03.21.12

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Exploring DIY Linux Router Distros

  Router lockups have been a problem for me ever since I got my first 802.11G Router in 2004. Since then, we’ve seen companies roll out supposed “power user” routers or routers meant for “gamers,” but for some reason not a single one has alleviated the problem of having to reset the router after running for a few days. After my new “gaming” router locked up while refreshing a server list for a multiplayer game, it was the last straw and I began searching for something a little more robust.

• New Universal USB Installer for Linux

  The Universal USB Installer converts live CDs of various Linux distributions to run on USB keys.

• Desktop

  • Past Year of GNU/Linux in Germany

    According to Statcounter, it’s more like 40%, but still quite good. Perhaps more of those units are going into homes rather than businesses. Doubling time at 40% per annum is about two years.

• Kernel Space

  • Linus Torvalds: The King of Geeks (And Dad of 3)

    The license plate on Linus Torvalds’ Mercedes SLK convertible says it all. The frame running around the outside of the plate reads “Mr. Linux. King of Geeks.” But the plate itself says “Dad of 3.”

    If you meet Linus Torvalds, he comes off as a mild-mannered, down-to-earth Finnish-American. He lives with his wife Tove, three kids, a cat, a dog, a snake, a goldfish, a bunny and a pet rat in a comfortable 6,000 square foot home just north of Portland’s tony Lake Oswego neighborhood. The house is yellow — his favorite color — and so’s the Mercedes.

  • Linux guru: re-merging of Android into kernel eases sysdev a bit

    Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman said the reintroduction of 7,000 lines of Android code into the Linux 3.3 kernel will make it somewhat easier for OEMs creating Android systems. App developers? Not so much

  • Graphics Stack

    • Mesa 8.1-devel Performance With Intel’s DRI Driver

• Applications

  • Darktable : Open Source Photography Apps and RAW Photo Editor

    Darktable is an free open source software development by Johannes Hanika and Henrik Andersso.this software designed for users interested in maneuvering photographies including RAW, meaning unprocessed camera captures with zero modifications in a database with numerous options to edit and enhance.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Become a VLC Media Player Power User

    • Linux Pocket Guide, 2nd Edition

    • Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Squeeze

  • Games

    • Let’s Play: Test Drive Unlimited

    • Fuduntu Gaming: The Humble Bundle for Android #2 is Live!

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Direct Rendering For Qt Compositor & More

    • Kdenlive: Superior Video Editor … not just for pros

      Video editing has evolved from a niche market in the computer world to something that computers are simply expected to do. It’s a tall order to be everything to everyone. But if any video editing software comes close to that mark, it’s Kdenlive—a KDE Applications star. With a strong commitment and a plan for making major improvements, the Kdenlive team is raising money. Please help out if you can.

    • KDevelop 4.3 released with basic C++11

      After about nine months of extensive development, the KDevelop team is happy to announce the immediate availability of KDevelop 4.3. As usual, this feature release comes packed with new features, bug fixes and improved performance.

• Distributions

  • Linpus Lite Desktop 1.7 review

  • JoldzicOS 3.31 Screenshots

  • Red Hat Family

    • Fedora

      • Naming Fedora 18, The Beefy Miracle Successor

        There’s two months until Fedora 17, which is codenamed the Beefy Miracle, is officially released. However, already getting underway is the codename proposal period for Fedora 18. What will succeed the Beefy Miracle?

      • Fedora 18 Picks Up New Features, Rejects Systemd-Journal

        There’s still two months prior to the official Fedora 17 release — Fedora 17 Beta isn’t even out yet — but besides coming up with a new codename, we have our first technical glimpse at new features to Fedora 18, which will be released by Red Hat and the community in Q4’2012.

        At yesterday’s Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee (FESCo), they approved the first batch of Fedora 18 features now that Fedora 17 is well into its feature freeze. The items approved for the yet-to-be-codenamed Fedora 18 include:

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Project News – March 19th, 2012

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Zorin OS 6 Lite Is Based on Lubuntu 11.10

            The Zorin OS development team proudly announced yesterday, March 19th, the immediate availability for download of the Zorin OS 6 Lite and Zorin OS 6 Educational Lite operating systems.

            This major release of the Zorin OS 6 Lite series is now based on the Lubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating sytem and takes advantage of the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, in order to provide an extremely fast and feature-packed desktop experience, especially for low-end machines.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Google is the least open part of Android

        I have been an Android user since the release of the G1. I was a Linux server admin at the time, and the idea of an open source environment on my phone was something I had been thinking about for awhile. Before the release of the G1, I was even considering diving into the OpenMOKO project, which nobody remembers (as a result of the G1 launch). For me, open source meant that, like my computer, I could adjust things at will that I wasn’t happy with. I followed the Android Open Source Project with eager anticipation, and watched as this community of developers modify and build and bolt on features to the Android that we know today.

      • ZTE N910 clears the FCC with LTE support for AWS and PCS bands

      • Sony Xperia Neo L MT25i announced as the company’s first Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone

        Sony has officially unveiled its first smartphone to come with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich from day one: the Xperia Neo L MT25i, announced earlier today in China.

        As its name suggests, the Xperia Neo L is the successor to the Neo and Neo V (which were introduced last year running Android 2.3 Gingerbread), although it doesn’t bring major hardware enhancements.

      • Huawei myTouch Smartphone Discovered Hanging In The Wild

        If you have been eagerly awaiting a first look at the upcoming Huawei myTouch line heading to T-Mobile, then we have good news for you. Thanks to a TmoNews ninja we’ve got a quick look at the upcoming non-QWERTY myTouch device, expected to arrive on store shelves in the coming months. At this point we don’t know much about the device, though we suspect a WVGA 800×480 resolution display and some other mid-range specs. The myTouch line isn’t billed as a high-end line for T-Mobile anymore — more as a “family” phone that has something for everyone. Huawei marks the third such manufacturer to release a device under the myTouch branding for T-Mobile, after HTC and LG.

      • Getac releases PS326: Android-powered, Milspec-carrying beast of a handset

      • Sony Releases Open Source Archive For The Xperia S, Includes Handy Build Instructions

        Sony released the Xperia S open source archive today, providing all the tools necessary to build a kernel and start cooking up ROMs for the Xperia S from Sony’s source code. In a post to Sony Mobile’s developer blog today, the company also noted that the opening of the Xperia S archive marks the first time Sony has published source code for a product built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S3.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Archos 1.5GHz G9 Turbo tablets now shipping

      Just a quick heads up that Archos has begun shipping their Turbo editions of the G9 series of tablets. Available in either 8-inch or 10-inch models, you also get to choose between 8GB or 250GB of storage. Price start as low as $269.99 for the (8GB) 80 G9 and go up to $389.99 for the (250GB) 101 G9.

    • Sony cooking up a Tegra 3 tablet with Android 4.0?

      According to a recently spotted NenaMark benchmark test entry, the followup to the Sony Tablet S could be in the works — and it carries a quad-core Tegra 3 processor. The device that was subject to the test was running Android 4.0.3 and featured a display with a 1280×800 resolution (the same as the Tablet S).

    • Sharp intros underwhelming RW-T110 Gingerbread tablet with NFC, not much else on board

Free Software/Open Source

• Big Switch Unveils ‘Open’ SDN Architecture

• Killed email device Peek resurrected with open source app framework

  Amol Sarva, the man behind Peek, recently made waves by giving away his remaining stock of discontinued Peek devices to hackers interested in reusing them for something interesting (the company is still around, but it’s focusing on cloud-based software services now — the hardware, and the cellular service that underpins it, is dead). This all happened less than two months ago, but we’ve already got an open source application framework from a coder by the name of Ryan Krumins available for Peek hackers to take advantage of.

• Big data enters open-source hype cycle

  Possibly. Open source was all the rage in the tech press for years as it promised to lower costs while improving enterprise IT freedom. Ultimately, a few start-ups cashed out big time (MySQL, JBoss), but for the most part the real value in open source came as both IT vendors and in-house IT organisations turned to open source to provide raw material for their software projects. Open source became less about sales and more about code, which was exactly what it was designed to do.

• CARS Unveils Free Open-Source IBEAM Portal

  Consolidated Asset Recovery Systems launched a new open-source, freeware version of its IBEAM Web portal to the agent and lender community.

  The company highlighted this new version of IBEAM — available after April 15 — will be specific to repossession and invoice management, providing all the capabilities of asset tracking, real-time monitoring of updates, online condition reports and complete transparency throughout the recovery process.

• 8 Free Open Source Alternatives To Microsoft Exchange

• NTIDA advocates open source software

  The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) says Nigerians need open source software if the country must be a full participant in the software industry.

• SaaS

  • EMC Intros Chorus Open-Source Big Data App

  • EMC wants to be the Linux of big data

    To broaden its reach in the big-data arena, disk-array maker EMC’s Greenplum division, which peddles data warehousing and Hadoop appliances and software, announced that it will open source its Chorus management and collaboration tools. EMC also has acquired Pivotal Labs, experts in agile programming, to help it build better big-data software and, equally importantly, help others do so.

    EMC has always been serious about data, but in case you haven’t noticed it, the company is now very serious about big data and the software that is used to chew it up and regurgitate useful bits of information.

• CMS

  • DrupalCon 2012 Kicks Off in Denver

    The Drupal Association, hosts of the biannual DrupalCon conference, announced the opening of its North American DrupalCon in Denver, with more than 3,000 Website designers, developers, site architects and IT managers in attendance.

    The first day of full conference events at DrupalCon is March 20. Drupal is an open-source content management platform that powers millions of Websites and applications. Drupal is built, used and supported by a very active community of people from around the world, and that community comes together for DrupalCon.

• Healthcare

  • HHS Revamps Its Open-Source Software for HIEs

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GCC 5.0 set for a modular future?

    Version 4.7 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is due out in April 2012 – a second release candidate was released last week. Discussions on the future direction of the utilities collection are currently underway. Musings over making GCC 5.0 more modular have attracted considerable attention. These have been inspired by the increasingly popular Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), a compiler infrastructure part-sponsored by Apple.

  • Interview: Richard Stallman

    RMS: The term “investment” is not applicable here, because that implies spending money on a business to obtain a larger subsequent profit. I set out to do a large job, but it wasn’t a business and the purpose was something more important than profit.

    I quit my job at MIT when I started writing code for the GNU operating system because I wanted to make sure MIT would not be able to claim copyright on the code I wrote for GNU.

    Evidently, financial support was not crucial at the beginning, because I made progress on my own, which drew others to help.

• Project Releases

  • Denemo – News: New Release Candidate

  • GnuTLS – News: Summer of code

• Public Services/Government

  • NSW Govt to open source digital archives software

    Files to remain in state-owned data centre for hundreds of years.

• Programming

  • What Boundary and DTrace Have in Common

    Is not – as Adam Leventhal, Jason Hoffman and Randy Bias hastened to point out – functionality. From a pure technology perspective, in fact, they could hardly be less distinct. Boundary is a SaaS based network monitoring service, DTrace an in kernel observation and tracing system. One is focused on the network at scale, the other on the performance and runtime characteristics of a single node.

  • GlobalSign Launches Open Source PHP Library for Fully Automated SSL Secure Site Activation

Leftovers

• Finance

  • Founders Of Marvell Technology Group Are Among The Largest Victims Of Greed At Goldman Sachs

    In the news release, Founders of Marvell Technology Group Are Among the Largest Victims of Greed at Goldman Sachs, issued 19-Mar-2012 by Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP over PR Newswire, the source should be Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP, rather than Marvell Technology Group as originally issued. The complete, corrected release follows: