03.14.12

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Server

  • Is Ubuntu Beating Red Hat Linux In Enterprise Market?

    Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has once again lit the fuse of another explosive discussion. This time he came out with some data. “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves.” Mark then presents us with this chart from w3techs.com.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux Kernel 3.2.11 Is Available for Download

  • Samsung Has G2D Driver, Virtual Display For Linux 3.4

    Besides the DRM work already piling up for Linux 3.4, there’s more. The Samsung developers responsible for the Exynos graphics driver have sent in their “-next” pull request, which brings several new features, including the basis of 2D acceleration for this open-source ARM graphics driver. There’s also a virtual display driver that could be used for handling wireless displays.

  • Look at Linux, the operating system that is an universal platform

  • Silicon Motion Has Open-Source Driver, But Fails

    For those that don’t closely follow the various development lists, at the end of February a Silicon Motion developer came to the DRI list announcing he had “a kernel driver for all our graphics chips” that he was looking to mainline. It sounds nice, but in the end it’s a let-down and the most you’ll probably get out of it is a few laughs.

  • The Synaptics Driver That Does Multi-Touch, ClickPads

    Following last weeks release of the new X.Org EvDev input driver that introduces support for multi-touch and smooth scrolling, the updated Synaptics input driver is now available for Linux users. Key features, of course, are multi-touch and ClickPads support.

  • Preview: Sandy Bridge Become Quicker With Linux 3.3, 3.4

    With the release of the Linux 3.3 kernel being imminent and the Linux 3.4 kernel drm-next already offering lots of changes, here are some Intel Sandy Bridge benchmarks comparing the Linux 3.2 kernel to a near-final Linux 3.3 kernel and then the drm-next kernel that’s largely a 3.3 kernel but with the DRM driver code that will work its way into Linux 3.4.

  • Linux File System — Analyzing the Fsck Test Results

    The results of our Linux file system fsck testing are in and posted, but the big question remains: What do the results tell us, what do they mean, and is the performance expected? In this article we will take a look at the results, talk to some experts, and sift through the tea leaves for their significance.

• Applications

  • Using Gimp in George

  • GIMP 2.7.5 (last test before GIMP 2.8) now available!

    This will be the last in the unstable GIMP 2.7 series. GIMP 2.7.5 is considered somehow a beta version for 2.8 or even a release candidate. It has exactly the same features and functionality which 2.8 will have. The devs want to really release in (late?) March. No more real bugs are blocking the release (Michael Natterer and others have fixed them all in the last weeks). The last big missing thing was the lack of support for the PDB paint API which has also been fixed now! So all the important stuff is completed.

  • Mirage Image Viewer: Seeing Is Believing

    I am fond of programs that do not impose standards on me. The Mirage image viewer follows that philosophy. The image editing preferences let me select the default scaling quality, whether or not to auto-save or prompt for action, and the saving quality to apply. But since its focus is on file viewing and not file controlling, Mirage starts with a clean slate.

  • Games

    • Half-Life 2 Benchmarks On Linux Are Imminent

      Pushed publicly yesterday was the test profile to run benchmarks of the popular Half-Life 2 game under Linux. As a result, coming out soon will be benchmarks of Half-Life 2 on Linux with an assortment of graphics cards and drivers.

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Cinnamon 1.4 Released With New Hot Corner Behaviour, More

      Cinnamon is a GNOME Shell fork which tries to offer a layout similar to GNOME 2: it comes with a panel at the bottom by default (optionally, you can use 2 panels or a panel at the top) that supports autohide, panel applets, a classic system tray, GNOME2-like notifications and so on, but using GNOME 3.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Calculate Linux 11.15 was released! Now with GNOME 3.

    • Salix Live KDE 13.37

  • Gentoo Family

    • Sabayon Linux Review: A Truly Delicious Flavor Of Linux!

      If you consider yourself a fairly advanced Linux user, I would (as one who has used nearly every Linux distribution worth talking about) highly recommend Sabayon Linux. At least from my own experience using it, Sabayon is the best Linux distribution overall. Here are some of the reasons why:

  • Red Hat Family

    • Obsidian trains SA’s first Red Hat Certified Datacenter Specialists

    • Zarafa Integrates Open Source Groupware With ClearOS

      European groupware and collaboration software maker Zarafa has intergrated its Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) with ClearOS Professional, made by Salt Lake City-headquartered ClearCenter, a hybrid IT platform provider that works closely with managed services providers (MSPs).

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 17 New Security Feature part VIII – New SELinux Domains in F17

      • Building b2g on Fedora. Field notes

        Yesterday I tried and successfully built b2g on Fedora 16 x86_84, targeting the emulator. These are my notes on how to do it as the instructions to setup the build environment are very Ubuntu centric.

        The prebuilt binaries expect to be on a 32-bits system. So we are gonna need to install 32-bits packages. Also there is a requirement to have adb to boostrap (it is built afterwards). Fortunately you can skip installing the SDK for the bootstrap and use the Fedora package android-tools that provides adb.

      • This week in Fedora 17: Test Days galore

        Yup, it’s Test Day time again. We did start up quite late this cycle, it feels like, but we’re stacking them deep each week to make up for it!

  • Debian Family

    • debian contributions to the linux kernel

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 256

        • Wayland’s Weston Lands In Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

          Landing today within Ubuntu’s 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” repository is Weston, the reference compositor for the Wayland Display Server. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS won’t have a full-on Wayland preview as was originally hoped for last November.

        • Is Ubuntu becoming a big name in enterprise Linux servers?

          When you think of Ubuntu Linux, what do you think of? I would guess you think about the Linux desktop. While Ubuntu is certainly a big player—maybe the biggest—when it comes to the Linux desktop, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu wants you to know that “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves.”

• Devices/Embedded

  • Raspberry Pi creators ‘punch-drunk’ over device’s success

    Widespread interest in the Raspberry Pi, a tiny but complete Linux computer that can be bought for as little as $25, caught the device’s designers completely off guard, Reuters reported this week.

    The news that a first production run of 10,000 sold out in less than a day, Eben Upton said, left the Raspberry Pi Foundation “punch-drunk” over the degree to which their expectations had been outstripped.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Huawei Prism Passes Through The FCC, We’ve Got The First Image

      • Asus and Google launching Nexus Tablet in May?

      • HTC confirms 16 Android handsets for Ice Cream Sandwich

Free Software/Open Source

• Community Metrics: Comparing Chef and Puppet

• Gravity Announces Labs and Open Source Projects

  Some of the Labs projects are open source, others are merely peeks into the stats behind Gravity’s service. For example, check out the metrics page. It’s good if you want to see the live metrics of Gravity Network data, number of signals processed on a given day, or number of requests that Gravity is processing per second.

• Cubit Adopts Open Source Model

  In what is undoubtedly Africa’s largest open source project, source code for the well-established and highly regarded Cubit Accounting platform has been released under GPL v3 as Accounting-123.com.

• APVMA opens up to open source

  The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) has opened up its tender for a new EDRMS platform to include open source options, promising to consider these equally alongside proprietary software.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 11 released with Style Editor and 3D DOM viewer

      Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 11, a new version of the popular open source Web browser. The update brings several noteworthy new user-facing features and a number of technical improvements under the hood.

      When Firefox 10 was released in January, the browser gained a new suite of tools for Web developers. Mozilla continued to work on the browser’s integrated development tools and has issued several major improvements in Firefox 11. One of the most significant new tools for Web developers is a new Style Editor.

    • Mozilla Announces Living Docs Project in Open-Source Documentaries

• SaaS

  • Rackspace Taps Open Source Pro for OpenStack, Cloud Builders

    Rackspace has recently added some more open source talent to its cloud services and hosting team.The recent recruit is Andrew Shafer (pictured] co-founder of Puppet Labs and former VP of Engineering at CloudScaling. Shafer will help Rackspace’s Cloud Builders and OpenStack teams develop products and bring them to market more quickly.

  • HP Cloud Bets the Garage on OpenStack, Open Source

  • Cloud Computing and Open Source

  • OpenStack Gains Global Traction

  • HP Cloud Bets the Garage on OpenStack, Open Source

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Oracle revs home-tweaked Linux kernel to 2.0

• Education

  • Australia is leading a global, digital, open education revolution

    Australia is ranked first among English-speaking counties and second in the world in leading a global, digital, open education revolution. Australia follows closely behind top-ranked South Korea –a nation with a bold policy goal of all textbooks and the entire school curriculum available in digital formats by 2015. In February 2012, the Australian government released a new version of their My School website. Users can now search nearly 10,000 Australian schools for statistical information and other details on a particular school, or to compare similar schools. The website provides a range of measures, including the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy, to help parents with school enrollment.

• Business

  • Talend Open Studio for Big Data Tackles Complexity

  • Semi-Open Source

    • eZuce Has Partners Talking Up Open-Source UC Software

• BSD

  • NetBSD 6.0_BETA binaries available for testing

    On behalf of NetBSD developers, I’m happy to announce the availability of a public beta of NetBSD 6.0, for your testing pleasure.

• Public Services/Government

  • Wikipedia Cofounder Jimmy Wales Now to Advise UK

• Openness/Sharing

  • Six ways to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day the open source way

  • Scientists tout ‘open source’ drug discovery

    Applying open source methodology to disease research could speed up the process of drug discovery, according to researchers at the University of Sydney.

    Senior lecturer at the university’s School of Chemistry, Dr Matthew Todd, told Computerworld Australia that the current method of drug discovery is extremely competitive and mostly carried out behind closed doors to protect certain ideas and any commercial benefits down the track.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Proposal would create online library for undergraduate course books

      A bill that would fund a library containing open source textbooks for the 50 most popular lower division courses at state colleges and universities has been proposed by State Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg on Feb. 8.

• Programming

  • Ray Ozzie’s not alone: Everyone loves Github

  • Using agile and open source software

    This week on Federal Tech Talk, Host John Gilroy is joined by Greystones Group CEO Sheila Duffy and Director of Technology Services Mary-Sara Camerino.

    Most listeners are familiar with Vivek Kundra’s 25 initaitives for reducing cost of federal IT. Two of these concepts are agile software development and using open source software.

Leftovers

• Security

  • Microsoft closes critical RDP hole in Windows

    Microsoft has released six security bulletins to close a total of seven holes in its products. According to the company, one of the bulletins (MS12-020), rated as critical, addresses two privately reported vulnerabilities in its implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

    The first of these is a “critical-class” issue in RDP that could be exploited by an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code on a victim’s system. Although RDP is disabled by default, many users enable it so they can administer their systems remotely within their organisations or over the internet. All supported versions of Windows from Windows XP Service Pack 3 to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are affected.

• Finance

  • Financial transaction tax: EU Finance ministers discuss the way forward

  • Jake Siewert, former Geithner aide, heads to Goldman

    Siewert is expected to inherit the portfolio of Lucas van Praag, a long-time Goldman executive who ran the public relations department and developed a reputation for his sharp wit and barbed emails to reporters he believed had misrepresented the bank. Van Praag is expected to leave within weeks.

  • Official slams Goldman Sachs as he quits: ‘Toxic’ culture, clients as ‘muppets’

• Censorship

  • Rather Than Speaking Out Against Domain Seizures, ICANN Provides A ‘How To’ Manual

    A couple weeks ago, we noted that with all of these questionable domain seizures going on, it was a shame that ICANN wasn’t speaking out against such questionable abuses of the domain system. We thought its silence was a sign of its impotence to actually take a stand. Turns out we may have actually overestimated ICANN’s willingness to stand up for the internet. You see, late last week it put out a “Thought Paper on Domain Seizures and Takedowns.”

  • Fake Political Attack Video Doesn’t Violate Lanham Act–Ron Paul v. Does

    The Doe Defendants registered the alias “NHLiberty4Paul” at YouTube and Twitter and posted a YouTube video attacking Jon Huntsman. The video ends “American Values and Liberty – Vote Ron Paul.” The Does acted without Paul’s permission–so much so that Paul sued them for violations of the Lanham Act and defamation. After filing the lawsuit, Paul sought to unmask the Does.

  • Shielding the Messengers: StubHub Un-Snubbed in Court Victory for Online Speech and Innovation

    Owners of online marketplaces can breathe a little easier this week: on Tuesday, a state-level appeals court issued a decision flatly rejected a dangerous court precedent that threatened not only online auction sites but social networks, message boards, and every other platform for online expression.

• Privacy

  • Open Ballot: Is privacy only for those with something to hide?

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • KEI Statement on India’s granting of compulsory license to patents on cancer drug sorafenib (NATCO Vs. BAYER)

    The India Controller General Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks has just (March 12, 2012) issued an order granting a compulsory license to patents on the cancer drug sorafenib/Nexavar, in the matter of NATCO Vs. BAYER. A copy of the decision is attached below, and is also available from the government’s web site here: http://ipindia.nic.in/

    KEI filed an affidavit in the case, which is available here. http://keionline.org/node/1359. The Bayer price in India for sorafenib was 69 thousand USD per year. A survey of prices on sorafenib is available here: http://keionline.org/prices/nexavar. Bayer’s main defense of the pricing was its program of discounts to lower income patients, and the fact that CIPLA was selling an infringing product at a lower price (Bayer is suing CIPLA, and asking for damages and injunctions).

  • Author’s Guild Boss On E-Book Price Fixing Allegations: But… But… Brick-And-Mortar!

    No sooner had the Department of Justice announced its plan to investigate Apple and five of the Big Six publishers for e-book price-fixing than a representative of those benefiting most from this (alleged) collusion boldly stepped into the fray. Scott Turow, bestselling author and president of the Author’s Guild, has issued one of the most profoundly self-serving and wrongheaded statements ever to grace the pages of a legacy industry’s website. There’s a ton to unpack here, so let’s get right to it.

  • Belgian rightsholders group wants to charge libraries for READING BOOKS TO KIDS

    I would have never, ever expected to be able to write a The Next Web blog post that involves my local library, but this story is just too crazy to not bring to your attention. It’s not really related to tech, though, so bear with me.

    People with a healthy interest in fundamental freedoms and basic human rights have probably heard about SABAM, the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, which has become one of the global poster children for how outrageously out of touch with reality certain rightsholders groups appear to be.

  • Trademarks

    • Scrolls will be Scrolls

      For us this was never about a trade mark but being able to use Scrolls as the name of our game which we can – Yey.

  • Copyrights

    • Pols fear ‘SOPA backlash’

      In the wake of the Internet blackout that led to the dramatic death of two controversial online piracy bills, a new warning has entered the Hill vernacular: “Don’t get SOPA’d.”

      Lawmakers are tiptoeing around issues that could tick off tech heavyweights such as Google or Amazon. They don’t want a legislative misstep to trigger the same kind of online revolt that killed the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate in January.

    • Guess What? Copying Still Isn’t Stealing

      Every time you think we’re done seeing totally ridiculous arguments about file sharing, the old really silly ones pop back up. Musician Logan Lynn has written a pretty silly rant on Huffington Post entitled Guess What? Stealing Is Still Wrong. And, indeed, it is. But nowhere in the article does he actually discuss stealing. He discusses infringement. In silly black and white terms that assumes that every single download is absolutely a lost sale, that no one who downloads ever gives him any money and that his biggest fans are criminals.

    • Richard O’Dwyer case: TVShack creator’s US extradition approved

      Home Secretary Theresa May has approved the extradition to the US of a student accused of copyright infringement.

    • ACTA

      • European Commission Blames Social Networks For ACTA Failure; Worried About Its Imminent Directive On Copyright Enforcement

        Now that the EU’s ratification of ACTA has departed from the original script of everyone just waving it through, the European Commission is clearly trying to come up with Plan B. Some insights into its thinking can be gained from the minutes (pdf) of a recent Commission meeting, pointed out to us by André Rebentisch.