03.19.12

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Snapshot: Where Linux is hot

  And, really, why wouldn’t it be? Nearly every “hot” technology hyped in the media these days directly or indirectly depends on Linux. Cloud computing? Big data? DVRs? Android smartphones? It’s all running Linux underneath, and as these sectors continue to explode, so too does Linux.

  About the only hot tech property that doesn’t have a direct Linux connection right now is the tablet market, which anyone would have to concede to Apple’s iPad.

  With all the giddiness about the success of Linux, I was a little curious about where Linux is popular these days, so with a little time to kill, I did a little research on Google Insights for Search. If you’re not familiar with this tool, Insights produces normalized results of search terms entered on Google, and tracks those trends over time. It also breaks out search terms by (again, normalized) geographic area.

• Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 191

• The Children of Linux

  Linux. It’s really not a hard operating system to learn. In fact, that very first statement is wrong. Linux is not an operating system. Linux a kernel which is used as the very core to build an operating system around. But these are the things that children of today are not learning. Not in public school systems anyway.

  When I was a teenager, I was very interested in computers. I looked forward to and really enjoyed my Information Technology classes. But it wasn’t just the computers that I was interested. The more I got involved with them, the more I wanted to know about what goes on to make them work. Or to be precise, the operating system.

• Linux Australia rejects fund request from Gold Coast

  Linux Australia has rejected a request for funding from the Gold Coast Tech Space, a project that would promote open collaboration among members of the technology community in the area.

• Linux For The Real World

  The recent Linux Foundation report about the Linux jobs market highlighted a need for experienced professionals, but the traditional Linux training and certification programs don’t always impart the kind of skills actually required by employers. In an attempt to bridge this gap, veteran Linux trainer and Linux Journal associate editor Shawn Powers has teamed up with CBT Nuggets to develop a series of Linux training videos entitled “Linux for the Real World.” According to the description, this course “goes beyond the hypotheticals to walk viewers through real-world situations.”

• Desktop

  • GNU/Linux has much more than 1% share of desktops

  • What Difference Can a Year Make?

    The difference a year can make is huge. A year ago, it was “standard wisdom” among many that GNU/Linux could never make it on the desktop. That does not seem to be the case today. The question this year seems to be what share M$ can retain, if any.

  • Operating Systems as Commodities

    Meanwhile, most OEMs are shipping more and more GNU/Linux systems and folks who weren’t into personal computers at all are shipping many millions of ARMed machines.

  • NoMachine Virtual Desktops Help Health Center Cut Costs

    The Mental Health Center of Riagg Rijnmond reduced their employee desktop budget by two-thirds by ditching their proprietary hardware and software for a Linux and open source-based system, which includes NoMachine software.

• Kernel Space

  • Kernel Comment: Btrfs too fast?

    Oracle and SUSE already support Btrfs, even though the filesystem hasn’t yet been proven in a proper field test and is officially still classified as experimental. The two distributors have also pressed ahead with the Btrfsck test and repair tool, foregoing any prior testing by the Linux community.

  • Intel Sandy Bridge Shapes Up On GCC 4.7 Compiler

  • New Intel Hardware Context Support Patches

  • Linux 3.3

  • What’s new in Linux 3.3

    Linux 3.3 fixes problems that resulted in freezes when writing to slow disks. Hot replace support for software RAIDs removes the element of risk when hot swapping disks in RAID arrays. The network subsystem now includes teaming support, a virtual switch and infrastructure for avoiding “bufferbloat”.

  • Linux Kernel 3.3 Released, will support Android Apps

  • Android Joins The Mainline Linux With 3.3 Release

  • Linux 3.3 eats Android

  • Graphics Stack

    • X.Org Was Not Accepted To GSoC 2012

    • NVIDIA Tegra 3 Makes For Fast Ubuntu On ARM

    • How To Begin Using OpenCL With Radeon Gallium3D

    • Why the GTK+ wayland backend can’t be enabled in linux distros, at all

• Applications

  • The Best Alternative File Browser for Linux

    The Best Alternative File Browser for LinuxLinux is rife with awesome file browsers, so if you don’t like the one that came with your distro, you have a lot of choices. Our favorite is the insanely feature-filled Krusader for KDE.

  • Rhythmbox and Empathy Get Quicklist Support

  • 7 Best Free Application Servers

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • CentOS 6.2 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend

    • Secure FTP Site with FileZilla

    • Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 6.2 (LAMP)

    • Howto- Resolve nosound problem on Ubuntu 12.04 and Older

    • Authenticating in PHP using SSH

  • Wine

    • Weekend Project: Take a Look at Wine 1.4

    • Wine 1.5.0 Fixes iTunes 10.x Installations

    • Wine 1.5.0 released

  • Games

    • Ryan “Icculus” Gordon Will Be Speaking In Two Weeks

      Ryan “Icculus” Gordon, the well known independent Linux game developer that’s single-handedly brought many games to Linux, is set to be giving a presentation in two weeks on a to-be-announced topic.

      Ryan Gordon will be giving a presentation on 31 March in Chicago as part of the Flourish conference. The presentation’s title and description is simply TBA (to be announced) on the presentation page.

    • Ides of March brings the Romans to 0 A.D.

      Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteer game developers, has released the ninth alpha of their open source real-time strategy (RTS) game, 0 A.D. yesterday. The aptly codenamed “Ides of March” release debuts the Roman civilisation and introduces new combat and trade systems.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Kubuntu Active is Activated

      The first Ubuntu flavour for tablets is now making daily builds. We even got our first bug reports from our localy Plasma Active upstreams. Images are for i386 only for now, ARMv7 should be added when we know it’s a bit more stable and have testers.

    • ‘Kubuntu Active’ Daily Builds for Tablets Now Available [Based on Plasma Active and 12.04 LTS]

    • KDE & Google Summer of Code 2012 – be part of it!

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 4th March 2012

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 11th March 2012

    • Kubuntu 12.04 To Drop KDE Support For Firefox

      Besides Canonical no longer sponsoring the Kubuntu distribution following the 12.04 LTS release of this KDE-focused Ubuntu derivative, there’s some more changes this cycle. As a last minute change prior to next month’s Kubuntu 12.04 release, Mozilla Firefox support is being dropped.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Cinnamon 1.4 Released: Come With New Settings Applet And Hot Corner Behavior

      Cinnamon 1.4 has been released and announced by Cinnamon Development Team. Cinnamon 1.4 bring a few changes, the major change in this release is a new hot corner behavior which can now use either workspace selection (like Compiz “Expo”) or window selection (like Compiz “Scale”).

• Distributions

  • Distrowatch Top 20-somethings

    There are a lot of distributions (distros) of GNU/Linux. A lot of newbies visit Distrowatch.com to check them out, compare styles and contents and try one or more out. It’s the “car lot” GNU/Linux. The ranking of “Hits Per Day” gives some idea of what newbies are seeking:

  • New Releases

    • Toorox 03.2012

    • SystemRescueCd 2.5.1

    • Salix OS 13.37 Live KDE has been released

    • Mint 12 LXDE Screenshots

    • Tiny Core 4.4

    • Tiny Core Linux 4.4 improves extensions searching

      The Tiny Core Project development team has released version 4.4 of its minimal Linux distribution. According to lead developer Robert Shingledecker, the new update makes searching for additional extensions easier using a new TAG field. Searching using tags is now supported in both the GUI and command-line versions of the AppBrowser and ScmBrowser for finding Self Contained Mountable (SCM) applications, which were introduced in version 4.2.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Some reflections on Mageia 2 Beta 2

      As a non-technical user of Linux, and after reading several posts about the battle between developers and users who feel neglected by them, I could not prevent myself from worrying a bit about the soon-to-come release of Mageia 2. You know, maybe Mageia also jumped on board that train that takes you to DumbOSland, where you “use-your-computer-as-if-it-were-a-cellphone”.

    • Mageia 2 Beta 2, Still No Live Images

      Mageia 2 Beta 2 was released yesterday with the declaration “near the goal.” They say “only one and a half months til the final release of Mageia 2.” Mageia 2 is in version freeze and developers are concentrating on bugs. However, there’s one major bug that continues to plague them.

    • Second beta version of Mageia 2 has been released

    • Second Mageia 2 beta arrives

  • Red Hat Family

    • JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 beta headed for the cloud

      Red Hat has announced the release of beta versions of both JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 and JBoss Developer Studio 5.

    • Red Hat releases Jboss beta software

    • Red Hat Delivers Beta of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 and Tools

    • Registration for Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2012 Now Open

    • Moving BI off the Mainframe

      Well, I am seeing it first-hand with a client that is swapping their IBM MVS/TSO platform for Red HatEnterprise Linux. All applications and data move off the mainframe and are exchanged for Micro Focus substitutes.

    • Red Hat drives JEAP to beta for off-road testing

    • Fedora

      • Linpus Lite Desktop 1.7 screen shot preview

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Introduction to task switching

        • An Open Letter to Ubuntu

          I spent some time Friday helping a friend who lives in the boonies to install a new modem. His only broadband option is ferociously expensive, so he’s still using dial-up Internet access, and his old USB modem died. He was savvy enough to not buy a USB winmodem; instead, he bought a US Robotics USB hardware modem — the kind that works with Linux. It appears to the computer as a standard USB serial port connected to a standard serial modem.

        • Developing for the “Average” User

          I like awesome stuff. Most of us do. However, there has been an unfortunate trend in the Linux community as of late. The major distributions have been gravitating towards a Linux that goes for awesome a little too hard. Gnome 3 and Unity have driven the major Linux distributions to be completely unusable to the average user. The Linux community isn’t solely to blame. Microsoft has had similar usability issues with their new Windows 8 design. And yes, I’m aware that the “average” user isn’t the typical demographic for Linux users, but, isn’t that the community’s end goal?

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Vinux 3.0.2 has been released : An Ubuntu based operating system for Visually Impaired People

            Mobeen Iqbal has announced the availability of the Vinux 3.0.2. This Ubuntu based operating system is specially developed for blind and visually impaired users. Hence it contain screen-reader, full screen magnification and support for Braille display.

          • SourceForge pulls off fake, ‘Trojan-wrapped’ Anonymous OS tool

          • Anonymosus-OS: the checksums that don’t check out

            Further to the ignoble saga of Anonymosus-OS, an Ubuntu variant targeted as people who want to participate in Anonymous actions: Sean Gallagher has done the legwork to compare the checksums of the packages included in the OS with their canonical versions and has found a long list of files that have been modified. Some of these (“usr/share/gnome/help/tomboy/eu/figures/tomboy-pinup.png: FAILED”) are vanishingly unlikely to be malware, while others (“usr/share/ubiquity/apt-setup”) are more alarming.

          • Anonymous OS could be a scam

          • SourceForge Rejects ‘Anonymous OS’

          • Anonymous Denies Authoring Linux OS

          • Web Site Takes Down Risky Anonymous OS

• Devices/Embedded

  • Alcatel-Lucent Improves Multimedia Fluency

  • The Home PC That Looks Like a Robot

    Inside the 5-kilogram robot is a fully functioning computer, running a version of Linux, that would allow a user to do all the things a computer normally does only this time with a face on it. With its HDMI outputs and Blu-ray player it is a multimedia center, but its speech-to-text (and animated mouth) means it can read out your emails, tweets etc.

  • Phones

    • Changing of the Guard for Personal Computing

    • Android

      • MetroPCS and ZTE announce Score M, obviously not aiming for powerhouse

      • Ice Cream Sandwich for Android rolling out

        While the launch of the new iPad is grabbing headlines worldwide this month, its chief software rival, Android by Google, is also undergoing a series of sharp changes that have not been heralded as widely.

        Google’s strategy — to develop the same operating system software that every phone and tablet maker could share and create a uniform experience for users — has largely worked.

        Android is quickly becoming one of the most popular operating systems, embraced by some of the largest smartphone makers worldwide.

      • Open source Android bug seeker launched

      • Android Continues To Ignore US Armed Forces

        Tweet

        Android is undoubtedly conquering the world. It has beaten Apple’s iOS in almost every market. However, Android doesn’t play very well with the US armed forced deployed overseas to help democracies and freedom. Those brave soldiers who risk their lives to keep us safe fin themselves deserted by Google’s Android. The same is the situation with US government employees or diplomats who are abroad serving their country.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • My Dream Tablet Running GNU/Linux: The LINTAB

      I recently purchased a Toshiba Thrive Android tablet. It is a wonderful device! The only thing that I can fault it for is not having access to the rich repository of GNU/Linux software. In this article, I will detail my dream tablet: a tablet running Linux.

    • TLWIR Special: Star Trek Foreshadowed the Linux Tablet

      Summary: In this special edition of The Linux Week In Review, I will discuss the coming growth of GNU/Linux running on tablet computers. GNU/Linux on tablets was indirectly predicted by various devices on Star Trek years ago. The Star Trek PADD undoubtedly ran Free Software because commerce and for-profit motivations were a thing of the past by the 23rd and 24th centuries. However, we live in the 21st century where profit is still a huge motivator. GNU/Linux is a great way to maximize profits on tablet hardware.

Free Software/Open Source

• Q&A: What the NwHIN folks are learning from DoD and VA open source efforts

  The DoD and VA are employing open source in their mammoth joint iEHR to an extent the federal government has not previously attempted – and among the agencies keeping a close eye on that is ONC.

• Open source culture can rescue ICT from Microsoft’s iron grip

  Are you tired of the seemingly endless tales of gloom being circulated by the media? Do you see headlines telling us that almost 1.2 million people under 24 today are classed as Neets (not in education, employment or training) and doubt whether the Government will ever fix education policy so that it teaches the next generation of workers to find their own feet? Are you concerned we are not doing enough to promote the virtues of original thought so that we can produce the nation’s future captains of industry and enterprise? Do you despair that education is helping to perpetuate a society that’s obsessed with entitlement and personal rights rather than driving young people to ambition? Well, to paraphrase that great British film Life of Brian, allow me to try and cheer you up, you old bugger.

• Sunside Games to release Crow’s Radiance engine as free open-source software

• Exclusive: MWR InfoSecurity unveils open-source Android app testing platform

• VMware Releases Java Open Source Framework Spring 3.1

• HP Releasing Additional Legacy webOS Source Code

  In addition to the Open webOS roadmap, HP is releasing legacy code from webOS 3.0.5 in a separate distribution.

• Facebook Bans Source Code Extraction In Proposed Governance Changes

  Facebook has proposed several changes to its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and is asking the public for feedback until March 22nd. The most important changes are the prohibition of extracting source code from its downloadable software, and a clear explanation that friends can share your information through applications. The changes are necessary since Facebook released its first download “Messenger For Windows” this month, and because it has come under greater scrutiny from government privacy offices.

• Team from UK visits Technopark

  A two-member team from the UK visited the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) campus in Technopark here on Saturday.

• Abhishek Arora wins Google’s open source competition, 4 other winners also Indians

  Abhishek Arora might be the baby of the family – he’s 14 – but when it comes to technology, he’s the grandpa . It’s little wonder that when Mohan Lal Arora wants to embed an interactive chart in his PowerPoint presentation, he calls on his son. Ditto for Ruhani Arora , who understands technology but turns to her younger brother for a helping hand every now and then.

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Chromium OS ‘Lime’ Builds Gets Desktop Mode and New Aura Window Manager

  • Mozilla

    • New Firefox beta romances developers

• SaaS

  • OpenStack 101: What Every CIO Needs To Know

• Databases

  • An Overview of Riak: an Open Source NoSQL Database

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Oracle Sees the Future

    The Oracle v Google, and OpenOffice.org fiascos may just be froth compared to deeper issues with Oracle. Some analysts are saying that the purchase of SUN has put Oracle into direct competition with lots of companies who used to promote use of Oracle’s database, Oracle’s bread and butter.

  • Analysts worry that something’s amiss at Oracle

  • JavaOne 2012 Call for Papers

    The JavaOne organisers have announced that they are now accepting presentation submissions for JavaOne 2012. The annual conference will take place from 30 September to 4 October at the Hilton San Francisco, Union Square and, as in previous years, it will coincide with Oracle’s larger OpenWorld event.

  • LibreOffice 3.5.1 Released with Fixes

• CMS

  • Nuxeo teams with LifeRay, uses CMIS integration

    Today, Nuxeo announced an alliance with Liferay. Both are open source products taking advantage of the CMIS standard to integrate the two systems.

    Nuxeo is an enterprise content management platform, while Liferay is a portal package. Both have the advantage of being Java-based, CMIS-compliant and are each open source, making integration between the two systems even easier. The way it should work is Nuxeo will act as a content repository for the Liferay portal.

• Education

  • $25,000 prize: “Why Open Education Matters” video competition

• Healthcare

  • Q&A: What the NwHIN folks are learning from DoD and VA open source efforts

• Business

  • Is It Wrong to Make a Profit From FOSS?

    “I can think of no business model that makes any sense without profits,” said Slashdot blogger yagu. Besides, “starting with ‘free’ software doesn’t guarantee profitability — free is misleading. Profits come from good products, and while there are plenty of good OSS applications, good isn’t enough. I’m all for someone turning an OSS application into a product, aka, software with great service! I’m happy to pay for TLC and see OSS members make money.”

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Can You Embed Open Source Pentaho Analtyics in your Application?

      To help accelerate the adoption and integration of Pentaho into third party applications, particularly software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, Pentaho now has a new program called Powered by Pentaho that is designed to help independent application vendors embed Pentaho’s analytics capabilities into their solutions.

• BSD

  • Installing NRPE on FreeBSD 9.0

    Normally, we would recommend using the source code file from the Nagios site to install NRPE. However, with FreeBSD, there are at least two advantages to installing NRPE from the official FreeBSD ports.

    First, the source code file in FreeBSD ports is already modified to work with FreeBSD. Second, FreeBSD ports contains many FreeBSD-specific plugins that can be used with the FreeBSD version of NRPE.

  • NetBSD 6.0 Beta Arrives With Cortex-A8, MIPS64 Support

• GNU Project Releases

  • GnuTLS 3.0.16

  • GnuTLS 3.0.17

  • GnuTLS 2.12.18

  • GNU Classpath 0.99 Released!

    We are proud to announce the release of GNU Classpath 0.99.

    GNU Classpath, essential libraries for java, is a project to create free core class libraries for use with runtimes, compilers and tools for the java programming language.

    The GNU Classpath developer snapshot releases are not directly aimed at the end user but are meant to be integrated into larger development platforms. For example JamVM, CACAO and Kaffe can make use of an installed copy of GNU Classpath 0.99, while GCC (gcj) will use the developer snapshots as a base for future versions. For more projects based on GNU Classpath, http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/stories.html

  • TeXmacs 1.0.7.15 released

    Many bug fixes. Beginning of a spreadsheet facility and user-defined widgets. Special editing mode for the documentation.

  • The OpenGL ES port of FreeGLUT is progressing

• Openness/Sharing

  • Putting open-source ideas to work

    Colby Powers, 13, works on a circuit board at the Sauk City Public Library as part of an Arduino club in which participants use simple computer programming to manipulate the open-source microcontroller.

  • Johan Open Sourcing His Solid State Free Energy Charger

  • Hardware

    • Qbo robot dons ASUS 3D sensor crown for intelligent autonomy

    • Xbox & Chumby hacker designs open-source Geiger counter

      Xbox hacker and co-founder of the Chumby project, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, has designed an open-source Geiger counter to help citizens in Japan detect radiation in the wake of the nuclear disaster, Huang writes on his blog.

    • Bunnie Huang builds open-source geiger counter to help Japanese civilians

    • Chumby co-founder designs open-source Geiger counter

• Programming

  • Minecraft Config: Subclassing and Inheritance, Editing all config items

  • Rackspace Open Sources Whiskey Framework for Node.js Testing

Leftovers

• Finance

  • NYC Activists Differ on Occupy’s Direction

    A day after police broke up a rally at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and arrested dozens, Occupy Wall Street protesters said Sunday that their movement for economic justice would pick up momentum with the spring.

    Activists listed issues including student debt, the environment and the November elections as priorities going forward. But some observers who watched workers hose down the now-barricaded park that was Occupy’s home wondered whether a movement so diffuse could accomplish anything.

  • Goldman Missive Shows Need for Volcker Rule, Democrats Say

    The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. employee who criticized the company’s culture in a newspaper column bolsters the case for Wall Street restrictions like the Volcker rule, congressional Democrats said.

    While the March 14 New York Times opinion piece by former executive director Greg Smith drew no requests for hearings or investigations, lawmakers including Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Jeff Merkley said the article showed why the U.S. needs tighter restrictions on Wall Street practices. The two Democrats authored the Volcker rule’s ban on proprietary trading and conflicts of

  • Culture of Predation: That Goldman Sachs Exposé Barely Scratches the Surface

    This week people have been buzzing about Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith’s high-profile resignation from Goldman and his description of the way that company’s ethics and morals have declined over the last decade and more, especially under current CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

    But Smith’s revelations aren’t really news at all, and the moral decline he describes at Goldman has been replicated throughout our corporate culture. Behavior at Wall Street firms like Goldman may have been more overtly criminal, but the shift from respect for the customer to the desire to rip customers off is pervasive and insidious.

    Wall Street has, of course, been the epicenter of this behavior. Years ago it was reported that traders at Morgan Stanley used to get off a phone call and gleefully shout “I ripped his face off!” — about their own clients — after successfully selling them what they knew were garbage investments. The surprise isn’t that Goldman Sachs encourages its employees to mislead clients and put its own interests above theirs — the surprise is that anybody is surprised.

  • Goldman Should Be Barred From Returning More Capital, Bair Says

    Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) should be prohibited from boosting its dividend or repurchasing stock because Federal Reserve stress tests showed the investment bank is too leveraged, according to former regulator Sheila Bair.

    The leverage ratios of four financial firms dropped below 4 percent under the stressed scenario, according to test results the Fed released this week. Two of those firms, Citigroup Inc. (C) and MetLife Inc. (MET), were prohibited from raising dividends or repurchasing shares. The central bank approved the capital plans of two others, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Arizona’s ALEC Leader Wants Your Boss to Make Decisions About Your Contraception Coverage

    One of the most extreme proposals yet in a recent spate of attacks on women’s reproductive health comes out of Arizona. American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Arizona State Chair, Rep. Debbie Lesko (R), is sponsoring a new bill that allows employers to pry into the sexual life of female employees.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • US judge rules that you can’t copyright pi

      The mathematical constant pi continues to infinity, but an extraordinary lawsuit that centred on this most beloved string of digits has come to an end. Appropriately, the decision was made on Pi Day.

      On 14 March, which commemorates the constant that begins 3.14, US district court judge Michael H. Simon dismissed a claim of copyright infringement brought by one mathematical musician against another, who had also created music based on the digits of pi.

      “Pi is a non-copyrightable fact, and the transcription of pi to music is a non-copyrightable idea,” Simon wrote in his legal opinion dismissing the case. “The resulting pattern of notes is an expression that merges with the non-copyrightable idea of putting pi to music.”