• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Application Development: Linux Skills Open Huge Job Opportunities

Server

• Raytheon banners COTS data transfer system

  The servers run a hardened Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

• File Sharing Made Easy With Media Servers and NAS

• LinuxForce Cluster Service Now Available

  LinuxForce, Inc. announced today the availability of LinuxForce Cluster Services℠, a new IT (Information Technology) service offering. LinuxForce Cluster Services℠ design, provision, and maintain redundant, high availability (HA) clustered servers. HA servers are needed by organizations to assure a reliable system for delivery of critical business applications whether on-site, colocated, or “in the cloud”. LinuxForce’s advanced approach to implementing HA server clusters protect valuable data and assure continuity for virtualized systems while minimizing overall costs and maximizing performance without burdening existing staff.

Audiocasts/Shows

• CAOS Theory Podcast 2011.12.16

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel 3.2 RC6 Is Available for Testing

  Linus Torvalds announced last evening, December 16th, that another Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.2 is available for download and testing.

• Linux 3.2-rc6

Applications

• Quest updates Sudo Unix management tool

• First Nightingale media player release arrives

  The Nightingale development team has published the first release of its open source media player and re-launched the project’s web site. Nightingale was forked from the cross platform Songbird player after its developers announced that they would be dropping support for Linux, citing prioritisation issues.

• Proprietary

  • DFT adds native support for Apple ProRes on Linux OS-based Flexxity software

    DFT Digital Film Technology has announced that its Flexxity suite of software applications (Dailies, Playout and Archive) now includes native support of ProRes files on the Linux OS.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • PDNSD HowTo – A DNS Caching Personal Server (Fedora 16)

  • Google Authenticator for multi-factor authentication

  • How to Root the LG Optimus V (Virgin Mobile) and Rid Yourself of the Bloatware

  • HOWTO create your own cloud server in 10 minutes

  • The Most Common OpenSSL Commands

  • How To Connect Your Android Device To Ubuntu

  • How To Manage Your Android Device From Linux

    Android and Linux, despite being kernel cousins have love hate relationship. There is no client for Linux to manage your Android devices. Yes, it’s true that Android devices don’t need an iTunes like to pry on what you put on your devices, you can just drag and drop content. But what if you want to sync your contacts? Well since you are either way using a Google account so you can sync those contacts with your email client easily. In a nutshell and in a majority of cases you actually don’t need a client for Android, in Linux.

  • Most Highly Recommended Books About Linux

    Ever since we started this blog, we’ve talked about Linux at great length. We’ve provided tips, tutorials, hacks and even some spicy gossip from the magical Penguinland. While that may suffice your geek cravings, the information falls quite short if you’re trying to learn about Linux in greater detail. For learning Linux, you’ll need a deeper knowledge and understanding about the system and its functions. And what better way to learn Linux than by filling your shelf with some great books on the topic?

• Games

  • ‘No Time to Explain’ Season 2 Released for Linux

    Season 2 for fun Linux platform game No Time to Explain has just been released. The second part takes the crazy fast paced platforming action to new heights and is bigger than ever.

  • GitHub Repository For Pygame Examples

  • Revenge of the Titans new version + removal from Desura

  • Humble Indie Bundle 4 Available

Desktop Environments

• ANNOUNCE: Razor-qt 0.4.0

  We are glad to announce the release of Razor-qt 0.4.0, after a months of development since the last release…

• Razor-Qt: A New Qt-Based Desktop Environment

  The Razor-Qt desktop was just updated to version 0.4.0 after being in development for months. This release improves stability of the lightweight desktop, introduces several new components, offers new translations, a new theme, new panel plug-ins, and much more. The new Razor desktop components are azor-runner, razor-config, qtxdg, and Razor own menu.

• Users voted for best XFCE-based Linux distribution

  Most Linux distributions use one or more mainstream desktop environments. To be honest with you, I prefer KDE. My next preference is XFCE, followed by GNOME. And LXDE brings up the rear of the mainstream desktop environments for me. Every user has his own preferences, of course. That’s why arguments over Linux distributions and desktop environments will never end. People will always have differences of opinion.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Plasma Active Two Released; KDE’s Second Step Towards an Open Linux Tablet

    Plasma Active, the KDE project that aims to create an open source user environment for tablets and mobile devices has had its second release. Earlier this year, they released Plasma Active One, their first preview release of many, that showcased their new Contour UI and activities.

Distributions

• McRae: Pacman Package Signing – 4: Arch Linux

  Back in March 2011, LWN examined package signing (or the lack thereof) in the Arch Linux distribution. Things have advanced considerably since then. Allan McRae has now posted the fourth in a series of articles about the adoption of signed packages in Arch.

• New Releases

  • Chakra Edn 2011.12, The Arch Linux Fork Released

    The Chakra Development Team has announced the release of Chakra 2011.12. Chakra is one the most popular Arch Linux forks. This version is Linux 3.1 and KDE 4.7. With this release KDE is updated to 4.7.4, kernel to Linux 3.1.4. The sound group has been rebuild/updated, latest networkmanagement and mesa-stack are also included. Chakra is now offering a DVD and CD version.

  • SystemRescueCd and GParted Live updated

    The SystemRescueCd and GParted Live developers have each released new versions of their Linux distributions for administering and repairing systems. Both of updated distributions include the recent 0.11.0 release of the open source GParted partition editor and new kernels, as well as other changes and package updates.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat and Navistar Move Up Trading Radars Prior to Earnings Reports

  • Collaring A Red Hat Investment

    Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) provides open-source software and services to the enterprise computing market. It is the most recognized open-source brand in the world. Their most popular solutions are Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating systems. Much of the company’s revenue is generated through subscriptions and in the training of these products.

  • Red Hat (RHT) Shares Given New $56.00 Price Target by Stifel Nicolaus Analysts

    Equities research analysts at Stifel Nicolaus raised their price target on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) to $56.00 in a research issued note to investors on Thursday. They currently have a “buy” rating on the company’s shares.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 Officially Released for IBM System z 64-bit

      Dan Horák announced a last evening, December 15th, the immediate availability for download of the Fedora 16 operating system for IBM System z (s390x) 64-bit systems.

    • Kororaa Linux 16 : A Fedora-based Linux named “Chum” has been released

      Chris Smart announced the availability of Kororaa Linux 16 which code name is “Chum” on 16 Dec,2011. The Kororaa is originally based on Gentoo Linux but after 2010 it is based on Fedora Linux. The main aim of this Linux is to provide the easiness and user-friendly packages.

• Debian Family

  • The newsletter for the Debian community

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical Will Remove Java From Ubuntu

        Canonical announced a few hours ago, December 15th, that it will remove all Sun JDK (Java Development Kit) packages from the Canonical Partner repository.

      • Oracle Java Dies On Ubuntu

      • MyUnity: A configuration tool for Unity

      • Puppy Linux Racy Review

        Puppy Linux is a tiny distribution that is geared towards older PCs and giving them a second life. Puppy Linux can be run from a Live CD or USB (for faster performance) or just install it onto your system.

        The software programs that come part of Puppy Linux are those that are specifically picked out to ensure that resources are not wasted while providing a productive machine. The programs that are part of Puppy you will not usually find on a distribution such as Linux Mint or Ubuntu which are geared towards more modern systems but that does not mean they are any less useful.

      • Ubuntu; apparently, a Linux apart from Linux

        When I decided to start a blog and write about Linux, I never thought that I would see this. Since this surprised me somewhat, I decided to share it.

      • Move unity launcher to the bottom with Unity Bottom Launcher | PPA Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Squeezebox music server: update and modifications

        Six months ago I wrote about a weekend project to install the SqueezeServer Squeezebox media server on an aging PC (a Hush PC based on a 1.2 GHz Via system with 40GB hard disk and 1 GB of memory) running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

        This is an update. I have spent the last few months tweaking the setup and buying additional Logitech Squeezebox devices, allowing me to stream music throughout the house with the same song playing in different rooms, or each room playing different music.

      • Thunderbird 70-100% CPU idle in Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10

        Dear People From The Future
        Use gtk-theme-switch2 to change from Oxygen-Molecule to some other theme, Oxygen-Molecule caused me massive CPU usage for Thunderbird and *some* other GTK software. Oxygen-Molecule-Flat works fine.

      • Ubuntu targets smartphones, clouds

        Ubuntu 11.10 has some jagged edges and documentation isn’t easy to locate, but Canonical is certainly dreaming big with this latest update, dubbed Oneiric (dreamy) Ocelot.

      • New Canonical portal a sign of mobile to come?

        Canonical is showcasing a new effort to reach out and touch hardware manufacturers… an effort that coincides well not only with its ongoing desktop PC push, but perhaps also Canonical’s latest drive to target the mobile device market.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Pear OS Linux Panther 3 review

          Pear OS is a new Linux desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop with the graphical installer. Its development started in early August 2011 by David Tavares (from France), and on August 15 2011, Pear OS 1.0, the first version marked “stable,” was released. The latest edition, release on December 14 2011, is Pear OS Linux Panther 3.

          Though a Linux distribution running the GNOME 3 desktop, Pear OS’s desktop is fashioned after Apple’s Mac OS X, and each major version’s code name is taken from the Mac OS release with a corresponding version number. So, “Panther,” the code name of Pear OS Linux 3, is taken from the code name of Mac OS 10.3. If you have not been following Apple’s flagship operating system, each Mac OS edition is named after a big cat. Like all reviews published on this website, this one is based on test installations of the 32-bit edition of Pear OS Linux Panther 3 (a 64-bit edition is available too) in virtual environments and on real hardware.

        • Create desktop launchers in Linux Mint 12

Devices/Embedded

• Timesys Expands Professional Services and Training Programs

• Linaro scheme recognizes effort by contributors

  Linaro, the open organization focused on improving Linux on ARM, has formed the Linaro Community Contributor Process and Team. Linaro Technical Leads now have the opportunity to nominate any individual who has made sustained contributions over a significant period of time as a Community Contributor of Linaro.

• Phones

  • How HP and Open Source Can Save WebOS

  • Android

    • Google Starts Rolling Out Android 4.0 To Nexus S

      Yesterday Google made available Galaxy Nexus in the US and today the company started rolling out Android 4.0 to its Nexus S phones.

      The Google + page of Android posted that “We’re rolling out Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, to GSM/UMTS Nexus S devices over the coming month, starting today.”

    • 6 Best Free Android FTP Tools

      File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a popular and time-honored method of transferring files to and from remote network sites and devices. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and uses separate control and data connections between the client and server applications. The FTP client connects to the FTP server, and enables the user to send and retrieve files from that server.

    • Pilotage Assistant LE

      Released with a GNU GPL license (see notice below), this is the application only. The distribution package contains the version 1.0 application .apk, source code, and all resources in an eclipse IDE workspace. There is a user’s guide.

    • How to: view core Android Java sources in Eclipse

EGL Goes Open Source

Last week, IBM announced that it was taking Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) into the open-source realm with the debut of Eclipse EGL Web Developer Tools version 0.7, which is built on an open, extensible compiler and generator framework. ( You can download it and get more information here.)

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Lime: Chromium OS with extra hardware support

    Chromium OS Lime logo Following nearly a one year delay, web developer and hacker Liam “Hexxeh” McLoughlin has released new builds of Lime, a customised Chromium OS-based operating system. Chromium OS is the open source branch of Google’s Chrome OS, the company’s minimalist Linux-based operating system that is built around the Chrome web browser.

SaaS

• Open Source Challenger to Dropbox and Box.net: ownCloud

  The file sharing, synchronization market led by Dropbox is a popular target these days. For many companies, it’s a chance to horn in on a growing market and carve out a piece of the pie for themselves. For open source projects, it’s a chance to return control of personal data to the user. For the folks behind ownCloud, it’s both.

• Why some execs think Hadoop ain’t all that

Business

• A-List – Peter Dawes-Huish

  Career so far I founded LinuxIT 12 years ago with the aim of it becoming the UK’s leading authority in the application of Linux and open source by offering the complete, integrated technology and service solution.

• Find a New Challenge as a Linux systems administrator Team Leader

Funding

• VC funding for OSS hits new high. Or does it?

  There are still a few days left for funding deals to be announced in 2011 but it is already clear that 2011 will be a record year. $672.8m has been invested in open source-related vendors in 2011, according to our preliminary figures, an increase of over 48% on 2010, and the highest total amount invested in any year, beating the previous best of $623.6m, raised in 2006.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• It’s been great!

  Hello, it’s Andrew the FSF campaigns intern. My internship is coming to a close, so I’d like to share with you what I’ve done this fall.

• GNU Telephony plans for 2012

  Today is a good day. I just distributed ucommon 5.1.0, and a second api and utilities snapshot for what will eventually become GNU Bayonne 3.0. I think GNU Bayonne will become strategic to our goals in 2012, along with GNU SIP Witch and the GFC client. We have already discussed internally an outline and possible goals for 2012 development in GNU Telephony, and I have made preliminary plans to attend LibrePlanet2012 in March.

Project Releases

• GNU Xnee 3.11 (‘Jansch’) released

Public Services/Government

• The LiMux project is more succesfull then expected

  The localized Linux distro of the German city Munich LiMux has reached another milestone.

• Open source use in govt is healthy: AGIMO

  The Australian Government Information Office (AGIMO) has reported a healthy level of open source software (OSS) use within government agencies during the past year.

• DWP to run open-source trials

• DWP Confirms 1,000 Open Source Desktops Pilot

• DWP to trial 1,000 open-source desktops

• DWP to trial open-source desktops

  The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is to pilot a new computing scheme over the next 12 months.

  As part of the government’s plans to adopt open source technology, 1,000 desktops are to be installed in the department to replace the current set-up. The DWP currently uses computers running Windows XP, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer 6.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Darrell Steinberg pushes ‘open-source’ college textbooks for Californians

    Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg announced Tuesday that he will push for legislation to create an online, open-source library to reduce the cost of course materials for college students across the state.

• Open Hardware

  • Open Source Electronics DIY Kits with Adafruit

Programming

• Explaining the API Revolution to your CEO

  One of the most striking findings was how often API programs were started in secret, nurtured by the true believers in a clandestine way, slipped into production, and then brought to the awareness of senior management after the API was shown to be a success.

• eBay Open Sources New Query Language

Security

• Security problem in PuTTY SSH client fixed

• ‘Self-aware’ bank account robbing code unleashed by hacker

  A hacker has published code for potent cross-site scripting attacks that he claims go beyond the usual cookie stealing and phishing for users’ private details.

• Aussie exploit challenges for noob to leet

  Linux security boffin Andrew Griffiths has launched series of educational hacking challenges that hone skills in privilege escalation, vulnerability analysis, exploit development, debugging and reverse engineering.

Finance

• Salon Corporate Challenge: Goldman Sachs

  But what singles Goldman Sachs out for special opprobrium isn’t the culpability it shares with other investment banks for helping to create the financial crisis and then get bailed out with taxpayer dollars. It’s the fact that Goldman Sachs figured out, before any of its Wall Street colleagues, that the housing boom was a house of cards and the entire mortgage-backed security market was headed for a crash. Goldman wasn’t caught by surprise by the revelation that the mortgage securities it was creating were toxic junk. Quite the opposite. But instead of sending up an alarm bell and using its political influence and lobbying muscle to try to fend off the coming disaster, Goldman Sachs simply liquidated the positions in which it would be vulnerable to a downturn and started betting, instead, on the likelihood of disaster. As the Senate report acidly notes, in December 2006, “when it saw evidence that the high risk mortgages underlying many RMBS and CDO securities were incurring accelerated rates of delinquency and default, Goldman quietly and abruptly reversed course.”

• Occupied Media: Interview With Professor William K. Black

• Bill Black: Dante’s Divine Comedy – Banksters Edition

  Obama did not explain what Wall Street behavior he found least ethical or what unethical Wall Street actions he believed was not illegal. It would have done the world (and Obama) a great service had he been asked these questions. He would not have given a coherent answer because his thinking on these issues has never been coherent. If he had to explain his position he, and the public, would recognize it was indefensible.

  [...]

  I have explained at length in my blogs and articles why:

  • Only fraudulent home lenders made liar’s loans
  • Liar’s loans were endemically fraudulent
  • Lenders and their agents put the lies in liar’s loans
  • Appraisal fraud was endemic and led by lenders and their agents
  • Liar’s loans could only be sold through fraudulent reps and warranties
  • CDOs “backed” by liar’s loans were inherently fraudulent
  • CDOs backed by liar’s loans could only be sold through fraudulent reps and warranties
  • Liar’s loans hyper-inflated the bubble
  • Liar’s loans became roughly one-third of mortgage originations by 2006

  [...]

  As a criminologist, I do not favor sentencing criminals to the fates they richly deserve.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Walker Enlists Karl Rove Protégé to Promote New Protest Policy

  As Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s new policies restricting protest in the Wisconsin capitol take effect in advance of the anniversary of 2011′s historic labor uprisings, the controversial governor has enlisted a new spokesperson to sell the rules, a 28-year old protégé of Karl Rove and new political appointee of the governor.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Systems Capacity Planning

“Linux Systems Capacity Planning: Beyond RRD and top”, by Rodrigo Campos

As infrastructure costs rise, there’s an urgent need to squeeze more performance from the same hardware. After several years of measuring and managing the capacity of thousands of Linux servers, we have learned that most typical tools and metrics are not sufficient to predict performance bottlenecks, particularly during traffic spikes. By using queue theory formulas and instrumenting our applications we were able to find the limits of our systems, improve reliability, and maximize throughput and performance.

Want a Linux Job? Learn Java or And

Linux Foundation shows job opportunities

GNFC-Intel tie-up may run into rough weather

Surprisingly, senior officials of the state education department as also those advising Modi on the use of IT are blissfully unaware of the tie-up. “Those promoting the tie-up should know the advantage of free open source software Linux, in which schoolteachers are already being trained. In states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, Linux-based software has been freely used in schools. It is easily downloadable,” the official said.

Desktop

• Future of the Linux Desktop

  With the end of another year inevitable talks of the year of the Linux desktop is emerging once again. But what I’ve seen so far is all pessimism. I believe that compared to last years there is much improvement in the chances of Linux desktop in some cases. But there is also one big problem, let’s list them.

  Gaming first; with the rise of indie gaming Linux is a much better place then it was a few years ago. Recent release of Desura and popularity of various indie bundles is testament to this. Moreover, gaming consoles’ overtaking of PCs can only benefit Linux. So far, with regards of a year of Linux desktop, changes in gaming only improved Linux’s chances.

• Google wants you to buy a Chromebook: Should you? (Review)

  Judging from all those Chromebook ads you’ve been seeing pop up on every tech. Web site known to man. Google really, really wants you to buy a Chromebook. Should you?

  I like my Samsung Chromebook, but it looks like not many people fell in love with these Chrome OS powered netbooks. So, Acer and Samsung have reduced their price from a high of $499 to $299 and Google started banging the advertising drum for Chromebooks. So, should you let the new price tempt you into getting one?

Server

• Domination

  M$ was never close to dominating on servers, playing catch-up for years. Certainly they did make a dent in business databases, and authentication but there is so much more that servers can do. Apache has always been ahead of IIS:

  See Netcraft.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Clutter/Cogl Running On Wayland Master

    The Clutter tool-kit and Cogl (Clutter’s OpenGL component) have been updated to work against the latest Wayland Display Server code-base.

Applications

• Pear OS Linux Panther 3 screenshot preview

  Pear OS is a new Linux desktop distribution based on Ubuntu. Development started in early August 2011, and Pear OS 1.0, the first version marked “stable,” was released on August 15 2011. The newest release is Pear OS Linux Panther 3.

  I tend not to pay too much attention to Ubuntu-based distributions especially when there is no feature or features that truly distinguishes them from their parent distribution, but Pear OS appears to be different. In fact, it looks to be better than any other Ubuntu-based distribution. Perhaps even better than Ubuntu itself.

• Screencast: Pear OS Linux 3.0 “Panther” for Mac OS X fans

• Instructionals/Technical

  • PDF import for LibreOffice in Debian Backports is broken — here’s how to fix it

  • How To Deal With Screenshot Issues In Ubuntu 11.10

  • Finding Out Package Dependencies With apt-rdepends On Debian/Ubuntu

  • Weekend Project: Convert WordPress into a Scholarly Publishing Platform with Annotum

  • Top 10 Photoshop Tricks You Can Use Without Buying Photoshop

    Top 10 Photoshop Tricks You Can Use Without Buying PhotoshopYou can do just about anything to an image with Photoshop, but if you don’t have the cash to shell out, free program the GIMP—available for Windows, Linux, and OS X—can take you pretty far. Here are our favorite Photoshop how-tos that also work in the GIMP.

• Games

  • Introducing the Humble Deteriorating Bundle!

    I can proudly say I purchased the first Humble Bundle (the “Humble Indie Bundle”), and I can say I’m glad to have not purchased the last seven. Why? I know what you’re thinking, “It’s a good deal, and it’s monetary motivation for developers to port their games to Linux, and remove any pre-existing DRM.” Yeah, yeah, but that’s nothing compared to the first Humble Bundle.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal’s Readers’ Choice Award

Distributions

• Top 5 lightweight Linux distros for older PCs

  The strange thing about PCs is that as they get older, even though they appear to be working fine, they can eventually become unusably slow. Successive operating systems take up more and more resources until your PC grinds to a halt.

• New Releases

  • Chakra 2011.12 (Edn – Third Release) out

• Red Hat Family

  • 5 S&P 500 Turnaround Stocks

    Red Hat (RHT): Red Hat, Inc. provides open source software solutions to enterprises worldwide. It also offers enterprise-ready open source operating system platforms. The company’s key products include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. The stock has an ROA of 5% and an ROE of 8.38%. The company is trading with an ROIC of 8.38%. RHT is currently trading at 60.9% higher volume compared to its 10 day moving average. RHT is currently trading at $45.98, falling $0.58 or 1.25% this year.

  • Healthiest Employers of the Triangle – #11 – Red Hat

  • Employers promise jobs, seek tax breaks

    Red Hat, a North Carolina software developer best known for marketing a version of the Linux computer operating system, tentatively plans to expand its engineering headquarters in Westford in exchange for such aid.

  • Red Hat is still bound for downtown

    Business software company Red Hat remains committed to downtown Raleigh despite the uncertainty hanging over the proposed merger between Progress Energy and Duke Energy.

  • Red Hat open sources RHEV virtualization management tool

  • Analyst raises Red Hat target

    Analyst Steven Ashley of Baird Equity Research raised his 12-month price target for Red Hat this week in advance of the Linux software company’s release of its latest quarterly results.

  • Red Hat: Middleware Is Changing

    Red Hat has ended its year in business with an obligatory look forward at prospects for 2012. The company suggests that the role of middleware software as a crucial component of automating businesses processes will continue in the year ahead, but that the ways in which it plays its part will inevitably change.

  • Red Hat Higher Ahead of Earnings

  • Analysts’ Weekly Ratings Changes for Red Hat (RHT)

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 Verne with KDE – Rather nice, actually

      Fedora 16 Verne WITH the KDE desktop is a surprisingly high-quality product, much more than expected, and this is without lowering the comparison bar to Gnome 3 level. Taking all former Fedora tests into account, Verne is crash-free in all aspects. This is a pleasant change. Then, it looks good, runs fast and can be tamed easily.

      It is not without fault, and the magic is in the little details, of course. There are some half a dozen small problems and two moderately serious ones, the desktop effects and the printing, which must be sorted out. But the occasional freeze, the screensaver glitch, the Flash player behavior, the odd message here and there, and the comic strip widget bugs all remind us that Fedora is after all designed to be bleeding-edge, so issues are expected. They do not turn the desktop session sour, though, but they sure don’t make it glorious.

      Regardless, as far as Fedora goes, being what it is, the latest KDE edition is a rather solid product. It wins in the major categories – look, speed, stability. It loses some points where the spotlight shineth not, and there ought to be focus there, too. Most importantly, there are no cardinal issues or showstoppers. If you’re looking for a technology demonstrator type distro with a good balance between speed and stability, Fedora 16 Verne with KDE is a reasonable choice. I would say, 8/10, and that’s a lot coming from my biased mouth. But it sure proves one thing, that Gnome 3 is a disaster and that it must not be projected onto the distributions that bravely and yet foolishly choose to bundle their products with it.

      Bottom line, Fedora 16 Verne, KDE, stable and fast, quite polished, some rough edges, recommended to itchy power users who need a slick platform for work and testing, until they promptly discard it by the next release a mere six month away. Overall, a nice surprise, by Dedoimedo standards. Do try it.

• Debian Family

  • Debian GNU/Linux Testing

    The next release of Debian GNU/Linux is shaping up beautifully. There are only a few hundred bugs to go and many are pretty easy to fix. Everything’s easy when you do it right. At the rate they are going, Wheezy could be released before “8″. I think Wheezy could be released by September, 2012 and “8″ may take until November, 2012.

  • Austrian e-Health System

    They use Debian GNU/Linux on 12000 machines scattered across the country. At DebConf11 there was a presentation given about how updates to the software are done in a single night remotely. The presentation mentions a rescue system they built in case something goes wrong. They do the normal testing followed by tests on 300 accessible clients and finally the whole set. They have a variety of clients some as small as 256MB RAM and 256MB storage to 4gB RAM. They have some custom packages and they polish the Debian packages to remove all unnecessary bytes like documentation. A messaging system notifies systems updates are available and the clients poll in a staggered and randomized pattern to spread the load out through the night. Systems that are in use 24×7 have a manual polling function. To trap defective installations, watchdog timers grab applications that fail to load and re-install packages in real time. They customize the distributions so that different types of clients and different application groups are all handled by the APT package manager.

  • Derivatives

    • PearOS Review: Polish Of Mac, Power Of Linux

      One of our Facebook fans, Ashwin Dexter Winongo, requested a review of PearOS. That’s how I came to know about Pear OS. Never heard of it before. I headed to the site and found the latest version was released yesterday. I downloaded it, put it on a USB and ran it on my Dell XPS.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Important notice regarding Java packages in Partner archive

        The Canonical partner archive currently contains Oracle’s Sun Java JDK packages (sun-java6) for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 11.04.

      • Ubuntu disabling the Sun Java JDK browser plugin

      • Pear OS: Linux Which Looks Like Mac

        I am not a big fan of Mac’s look and feel; I prefer KDE’s polished look. However, there are quite a lot of users who do like the look and feel of Mac, but don’t want to lock them inside the walled garden and be at the mercy of a bully.

      • Ubuntu One gains music web streaming

      • MyUnity Fixes Annoyances in Ubuntu’s Unity Interface

        Ubuntu: If you’re using the newest versions of Ubuntu, you probably have an annoyance or two with the Unity interface. MyUnity is a system tweaker based around changing Unity’s behavior and appearance.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Developers Working to Improve Energy Efficiency

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Development update

      • Expect Longer Battery Life with Ubuntu Linux 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’

        Not only is there a Linux kernel patch on the way that promises to fix the power regression problems that have been plaguing the open source software over the past year or so, but now it looks like the next version of Ubuntu Linux–version 12.04 LTS, or “Precise Pangolin”–will be delivering some big improvements of its own in that area as well.

Devices/Embedded

• Beware the vain robot

  Meet Qbo, an open-source robot built on Linux that has learned to identify itself and other objects. The project started as a “what if” experiment by Qbo creator Francisco Paz and his team of engineers at TheCorpora. Qbo is already equipped with two cameras to give it stereoscopic vision and features facial and object recognition software, so the group wondered it they could teach Qbo to recognize itself.

• Wind River Recognized As Embedded Market Leader In VDC Research Report Series

• Encouraging the next generation of hackers part 1 – Raspberry Pi the $25 computer

• Phones

  • Android

    • Hacking the Google TV Box Without Rooting It, Part 3

    • 2011: The year of the Android OS

      Android is, without a doubt, the most successful Linux distro out there. And it’s only going to go from strength to strength come 2012.

    • NARS script makes it easy to root a NOOK Tablet on Linux or OS X

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Dell pulls out of netbook market

    Dell has discontinued making consumer netbooks and appears to be ready to phase out its Latitude business netbooks in favor of larger ultrabooks, says an industry report. The netbook shutdown follows Dell’s termination of sales of its Streak 7 Android tablet earlier this month.

  • Amazon selling 1 million+ Kindle Fires a week as demand increases

  • Second look

    The MeeGo OS 2.1 installed also is not bad for a mobile handset, the development was already mature enough even before Nokia pulled the plug on the project and would have been a worthy contender in the mobile operating system sphere along with iOS and Android.

Reflecting on 2011

Bottom Up Adoption: The End of Procurement as We’ve Known It

Open Source

In the late nineties, startups and enterprises alike were effecitvely beholden to commercial suppliers for the majority of their software needs. Because each piece of the requisite software infrastructure had to be licensed, the capital expenses associated with new initiatives was high. This represented a barrier to entry, and thus a brake on innovation.

With the popularization of open source software, developers from enterprises and startups alike were able to operate independently. For the first time, the actual software practitioners were free to choose their own software rather than having it selected for them and subsequently imposed upon them by upper levels of management. Even in situations where the ultimate production infrastructure targets remained commercially licensed software, open source software like Linux and MySQL allowed for prototyping and rapid development without the attendant costs, both financial and in procurement latency.

This was the first major shift affecting procurement, and perhaps the most profound. None of the infrastructure we take for granted today – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc – were originally adopted from the top down. Their adoption was, instead, a fait accompli. CIOs – the last to know – gradually became aware that increasingly significant portions of their infrastructure, unbeknownst to them, were running on free and open source software. The inevitable demand for production support options for this software is what fueled, in time, the valuations of MySQL, Red Hat and others.

Events

• A need to know

  THE use of computers and the knowledge of software and the Internet are basic needs for education with the Software Foundation of Fiji holding its first workshop on Linux for Beginners on Saturday.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chromium OS Lime offers better hardware support and Java plug-in

    Just as with Android, Google makes the open source base for Chrome OS available for all to download. But if you’re not keen on setting up a 64-bit Linux build environment, what can you do? You can download a pre-compiled Chromium OS from Hexxeh, who’s long been the name to know in Chromium OS DIY builds.

  • Like Chrome OS? Try Lime for Extra Hardware Support

Funding

• FCC doles out $100K to open source community apps challenge winners

  The $100,000 challenge: Develop useful, localized open source apps that make local public information more personalized and usable.

Public Services/Government

• UK Department for Work and Pensions to test open source desktop
  

  The United Kingdom’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will start a small-scale pilot with open source software on up to one thousand desktop PCs, sometime within the next twelve months, a spokesperson for DWP confirmed today.

A Wayback Machine journey with BeOS R4, Zeta 1.0, and Haiku

As the staff of Ars Technica convenes in Chicago for some infrequent face-to-face time, we’re turning the clock back to 1998. It was a time when Windows 95 ruled the desktop, preemptive multitasking on the Mac was still a gleam in Steve Jobs’ eye, enthusiasts were furiously overclocking their Celeron 300a CPUs, and the attention of geeks was distracted by a unusually bright, shiny object: BeOS.

Security

• The risks of not updating Java on your computer immediately

Finance

• Yet Another Goldman Investment You Shouldn’t Buy

  Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS ) earned a terrible reputation during the financial crisis. It ended up paying $550 million to the SEC to settle charges, admitting that it offered complex investments involving subprime mortgage-backed securities to investors — without bothering to tell them that the hedge fund that helped choose those securities also had a short position against the offering.

• Goldman Sachs to pay $10 million to settle Nadel-related claims

  Published: Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 12:03 p.m.
  Last Modified: Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 6:16 p.m.

  Giant investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will pay nearly $10 million to settle claims over its handling of hedge-fund trading in the Arthur Nadel Ponzi scheme.

  The settlement, by far the single largest recovery of money for the Nadel receivership, could set the stage for other deep-pocketed companies to resolve threatened litigation in the case.

Privacy

• Sen. Franken Statement on Responses from Carrier IQ, Wireless Carriers, and Handset Manufacturers

  Today, U.S. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) released the following statement after reviewing the responses he received from Carrier IQ, AT&T, Sprint, Samsung, and HTC regarding Carrier IQ and the use of its software.

• Tor experiments with IPv6

  With the alpha version 0.2.3.9 of Tor, the anonymity software, Tor clients can now connect to private bridges using IPv6. According to the announcement on the Tor blog, when using IPv6, bridges still need at least one IPv4 address, as they would otherwise lose contact with other nodes in the Tor network. On the Tor Developer mailing list, Linus Nordberg describes how to set the necessary options on a Tor bridge for IPv6 operation.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Universal Music claims it has a private deal with Google to take down YouTube videos it doesn’t own

    The saga of Universal Music’s war on the Mega Song (a song and video recorded by several major artists in support of the online service MegaUpload, which Universal is trying to have censored in the USA through its support of the Stop Online Piracy Act) just got weirder. Many of us were baffled that Universal kept telling YouTube to take down this video, even though it was clear they didn’t hold a copyright to it — a fact reinforced by artists like will.i.am, who insisted that he hadn’t authorized Universal to send the takedown notice.

  • Goldman Sachs to pay $10 million to settle Nadel-related claims

    The controversy over the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act legislation pending in Congress have pretty overwhelmingly focused on free speech issues (see, e.g., James Losey and Sascha Meinrath in Slate eloquently making the case again) but I think it’s worth calling into question the underlying economic premises here as well.

    It’s no secret that high-end income inequality has increased substantially over the past several decades. That’s happening for a variety of reasons. One reason, however, is that the returns to being a superstar content creator are much much higher in 2011 than they were in 1981. That’s because the potential audience is much bigger. It’s bigger because the world’s population is larger, it’s bigger because many poor countries have gotten significantly less poor, and it’s bigger because the fall of Communism has expanded the practical market reach of big entertainment conglomerates. At the same time, the cost of producing digital media content has fallen thanks to improved computers and information technology. Now step back and ask yourself why we have copyright in the first place. Well, it’s because policymakers think that absent government-created monopolies there won’t be adequate financial incentives to go out and create new content. That’s not a crazy thing to believe. But the implication is that if globalization and technology drive the returns to content ownership up, we need less IP protection. Instead, we’ve consistently gotten more. Copyright terms have been extended. Copyright terms have been extended retroactively. We’ve added “anti-circumvention” rules. And now we’re talking about SOPA and Protect IP. But why? What’s the policy problem being addressed here?