12.14.11

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• A Very Unscientific Adventure Into Ubuntu Linux and Google

  I tossed Windows into the snow bank several years ago. Elegant on the outside, but ugly on the inside. The world of Blue Screens of Death, malware and viruses were really beginning to tick me off. I sought salvation in Linux. Over time I have flirted with several species of Linux. And like many people Ubuntu has become my weapon of choice. I gave up ‘geekery’ a while ago, I just want tools that I can use. Simple tools, a glorified IBM Selectric typewriter, email, and a Web Browser, and pretty much I am a happy guy.

• Predictions for 2012

  GNU/Linux will arrive on retail shelves everywhere in every format. This is inevitable and we saw a few more devices available in 2011. 2012 will open the floodgates. M$ blinked by going to ARM. The world noticed and GNU/Linux will be able to rush in through the opened door. Retailers and OEMs will take the opportunity to make more money selling products running on FLOSS. The x86 OEMs are hungry and wanting to feed at the same trough the ARMed OEMs have been feeding at, both Android/Linux and GNU/Linux.

• Judge Dismisses PlayStation 3 ‘Other OS’ Removal Class Action Suit

  A federal judge has dismissed all of the counts brought against Sony in a class action suit over the disabling of PlayStation 3′s “Other OS” feature last year.

  The feature was primarily used to install versions of the open source Linux operating system on the console, allowing home users to tap into the PlayStation 3 for homemade applications.

  In April 2010, Sony released a PS3 firmware upgrade removing the console’s Other OS functions as a response to hacker exploits enabling users to run unauthorized software and pirated games by using the feature.

• 2011: A year full of right and wrong for Linux

  The year was 2011. The world’s economy was still in the tank, the publishing industry was in full-on meltdown mode, the tablet was finally accepted, smartphones were catching up to PCs in power, Steve Jobs passed away, the Indianapolis Colts were running down the perfectly imperfect season, and Linux had some major ups and downs.

  It’s been a strange, strange year that might well go down as one of “those” years in my book of books. It seemed for every step forward there was one or two steps backwards to be taken — no matter what your focus or industry. Naturally I only want to address Linux, this being an open source blog and all.

• Three greatest successes in Linux world 2011

  2011 is coming to its end. It is time to make final roundups and see what happened in our life in this year.
  I have written about three greatest failures in Linux world 2011 just now.
  Now let’s have a look at greatest successes in 2011 from my point of view.

• Three greatest failures in Linux world 2011

• Top 5 Linux Predictions for 2012

  There will continue to be discussions and debates about Linux on the desktop, including popularity, vitality, usability, commercial connections and more, which is good for users and vendors. However, based on trends in cloud, mobile and consumer computing, Linux should and will move to these areas, leaving its longstanding low use on the desktop as it is.

• 2011: The Year of Linux Disappointments

• Advantages of Using Linux

• Five Reasons to Adopt Linux, Today!

  Whether you are a home user or a business owner, Linux is a great choice for an operating system. I entered the Linux world pretty recently, after spending a long time with various Microsoft Windows versions. Now, there’s no looking back!

• The Real Linux Girl: Friends Told Me That My Place Was in the Kitchen.

• Desktop

  • Broken Logic Around GNU/Linux Desktops

    It’s not a zero-sum game. FLOSS doesn’t get used up somehow because it’s successful in the cloud, and mobile. FLOSS gets excited, drawing in new talent and more users sharing the joy. FLOSS is on fire and it will grow as long as there is fuel and oxygen.

  • The Linux Setup – Alan Orth, Systems Administrator

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Linux Outlaws 240 – You Wouldn’t Steal a Baby!

• Kernel Space

  • Building The Linux Kernel In 60 Seconds

    Besides finishing up the Phoronix Test Suite 3.6-Arendal release this weekend, on Saturday I began running some new Intel CPU benchmarks. In building the Linux 3.1 kernel for x86_64 in a default configuration (make defconfig), I’ve now managed to trim down the compile time to less than sixty seconds on a single-socket desktop system. Similar speeds can be achieved out of multi-socket servers and other configurations, but this is the first time I’m seeing such kernel build speeds out of a single processor — the AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer doesn’t come close.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Wayland Has Working Screensaver Support

      Patches have been published for Wayland today for an idle animation interface and implementation within its demo compositor. In other words, you can now have a working screensaver in Wayland.

    • Intel Puts Out Its 2011 Holiday Linux Package

      While this package doesn’t mark the release of any new software, Intel defines the 2011Q4 graphics package as being the Linux 3.1 kernel, Mesa 7.112, xf86-video-intel 2.17.0, libdrm 2.4.27, libva 1.0.15, and vaapi-driver-intel 1.0.15. This is the configuration they recommend for Linux end-users and distributors. They tested these components against X.Org Server 1.11.1.

    • Racing To Finish X.Org Multi-Touch Support

    • New Radeon HDMI Audio Patches Published

      While AMD still hasn’t published Radeon HDMI audio patches for their open-source Linux driver to enable the audio support on their Radeon HD 5000 series and newer, the reverse-engineered community patches have quickly evolved.

    • The Current State Of Radeon Power Management

• Applications

  • Emacs can’t do everything

    Tonight something incredible happened: I asked Emacs to solve my physics homework and it couldn’t. If you think Emacs can do everything, think again: there is no (require ‘physics). Go solve assignments yourself.

  • GrooveWalrus: Music Player with GrooveShark and Last.fm Support

  • 3 Software to manage your photo on Linux

    In this article I’ll do a roundup over a collection of software that can be very useful for all people who have the hobby of photography.
    They can be really useful if you have a collection of photo and you want to organize them in albums, by date or tags.

  • sslyze – Fast and Full-Featured SSL Configuration Scanner

  • Emulators on Linux, part 2

  • Is Calibre the most annoying program in the world ever?

  • Vegas Baby!

    Totem’s new Vegas browser plugin provides you with a way to watch Flash based videos, without using Flash, using libquvi’s growing collection of supported sites.

  • Oyranos Colour Management LiveCD III

  • The Best Video Player for Linux

  • Bash and I – The Bourne-Again SHell

  • Live USB Install Puts Linux On Your Thumb Drive With Ease

    Boot one of over a hundred Linux distros from a USB disk. With Live USB, software you can run on both Windows and Linux computers, it only takes a couple of clicks to make your USB disk a bootable Linux disk. The live CD just might be the most useful tool in any geek’s arsenal – we’ve pointed out 50 uses for live CDs in the past and plan on showing you many more. As time goes on, however, CD drives become less common. That’s why booting from a USB drive is useful: it works on notebooks and other devices without optical drives.

  • The most popular CAD software for Ubuntu Linux

    CAD or Computer Aided Drawing is now a predominant force in any form of industry that involves extensive use of design modelling or prototyping of graphical architectural depictions. Here is a list of some of the most popular CAD apps available for Ubuntu.Linux.

  • Paint Portraits Using MyPaint Graphics Application

  • Panel-Based Linux Radio App ‘RadioTray’ Adds Minor New Features in Update

  • Bisigi Themes to be Ported to GTK3, First Preview Looks Stunning

    Bisigi Project has released 15 well designed and beautiful GTK2 themes. However, the project was concluded recently after the team announced that there will be no support for GTK3.

  • Screencast-O-Matic: Make Screen Recordings Online for Free

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Lessons from password/key changes

    • Installing PowerDNS as supermaster with slaves

    • HOWTO: Force Skype to use Alsa on Linux

    • Getting Started with Mercurial

    • Install .deb Packages Manually (Linux Debian/Ubuntu)

    • Extract an RPM Package

    • Mount Ext4 partitios in Windows

    • HowTo Get Mac OS X’s “Natural Scrolling” In KDE

    • How to Monitor Realtime Network Traffic in Ubuntu / Debian Linux

    • Kernel panic – not syncing: VFS – How to solve

    • Sysadmin Trick: Custom Bash Prompt and Shortened Path Display

    • C Arrays Basics Explained with 13 Examples

    • How To Disable The Blurry Dash , Change The Top And Launcher Panel Opacity On Ubuntu 11.10

    • The right way to uninstall a software in Arch Linux

    • Kill Processes On Ubuntu

    • The Perfect Desktop – Pinguy OS 11.10 (Beta)

    • Enable Classic Gnome 2 Desktop In Ubuntu 11.10

    • How to : Configure Thunderbird in Ubuntu 11.10 to Send & Receive Mails of Gmail Account

    • LibrePlan Project Planner | Install LibrePlan 1.2 On Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

    • Embiggen Your KVM Virtual Machines

    • How to Move Ubuntu Window Buttons To Right Side

    • Backup all databases nightly w/ mysqldump

    • Tutorial: Put your bookmarks online with SemanticScuttle

    • Scripting KVM with Python, Part 1: libvirt

    • Mounting Remote Directories With SSHFS On Ubuntu 11.10

    • Scheduling in Hadoop

    • Progamatically Comparing Debian Package Versions

    • Evolution of shells in Linux

    • Learn Linux, 302 (Mixed environments): Linux file system and share/service permissions

    • Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 5.7 (LAMP)

    • Usenix: Dartmouth expanding diff, grep Unix tools

  • Wine

    • Infos: Wine 1.3.34 released

      The Wine development release 1.3.34 is now available.
      What’s new in this release:

      * Bytecode support in JavaScript.
      * Support for gradients in the DIB engine.
      * A number of Uniscribe improvements.
      * Fixes for DirectDraw mode switching.
      * A few more MSVC runtime functions.
      * Various bug fixes.

  • Games

    • P’d Off Penguins

      I don’t know anything about video game development, so I am hoping that this project succeeds so that he releases the full game source code. I don’t want to give all of the details here, so I encourage to watch his video explanation. If you like his proposal, offer him a donation.

    • Oil Rush Retail

    • Tiny & Big Alpha Trailer

    • Dungeons of Dredmor Expansion ‘Realm of the Diggle Gods’ Revealed

      In a recent post, Gaslamp games revealed new screens and trailer of ‘Realm of the Diggle Gods’, a new expansion pack for Dungeons of Dredmor.

    • Steel Storm 2 info

    • Lariad a space adventure

    • Dungeons of Dredmor Expansion!

    • End of Year Awards

    • Humble Indie Bundle 4

    • Whats happening in OpenDungeons?

    • Epic Inventor, New Side-scrolling, Crafting RPG Game for Linux

    • Linux Game SpaceChem is Now Available for Free to Schools

    • Update: StarTopia 1.0.2 patch

    • World of Goo for Android Phones, Tablets Released!

    • MegaGlest 3.6.0 Released – Overview, Installation & Screenshots

    • Desura open source info

    • Humble Introversion Bundle On Mesa/Gallium3D

      For anyone wondering whether the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers will work with the Humble Introversion Bundle titles (or are thinking about buying the collection at the last minute), here are the results from some quick tests using different hardware and drivers.

    • Outerra 3D Planetary Engine Renders Whole Planets from Space Down to the Surface, Will Wow You!

    • Linux Gaming is Alive and Well

      One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard from people about Linux is its lack of support for any decent games. I’d like to illustrate today how woefully wrong this myth is. I’ve been using Linux on my personal system for over four years now, and have picked out a number of fantastic games that have full Linux support, done by big name studios.

      I’ll start out with three big FOSS games, because I’m all about the free.

    • Trine 2 next year…we already knew!

• Desktop Environments

  • Open Source: A GUI Minimalist Tries e17

    e17 Impressions

    * Appears to take very few resources, which appeals to my GUI minimalist mind.
    * Seems a bit rough around the edges in a few places.
    o Auto-hide of the shelves stops working sometimes. Have to open the settings dialog for a shelf and save it again to “fix” this.
    o At times the Taskbar gadget running in a shelf mishandles / overlaps / truncates the items that it shows running on a desktop. Opening the shelf settings dialog and saving again “fixes” this.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Is Kmail still being developed?

      Yes, KMail is maintained, It even has a new maintainer since a few months. Laurent Montel now takes care of KMail2 and already made an awesome work.

    • digiKam 2.4.0 improves histogram view

      The digiKam development team has released version 2.4.0 of its open source digital photo management application for KDE. According to the developers, the maintenance update introduces improvements to the histogram view in the right sidebar aimed at making it easier for users to analyse their images.

    • 7 Plasma Widgets To Make Your KDE More Social

      We’ve already touched upon some of the best plasma widgets that are out there for KDE. While those may be enough to make your GNOME-loving friends jealous, it sounds much more fun when you get to brag about them on social media and IM. And, even though there are many apps that let you do that, nothing beats updating your social networks right from your main desktop. So, if you’re looking to add a social twist to KDE, read on as we list some social plasma widgets ( or plasmoids ) you can fill your desktop with.

    • Kdenlive part 4: Color correction

    • The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part IV – KIO

      So what is KIO? It is a technology that makes arbitrary resources available in form of files (if it makes sense to be files) which any KDE application can seamlessly access and use. Let’s have FTP server as an example. It’s a remote server somewhere on the other side of the country. How would you normally access it? Install some FTP client, create new connection, enter your credentials, connect, browse the server in the client, do some work. With KDE KIO all this is not needed.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME 3.2: Who Invited Nautilus to this Environment?

      So to no one’s surprise, I made the switch to OpenSUSE 12.1 on my main laptop, a Lenovo T420i.

      The main reason? I fell in love with GNOME shell. Sabayon LXDE was nice, but tiny things kept creeping up, like clamz not working to unpack Amazon music. It was nothing that impacted the usability of the machine, but it was just enough to make me open to switching distros.

    • Why Gnome3 sucks (for me)

      Among the users of desktop environments, I’m probably not a typical user. In 2009 my setup drifted from a more or less standard GNOME 2.3 to a combination of GNOME and a tiling window manager, which I called Gnomad, as a logical continuation of something I’ve done for a long time since using computers: Simplifying tasks, which are not my main business.

    • Gnome 3 Will Bring Users Back To Ubuntu: Top 6 Gnome Extensions

      Gnome 3 extensions have breathed a new life in those disgruntled Ubuntu users who were looking elsewhere due to the lack of customisation of Unity.

• Distributions

  • Distro Hoppin`: Semplice 2.0 Beta 1.1

    Good day, people who visit my site! It is with great pleasure that I invite you to yet another pleasant reading break. The theme? As always, my latest visit into the open source awesomeness that is GNU/Linux. I discovered Semplice while reading Distrowatch’s Weekly and I was drawn by its purple background. Yep, I am not ashamed to admit it! Staaaaart wearing purple, wearing purpleee. And it’s not even Ubuntu’s kind of purple, it’s the cool purple, lilla, mauve even. Yes, I like mauve. Let’s call it mauve. Mauve Linux. Mauve OS. Score!

  • KahelOS: An Easy-To-Use Version Of Arch Linux

    If you have been wanting to dabble with Arch Linux but don’t want to jump directly into this leading rolling-release Linux distribution, you may want to give KahelOS a shot.

  • Review: Puppy Linux 5.3 “Slacko”

    Puppy Linux Puppy Linux is a fascinating little distribution which regularly thinks outside the box. The little Linux distro, which typically finds a home on low-end hardware, tries to strike a balance between being small and being complete, being efficient and being user-friendly. There are many different flavours of Puppy Linux and it’s a flexible distribution, able to take on many roles, which has endeared it to a large community. This week I decided to take the latest version, Puppy Linux 5.3 “Slacko”, for a test run.

  • Whatever Happened To… gOS?

    gOS was a green-coloured Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that made a splash during early 2008 when it became the default OS on a line of PCs, laptops and netbooks from computer manufacturer Everex. Much of the lesser-known gOS hardware was exclusive to the American Walmart chain – such as its ‘mac mini’ style gPC.

  • Will Linux’s Hardware Requirements Stifle Its Acceptance?

    Before we get ahead of ourselves — and I get flamed for spreading FUD — let’s state the obvious: Linux still can be plenty friendly to old or otherwise “slow” computers. The Damn Small Linux distribution, for example, can be installed in full on as little as 50MB of disk space, and run perfectly well on a 486 processor — with a graphical user interface. It’s not the Linux kernel that’s become resource-hungry, but the distributions that are built on top of it.

  • A galaxy of Linux Distros

    The Internet is a great place to scratch the itch of curiosity. I’d heard some interesting things about Arch Linux so I Googled it. I wanted to know what the Distro was all about and a bit of it’s history.

    I accidentally discovered The GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline which informed me where Arch Linux was derived from (Crux) and what had branched off from it (7 current branches)

    It charted the Galaxy of GNU/Linux Distributions. Organized the mess that Linux Distros have become into an understandable chart. A huge svg graphic measuring 2,120 x 8,330 pixels

    A chart that is very detailed. Remember that Distro of Linux meant to be a replacement for Windows, “Lindows”, that first appeared in 2001? It had it’s security dumbed down to about the Windows 95 level.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • For a successful Mandriva 2011 install, follow these steps!

      Mandriva 2011 is a very decent and innovating Linux distribution but is sadly let down by a few fixable quirks. The biggest show stopper occurs when trying to update Mandriva 2011 for the first time. Unfortunately many newbies are struggling with this pain in the backside so let me tell you what to do in easy to follow steps.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Why Red Hat Remains Hot

      Don’t think of Red Hat (RHT) as a Linux company, an open source company or an operating system vendor. Think of it as a cloud software leader.

      If you want to build a reliable cloud, one that can hold your enterprise applications, you are probably doing business with Red Hat, and will only do more in the future.

    • Red Hat providing key open source solutions

    • CentOS 6 Basic Install

    • Fedora

      • HP’s WebOS plan modeled after Red Hat’s Fedora

        HP is hoping to model the WebOS open source government model after Red Hat’s Fedora project. Apache, CDDL and MPL are license possibilities.

      • HP open sources WebOS: The fallout

      • Fedora NFS server outage retrospective

        As you may have seen if you are on the fedora announce list, we had an outage the other day of our main build system NFS storage. This meant that no builds could be made and also data could not be downloaded from koji (rpms, build info, etc). I thought I would share here what happened so we can learn from and try and prevent or mitigate this happening again.

      • New Features Approved For Fedora 17

        There was a FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) meeting held today where several new features were approved for the Fedora 17 feature list.

        The features that were approved today for Fedora 17, which is codenamed the Beefy Miracle, include:

  • Debian Family

    • FLOSS for Neuroscience: An interview with the NeuroDebian team

      This time we bring you an interview with Michael Hanke and Yaroslav O. Halchenko, leaders of the NeuroDebian project. NeuroDebian is a turnkey platform (using Debian as its foundation) that offers a huge bundle of FLOSS software for neuroscientists. Enjoy the interview!

    • People behind Debian: Ben Hutchings, member of the kernel team

      Ben Hutchings is a rather unassuming guy… but hiding behind his hat, there’s a real kernel hacker who backports new drivers for the kernel in Debian stable so that our flagship release supports very recent hardware.

      Read on to learn more about Ben and the kernel team’s projects for Debian Wheezy!

    • Debian 5.0 Reaches End-of-Life on February 2012

      The Debian security team, through Moritz Muehlenhoff, announced on December 6th that the Debian 5.0 (Lenny) operating system will no longer be supported started with February 6th, 2012.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • PayPal Support to Land in the Ubuntu Software Centre ‘Before Xmas’

        • Unity Shortcut Overlay Coming to Ubuntu 12.04

        • Introducing odm.ubuntu.com

        • Top 20 Apps you cannot miss out in Ubuntu Software Centre

          Ubuntu being an Open Source OS is a perfect place for developers worldwide to showcase their skills. Deriving contributions from millions of programmers worldwide, Ubuntu is rich in features and is loaded with apps that will perform any task. In fact you don’t have to worry about compatibility issues as those existing in premium operating systems. So let us take a close peek into the world of Ubuntu and list down some of the hottest apps that you must have on your Ubuntu PC.

        • Interview with Mr.doob

          In the following months we are going to invite inspiring artists to talk about their amazing work and the role that Ubuntu and free software cover, or could cover, in their creative lives.

          Today I invited a special Ubuntu friend to talk about his journey in creative coding.
          He is well known in the web community and he is recently blowing it away with cutting edge online real-time music videos using open web technologies.
          The Canonical Design blog is happy to welcome Ricardo Cabello, aka Mr.doob.

        • Hands on with Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

          With Mac OS X Lion on the prowl and Windows 8 just around the corner, now more than ever is the time for Linux to show it can keep up with the times.

        • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Features Unity Configuration Tool MyUnity

        • Used Unity for over a month

          In March I got tired of KDE4 and switched to XFCE which served me quite well during Ubuntu 11.04 ‘natty’ cycle. But then I had a feeling that it becomes more and more second citizen in Ubuntu world. All those transitions from GTK+2 to GTK+3 which made some applications look ugly etc.

        • Canonical Launches New Unofficial Site for Ubuntu OEMs/ODMs

          We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Canonical may have all but given up the fight to ship Ubuntu on consumer PCs in the United States, at least for now, but it remains staunchly committed to forging strong relationships with hardware manufacturers. The company’s latest effort in this vein is a new Web portal catered to that group — which is also a significant example of how Canonical is reconfiguring the way people find information about Ubuntu. Read on for details.

        • Ubuntu TB Decides On Future Of Non-PAE Kernel

          The Ubuntu Technical Board met yesterday and they decided on the future of non-PAE Linux kernels within Ubuntu, a decision that affects 32-bit users on older hardware.

        • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 245

        • [How to] Make Ubuntu 11.10 Look and Feel Like GNOME 2

        • For Ubuntu’s Mobile Endeavors, Android Has Some Bitter Lessons to Offer

          A couple of months ago, Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s benevolent dictator, announced on his blog that by 14.04 (April 2014), he plans to bring Ubuntu to tablets, mobiles, and TVs. The announcement was met with surprise, shock, and some criticism.

        • Creative Ubuntu Unity TV Mockups You Must See

        • Mark Shuttleworth Juju Webinar on December 8th

          Sonia Ouarti from Canonical announced a couple of days ago, December 2nd, that the Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and devops expert Clint Byrum will hold a webinar about Juju, this Thursday, December 8th at 3pm GMT.

        • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Release Candidate Dropped

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint 12 Lisa, ano’er review

            Also sprach Dedoimedo: Linux Mint Lisa is the best Gnome 3 incarnation now, but that’s not something to be proud of. While the Mint developers are trying their best to deliver a consistent and friendly experience for years and pretty much succeeding, the last release is a setback. You’ve seen all this and more in my namesake review, just a few days back. This was done on an ancient T60p laptop.

          • How to run Unity desktop on Linux Mint 12

            Out of the box, Linux Mint 12, the latest edition of Linux Mint, a desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, comes with a choice of two desktop environments – GNOME 3 with Mint GNOME Shell Extension (MGSE), and MATE, a fork of GNOME 2.

          • Checking Out Ubuntu Studio 11.04

            Well, it’s not exactly brand new, but I am taking my first real look at Ubuntu Studio 11.04 (based on Ubuntu “Natty Narwhal”). This is what we decided to put on our “guest” computer when Debian “Wheezy” proved not to be so easy, and it gives us an opportunity to step out of our rut and look at a new GNU/Linux distribution.

            If you read my column a lot, you probably know I’m a long-term Debian loyalist. Or maybe I should say “lazy-ist”, because my loyalty to Debian is not so much a matter of ideology as a simple case of me not wanting to have to learn a new system. I like computer technology, but mostly because of what I can do with it, not for its own sake. So I tend to find one system I’m comfortable with, and stick with it — especially when it comes to the computer I use every day.

          • Linux Mint 12 “Lisa”: Gnome, deep in a dream

            Is it melodramatic to say that Linux Mint 12 has been the most anticipated distribution of the year? Maybe, maybe not. Probably. But I was certainly looking forward to it: even more so when I learned about Mint’s proposed reworking of the GNOME Shell. So I installed the release candidate on three computers, and I have the final on two of them.

          • Ultimate Edition 3.0 Screenshot Tour

            Finally! Ultimate Edition 3.0 is here, officially released today, December 6th, and based on the Linux Mint 11 (Katya) and Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating systems.

          • Linux Mint 12 review

            Linux Mint 12 is the latest edition of the popular Linux distribution. Not to be confused with Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), the version of Linux Mint that is based on Debian, Linux Mint 12 is based on Ubuntu Desktop.

            This release, code-named Lisa, comes with more desktop options than you would normally find on a Ubuntu-based distribution. That of course has much to do with the distribution’s developers attempt to find a compromise desktop for the mess that has become the GNOME line of desktop environments.

          • Video Review: Ubuntu Privacy Remix 10.04r2

• Devices/Embedded

  • The Geek’s Guide to the Coolest Holiday Gifts

    Two Player Home Arcade Game Controller

    Does the thought of building your own retro arcade game seem a bit daunting?

  • Phones

    • Android

      • 7 Best Free Android Weather Apps

      • Fujitsu’s waterproof Android phone just 6.7mm thin

        Fujitsu-Toshiba announced an Android 2.3 smartphone for Japan’s KDDI network that features IPX5/8 waterproofing, an ultra-thin 6.7mm (0.26 inch) profile, and a low, 3.7-ounce weight. Built around on a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, the Fujitsu Arrows-ES IS12F offers a five-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, infrared, NFC, and even a TV tuner.

      • Why It Will Take So Long to Upgrade Phones to ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’

        Ever want to know exactly why it takes so long to push the latest Android operating system release to your phone? Motorola and Sony Ericsson attempted to explain it on Wednesday.

        On Nov. 14, Google released the Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” code base to the general public, including manufacturers, which immediately began implementing it into their phones.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open Source Trust Abused

  The matter has been a unhealed wound for more than six months, but this week the problem that C|Net’s Download.Com website has been perpetrating leapt into high profile with a complaint from the developers of NMap and others. The download.com site is one of the oldest software download sites, running since the nineties to offer downloads of free-of-charge software of all kinds – shareware, trialware and other proprietary software with loss-leader business models as well as true open source software.

• 60 Open Source Replacements for Communications Software

  By 2013, experts estimate that e-mail users will send 507 billion messages every day. Currently, the average person receives about 419 e-mails per day, with a little less than half of them related to work.

  When you add up the time it takes to read and manage all that e-mail, plus time spent instant messaging, reading and writing blogs, and viewing and creating Web content, it’s clear that digital communication is one of the primary uses for technology.

• Introducing LibrePlan: Project Planning, Monitoring and Control

• Events

  • Ada Initiative to hold first camp in Melbourne

• Web Browsers

  • Midori: Low-fat Browser

  • Chrome

    • Chrome is the most secured browser – new study

      Google Chrome offers more protection against online attacks than any other mainstream browser, according to an evaluation that compares exploit mitigations, malicious link detection, and other safety features offered in Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox.

    • Run ChromeOS with a Hint of Lime: ChromiumOS Lime Builds (Finally) Available

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox Won’t be Able to Update Silently Until Version 12

    • Firefox’s Steady Fall from Grace

    • Automatically Restart Firefox On High Memory Usage

    • Why Firefox Isn’t Doomed

    • Enough of the doom already

      A couple of weeks ago, a blogger at ReadWriteWeb wrote about the demise of Mozilla and Firefox, claiming that the loss of market share and lack of availability on mobile devices — and the departure of Google sponsorship — could lead to Mozilla’s downfall.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Grammar checking in LibreOffice

    Competitive grammar checking would be a nice improvement for LibreOffice. Supported by FSF.hu Foundation, Hungary, I have made two sentence checking patches to the English and Hungarian dictionary extensions of LibreOffice, based on the Lightproof Python UNO environment: see the related issue, the description and the standalone extensions.

  • A look at IBM Lotus Symphony

    BM Lotus Symphony is a free Office Suite available on Windows, Mac and Linux. The project began in 2007 and is basically a modified version of Openoffice.org. Though active, it still uses Openoffice 3.0 as its base. The developers seem to be focusing on stability and have released 3 “fix-packs” for Symphony 3.0 last year instead of newer versions. After the Libreoffice/Openoffice split, Symphony will continue to be based on the “official” version of Openoffice maintained by Apache.

• CMS

  • Louvre using Drupal

    Big news! The world’s most visited art museum in the world is now using Drupal for its website: http://louvre.fr. Très cool!

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GNU Fdisk 2.0.0a1 released!

    We are happy to announce the new release of GNU Fdisk.

    As reported in the previous release, the software has been rewritten from scratch with a new design. With this release we include a first backend.

  • GIMP 2.7.4 now available for testing

    The maybe last development release in the 2.7 series of GIMP has just been made available for testing purpose.

• Project Releases

  • Blender 2.61 Release Notes

• Licensing

  • The GPL and distributing binaries

    Of late I’ve become the “build guy” in GNOME it seems. One thing I want to clear up is I do not actually care about building just because I think it’s fun or interesting in and of itself. No, the reason I care about building is because if software doesn’t build, then clearly it’s not being run. And if it’s not being run, then it’s not being tested. And if it’s not tested, then it will be crap. In other words, a competent build system is necessary for not producing crap (but not sufficient, obviously).

• Openness/Sharing

  • Charter of Open Source Org is Classified, CIA Says

    Open Source Works, which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information. Oddly, however, the directive that established Open Source Works is classified, as is the charter of the organization. In fact, CIA says the very existence of any such records is a classified fact.

  • Open Data

    • White House to open source Data.gov as open government data platform

      As 2011 comes to an end, there are 28 international open data platforms in the open government community. By the end of 2012, code from new “Data.gov-in-a-box” may help many more countries to stand up their own platforms. A partnership between the United States and India on open government has borne fruit: progress on making the open data platform Data.gov open source.

• Programming

  • Controlling Test Parallelism with prove

Leftovers

• Suicide by Silverlight?

  It’s obvious that the MPAA has their greasy hands all over this decision, and there is probably little doubt that any licensing agreement between LoveFilms and the content owners was contingent upon them switching over to Silverlight.

• Security

  • 10 things you probably did not know about SELinux #9 Backing up and Restoring Labels.

• DRM

  • Spotify on Linux Works for Free Accounts, Offers 15 Million Tracks

    Chances are you’ve heard of music streaming service Spotify.