02.19.12

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Where are all the Linux professionals?

  Earlier this week, the Linux Foundation, in conjunction with job board Dice.com, published its 2012 Linux Jobs Report–a collection of survey results that gave an interesting picture of the state of the jobs market for Linux.

  Overall, the news was positive, and much reported on in the media: job demand for Linux professionals is high, with employers adding more Linux job openings, and paying more to acquire and keep good Linux talent.

• Linux Job Openings on the Rise: Dice Report

• Linux Popularity Sparks Salary Jump

• Linux Professionals Most Valuable Tech Employees

• Linux Skills Remain In Strong Demand In the Job Market

• Windows 8 ‘Borrowed’ Features From Linux

  Design, ideology and primary audience are the main distributions where Linux and Windows 8 differ greatly. However, they all have been developed on the basic principles of OS design and it is quite obvious that there will be some overlap, in-fact they are bound. According to some Linux fans, Microsoft has been stealing from the open source community for a long time. And now Microsoft is nearing the point where the company simply appropriates good Linux features.

• Catch Creeps and Thieves in Action: Set Up a Motion-Activated Webcam DVR in Linux

  When it comes to webcams these days, most people are using their laptops over desktops. The cameras are centered, integrated, and require no configuring. They’re a cinch and usually have great resolution. So, then what do we do with all of those old wired desktop webcams that we’ve accrued over the years? Even if you still use an external USB one, chances are you’re not using it daily, so why not come up with a better use for it?

• Success story: IT solutions company Greenwire thrives on dedication

  Paul Rausch started his career at 14, tinkering with open source programs like Linux and building computer servers in his garage.

• ARINC supercomputers help design and model the performance of complex aviation antennas
  

  The Linux supercomputer is a multiprocessor cluster, consisting of 14 compute nodes, each with several high-speed multi-core processors, as well as 448 gigabytes of available memory. A high-speed local area network connects nodes on the supercomputer, which is designed to solve computationally large problems such as complex antenna engineering and analysis.

• Server

  • Storage Planning for Virtual Infrastructures — More Than Just Managing Latency

  • Technology: Linux Servers a Favorite at Fortune 500 companies

  • Interamerican Selects Clerity, Veryant for Mainframe Migration

    Greek insurer Interamerican Insurance will use the UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software from Chicago-based Clerity and vCOBOL Enterprise from Westchester, Ill.-based Veryant to transition its environment from COBOL to Linux.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • CAOS Theory Podcast 2012.02.17

• Kernel Space

  • Mesa 8.0 Advances Open-Source Linux Graphics Drivers

    Here’s another reason to celebrate today besides the release of Wayland 0.85: Mesa 8.0 has been officially released! Mesa 8.0 is what brings OpenGL 3.0 compliance to several open-source graphics drivers, advances the Gallium3D architecture, brings many new features, and a heck of a lot of other changes that materialized over the past six months.

    The release announcement can be found here, but it really doesn’t say anything. “Mesa 8.0 has been released. Mesa 8.0 is a new development release. People who are concerned with stability and reliability should stick with a previous release or wait for Mesa 8.0.1.”

  • VMware’s Virtual GPU Driver Is Running Fast

  • A Patch That Can Make Btrfs 5~10% Faster

    A patch has been sent over to the Btrfs developers that can result in the next-generation Linux file-system being 5~10% faster in writes by introducing an extent buffer cache for each i-node.

    Miao Xie sent over a patch to linux-btrfs asking for comments about this patch that provides an extent buffer cache for each i-node. “This patch introduce extent buffer cache for every i-node. By this way, we needn’t search the item from the root of b+ tree, and can save the search time. Besides that we can also reduce the lock contention of the root.”

  • Graphics Stack

    • Tizen’s Dawati Is Using A Hybrid X-Wayland

      Besides Kristian Høgsberg’s keynote at FOSDEM 2012, where he talked of Wayland 1.0, and his more interesting technical discussion, there was also a talk in Brussels about Wayland compositors. Tizen’s Dawati was shown on Wayland using a hybrid X-Wayland compositor, talk of the GNOME Shell on Wayland with Mutter, and much more.

      The talk itself, which happened in the X.Org development room, was about “how-to write a Wayland compositor” and the speakers were Robert Bragg and Neil Roberts. Robert and Neil work for Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center out of London and as of late have been tasked with Wayland work.

    • Nouveau Working On Video Decoding & More

    • Radeon Gallium3D Hierarchical-Z Updated (R600)

    • Planning the X/Wayland Marriage, X Server 1.13

      Keith expects that there will be no performance penalty of running X applications on Wayland versus running them as you have already for decades on bare metal. In fact, he says it’s one of his goals to see there aren’t any performance drops, but the performance of X applications on Wayland may actually yield a performance boost. The performance boost would come as a result of handling swap requests with Wayland being much simpler.

      Among the X/Wayland items still to be solved is how to synchronize keyboard mapping changes, the acceleration architecture for X on Wayland, and how to handle RandR-like display configuration changes. In terms of the acceleration architecture discussion it came down to how to best accelerate X apps on Wayland and whether some DDX driver code from the various hardware drivers should be pulled out or what would be the best approach.

    • SPICE On KVM/QEMU Works Towards Gallium3D

      Red Hat’s SPICE project that’s used in KVM/QEMU virtualization environments is working towards better graphics support, which also includes work on a DRM driver and Gallium3D component for offering 3D acceleration support within guest virtual machines.

      Alon Levy of Red Hat presented at FOSDEM last weekend about “Xspice: Integrating spice-server into Xorg”, during which he talked a lot about their graphics driver plans. Right now QEMU/KVM really doesn’t have any guest 3D support in the manner that VirtualBox or VMware graphics exposes OpenGL/DirectX support to guest systems and in turn passes the graphics calls onto the host system so it can be executed on bare metal.

    • The Virtual GEM Provider Is Still Being Hacked

    • First Wayland Release: Wayland 0.85 With Weston

    • Linux graphics system Wayland sees first “real release”

• Applications

  • Epic Linux Image Backup for Mixed OS Networks Software Functionality Announced by Novosoft

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Book Excerpt: Drupal User’s Guide: Building and Administering a Successful Drupal-Powered Web Site

    • Installing A Web, Email & MySQL Database Cluster On Debian 6.0 With ISPConfig 3

    • Encrypt DNS Traffic In Linux With DNSCrypt (Via OpenDNS)

    • Centralized RSYSLOG Server Monitoring

    • FreeNAS to Ubuntu: Initial Fileserver Setup with ZFS

    • Untangle Gateway 9.2 has been released : A multi-functional firewall

    • Book Review: Introducing Character Animation with Blender, 2nd Edition by Tony Mullen

    • Using “t” to manage personal tasks

    • Autologin, passwordless login and controlling who can reboot and shutdown your computer in KDE

    • C development on Linux – Basic I/O – VIII.

    • Set up Spice-Gtk 0.9 with USB redirection on Ubuntu Precise

    • Linux for Users: Monitoring a Wireless Connection

    • New performance numbers and a patch for RapidDisk (rxdsk) 1.4 to build for 2.6.18

    • Installing Debian Linux on Oracle VirtualBox

    • Create a Bootable Linux Flash Drive in Three Easy Steps

  • Wine

    • CodeWeavers CrossOverNow 30% off sale

      Codeweavers offers downloads of its Crossover Games for $39.95 and Crossover Professional for $69.95 but if you apply coupon code “CrossOverNow” this will drop CrossOver Games to $27.96 And Crossover Professional to $48.96 That’s 30% off the normal retail selling price.

    • Wine 1.4 Moves Closer To Release With RC4

  • Games

    • Humble Bundle Mojam: Games Made In One Weekend

      The latest Humble Indie Bundle ended earlier this week without much fanfare and less than $1M USD in sales, but there’s a new special weekend bundle that’s a bit different from the rest… This new bundle lasts for only the weekend (28 hours left) as three teams compete to each make a brand new game in the span of this weekend.

      The name of this new bundle is “The Humble Bundle Mojam” where “Mojang and friends create games from scratch in the span of a weekend! Pay what you want to get the games, and all proceeds go to your choice of four excellent charities!”

    • The Humble Bundle Mojam

    • Indie Royale Opens Pre-Orders For ‘Valentine’s Bundle’

      Indie game fans can now blind pre-order Gamasutra sister site Indie Royale’s Valentine’s Bundle at a recommended €/£/$10 or €/£/$5 USD contribution, and a minimum of $3.99 USD.

      The games offered this time include a fantastical first-person action-adventure game (Steam for PC), an IGF-nominated puzzle adventure title (Steam for PC and Mac, Desura for PC and Linux, DRM-free PC, Mac and Linux download), a ‘scorching’ single and multiplayer arcade-strategy game (Steam for PC and Mac), and a world premiere on PC for a pair of retro RPG-defense games (Desura for PC, DRM-free PC download).

    • Update for The Humble Bundle Mojam

• Desktop Environments

  • Tech Pluralism

    GNOME3, KDE4, and Unity were all Vista-like in their failures. GNOME3 and KDE4 completely abandoned everything that people had come to expect from the respective projects. KDE4 has regained some ground as it has become more stable and feature-rich, but it is still no where near as popular as it once was. People fled to GNOME2 to avoid KDE4, and GNOME3 has caused such a problem that GNOME lost ground. GNOME3 is bad enough that two projects have come about to make something that sucks less. MATE is one of them. It’s a fork that aims to continue GNOME2, much the way Trinity is meant to continue KDE3. Cinnamon is the other, and it aims to provide some GNOME2-like features to GNOME3. Unity is the interface of Ubuntu, and is the most polarizing software project I have ever seen. The debate about Unity can get as heated as debates about Vi or Emacs.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE PIM Sprint 10: ACCOMPLISHED!

      The 10th KDE PIM Meeting in Osnabrück finished on 12 February. Starting with pizza Friday afternoon running until Sunday around 17:00, the meeting attracted more than 20 hackers working on the various parts of KDE PIM. There was talk, code, beer, a group picture and even an anti-ACTA demonstration. Read on for a report on the meeting.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • `Window Applets`, Finally Available For GNOME 3 (Classic / Fallback)

      Window Applets is a pack of two GNOME panel applets that lets you put the window title and buttons on the top panel. Since GNOME 3, Window Applets stopped working but today, a new version has been released with support for the GNOME 3 classic / fallback panel.

    • Cinnamon: A New Delicious Flavour For Linux Users To Enjoy

      Gnome 3 has failed to win users over. Unity was so unpopular it wiped out Ubuntu’s lead on Distrowatch and made Linux Mint number one. With the dominant desktop (Gnome) and the dominant distribution (Ubuntu) both failing to set users’ hearts racing we’re reminded once again why we love using Linux – there’s so much choice.

• Distributions

  • Netrunner 4.1 Screen Shots – Netrunner website

  • Review: Salix OS 13.37 Xfce Live

    I have wanted to review Salix OS for a while now. It does seem to be the one derivative of Slackware that really synchronizes itself with Slackware development, to the point where even the version numbering system is the same. I have already tried out a few other derivatives, like Zenwalk, Kongoni, VectorLinux, and Porteus; on the whole, all of those worked relatively well, but there were a few things here and there that bothered me about each of them. I would like to see if Salix OS can overcome that.

  • Chakra GNU/Linux 2012.02 Archimedes review

    Chakra is a desktop-centric, Linux distribution that was derived from Arch Linux, but is now a fork of that distribution. Unlike Arch Linux, which supports several desktop environments, Chakra is a KDE-only distribution.

    The latest edition, Chakra 2012.02, code-named Archimedes, was released on February 12. Since there is very little difference, other than changes in software and kernel versions, between this latest release and Edn, the previous release, this article offers a summary review only. You may read the previous review here.

  • New Releases

    • Tiny Core 4.3

    • Blender 2.62 has been released! PPA Ubuntu and LinuxMint

  • Red Hat Family

    • A Forward Look, the Year Ahead – Featured Research on Red Hat, Inc. and BMC Software, Inc.

    • Why This Tech CEO Owes His Career to 9/11

      On the morning of 9/11, Whitehurst thought he would be a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group forever. He met his wife there. He loved the work. He was happy, he told Business Insider.

      But as the towers were falling down, he got a call from Leo Mullin, the CEO of one of his biggest clients, Delta Airlines. “Jim I need you now. I need you to be my treasurer,” Mullin said.

    • ANNOUNCE: oVirt First Release

    • Red Hat’s GlusterFS Appliance for Amazon Now Totally Virtual

      One thing you don’t quite get accustomed to in reporting developments in cloud technology is how even the virtual things become virtualized. Last December, Red Hat released a software storage appliance based on the GlusterFS software-based NAS system that Red Hat acquired in October. That product is a way to apply the same methodology that GlusterFS customers used to build network-attached storage pools completely from existing storage.

    • Red Hat Rebrands, Reconfigures Virtual Storage Appliance For Amazon AWS

      Less than four months after its acquisition by Red Hat, Gluster, now known as the Red Hat storage unit, is announcing new storage products. The Red Hat Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS), announced this week, is essentially a rebranding of the Gluster product, or what the company refers to as “baselined.” This means that it now uses the Red Hat Linux open-source operating system rather than the CentOS operating system it had used previously, and it has also been retested and re-certified. In addition, it now supports a new file system option, the Extensible File System (XFS).

    • How to Get Up and Running with oVirt

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Canonical Survey Reveals Worldwide Ubuntu Server Trends

          Who uses Ubuntu, where and why? That’s a question a lot of parties in the open source channel likely ask themselves. It’s also one that’s hard to answer, since public data on Ubuntu deployment is scarce. But it became a little less so recently with the publication of the results of Canonical’s latest survey of Ubuntu server users. Read on for the highlights.

        • Hello, World!

          Linux Mint 12 KDE has been released. This is the Ubuntu-derived line from Mint, but it is not from Kubuntu. They have taken their own Linux Mint 12 distribution and integrated KDE with it. The result is very nice – if you are one of the many who want to avoid the current desktop wars going on with Gnome, this could be an excellent alternative.

        • Ubuntu 10.04 gets final maintenance release

        • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Is in Feature Freeze

          Canonical, through Kate Stewart, announced a few hours ago that the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system is now in Feature Freeze state.

          “Hello Ubuntu Developers, 2100 UTC has now passed and we are in Feature Freeze for Precise. Many thank yous to those developers who got their tested work in on time!”

        • The Last Maintenance Release For Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx Is Here

        • Heads-up Ubuntu fans

          Not content with having thrown out the “traditional” computer desktop in favour of the radically new Unity desktop, Mark Shuttleworth now hopes to transform the desktop even further. And this even before most Ubuntu users have got used to the last changes.

          Shuttleworth’s latest plan is to introduce a new “heads-up” interface, one that will completely remove the need for traditional menus along the top of the screen. In their place will be a heads-up display which will remain hidden most of the time and only appear when needed.

        • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Gets Unity Video Lens

          Being in Feature Freeze, the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system received numerous updates today, including the Privacy Settings mentioned in an article earlier.

          Among other noticeable features, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS now has an Unity Video Lens, allowing users to easily track their video files stored locally, or search for videos online, via popular websites like YouTube or Vimeo.

        • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Gets HUD Interface

          With today’s updates, the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system received many new features and improvements, including the Privacy Settings, Video Lens for Unity and the HUD (Head-Up Display) system described in this article.

          Originally introduced by Mark Shuttleworth last month, the Head-Up Display, or HUD for short, is some sort of add-on for the Unity interface allowing users to interact with application’s menus by pressing the ALT key.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Kubuntu 12.04 Alpha 2 With KDE Plasma Netbook – Overview & Screenshots

            With Unity getting most of the attention lately in Ubuntu and the feature-freeze coming in tomorrow, I decided to take the latest Kubuntu alpha for a spin and see how KDE 4.8 for netbooks looks and behaves. But first, a little about 12.04 as a whole.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Raspberry Pi boards set to go on sale

  • Elite’s David Braben hopes to teach kids how to program on a very cheap computer

  • First Raspberry Pi SD Card Image Released [Debian Squeeze, LXDE]

    Raspberry Pi Foundation has released first SD card image for $25 computers that will go on sale on February 20.

    Based on Debian Squeeze (6.0), the image includes LXDE interface, Midori web browser, development tools and example source code for multimedia functions.

  • Buyers Lining up for Raspberry Pi’s $25 PC

  • Raspberry Pi’s Linux computer nears completion, should ship by end of February

  • Low-Cost Raspberry Pi Linux Devices to Arrive This Month

  • µClinux for ARM Cortex-M3

  • Lauterbach Announces Support for Cavium OCTEON(R) III Multicore MIPS64(R) Processor Family

  • Latest Linaro GCC Toolchain Release Supports Full Range of ARM Cortex-A Processors

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android 5.0 Jelly Bean: Top 5 Must-Have’s

        Android 5.0 is big news, and in the coming months as we learn more about it, I’m sure there will be quite a few things to get excited about. I have a feeling that some things might be missing, no matter how hard I dream about them, but here they are; the 5 things I want to see from Android 5.0, Jelly Bean

      • Why ‘Android fragmentation’ isn’t so bad

        New research from Localytics claims that Android fragmentation might be becoming less of a issue.

        If correct, this could start bringing more popular apps to Android phones faster — or maybe even first. But the catch is, the Android ecosystem is far more variable than the iPhone landscape. That makes it a bigger long-term risk for app developers.

        Many popular consumer apps are still are rolled out first for the iPhone. (Hello, Instagram?) That’s because many Android phones are running substantially older versions of Android, which limits which apps they can support. Plus, Android phones come in a dizzying array of sizes, configurations, and capabilities — compared to a fairly small selection of iPhone models. Also phone manufacturers and wireless carriers tend to customize the Android interface (in “flavors” such as HTC Sense and Motorola Blur).

        Localytics provides analytics tools that app developers use to monitor how people use apps. Data gathered from Localytics users during two weeks in January indicate that most Android phones now have “remarkably similar specifications.” Localytics notes that this significantly simplifies the job of deploying mass market Android apps.

      • HTC One X and One S coming to MWC

        Official branding for HTC‘s Mobile World Congress smartphone line-up has emerged, suggesting that the quadcore device codenamed Edge/Endeavor will launch as the HTC One X, while the dualcore Ville will be the HTC One S. Insiders confirmed the impending One X branding to Pocketnow for HTC’s flagship, fitting with information SlashGear has heard independently about the mid-tier Ville’s launch name.

      • Archos Arnova 9 G2 Tablet Now Available In The US [B&H (Among Other US Retailers) Begin Selling The Budget-Minded Archos Arnova 9 G2 Tablet; Features Include 9.7" Display, 4GB Internal Storage & Gingerbread]

      • Google may launch Android 5.0 in 2Q12, say Taiwan makers

        Viewing that the adoption of Android 4.0 has fallen short of original expectations and Microsoft will launch Windows 8 in the third quarter of 2012, Google is likely to launch Android 5.0 (Jelly Bean) in the second quarter and appeal for adopting Android 5.0 and Windows 8 in the same tablet PC, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.

      • Nvidia: Tegra 3 smartphones will ship this quarter, integrated LTE chipset this year

        Perhaps Nvidia’s most exciting disclosure, though, was that the Icera acquisition will also bear fruit relatively soon: the company’s new integrated 3G / 4G LTE system-on-chip, codename Grey, will be headed towards devices this year. “We will have shipping modems this year, hopefully sooner than later,” Jen-Hsun said, suggesting that the move will help Nvidia compete against Qualcomm, which is tracking towards Snapdragon chips with integrated LTE as well. Presently, LTE phones and tablets have radio chips that are separate from the processor, a setup that’s not terribly good for long battery life, among other concerns.

      • “Brand new” Bump 3.0 arrives in Android Market

      • Finer details for HTC One X (Endeavor) come into light

        We’re getting down to the wire here as Mobile World Congress approaches so it makes sense to get a few final leaks for various smartphones. Such is the case here as we learn a few finer details for the HTC One X. Formerly known as the Edge and/or Endeavor, this model is said to be designed with a Super LCD display as opposed to Super AMOLED. While it could look as nice as the HTC Rezound’s display, the larger 4.7-inch screen is not going to be quite as dense.

        Additionally we have learned that the One X will come with 32GB internal storage and forgo a microSD expansion port. If so, this would be one of the only HTC Android smartphones to not offer expandable memory.

      • Conceptualize This! Quad Core Motorola Atrix 3

      • Best Buy planning President’s Day sale, BOGO on Droid Razr

      • LG Optimus Vu officially revealed ahead of MWC with stylus, 1.5GHz CPU

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Enter the Spark — a $265 tablet rocking a Linux OS

    • Spark Linux tablet now available to pre-order

      At the end of last month we told you about a very interesting $260 tablet powered by the Mer mobile-optimized OS and KDE Plasma Active. The so-called Spark tablet has now gone up for pre-order on the Make Play Live website.

      Typically, a pre-order requires a credit card in order to secure your device, but not in this case. All Make Play Live require is your name, email address, what region you live in, and how many Sparks you want. Then, when stock is available you will be emailed a priority product code, which guarantees you get a Spark as soon as your number comes up. As a bonus for pre-ordering, Make Play Live are offering 500 free points for the add-on store that should go live at launch.

    • Linpus retools Android 4.0 for x86 tablets, netbooks

      Linpus is rolling out a new version of its Android-based operating system designed to run on tablets, netbooks, and notebooks with x86 processors. It’s based on Google Android 4.0, and the notebook version adds support for hardware that you wouldn’t normally find on an Android tablet.

    • Spark Linux tablet given video rundown

      The device you will soon be looking at is a $256 7-inch tablet running on a basic mobile version of Linux, and its name is Spark. The software user interface goes by the name Plasma Active and has been in the works for some months, ramping up to this point at which this tablet can bring the lovely functionality to the market with what we hope is a beta version of the Spark tablet. You’ll find that the software experience looks familiar if you’re used to using a Linux environment on your computer now, but that the tablet itself isn’t all that impressive when it comes to hardware.

Free Software/Open Source

• XBMC 11 “Eden”

  XBMC, the open source media center, has steadily grown from its humble origins as an X-Box only replacement environment into the cross-platform, de facto playback front-end for multimedia content. It merges the file-centric approach taken by traditional video players with an add-on scripting environment that handles remote web content. The project is currently finalizing its next major release, version 11.0 (codenamed Eden), which includes updates to the networking and video acceleration subsystems, broader hardware support, and numerous changes to the APIs available to add-on developers.

• Barriers to Migration to FLOSS

  I did a bit of fixing knowledge by exposing students and staff of K-12 schools to GNU/Linux. We sure freed up resources by bringing “dead” machines back to life and getting better and more reliable service from our PCs. Only a few schools have an official policy against FLOSS. Many just don’t know.

• Events

  • ABLEconf 2012 Schedule Now Online

  • FOSDEM 2012 Summary, Videos To Watch

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Chrome web browser comes to Android, app store, extensions behind

    • Google expands its vulnerability reward programs to cover Chromium OS

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox finally enriches New Tab page

      Long after its competitors replaced blank New Tab pages with personalized content drawn from your browsing habits, Mozilla reveals the beginning of its own New Tab revamp.

• SaaS

  • I just installed ownCloud: It’s like my own, wholly controlled version of Google Docs (without the spying) and Dropbox (without the cost)

  • Apache Hadoop: What You Need to Know About This Important Big Data Tool

    Apache Hadoop has been the driving force behind the growth of the big data industry. You’ll hear it mentioned often, along with associated technologies such as Hive and Pig. But what does it do, and why do you need all its strangely-named friends, such as Oozie, Zookeeper and Flume?

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Report on Richard Stallman’s visit to Chennai

    Dr. Richard. M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, addressed a mammoth gathering at IIT-Madras on Monday, February 6, 2012. Speaking on the topic ‘Free Software, Freedom and Education’ in front of a crowd of at least 3,000 students, teachers and activists, Dr. Stallman elaborated on a variety of topics including the history of the free software movement, the difference between free software and open source software and the dangers of proprietary software.

• Project Releases

  • Blender 2.62 has been released! PPA Ubuntu and LinuxMint

  • Blender 2.62 Brings New Render Engine Features

    Blender 2.62 was released on Thursday with notable improvements to the Cycles Render Engine, motion tracking, the Blender Game Engine, and much more.

    Blender 2.62 is the project’s February release to succeed Blender 2.61 from December. The 2.62 release builds upon the Cycles Render Engine from the previous release along with incorporating new UV tools and other work. The new Cycles Render Engine improvements include support for render layers and passes, multi-GPU rendering, border rendering, BVH caching, and much more. The new UV editing tools include an advanced interactive stitch tool, a tool to compute seams for islands, sculpting tools, and much more.

  • VLC 2.0 Media Player Soon Arriving On Mac OS X, Windows And Linux

  • VLC 2.0 RC build available for download, iOS version returns

• Public Services/Government

  • European Standardisation Reform lowers the bar

    The Consumer Committee (IMCO) within the European Parliament is considering an overhaul of the current standardisation system in Europe. The FFII presents a paper on the proposed recognition of ICT specifications from consortia.

    “They propose minimum rules against trade and antitrust abuses. It’s hard to imagine up an awkward specification which would fail the test”, explains FFII standards analyst André Rebentisch.

• Licensing

  • Why FLOSS Should Use The GPL

    I just read an article about the software business littered with “zealot” and “restrictive” in relation to licensing of FLOSS and how ASFL is the only way to do business with FLOSS etc. It’s pretty sickening to read these parasites of FLOSS denying the reality that the GPL works and works well. It allows startups to have a head start. It allows startups to innovate and not to have to compete against their own code used against them by competitors in closed source software.

    Instead these “pro-business” parasites would have us believe that working for free for M$ and the like is just great for the world of IT. It would be laughable if they weren’t so seriously trying to undermine FLOSS at every turn. These traitors actually promote non-free software as some kind of virtue and perpetuate the myth that using the GPL “infects” software and harms business.

• Openness/Sharing

  • DNA robot could kill cancer cells

    The researchers designed the structure of the nanorobots using open-source software, called Cadnano, developed by one of the authors — Shawn Douglas, a biophysicist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. They then built the bots using DNA origami. The barrel-shaped devices, each about 35 nanometres in diameter, contain 12 sites on the inside for attaching payload molecules and two positions on the outside for attaching aptamers, short nucleotide strands with special sequences for recognizing molecules on the target cell. The aptamers act as clasps: once both have found their target, they spring open the device to release the payload.

• Programming

  • The Shrinking Expanding World of CI

    Continuous integration is undergoing somewhat of a renaissance as continuous delivery (and its sidekick, DevOps) begin to find adoption in many enterprises. Simultaneously, the number of viable CI packages is shrinking quickly.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Is WebKit slowly turning into IE6?

    For those who don’t know, WebKit is today’s predominant layout engine, used by the major web browsers on almost all platforms. Examples are Safari on OS X, Windows and iOS, or Google Chrome on OS X, Windows, Linux, Android, to name only a few (1).

Leftovers

• Litigation between SCO and IBM to resume

  The reactivation of the litigation between IBM and SCO is largely a procedural matter aimed at resolving the pending claims and counterclaims that the companies have brought against each other. Due to the court’s previous conclusion that Novell is the rightful owner of UNIX, the reactivated litigation between SCO and IBM isn’t going to be an opportunity for SCO to turn the tide in its favor.

• Linux Bloggers Everywhere Burst Into Tears At The Thought Of Having To Write One More SCO Trial Blog Post

• Keeping an Eye on the Enemy

  My enemies are the purveyors of non-free software who try to lock the world into doing things their way and paying for each iteration. M$ is chief among them but many of their “partners” are cut from the same cloth. Apple does charge less for software but it’s still lock-in one way or another. That lock-in and emphasis on keeping the cost of IT high is a terrible waste of resources especially when the enemy is restricting what I can do with hardware that I own.

• Security

  • Mozilla Releases Firefox 10.0.2 for png Flaw