03.16.12

Links 16/3/2012: Wine 1.5.0, HP’s webOS Community Release

Posted in News Roundup at 8:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Amazon EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million Linux servers

      We know that Linux on servers is big and getting bigger. We also knew that Linux, thanks to open-source cloud programs like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was growing fast on clouds. What he hadn’t know that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), had close to half-a-million servers already running on a Red Hat Linux variant.

  • Kernel Space

    • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS – Benchmarking All The Linux File-Systems

      When running Linux file-system benchmarks at Phoronix it is most often a comparison of EXT4 vs. Btrfs, since they are the “hot” Linux file-systems at the moment. Sometimes others like ZFS, Reiser4, and XFS also join the party. In this article is a look at all of the Linux file-systems with install-time support under the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. When carrying out clean installations each time with changing out the root file-system and using the default mount options, ReiserFS, JFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS are all being compared in this article.

    • Can Linux Win in Cloud Computing?

    • Graphics Stack

      • Canonical Publishes Apple Hybrid Graphics Driver

        Seth Forshee, a kernel engineer at Canonical since last year, published the Apple GMUX driver to the kernel mailing list. From the commit message, “Apple laptops with hybrid graphics have a device named gmux that is used for switching between GPUs and backlight control. On many models this is the only reliable method for controlling the backlight. This series adds initial support for the gmux device, along with anciallary support for disabling apple_bl when the gmux device is detected. Initially only backlight control is supported.”

      • X.Org Foundation Elects New Board Members

        They barely had enough members voting to meet the minimum 25% quorum to carry out an official election. Only 40 of 144 members voted this year, which comes in at just 27.77%.

      • Participating in Google Summer of Code 2012

        Hello, Wayland developers!

        It’s high time to begin discussing application ideas with mentoring organizations.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Kubuntu Active To Run On Tablets

        The lead Kubuntu developer Jonathan Riddell has announced the activation of Kubuntu Active project targeted at tablets. The project has started creating daily builds. At the moment the builds are available only for the i386 architecture, but will soon be available for ARMv7.

        “The project is aimed at creating a Kubuntu version of the Plasma Active tablet interface,” writes Fabian Scherschel on H-Online.

  • Distributions

    • Guadalinex 8 Screen Shots

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Here Comes The New Ubuntu Unity Spread Design

            Be prepared to be amazed because this is huge and would change the way you interact with multiple applications in Unity. The Compiz window manager has been around in Ubuntu for quite a long time, in fact I cannot think of a time when it wasn’t present. The good old days where people in fact use Ubuntu because of the fancy cube effect and other effects. With Compiz, you have a huge list of Compiz plugins like Spread, Expo, Alt-Tab and many more etc. And this has remained the way it has for the past few years, sticking out like a sore thumb in light of the new modern, gorgeous Unity interface. Well, all that is about to change soon.

            John Lea, the lead designer of the Ayatana Team has just provided insights of the new Spread that has been designed. We will be covering the new design here but the detail he goes into is overwhelming. It gives an idea of how every minute thing is thought of during the design process. All right, enough with all this beating around the bush. Let’s dive straight into it, shall we?

          • Sure It’s Popular with Consumers, But Ubuntu Increasingly Means Business

            Most of us who follow Linux know that it has been a huge success at the server level, and powers much of the server infrastucture of the Internet. The fact is, many Internet and enterprise users don’t even realize the extent to which they depend on Linux and related platform technology every day. In addition, Linux is playing a bigger part in business technology deployments, which companies like Canonical and Red Hat are extremely focused on. Now, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth is out with some hard-hitting data that shows just how effectively Ubuntu is competing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Here are the details.

          • Flavours and Variants

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Android Tablets Gain Market, Apple Loses

        According to a study by IDC Android tablets made some strong gains in fourth quarter of 2011. This growth can be attributed to Amazon which introduced its Kinde Fire tablet running cutom Android OS. Android tablets increased their market share from 32.3% in 3Q11 to 44.6% in 4Q11. This is an impressive 12.3% increase. On the contrary iOS slipped from 61.6% market share to 54.7%, losing around 7% market to Android.

      • Spark Linux tablet renamed Vivaldi

Free Software/Open Source

  • NYSE Opens Up About Giving Up Control

    We also had the opportunity to talk to NYSE Technologies’ Head of Global Alliances Feargal O’Sullivan. He will be a keynote presenter at the Collaboration Summit and will be talking about “Open Middleware Standards for the Capital Markets and Beyond.”

  • Cool, Free Open Source Tools for Producing Music

    Music-making technology has improved dramatically in recent years, and software and hardware tools even play a bigger role in the production processes of huge bands ranging from Coldplay to Metallica. Free and open source music making and production technologies have also become very sophisticated, and are worth looking into. If you play and produce music here are some must-have free tools that you can leverage.

  • Zytronic encourages creativity with open-source driver for touch sensors

    In order to increase the depth of support it can deliver to the market, Zytronic has introduced the first in a series of new software drivers for use with its range of Projected Capacitive Technology (PCT) touch sensors and touch controller products. Designed to work with Zytronic’s latest ZXY100 touch controller series, the initial drivers will support the increasingly popular Linux operating system, and for industrial users Microsoft Windows CE . The Linux drivers are supported on both Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian 6.01/6.02 distributions.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Eucalyptus refocuses on open source values

      Even as its competitors generate the headlines and talk more than a little smack, Eucalyptus Systems has been quietly and carefully re-aligning its business practices, while steadily growing. Now the cloud computing company is ready to take on the sector with less quiet and more open source attitude: including a radical shift in how it will deploy its main product.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Magnolia CMS 4.5 improves usability

      Magnolia International has announced the release of version 4.5 of its enterprise content management system (CMS). According to the developers, this update to the Java-based CMS – available as an Enterprise Edition or an open source Community Edition – is the “largest upgrade to date”, improving usability and adding a number of new features.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • OpenStreetMap completing move to Open Database Licence

        The OpenStreetMap project is preparing to delete data from its database on 1 April if data contributors have not agreed to licence their data under the Open Database Licence (ODbL) or assign it to the public domain. The move is the culmination of a near two-year long process to switch the licensing for the data behind the popular mapping project.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Study analyses ten years of security holes

      Since 2001, S21sec has collected all major software companies’ known security holes in a database, including those of Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. The “Vulnera Database” is fed from 36 sources, among them well-known contributors such as CVE, Bugtraq and Secunia. It currently lists more than 22,000 products and over 74,000 security holes in total.

    • Exploit code published for RDP worm hole; Does Microsoft have a leak?

      Chinese hackers have released proof-of-concept code that provides a roadmap to exploit a dangerous RDP (remote desktop protocol) vulnerability that was patched by Microsoft earlier this week.

      The publication of the code on a Chinese language forum heightens the urgency to apply Microsoft’s MS12-020 update, which addresses a remote, pre-authentication, network-accessible code execution vulnerability in Microsoft’s implementation of the RDP protocol.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Understanding the New Price of Oil

      In the Spring of 2011, when Libyan oil production — over 1 million barrels a day (mpd) — was suddenly taken offline, the world received its first real-time test of the global pricing system for oil since the crash lows of 2009.

      Oil prices, already at the $85 level for WTIC, bolted above $100, and eventually hit a high near $115 over the following two months.

      More importantly, however, is that — save for a brief eight week period in the autumn — oil prices have stubbornly remained over the $85 pre-Libya level ever since. Even as the debt crisis in Europe has flared.

  • Finance

    • Public Rebuke of Culture at Goldman Opens Debate

      Until early Wednesday morning, Greg Smith was a largely anonymous 33-year-old midlevel executive at Goldman Sachs in London.

      Now everyone at the firm — and on Wall Street — knows his name.

      Mr. Smith resigned in an e-mail message to his bosses at 6:40 a.m. London time, laying out concerns that Goldman’s culture had gone haywire, putting its own interests ahead of its clients.

    • Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • New Toxic Sludge PR and Lobbying Effort Gets Underway

      A trade association known for using the terms “compost,” “organic,” and “biosolids” to describe sewage sludge is investing in a new public relations campaign to influence policymakers and the public. The US Composting Council (USCC), which was founded by the disposable diaper industry, will be expanding its long-standing efforts to “rebrand” sewage sludge, which is increasingly disposed of on agriculture crops and through garden centers without telling the public that their food is being grown in medical, industrial, and human waste.

  • Censorship

    • Court Orders SOPA-style Blackout of 100+ Music Sites

      Every single ISP in India has been ordered to block 104 sites offering unauthorized music. A total of 387 ISPs must block the sites immediately via DNS and IP address blocking, backed up with Deep Packet Inspection. While the IFPI praised the action, their Indian counterparts are singing are more interesting tune – they don’t want to destroy their opponents, but bring them into the business.

      “Content theft is a global problem and we must have a global commitment to solving it. This is an important opportunity for the Indian government to move forward with strong protections against online theft,” MPAA chairman and CEO Chris Dodd told the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry conference this week in Mumbai.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

Links 16/3/2012: GNOME 3.4 Beta 2, Cinnamon 1.4

Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 65 Open Source Replacements for Security Software
  • A golden age of open source innovation?

    Open source’s ability to innovate has been challenged many times. But Glyn Moody argues that open source innovation is actually going from strength to strength, creating new opportunities to deliver cheap computing to people corporations would not normally consider.

  • Computer Aided Design the FLOSS way: An Interview with Franz Reiter, lead developer of gCAD3D

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Cranks Firefox to 11
      • Thunderbird 11 has been released! PPA Ubuntu 11.10 & LinuxMint
      • Mozilla struggles with Firefox for Windows 8 Metro development

        Mozilla’s Brian Bondy said the outfit did some preliminary work on getting a basic application working in Metro. However Bondy complained of poor documentation on Microsoft’s part and a general lack of public knowledge, saying, “To get started we read the MSDN whitepaper entitled Developing a Metro style enabled Desktop Browser. This document lacked quite a bit of information though so a lot of registry hacking was needed to get things working. Jim [Mathies] and I documented a lot of this missing information….”

      • Now You Can Chat From Thunderbird

        Thunderbird, the popular email client, has added chat support for future versions. The feature was introduced in the daily builds of Thunderbird. I am running 14.x series on Kubuntu.

      • Silent Updates Are Coming to Firefox in Version 12

        Back in December, we covered a blog post from Ehsan Akhgari, a Firefox engineer, which discussed work on what could eventually become an essential part of delivering silent updates to the Firefox browser. If you’re a Google Chrome user, you may already appreciate the fact that updates to the browser happen in the background, and now, according to a post on the Mozilla Hacks blog, background updates are coming to Firefox. Not every user is going to be happy with the news, though.

  • SaaS

    • Hadoop Training Is Easy to Get, Online or Offline
    • Is the OpenStack Foundation All about Big Money?

      An interesting argument and McKenty knows alot more OpenStack than I do. That said, I think that McKenty is wrong.

      You need to look no farther than the Apache Software Foundation to see how this dual system of money and meritocracy can work. The Apache Software Foundation takes big money from vendors like Microsoft, who yield little influence on development. Development is managed by The Apache Way of meritocracy and it works. The Eclipse Foundation has a similar model that has also worked well.

      So yes, you can have big money and a meritocracy for developers too.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Brand Confusion

      I cannot pinpoint accurately what caused to inflate the whole issue, but it seems that some at Apache OpenOffice (incubating) would like to stress that there are the rightful continuation of the now defunct OpenOffice.org project, to the point of showing outright hostility to LibreOffice. They base their claims upon the following elements:

      * they own the OpenOffice.org domain name
      * they own the trademark of OpenOffice.org
      * they must be the right heirs of OpenOffice.org since the Apache incubating project they’re contributing to was born out of the will of the copyright holder (Oracle) through its donation to the Apache Software Foundation.

    • Update on Apache OpenOffice

      Not too long ago, many, yours truly included, thought that OpenOffice was dead. That opinion was informed by the decision the major Linux distributions made to replace OpenOffice.org, as it was known at that time, with LibreOffice, the new office suite forked from OpenOffice.org by its former contributors.

      If this is all news to you, here is a brief recap of what happened. OpenOffice.org was a Sun Microsystems-sponsored project. It was, then, the most popular office suite, as it was pre-installed on almost all Linux and BSD desktop distributions. Then something happened. And that “something” was the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. by Oracle Corporation.

    • IBM on Licensing OpenOffice.org

      Clearly Heintzman does not get FLOSS. The GPL, for instance is a licence, not a contract, so one it not “contractually obliged to do anything”. One is permitted to copy by a licence from the creators under the conditions laid out by the GPL. OpenOffice.org ships under a mixture of licences for different parts of the code, reflecting its long history and huge number of contributors.

      He never does get around to explaining why IBM chose Apache/ASL licensing except to state that IBM chose it. He certainly does not explain why IBM went with the code contributed to Apache instead of the code forked to LibreOffice and the greater numbers of contributors if they were interested in “community”. OpenOffice.org has yet to make an ASL release while LibreOffice is chugging away making release after release and doing well while OpenOffice.org is still under code review years later.

    • LibreOffice 3.5.1 Is Now Available for Download

  • CMS

    • Drupal, Joomla and WordPress face challenges in Germany

      Last week, I attended CeBIT, the enormous technology trade fair that takes place every March in Hanover, Germany. This year, as I walked through the building devoted to content management and other enterprise technologies, I spied a booth with Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and TYPO3. All except for the latter are well known in the United States, but I was surprised to find that those three are struggling to find market share in Germany.

      I found it remarkable that the three open-source web content management systems that are so popular in the United States were having trouble getting the same level of recognition in Germany.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • PulseAudio 2.0 Is Set To Be Released Very Soon

      While many Linux desktop enthusiasts still have nightmares concerning the early days of PulseAudio, the developers behind this common open-source audio server are planning to do a major 2.0 release before month’s end.

      PulseAudio has been found in major Linux distributions like Ubuntu going back to 2008, but it was only in September of 2011 that they hit the 1.0 status. Their next major release is now PulseAudio 2.0.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • The Code for America brigade effect

      Have you ever seen results from your community engagement and realized the impact of your efforts? We recently told you about the LocalWiki project and shared some of the results from the Triangle Wiki day event. But then our friends at Code for America took it a step further.

      The co-founders of LocalWiki were in the Code for America offices last week to see how they could build on the success of the Code Across America event. They took the data–633 page edits, 100 maps, and 138 new photos–and amplified it.

    • GCC 4.7 RC2 Released; The State Of C99 Support

      The second release candidate of GCC 4.7 is available today for those wishing to try out this open-source compiler that will be officially released in the coming weeks. Separately, there’s also updated documentation concerning the state of the C99 language support.

    • The Prominent Changes For The GCC 4.7 Compiler

      With GCC 4.7 being released soon, new compiler benchmarks at Phoronix will be published in the coming weeks (beginning next week Monday), but for those wondering what’s different on the feature side, here’s a look.

      Most of the key GCC 4.7 features have already been talked about in a number of different Phoronix articles, but here’s a concise summary of what to expect from this open-source compiler collection.

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • A Response from Goldman Sachs

      The following letter to Goldman Sachs’ worldwide clients was issued today by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein:

      Dear Goldman Client:

      By now, many of you have probably read the regrettable resignation letter published in today’s New York Times by former Goldman executive Greg Smith, explaining why he is leaving the firm after twelve years.

      In the letter, in which he excoriates Goldman and its practices, Mr. Smith comes across as a man of conscience, ideals, and high moral standards. And as you read his words, you no doubt asked yourself this troubling question: how could Goldman have hired such a person?

      At Goldman, we pride ourselves on our ability to scour the world’s universities and business schools for the finest sociopaths money will buy. Once in our internship program, these youths are subjected to rigorous evaluations to root out even the slightest evidence of a soul. But, as the case of Mr. Smith shows, even the most time-tested system for detecting shreds of humanity can blow a gasket now and then. For that, we can only offer you our deepest apology and the reassurance that one good apple won’t spoil the whole bunch.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

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