02.22.12

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Kernel Space

  • What Greg Does

    With my recent job change, I’m starting to run into a bunch of people asking “What exactly are you going to be doing now?”

    I’ve tried responding by describing the kernel related stuff I’ve been doing for the past years, and it turns out that a lot of people didn’t even realize I was doing that.

    So, here’s a short list of some of the things that I’m going to be doing at my new job, and most importantly, how you can track what I do yourself, so that I never have to write a status report again…

  • Graphics Stack

    • Image Quality Comparison: Nouveau Gallium3D vs. NVIDIA

      Last week I posted an image quality comparison of the Radeon Gallium3D driver versus AMD’s Catalyst Linux driver to highlight some visual differences between the open and closed-source Radeon graphics drivers. Now here’s a look between the Nouveau Gallium3D driver and NVIDIA’s proprietary Linux graphics driver.

• Applications

  • Take Control Of Your Power Usage With Gnome Power Statistics [Linux]

    Gnome‘s Power Statistics application is a very easy-to-use way of getting hard numbers about your power usage. As far as out-of-the-box experiences go for power statistics, Gnome’s is probably the best. While it doesn’t have as many power options as Windows and Mac OS X, I don’t know of either having a way to see power statistics as detailed as Gnome’s from the get go.

  • Proprietary

    • Bricscad Linux v12 Classic, Pro, Platinum Edition Released

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Uncrackable: Secure Your Secrets with 4096-Bit Encryption

    • Create a radio station in five minutes with Airtime 2.0 on Ubuntu or Debian

    • Practical guide to TCP Syn Port scanner from SecPoint

    • Using Bash To Solve A Brain Teaser

    • Remove Recent History Lists In Ubuntu 11.10

    • Who couldn’t use a little more screen space?

      Text LCD’s are handy for any occasion, a printer port on your PC is also darn handy as well. Mix together and add in a splash of linux and you get a very handy Linux device driver for a 16×2 LCD connected to the parallel port.

  • Games

    • Hands On With Incursion – A New Linux Bound Text-based Adventure Game

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Spark pre-orders closed!

      The response to the Spark pre-order registration program has been phenomenal. Thousands have registered and we’ve exchanged hundreds emails with various interested parties answering questions and receiving great feedback and input.

    • next steps

      Still, I’ll be around and available for meetings and hallway discussions about Spark and Make·Play·Live.

    • Will KDE drop support for older graphics chips?

      Martin Gräßlin, lead developer of the compositing window manager KWin, has been considering the future of OpenGL 1.x support in KWin in a blog entry titled “The costs of supporting legacy hardware”. He is considering removing the code because almost all modern graphic chips and drivers support the more recent OpenGL 2.0.

• Distributions

  • Red Hat Family

    • What’s new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8

      As well as bug fixes and improved hardware support, the eighth minor revision of Linux distribution RHEL 5, which was first released in 2007, also includes new virtualisation and power management features.

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 to 5.8 Risk Report

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • SimplyMEPIS 11.0.12 Released

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Android add-on designed to replace PCs

        • Ubuntu Linux Unveiled for Android Phones

        • How RIM could learn from Ubuntu, and why it needs to before it’s too late

          Ubuntu is taking small steps to get into the mobile game – at the same time, RIM’s big efforts have been underwhelming to the say the least. Is this reversible or can the veteran learn a thing or two from the open-source platform’s more restrained pace?

        • Ubuntu 12.04: Three new features sneak in to make things interesting

        • Criticism: You’re doing it wrong

          There have been some recent accusation that the Ubuntu community isn’t taking criticism well. However, those making the accusations seem to have a misunderstanding about what exactly criticism is. In an effort to improve the quality of that feedback, I’ve put together a short, simple list of things you can check to make sure your criticism is in fact criticism.

        • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 253

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Introduction To The Linux Mint Cinnamon Desktop

            This tutorial is supposed to guide the reader through the features of the Cinnamon desktop, Mint’s new desktop environment to be used in Linux Mint 13. Cinnamon concentrates on holding on to classic design and functionality in times where Gnome 3 and Unity come up with different innovations to the user interface.

          • Living with Statistics

            The questions for which I would like accurate stats include: how many GNU/Linux users are there? Has Linux Mint really overtaken Ubuntu as the most popular distribution? Has GNOME gained or lost users with the start of its third release series? All these questions and more would benefit from reliable figures, yet we don’t have any. Instead, we have a series of indicators that are approximate at best, and completely unreliable at worst.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • HP has open-source vision for ‘orphan’ webOS

    • Intel expected to release smartphone plans next week

      Intel Corp. is expected to provide more details next week on its plans to become a key supplier for the smartphone market when wireless industry experts gather for the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain.

      Intel is the kingpin of personal computer technology but a late arrival in a smartphone market crowded with such providers as Apple Inc., Nvidia Corp. and Qualcomm Inc.

      Intel has been trying to push into the mobile products market for years without much success. Analysts say a few of its recent attempts — chips called Menlo and Moorestown — fell short of the mark.

    • Android

      • Samsung Benelux: ‘Mark Your Calendars’ on… March 15th

      • Leaked DROID RAZR Ice Cream Sandwich Build Shows What We Can Expect in the Next Version of Blur

      • Panasonic announces ultra-thin Eluga for European crowd; More expected next week?

        Panasonic, looking to toss their name into various smartphone conversations, has unveiled an ultra-thin, high-end Android handset ahead of Mobile World Congress. Dubbed the Eluga, the hardware puts the device right in the mix with some of today’s elite Android combatants.

        Thinner than most smartphones, the Panasonic runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread and offers a 4.3-inch (540×960) qHD display, a 1GHz TI OMAP dual-core chip,1GB RAM, and 8GB internal storage. There’s a rear-facing 8-megapixel camera on the backside however there’s no front-facing shooter.

      • Chrome kingpin Pichai promises Android upgrades

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Amazon may launch 10-inch Kindle Fire in Q2, new color E Ink reader next month

    • Barnes & Noble announces $199 Nook Tablet, $169 Nook Color

    • Internet for all… British firm develops £22 wireless tablet to plug ‘affordability gap’ in market

      The newer version has more features but is still priced at around $US35.

      Suneet Singh Tuli, Datawind’s chief executive officer, said: ‘We have already received over three million individual hand users pre-booking on this.’

Free Software/Open Source

• Kiwi open sourcers invade Aus

  New Zealand open source digital media company SilverStripe is ramping up its presence in Australia, selecting Victoria as its Australian headquarters and hiring 50 new staff.

• Is Open Source Software Falling Short?

  Open source software has managed to find its way into the minds and hearts of users on all three popular desktop platforms. I know of countless Windows users who enjoy free access to applications such as Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP, Filezilla, among others. Users of these popular software titles know all to well the benefits of using open source software.

  Yet, there’s still the question of using open source software in place of proprietary software. Specifically: can open source software provide an adequate replacement for legacy software?

  This is the question I’ll answer in this article. I’ll look at the open source applications I use, and how they differ from their proprietary alternatives.

• Open Source Software Is Made For The Cloud

  Open source software has been maligned and celebrated over the years. Proponents of the open source concept claim that collaboration and openness will lead to better technological results for the consumer at a fraction of the price. Opponents of the concept claim that without a profit motive, technological progression will grind to a halt. Both sides may be right, but with many technology companies finding ways to turn a profit outside of software sales over the past decade, open source software has gotten a significant boost in popularity.

  Cloud computing encompasses many things, but a major part of it is the ability for multiple people in disparate places to collaborate on a single project at the same time. Since the information and processing are done in the cloud, each user only needs a way to log in to the cloud and all users can view updates in real time. This spirit of collaboration makes for an ideal pairing with open source software. Having the source code of a cloud service available to everyone makes it that much easier to spot bugs and improve performance.

• Events

  • HIMSS12 in Las Vegas

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla releases Firefox 10.0.2 update

• SaaS

  • Teradata grabs Hortonworks by trunk

• Databases

  • Clustered NoSQL database Riak gets administration console

    The Riak distributed database has been updated to version 1.1, and has a new administration console and diagnostic console. Riak creator Basho believes the changes in 1.1 make Riak the most scalable and stable NoSQL database available.

• Education

  • How to teach undergrads how to become open source contributors without writing any code

• Business

  • yaSSL Offers New Open-Source Security Tools

• Funding

  • The H Half Hour: Interview with CASH Music’s Maggie Vail

    It raised $30,000 in 72 hours on Kickstarter with its plan to disrupt the music industry using open source, but what is the CASH Music project about? The H talked with co-executive director Maggie Vail to find out.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Access/Content

    • Utah to Adopt Open Source Textbooks

      The Utah Office of Education (USOE) announced a new program late last month. Starting in the next couple months, Utah is going to develop and release open source digital textbooks for science, and mathematics, and English.

    • NHMRC CEO supports Elsevier boycott; says all research must be made open access

Leftovers

• Vic Toews Apparently Not A Fan Of Others Seeing His Personal Data

  You may recall that Canadian Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews announced Canada’s “lawful access” (read: government monitoring of the internet) bill by saying that if you weren’t in favor of the bill, you supported child porn. Over the weekend, he also seemed to admit that he didn’t even understand the bill he was supporting.

• Finance

  • “Crooks on the Loose? Did Felons Get a Free Pass in the Financial Crisis?“

  • Looking for Someone to Blame? Congress is a Good Place to Start

    While we here are committed to exposing the actions of Goldman Sachs – many of which helped, if not directly, created our economic problems – we often over look and under report on those who have and had the power to prevent the actions of Goldman Sachs and their band of merry banksters (including The Fed). Charlie Reese says it in plain and simple language. A report that he began in the 1980′s and modified several times. The version below was the one from 1995, long before anyone could have ever imagined the mess we would be in at the beginning of the 21st century.

• Censorship

  • Twitter Sued For Defamation By Someone Who Thinks It’s Responsible For ‘Publishing’ Tweets

    I would have hoped that, by now, most people could understand basic secondary liability issues, such as the difference between a service provider who provides the tools/service for communications and a content creator and/or publisher who actually creates or chooses the content. Unfortunately, when large sums of money are involved, people often have difficultly distinguishing the two. The latest situation involves a guy in Australia, named Joshua Meggitt, who appeared to have a legitimate defamation claim by Australian writer/TV personality Marieke Hardy. On her blog, she accused Meggitt of writing “ranting, hateful” articles about her. She then posted a link to her blog on Twitter, where it got a lot of attention. Hardy and Meggitt have already “settled” the dispute between each other, with a rumored $15,000 changing hands, but Meggitt has now sued Twitter directly claiming that it “published” the tweet by putting it on its front page.

  • The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom

    On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

  • Billionaire Romney donor uses threats to silence critics

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Toronto & Western Break Ranks to Sign Access Copyright Deal

      The universities of Western Ontario and Toronto have signed a deal with Access. Copyright that allows for surveillance of faculty correspondence, unjustified restriction to copyrighted works and two million dollars in fees that will be passed along to students.

    • Belgian Anti-Piracy Group Facing Copyright Fraud, Embezzlement & Money Laundering Charges

      The Belgian anti-piracy group, SABAM, has been one of the most aggressive anti-piracy groups out there. The group recently lost two huge court cases in which it tried to get courts to force ISPs and hosting firms to put in place filters to stop infringement. Perhaps more controversially, the organization has tried to require social networks to pay a flat fee for all the infringement happening on their networks. A year ago, there was a story of SABAM taking cash for a band they didn’t represent after a TV show played a “joke” on the group.

    • The Various Ways In Which Capitol Records Screwed Kenny Rogers…

    • Recording Industry Can’t Wait To Start Kicking People Offline In France For Listening To Their Favorite Songs

      Multiple studies have shown that piracy is almost never an educational issue. It’s not about people needing to “understand that artists should get paid for their work.”

    • ACTA

      • Dutch Economics Minister Says ACTA Is Designed To Shut Down Child Porn Sites… Even Though That’s Not True

        If you’ve been paying attention lately, you’ve probably heard SOPA/PIPA/ACTA supporters insisting that anyone against those bills is involved in a misinformation campaign. This seems pretty ridiculous, considering the level of misinformation that has been spewed for decades in support of these kinds of laws. But it’s reaching a new level of crazy over in the Netherlands, where the Dutch Econimics Minister Maxime Verhagen has apparently announced that “ordinary” people have nothing to worry about concerning ACTA because its focus is to take down child porn sites. Talk about misinformation. ACTA is about intellectual property infringement and has nothing to do with child porn.