ll fight against terrible monsters, to get new equipment, skills and fight the big bad Evil guy, from the official site:
  - Let’s Play: StarTopia
    
    I really like this game. It was 2001 when Mucky Foot Productions (not existing anymore) released this game. I played it a lot of times, and i never got tired of it. Beautiful music, funny characters, great landscapes. Ladies and gentlemen, a strategic game called… StarTopia!
  - Solve Challenging Puzzles in New Linux Game ‘Ortho Robot’
  - Three Days Left To The Humble Introversion
    
    There’s three days left to the Humble Introversion Bundle that offers up a collection of DRM-free, multi-platform games at whatever price you wish, but how is this Linux game sale performing?
  - Aleph One 1.0 released
    
    Hard to believe, but after 12 years of community development, the guys from the open-source engine based on Bungie’s Marathon trilogy Aleph One have finally released a version called 1.0!
  - New Linux Game ‘Metagolf’ Innovatively Combines Platforming and Golf
    
    Metagolf Linux game innovatively combines platforming action and golf. The gameplay style is really unique where upto 4 players can play on same screen with one golf ball to complete various objectives of different levels.
  - Games On Sale
Desktop Environments
- Linus Torvalds Starts Liking Gnome 3
  
  Yesterday Gnome project announced a site called Gnome Extensions which makes it easier to find and install extensions. A lot of useful Gnome 3 extensions already existed, but not much was known about it until LinuxMint popularised them. It seems Linus Torvalds has tried the extensions and is now liking it. He posts on his Google + page, “Hey, with gnome-tweak-tool and the dock extension, gnome-3.2 is starting to look almost usable.”
- GNOME Desktop
  - Will GNOME 3.4 Save the Linux Desktop?
    
    There are a lot of people that don’t like the changes brought to the Linux desktop with GNOME 3. Among those people is none other than the father of Linux himself, Linus Torvalds.
  - Gtk heading for a bumpy time in mobile space?
    
    In an effort to slim down and improve its cross-platform capabilities, the developers of the Chrome browser and ChromeOS itself appear to be shifting away from Gtk use.
    
    This bit of information was quietly pointed out earlier in the month on the Aura window manager pages for the Chromium Projects. Chromium is the open source implementation of Chrome and ChromeOS, and Aura is the new window manager and shell environment that will support the various interface elements on these implementations.
  - Marlin File Browser for GNOME – Overview
    
    Marlin is a relatively new file browser for GNOME somewhat similar with Nautilus when it comes to features, but with a different default interface.
Distributions
- New Releases
  - Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 176
    
    · Announced Distro: VectorLinux 7.0
    · Announced Distro: Clonezilla Live 1.2.11-23
    · Announced Distro: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 1
- PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
  - ROSA Media Player for Mandriva announced
- Debian Family
  - Derivatives
    - Canonical/Ubuntu
      - The Coding Studio OS Screenshots
        
        Ubuntu is a complete desktop Linux operating system, freely available with both community and professional support.
      - Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’ alpha 1 has been released
        
        Ubuntu 12.04 named ‘Precise Pangolin’ has been released on 1st Dec,2011. This time Ubuntu 12.04 is based on Linux Kernel 3.2.0 relaese candidate 3. There are many more changes are done in the Ubuntu 12.04. It also support for APLS touchpads.
      - Is Your Hardware Ubuntu Friendly?
        
        Ubuntu team is running a pilot project called ‘Ubuntu Friendly community hardware testing programme’. The goal of the program is to find if the hardware is Ubuntu friendly or not.
        
        Members can run a test on “how well their systems work with Ubuntu, and submit this information to a website where data is aggregated and a useful ‘friendliness’ rating is generated for each model. This information is useful, for instance, in determining which systems work well with Ubuntu, and whether a particular hardware component is likely to work or give trouble,” Daniel Manrique write on a mailing list.
      - Flavours and Variants
        
        Linux Mint 12 MATE
        
        Since MATE is new, there’s not really a “new features” list for it. However, there are a couple of new features in Linux Mint 12 that also apply to MATE. Some things that are new apply only to GNOME 3 so I haven’t included them here. If you want to see those, please see the Linux Mint 12 GNOME 3 review that I did earlier.
        
        Linux Mint 12 Lisa Review: Magnificent is the Word!
        
        Linux Mint, the venerable Ubuntu based Linux distro, is in the news again. Linux Mint 12 codenamed “Lisa” is finally released. It based on GNOME 3.0 and runs GNOME Shell with some ingenious tweaks of its own. Detailed review of Linux Mint 12 “Lisa” OS. Read on.
        
        Linux Mint 12 Revives Classic GNOME Desktop
        
        The week of Thanksgiving in the United States was a shorter week for some, but that didn’t slow the progress of Linux. This past week, Linux Mint 12 was officially released, providing those that don’t want GNOME Shell or Ubuntu Unity with an alternative take on a modern GNOME Linux desktop. As Mint freshened the Linux desktop, developers continued to push forward on KDE and the Linux kernel.
Devices/Embedded
- Phones
  - Android
    - Android 4.0 Available for Your PC
      
      Android-x86, the famous port of Google’s famous Android platform for the x86 (32-bit) architecture has just reached version 4.0.
      
      Android-x86 is a Live CD Linux distribution created mostly for the Eee PC netbooks, but can also run on any other 32-bit (x86) platform.
    - Galaxy Nexus bug-fixing software released
- Sub-notebooks/Tablets
  - Amazon’s Kindle source code: Much ado about nothing
    
    This week there’s been a lot of fuss about Amazon releasing source code for software on its Kindle devices, including the Kindle Fire. A lot of the hype we’ve seen is simply unwarranted; while you can download the source code that Amazon was legally required to publish, most of the software on the device remains proprietary, and every Kindle is still Defective by Design.
  - The Smallest And The Toughest Android Tablet
    
    This Android tablet can withstand five ft drops, water and dust ingress (IP65), and boasts the rugged military grade MIL-STD-810G rating. The Z710 can also operate in the coldest and hottest of environments, from -30 degrees C to +60 degrees C.

Free Software/Open Source

Blender is amazing!
Apache: Old, out of touch, but worth it…

The Apache Software Foundation has come under withering attacks lately, with accusations of its politics and bureaucracy getting in the way of its ability to foster open-source software.

The common rallying cry of the Apache attackers is GitHub, a source-control system that has almost blossomed overnight into the industry’s top open-source code repository. But while GitHub clearly does offer a superior code-hosting alternative to Apache and other foundations in many respects, it is deficient in one of the most important ways: branding.
Lightspark Open Flash Now Works On Windows

There’s a new release of the open-source Lightspark software for handling Adobe SWF/Flash support on the Linux desktop. New to Lightspark 0.5.3 among other changes is a working Microsoft Windows port.
Netflix opens “portal” for its open source projects
Events
- Thoughts on conferences
  
  Over the last four years or so, I have attended numerous conferences in many different locations. It has been, really without any exceptions, an incredible experience. Conferences are one of the main ways that our communities come together and meet face-to-face—something that’s important to counterbalance the standard email and IRC development environment.
  
  In that time, I have also seen many different ways to organize, schedule, and produce those conferences, and, as is the case with free software projects, there are bits and pieces that conferences can learn from each other. What follows is my—fairly opinionated obviously—distillation of what works well and less well, which will hopefully be useful as new conferences spring up, or as existing ones plan for next year.
Web Browsers
- Chrome
  - Why Hasn’t Google Put ChromeOS Out to Pasture?
    
    Google has been on a killing spree the last few months, whacking projects that are non-essential to the company strategy or that haven’t caught on. Even though this has angered some users, Google is still stubbornly clinging to one of its biggest dogs to date: ChromeOS and the Chromebooks.
SaaS
- Rumble in the cloud: 5 cloud storage services compared
Databases
- NoSQL hopeful cozies up to Hadoop data-muncher
  
  NoSQL data store CouchDB has become Hadoop’s latest convert with delivery of a connector tying together the two big-data architectures.
  
  CouchDB user Couchbase has announced a certified Couchbase Hadoop Connector, developed with Hadoop shop Cloudera.
  
  The connector potentially simplifies movement of data between the Couchbase Server, which Couchbase says is “powered” by CouchDB, and the Cloudera Distribution including Hadoop (CDH). Couchbase uses capabilities of CouchDB such as mobile and sync. Both CouchDB and Hadoop, meanwhile, are Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects.
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
- TDF Celebrates 100 Extensions
  
  Little over one month ago The Document Foundation announced their new online extension repository. At that time it had maybe a couple of dozen total extensions and templates, but now the number totals over 100.
  
  A short note from Florian Effenberger expressed the projects pride and gratitude towards those who have been contributing. OpenOffice.org had a wide selection and many articles were devoted to the bounty. Today, LibreOffice is well on its way to closing the gap.
  
  The extension site is easy to use because one can sort and search through the extensions. You can sort by LibreOffice version, or one of several criteria such as Highest Rated, Most Downloaded, or Newest. Extensions can also be filtered by category such as Language Tools or Writer-Extensions. And it doesn’t require Javascript to function.
Project Releases
- Genode 11.11 Released With Virtualization Options
  
  Genode, the interesting research (non-Linux) operating system developed on a unique framework architecture, recently experienced the release of Genode OS 11.11. This operating system, which brought Gallium3D support last year, now has a variety of virtualization modules available.
Public Services/Government
- DWP Confirms 1,000 Open Source Desktops Pilot
  
  Microsoft beware: a major UK government department is to trial open source desktops
Programming
- Review of CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development

Leftovers

Copyrights
- Copyright Corruption Scandal Surrounds Anti-Piracy Campaign
  
  Anti-piracy group BREIN is caught up in a huge copyright scandal in the Netherlands. A musician who composed a track for use at a local film festival later found it being used without permission in an anti-piracy campaign. He is now claiming at least a million euros for the unauthorized distribution of his work on DVDs. To make matters even worse, a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.

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IRC Proceedings: December 3rd, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz


#techrights log	#boycottnovell log

#boycottnovell-social log	#techbytes log

Enter the IRC channels now

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Links – US crackdown continues, CarrierIQ round up

Posted in Site News at 5:08 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

SANS Internet Storm Center writes up GoogleBot
Security
- HP printers can be remotely controlled and set on fire, researchers claim
  
  the access can be used to steal personal information, attack networks, and even set printers on fire by feeding them a continuous stream of instructions designed to heat them up. … such an attack “can be sent though several vectors, the USB connection [from a printer to a computer] is one of them. “
  
  Sounds like a Windows problem but Windows is not mentioned. Instead HP sent some FUD about gnu/linux and OSX sending corrupted print jobs to do the same thing. Ars could do better with technical details.
Defence/Police/Aggression
- Sheriff’s Department investigating Occupy L.A complaints
  
  Tyler Lyle, 26, who was arrested for blocking a sidewalk, says he sat on a parked bus for at least five hours. During that time, numerous protesters called out to a deputy to complain their hands were turning purple due to too-tight handcuffs. The calls were ignored, as were requests to help a woman who vomited and urinated on the bus. As the protesters called out for help, said Lyle, the deputy turned up the radio volume. “It was the song ‘God Bless America,’”said Lyle.
Cablegate
- EU and UK Citizens, help fight the extradition of Julian Assange
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
- Radioactive cesium blankets 8% of Japan’s land area

Finance

Since 2009, 88 Percent Of [US] Income Growth Went To Corporate Profits, Just One Percent Went To Wages

Anti-Trust
- Verizon Wireless makes marketing, airwave deal with three cable companies
  
  Verizon Wireless has reached an unorthodox deal with three major cable companies that could transform the way consumers get access to TV, cellphones and the Internet, setting up a consortium of firms with enormous power over mobile and home entertainment. … Verizon will pay $3.6 billion to Comcast, Time Warner and Brightline Cable to use a swath of cellphone airwaves that the cable giants own but do not use. … The cable companies would essentially kill plans to move into the cellular industry. Meanwhile, Verizon would promote the cable companies even where it offers its fledgling cable and home Internet service known as FiOS.
  
  If this does not convince people that selling spectrum in corrupt auctions was a bad idea, nothing will.
Censorship
- US courts still think the can censor the internet and demand impossible things from search engines.
  
  SOPA, meanwhile, is mutating into a ITC controlled censorship by big bank financial blockade law and dropping the auto DNS and search engine provisions. Financial blockade is currently killing Wikileaks, so the result is still US controlled censorship.
- BART’s Board OKs New Cell Phone Service Interruption Policy
  
  San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit thinks disrupting protests is more important than being able to call an ambulance, the fire department or other first responders. The FCC may not agree
Privacy
- Your smart phone is probably reporting everything you do with it.
  
  All non free software demands this power over users and that is why non free software is always a bad deal.
- A US Senator has some serious questions about cell phone privacy.
- CyanogenMod will never have Carrier IQ
- Software Freedom Law Center Asks U.S. Librarian of Congress for DMCA Exemption
  
  Just as we are all reading about Carrier IQ, with our eyes wide in horror and our jaws on the ground, the Software Freedom Law Center has announced that it has filed comments [PDF] with the US Librarian of Congress, asking for an exemption to the DMCA, so that users can legally control their own devices — have the legal authority to control what software is installed, including being able to install a completely free operating system, and be able to remove whatever is not desired.
Civil Rights – The crackdown on OWS continues.
- Senate’s Disastrous New Detention Bill
  
  The new National Defense Authorization Bill (S1867) presented to the Senate by the Armed Services Committee is such a disaster for civil liberties and human rights it is difficult to know where to begin.
- As the US slips into martial law, The Media’s Blackout Of The National Defense Authorization Act Is Shameful
  
  The broadcast media’s ignorance and unwillingness to cover the National Defense Authorization Act, a radical piece of legislation which outrageously redefines the US homeland as a “battlefield” and makes US citizens subject to military apprehension and detainment for life without access to a trial or attorney, is unacceptable.
  
  There have been a few print stories but corporate media mostly ignores and defends the act which makes easy what companies have previously done to protesters one at a time with SLAPP and laws defining animal rights protest as terrorism. Banksters would love to be able to round up OWS protesters and throw them into “Communication Management Units or jails built to house undocumented aliens in each state. President Obama again pledged to veto the law but not for the right reasons.
- Obama Should Veto Empire Over Republic
  
  the ACLU called it “an historic threat to American citizens”, this bill is so dangerous not only to our rights but to our country’s security that it was criticized by the Directors of the FBI, the CIA, the National Intelligence Director and the U.S. Defense Secretary! For the first time in our history, if this Act is not vetoed, American citizens may not be guaranteed their Article III right to trial. … Senator Lindsey Graham declared that suspected citizens open themselves up “to imprisonment and death”. “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them: ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’” … we could witness the US government targeting a large range of political dissidents, human rights activists, humanitarians, and maybe even “occupiers”.
- Stallman: Facebook IS Mass Surveillance
  
  Free software literally gives you freedom in the area of computing. It means that you can control your computing. It means that the users individually and collectively have control over their computing. And in particular it means they can protect themselves from the malicious features that are likely to be in proprietary software … human rights support each other. In an age when a lot of what we do, we do with computers, if we don’t have freedom in our computing, that makes it harder for us to defend or fight for freedom in other areas.
- Clownish Gov [Koch-Walker] Wants to Charge a Protest Fee So People Will Stop Protesting Him
  
  The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel shares details of Walker’s plan, which we’ll title “The Safe Capitol Requires Expenditure of Wages, the Protection of Everyone, Official Permits, and Liability E-surance (SCREW the PEOPLE) Act of 2012″
  
  Essentially, the governor would like to charge protesters the cost of beating them. The Milwaukee Journal article
  
  notes that Walker is recycling an old smear about the cost of the protests
- Texas limits protests to three hours durration.
  
  [a stranger] showed up at the very end of our allotted 3 hours of free speech time, and was told she was part of our “event” and that she would be ticketed and could risk arrest if she didn’t leave.
- U.N. Envoy: U.S. Isn’t Protecting Occupy Protesters’ Rights
  
  Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. “special rapporteur” for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.
Copyrights
- Misappropriated music used by BREIN in a propaganda campaign against sharing proves Dutch collection agencies are a farce.
  
  When Rietveldt bought a Harry Potter DVD early 2007, he noticed that the campaign video with his music was on it. And this was no isolated incident. The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. … The existence of excellent copyright laws and royalty collecting agencies in the Netherlands should mean that the composer received help and support with this problems, but this couldn’t be further from what actually happened. … a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.