Notable science fiction and fantasy novelist Piers Anthony has now gone where no author has gone before. Twitter. Anthony, who is new to Twitter is attempting to write an entire novel using only tweets.
The x86 personal computers have long been powerful enough to run the applications of multiple users. I have often run a whole computer lab from a single PC running GNU/Linux. I used the lab’s PCs as thin clients. There is another way to use a PC for multiple users and that is to connect multiple monitors, keyboards and mice to one PC. That is what MiniFrame has been doing from M$’s OS. M$ liked that so much that they revised their EULA for Vista to include a “single-user” requirement.
The Ninja Block open source cloud automation device looks as if it could be heading into the development stage after attracting $50,000 of pledges in only a week on the Kickstarter crowd-funding website.
I have been a Microsoft defender for decades. “No, MS-DOS 4.0 isn’t really that bad,” I pleaded to friends almost 25 years ago. “Give Windows 98 a chance” I begged ten or 11 years later. Heck, I extolled the virtues of Vista (which I did believe in, by the way) to anyone willing to listen. But in the wake of last week’s introduction of the Consumer Preview edition of Windows 8, I can say only this: Microsoft, you’re on your own.
Never — and I’m going to repeat this for additional emphasis, never – have I been as horrified by one of the company’s products as I am by this one. (Yes, I used Microsoft Bob.) Every choice seems to have been made for a sketchy reason, and the full collection of them bears the haphazard feel of the morning after a particularly raucous college party. Scratch that: Even at my most inebriated, I’m pretty sure I would never conceive of something like Windows 8.
Hands down the fastest boot-up time is Ubuntu. Without fail, 10-ish seconds after typing my password, it was ready to go. Even on an old machine. Even if I left a lot of files and apps open.
235 million page requests last month were from Linux systems. 161.9 million from Android/Linux for 3.36% share and 1.52% for GNU/Linux. That other OS was clinging to monopoly at 74%. In April, 2009, that other OS was at 89.5%. Times are changing.
The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project has been quite interesting as one of the official Debian operating system ports. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD pairs the FreeBSD kernel with the Debian GNU user-land so that users can enjoy their traditional Debian applications while taking advantage of the FreeBSD kernel. With the recently released FreeBSD 9.0 kernel having worked its way into Debian Wheezy, how is the FreeBSD 9.0 kernel performance compared to the Linux 3.2 kernel? This article provides those benchmarks.
A long line-up of changes to the code for memory management will fix problems and improve performance in some areas. The kernel now supports the Large Physical Address Extension (LPAE) and boots on x86 EFI systems even without a boot loader.
From Monday through next week, X.Org members are able to vote for their choice of candidates to be seated on the X.Org Board of Directors.
Guayadeque is a Lightweight and fully featured Music Player for Ubuntu and other linux distribution such (Arch linux, gentoo,Mageia and Fedora). Guayadeque Music Player version 0.3.5 comes with smart/dynamic playlists, iPod and portable device support, automatically downloads album covers, lets you play and record shoutcast radios, Mpris v2 support and other interesting features
While Cairo gets much of the spotlight when it comes to a 2D vector graphics drawing library, there's another open-source project that claims to provide even faster performance and greater benefits; meet the Fog-Framework.
The 2011 Members' Choice Awards from LinuxQuestions.org has honored the KDE Community with "Best Desktop Environment of the Year". In addition, Tech Radar has declared that KDE Workspaces are the best desktop environment. KDE innovation, performance and stability have particular appeal for users. Tech Radar reports that KDE Workspaces have "the best mix of cutting edge software and stability...", and writes, "We were amazed by the level of comfort the users experienced with KDE." Chris from the Linux Action Show is switching to KDE!
tl;dr we need a Gnome computer.
This is not about choice, it is about freedom.
A hardware platform that would be libre, that would run a libre OS, based on Gnome, Linux and GNU.
The Frugalware Linux live CD is provided as a 490 MB CD image. Burning this image to a disc and booting from it brings us to an Xfce desktop environment with a pleasant blue background. On the desktop we find icons for navigating the file system and launching the system installer. The application menu and task switcher are positioned at the top of the screen. In the top-right corner of the display an icon appeared indicating network status and I was surprised to find the icon showed I was not connected. Opening a terminal I tried to ping a server and found the live CD doesn't include the ping command. Nor does it include the FTP command-line client, nor telnet. Deciding to change gears I clicked the icon for launching the distro's web browser. A prompt came up asking which browser I would like to make my default, though only one browser, Midori, is listed as available. Once the browser launched I found that I was, in fact, connected to the network, despite the status presented by the network icon.
Linux is a badass open-source operating system. Take it from a card-carrying Linux lover. But it's not without problems. One such problem: There are nearly six hundred different versions of Linux out there—an incredibly overwhelming number to even the most experienced of Linux users. If you've tinkered with Linux a bit and want to move beyond the basics, here's how to narrow down that selection and find the distribution that fits your needs.
I have already written about two Linux distribution releases which happened in February: PCLinuxOS and Sabayon. Although it is already March, I still would like to write a third one about just another February release. Let it be three.
The Linux From Scratch (LFS) project has published version 7.1 of its manual for building a custom Linux installation. The new release of the step-by-step instructions is 345 pages long and uses more up-to-date components than previous versions – for example, the 3.2.6 Linux kernel and version 4.6.2 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The update includes fixes to bootscripts and corrections to the text, as well as updates to 20 packages.
Once upon a time, Sabayon impressed me as a cute, furry mutation of Gentoo, a distribution forged in virgin's blood and C code. It was big, even massive, and dared fight byte for byte with the likes of Vista. While most distributions were proud to claim their minimalistic share of GB for the installation, Sabayon shouted gimme more. It was nice. Lots of fun stuff, games, a media center, whatnot. Then it went downhill.
Between versions oh-four and oh-five, some of the fun was gone, traded for maturity that did not suit it well. In fact, I let Sabayon rest for a while before picking it up again for today's review. Now I'm aware of its Gentoo legacy, so credits are due when they are due, but that does not make the need for a suitable, friendly desktop environment any less. Therefore, me asking, can Sabayon deliver?
* Rebuild of the Debian archive with clang * Debian Peru revival * DebConf11 final report is out * Debian Utsav * Other news * Upcoming events * New Debian Contributors * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release * Important Debian Security Advisories * New and noteworthy packages * Work-needing packages * Want to continue reading DPN?
"People are going to take these [RPi] boards and turn them into commercial products; they're going to make gonzo one-off hardware projects 'because they can.' They're going to use them in ways that we can't begin to imagine, in places we wouldn't normally think of," said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. "Instead of Beowulf clusters or Lego blocks, we can now think 'tinker toys for the mind.'"
The Linux operating system for the Raspberry Pi bare-bones computer is ready to download.
If you're one of the lucky thousands who snagged a $35 Raspberry Pi pocket Linux system before the first run of 10,000 sold out in just a few minutes, there's almost certainly one question on your mind--where am I going to put this thing?
The Raspberry Pi is a full system with all the needed ports that's about the size of a credit card. It's definitely cheap, but it's not exactly pretty. That's likely because its nonprofit designers are mainly focused on their mission of getting the systems into the hands of kids across the developed and developing world to get them excited about programming.
While the $25 Raspberry Pi is turning a million eyeballs, Canonical’s incessant attempts at conquering non-Ubuntuers don’t seem to be working out as hoped or planned. Even though Shuttleworth, Canonical’s benevolent dictator, has decided to go all out in order to reach his 200-million mark as early as possible, the efforts are still visibly falling short. The recent announcements including Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu for Android have created some buzz among the non-Linuxiens, it’s still nothing compared to what Raspberry Pi has achieved in such a short span of time.
The new Unity Launcher is a new and very significant part of the desktop environment. After logging into your system the Launcher will automatically appear along the left edge of your screen. The Launcher can be used to store and run all of your favorite applications.
Ever since the Unity desktop first came to Ubuntu, I've been critical of it and found myself completely disinterested in it. Some aspects of this discontent may have stemmed from my refusal to try something new. But certainly Unity had some rough edges in the beginning.
In short, Unity was a neat idea that needed more time to develop.
With Ubuntu 12.04 just around the corner, I was shocked to discover that Unity now offers a stable and configurable desktop experience. Thanks to the HUD (heads up display), more Unity-based configuration options, support for Sandy Bridge, and improved power consumption, Ubuntu 12.04 is shaping up to be a really solid release.
We’ve now officially entered the season that comes only, er, twice a year: the countdown to the next iteration of Ubuntu. With beta 1 of Ubuntu 12.04 now available, it’s time to take a look at what’s new — and there’s a lot of it — in the latest and greatest version of what is (probably) the world’s most popular open source operating system.
For the first time with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, real desktop user experience innovation is available on a full production-ready enterprise-certified free software platform, free of charge, well before it shows up in Windows or MacOS. It’s not ‘job done’ by any means, but it’s a milestone. Achieving that milestone has tested the courage and commitment of the Ubuntu community – we had to move from being followers and integrators, to being designers and shapers of the platform, together with upstreams who are excited to be part of that shift and passionate about bringing goodness to a wide audience. It’s right for us to design experiences and help upstreams get those experiences to be amazing, because we are closest to the user; we are the last mile, the last to touch the code, and the first to get the bug report or feedback from most users.
Late last week, after a long alpha release test period, which we covered here, the first beta version of Ubuntu 12.04 (dubbed Precise Pangolin) became available. You can get it and read about it now, although the Ubuntu Wiki warns that this beta is primarily for developers and testers at this point. This new version of Ubuntu is a major upgrade. Here is more on what to expect from it.
One of the most popular features of the new Unity desktop are the Lenses. You can uses lenses to sort and search for items inside the Unity dash. For example, a lens for music will allow you to filter your searches for all of your music items and display music only in your search results. There are several lenses that can be added to the dash, each providing its own impressive functions as well.
First and foremost Raspberry Pi are a UK not-for-profit foundation.
Though the credit-card sized naked motherboard does contain many ports including USBs and an SD card reader, it does not include a wireless mouse, screen or carry case.
The peripherals are left up to users to find and build. Sort of.
The two authorised resellers Premier Farnell/Element 14 and RS Components provide bundle packages that include all the bells and whistles to make it easier for users to build their own computers and create their own software programs.
Would you pay a small fee to turn your average HDTV into a smart TV? Always Innovating hopes so. The San Francisco company showed off its HDMI Dongle, which adds Android 4.0 support to non-connected televisions, at this week’s Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
We are filing this story in 'rumor' section as there are no confirmed reports yet. The Verge is reporting that Google has reportedly planned to codename the successor of Jelly Beans (Android 5.0) as Key Lime Pie. The Verge claims that there can be some credibility about the code-name as they attribute the information to the same source that tipped them about Jelly Beans. The release date of Key Lime Pie is not known, obviously.
Just one more entry in the Hardware Profiles category, where I profile upcoming and available mobile devices powered by Linux-based operating systems (distributions, as we like to call them). This one is an Android tablet from Toshiba.
Potential buyers have been clamoring over the new KDE Spark tablet. Though predicted to perform otherwise, demand has been incredibly high as suggested by the sheer volume of pre-orders over at Make-Play-Live. Well, you don’t have to wait in line…
The Spark tablet is really just a re-branded unit. At first, €200 doesn’t seem like a lot of scratch, but once you get familiar with the intimate details of the hardware, you find something here that you might not be able to carry with you as a daily-driver. I must say however, the allure of this rather nice looking experience is enough for me… Now, how well will this run on a Touchpad??
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. As we know, where many people come together communities are formed and if open source technology needs one thing, it is community.
Unfortunately Nigeria is better known for organised crime, piracy and political dictatorships than it is for software. Regardless of these setbacks, the 5th African Conference on Free and Open Source Software will be held in Abuja later this March 2012.
Unicon, Inc., a leading IT consulting services provider, specializing in open source for the education market, today announced that it has developed and contributed over 20 new portlet enhancements to the Jasig uPortal project. These contributions included technical fixes, feature enhancements, improvements, and new functional capabilities. This development work, along with fixes performed by the Unicon team, was contributed back and shared with the uPortal open source community. As a Jasig partner and authorized Solutions Provider for uPortal, Unicon is deeply committed to ensuring uPortal's long-term success.
In news that failed to make the core publicity channels emanating from productivity tools vendor JetBrains, the company has reportedly made a preliminary version of the Kotlin language available via an open source license on github under an Apache 2 license. Kotlin's statically compiled pedigree allows it to compile to both Java Virtual Machine byte code and JavaScript.
Minister of Communication Technology, Mrs Omobola Johnson, is to declare open the 5th African Conference on FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and the Digital Commons – (IDLELO 5) will hold at the Umaru Musa Yar'Adua Centre in Abuja from March 19-23, 2012.
With theme, ‘Open Source Solutions for Achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), IDLELO 5 follows successful series of conferences already held in Cape Town, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Dakar, Senegal and Accra, Ghana.
On the PC, Internet Explorer (IE), while declining for years, is still the top Web browser. On mobile devices, though, IE has never mattered, and Opera has long been the top dog. But, that’s no longer the case. According to StatCounter, Android’s built-in Web browser is now number one.
This year at the CanSecWest security conference, we will once again sponsor rewards for Google Chrome exploits. This complements and extends our Chromium Security Rewards program by recognizing that developing a fully functional exploit is significantly more work than finding and reporting a potential security bug.
The aim of our sponsorship is simple: we have a big learning opportunity when we receive full end-to-end exploits. Not only can we fix the bugs, but by studying the vulnerability and exploit techniques we can enhance our mitigations, automated testing, and sandboxing. This enables us to better protect our users.
Benoit Jacob of Mozilla is looking at the possibility of using Mesa's LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver as a means of WebGL software rendering within Firefox.
This Mozilla developer is currently investigating the graphics driver black-list for Firefox and deciding which drivers should be allowed for future Firefox releases. With that said, he's also looking at possible enabling LLVMpipe as a means of Gallium3D software rendering within Firefox.
Mozilla, the organization that brought the world the Firefox browser and other applications, thinks we need another mobile operating system. I don't think so, but the efforts of Mozilla and some big-name companies could be valuable for the future of wireless Internet development.
We are pleased to note that NAKATA, Maho and Pedro Giffuni have ported Apache OpenOffice to FreeBSD. The results of their porting effort are now in the FreeBSD ports tree, so everyone can easily build and use it. FreeBSD users are invited to help test this port and report bugs.
FreeBSD is a free operating system based on Berkeley's 4.4 BSD source release. The code base has undergone over thirty years of continuous development, improvement, and optimization by large number of individuals. There are approximately 400 FreeBSD committers (those who can commit to the source code repository). Development is especially focused on networking, security, performance and porting applications (they have over 20,000 well-maintained applications). FreeBSD is used as a platform for devices and products from many of the world's largest IT companies, including, Apple, Cisco, Juniper and NetApp. It has broken ftp performance records and powers important sites like Yahoo, Hotmail and the Apache Software Foundation's infrastructure.
Intel in fact, is considering adding LibreOffice to its AppUp Center providing users a great alternative to use vendor neutral productivity suite.
As promised, here are some of the additional documents from last week. Specifically, we provide text versions of document 759 [PDF; Text]), Exhibit A to Document 760 [PDF; Text]), and 762 [PDF; Text]). These represent Google's opposition to Oracle's motion to exclude portions of the supplemental expert report of Dr. Cox, selected portions of Dr. Cox's supplemental report, and Google's opposition to Oracle's motion to exclude portions of the supplemental expert report of Dr. Leonard, respectively.
The bottom line in these responses is that, in Google's view, Oracle is merely objecting without providing any rational argument for their objection. Google refers to it as Oracle's tit-for-tat objections. As Google points out, when the court granted Oracle/Dr. Cockburn a third attempt at a damages report, the court offered Google (through Drs. Cox and Leonard) carte blanche to respond to any new material introduced by Dr. Cockburn.
Dora Scilipoti, an Italian free software activist and teacher, is leading the GNU Project Education Team, which was recently re-launched as a worldwide volunteer-led effort to bring free software to educational institutions. SD Times spoke with Scilipoti about the GNU Project Education team and what it will be working on.
Not only was the rally meant to promote lower cost of tuition, but it also promoted Perez’s Middle Class Scholarship and Steinberg’s Open Source Textbook Act.
If you have free time, and experience with gtk-doc documentation or man pages, ModemManager developers will thank you [1] if you help writing the new libmm-common, libmm-glib and mmcli documentation: [MM 0.6] Documentation
After quite a long development cycle, which saw MythTV forked into a new project called Torc by one of its lead developers, the upstream MythTV 0.25 release is finally becoming a reality.
But I heard those words last month from a former member of Congress. Tom Perriello, the moderator of a panel on 'open innovation’ held at a mainstream think tank here in Washington (the Center for American Progress), gives them a different context.
[...]
Rather, the question that kept coming up for me after listening to these leaders is: How is 'open innovation' tangibly different than the older models of innovation?
Compact hardware synths are very much flavour of the month, but few are as small and affordable as the Open Source MeeBlip, which comes courtesy of Create Digital Music and Reflex.
Late last week, a flaw in the underlying github ruby code was discovered and reported to github. Github disagreed with the severity and closed the bug without fixing it, which led to one of the best back/forth discussions I've ever seen in an open forum about a security issue. You see the researcher that discovered the flaw, Egor Homakov didn't stay quiet, he kept pushing the issue.
You can say one thing for the powers that be in the banking industry. They’ve got a lot of nerve.
This past week, our own finance minister, Jim Flaherty, along with Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, came out strongly in opposition to a modest proposal to regulate the U.S. banking system.
Their interventions followed a concerted effort by American bank lobbyists to spark international opposition to U.S. regulatory reforms.
What a shameful spectacle! Less than four years ago, the world was holding its breath for fear the crisis in the hyper-deregulated U.S. financial system would cause a second Great Depression. Now Canada and other foreign governments, cheered on by U.S. banking interests, are doing their best to block U.S. legislation that would curb the industry’s worst excesses.
A federal judge on Monday refused to halt efforts by a key regulator to limit excessive speculation in the trading of oil contracts — which is driving up oil and gasoline prices — but hinted that he might soon rule in favor of Wall Street and let speculation go unchecked.
Robert Wilkins, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, declined a request for a preliminary injunction to halt the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from implementing a congressional mandate to limit how many oil contracts any single financial speculator or company can control.
However, Wilkins told both the CFTC and lawyers for the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the International Swap and Derivatives Association that he expected to make a ruling soon on whether to hear the case. His line of questioning left both sides with the impression that he was concerned about how the regulatory agency has proceeded.
Twitter has sold billions of archived tweets believed to have vanished forever. A privacy row has erupted as hundreds of companies queue up to purchase users’ personal information from the new database.
They require you to sign up with the voluntary spyware company called Facebook to get a Spotify account.
Talks on a free trade agreement between Canada and the European Union may take months longer to complete than initially planned as Canada seeks the best possible deal, Ottawa said on Tuesday.
The agreement is particularly important for Canada, which is seeking to diversify exports away from the giant U.S. market.
The two sides still have to settle contentious issues such as whether to amend Canada’s Patent Act to give more protection to European drug firms, a move the Canadian generic pharmaceutical industry opposes.
I'm in Melbourne to advocate for free software users and developers at the latest round of negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), and I'm chomping at the bit to share a little good news with you all. The tone of the discussion here has turned much more friendly to us—and it's thanks to your activism.
A judge in New York sided with Monsanto and against organic farmers in the first case of its kind seeking to protect famers from being accused of patent infringement upon unitentional contamination by Monsanto's GMO seed.
Organic farmers sought a judgment against Monsanto to protect themselves from being sued for patent infringement when their crops are unintentionally contaminated with the company's genetically modified (GMO) seed, was dismissed in federal district court in New York by Judge Naomi Buchwald called the plaintiffs' concern an "intangible worry, unanchored in time."
On the 22nd of February, video games publisher THQ filed a trademark with the United States Patent & Trademark Office for a property called "Evolve".
It is still unclear what the term stands for, but we know that it pertains to "computer game software; video game software; downloadable video games." Gamespot requested more information on the patent, unfortunately a THQ representative responded by saying "Sorry, no, we don't comment on filings."
These two pieces are largely addressing different questions. Ruffini and Salam point out that the federal government have been pouring resources into anti-piracy efforts, and restraining individual liberty in the process, for decades. These efforts haven’t been very effective, and there’s no reason to think that the even greater efforts Hollywood advocates will be much more effective. So, they argue, Hollywood needs to recognize that the war on piracy can’t be won decisively and take pragmatic steps to deal with this reality.
VerBruggen responds by insisting that piracy is wrong. He’s right, but this doesn’t get him as far as he thinks it does. This isn’t just an abstract exercise in moral philosophy. The government has limited resources, and a long list of problems to deal with. The question isn’t “should the government try to stop piracy,” it’s “how many resources should the government devote to combatting piracy as opposed to other problems.”
The ham-handed attempts by the U.S. entertainment industry to rein in online piracy, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), triggered an earthquake of public backlash that led to one of the quickest legislative collapses in modern history. In one day, fueled by Internet blackouts and user protests, the once “slam dunk” legislative effort to censor the Internet and make websites liable for “infringing” user content quickly became politically untouchable.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has mushroomed into a massive political issue in Europe in recent weeks with protests in hundreds of cities across the continent. Much of the focus has been on whether the European Parliament will give its approval to the agreement. The focal point of attention within the EP has been on the INTA committee, which holds a public workshop on the issue today. Interest in the workshop has been incredible - there are apparently 800 registrants with thousands more expected to watch the live stream.
Following the initial discussions in the European Parliament and the overwhelmingly negative workshop that was held on 1 March, ACTA is close to dead in Europe. What are the strategies for bringing it back to life and how will this impact on other similar initiatives? How can activists ensure that our great success so far can be maintained?
The original intention was to adopt ACTA in May or June 2012, with the Commission Communication on review of the IPR Enforcement Directive 2004/48/EC (also known as “IPRED”) being launched at approximately the same time. The Commission's "roadmap" for the review of the Directive is available here.
The protests in the streets and the lack of support in the European Parliament created two big problems for the European Commission. Firstly, there was a significant risk of losing the Parliament vote and, secondly, the (successful) campaign against ACTA would create problems for the new proposal on the Enforcement Directive.
The European Commission therefore decided to refer ACTA to the Court of Justice of the European Union in order to “de-couple” ACTA from IPRED. This leaves the way open for the launch of a legislative proposal in November/December. However, it is quite likely that these will be delayed to some extent.
It has to be said that, while we would disagree with the Commission on a lot of aspects of IPRED, the Commission services working on the dossier do recognise many of the problems with the Directive and have ambitions to improve the legislation. They would, for example, seek to implement the rules against abuse of the Directive more effectively, in order to prevent disgraceful use of personal data, as in the ACS:Law case. The problem is that these positive proposals may not survive internal discussions in the Commission and the approach of the Parliament so far has been far from enlightened.