03.29.12

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Building the worst Linux PC ever

  Linux is generally considered the go-to OS for under powered computers. Wanting to challenge the preconceived notion that Linux requires ‘a computer made in the last 20 years,’ [Dmitry] built the worst Linux PC ever around a simple 8-bit microcontroller.

• Munich Breaks Even By Migrating To GNU/Linux

  So much for the sycophants of M$ claiming costs had ballooned with GNU/Linux. Frankly, I am surprised they found so few problems with that other OS. Perhaps users “just rebooted” and made problems go away with that other OS. 46 per month with GNU/Linux is rather trivial for thousands of desktops. The help-desk people must nap a lot. I’ve had that many requests to reset passwords with ~100 PCs. I’ve had a few users who forgot passwords every weekend…

• Researcher publishes specs for real Linux-powered Star Trek tricorder

  The Star Trek tricorder has become a reality, thanks to the hobby project of a cognitive science researcher. Dr. Peter Jansen has developed a handheld mobile computing device that has a number of sophisticated embedded sensors. The device is modeled after the distinctive design of the 24th-century tricorder.

• Desktop

  • Windows 8 and the Linux Desktop Windfall

    So let’s recap, new interface that many people won’t like. Old operating that needs to be replaced.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Linux In The Shell Episode 003 – cut

    The cut command, as the man page states, “removes sections from each line of a file.” The cut command can also be used on a stream and it can do more than just remove section. If a file is not specified or “-” is used the cut command takes input from standard in. The cut command can be used to extract sections from a file or stream based upon a specific criteria. An example of this would be cutting specific fields from a csv (comma separated values) file. For instance, cut can be used to extract the name and email address from a csv file with the following content:

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 3.3: Finally a little good news for bufferbloat

    While I was out chasing computer history last week, the Linux 3.3 kernel was released. And a very interesting release it is, though not for its vaunted re-inclusion of certain Android kernel hacks. I think that modest move is being overblown in the press. No, Linux 3.3 appears to be the first OS to really take a shot at reducing the problem of bufferbloat. It’s not the answer to this scourge, but it will help some, especially since Linux is so popular for high volume servers.

  • Graphics Stack

    • KMSCON: A DRM-Based Terminal Emulator

      Announced yesterday was the release of kmscon, a terminal emulator for Linux that’s similar to what’s offered inside the kernel, but instead it’s in user-space and relies upon the kernel’s DRM interfaces as well as Mesa.

    • OMAP, Radeon, Valley View Linux DRM Updates

    • AMD Catalyst 12.3 For Linux Officially Released

    • xf86-video-ati 6.14.4 Has New Features

• Applications

  • Multimedia/Graphics

    • OpenShot! We can be all great directors, with our Linux, of course

    • New Shotwell release brings photo straightening tool

      The Yorba Foundation has announced the release of the newest version of its Shotwell photo organiser. Shotwell 0.12.0 adds the ability to straighten photos, support for GTK+ 3, the ability to recognise more Android devices for photo import, and more.

    • Shotwell Reaches 0.12.0, Finally Gets Support For GTK3

    • Fork Skewers Photoshop Skin GimpShop

      The GIMP photo editor is a popular favorite among FOSS fans. However, some users think the app’s interface could benefit by looking more like the one found on Adobe Photoshop. That’s where GimpShop is supposed to come in. However, it seems development on GimpShop for Linux has fallen woefully behind.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Customizing emacs for development

    • Build Instant Websites with Poole

    • Reminder for everybody living in the attention economy: who should we really thank for command-line Wikipedia searches?

    • Easy File Sync with Bitpocket

    • SSH Tunneling – Poor Techie’s VPN

    • HOWTO: TI-83 Emulator on Linux

    • Use NFS to Extend and Integrate Your Filesystems

    • Using Nagios to Monitor Your Clusters’ Health

  • Wine

    • And what about Valve?

  • Games

    • Coming soon Linux Wasteland 2 to Linux

      Linux Games are going main stream now. Wasteland 2 follows the greatly successful 1988 version of the role playing game, by the same name. Wasteland follows the success of Double Fine Adventure developed by game producer of Brian Fargo of InXile Entertainment.

      Termed a post-apocalyptic role-playing video game, it is expected to be a computer-only genre and will not be developed for consoles or other handheld platforms. The dream with Wasteland 2 is to create the magic of theFallout game series, which had earlier proved to be a complete new gaming experience in this genre.

• Desktop Environments

  • The Best Linux Desktop Environment is…

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 18th March 2012

    • KDE Cascadia & LinuxFest Northwest

      KDE Cascadia will be held in partnership with LinuxFest Northwest (LFNW) in Bellingham, Washington on April 28 and 29, 2012. This is a pilot of regional KDE gatherings in conjunction with established grassroots FOSS conferences. The goals are to reduce the effort and expense associated with a single annual stand-alone meeting, and to increase user and developer involvement in KDE. The LFNW Organizers warmly welcome the KDE Community.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Gnome 3.4 Released

    • GNOME 3.4 Redefines the Linux Desktop

      GNOME 3.4 will be a big release, as it’s the one that will ‘refine’ the GNOME 3.x experience. This is not an initial attempt, or even just a bug fix stability effort. GNOME 3.4 is about making GNOME 3.x great.

    • All the new cool stuff in Epiphany, alias, Web

    • New GNOME 3.4 Release Offers Features, Fun & UI Finesse

    • GNOME 3.4 Released with Lots of Improvement

    • Gnome 3.4 Review: Impressive, Elegant, Fast

    • GNOME 3.4 has been released, includes better search functions

    • GNOME 3.4: Will the new features make you a fan?

      I have never being a big advocate of the GNOME desktop environment, most especially the standard (default) GNOME 3 desktop. That is why I am looking for distributions that ship with a modified GNOME 3 desktop. Three that I have so far identified are: KahelOS, Deepin Linux, and Comice OS 4.

      So, what exactly are the new features of GNOME 3? Will they reveal that the developers listened to critics or are still forging ahead in the direction that started this whole mess? I am not in a position to answer those questions because no distribution has been released with GNOME 3.4 yet (it was just released today).

• Distributions

  • Toorox 03.2012 KDE Screen Shots

  • New Releases

    • DoudouLinux 2012-03

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2012 Results

    • Red Hat: The first billion dollar Linux company has arrived

      Depending on how you look at these things, Red Hat has long been a billion dollar company. With a market cap of almost $10-billion dollars, Red Hat, the biggest of Linux companies, has long been open-source’s shiniest success story. The gold standard of business success, though, is making a billion dollars in revenue in a single fiscal year and Red Hat has just this feat off.

    • Red Hat climbs, Mosaic lower after hours

    • Red Hat Becomes Open Source’s First $1 Billion Baby

    • Red Hat on what an open cloud really means

      Open source cloud offerings have specific characteristics that provide benefits above and beyond proprietary offerings, two top officials at Red Hat said during a webinar this week.

    • Linux Powers Red Hat Over $1 Billion – Why Open Source Matters

    • Red Hat: First Open-Source Company With $1 Billion In Revenue

    • What Red Hat Has Done is Worth So Much More Than a Billion

    • Jim Zemlin Congratulates Red Hat

      Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation, has congratulated Red Hat for registering more than $1 billion in revenues. He writes, “I would also like to use this occasion to show that there is significantly more at play here. It isn’t just the billion dollars Red Hat is making with open source; there are many more reasons why Linux and open source are fundamental building blocks of the future.”

    • Red Hat Earnings End Ubuntu Server Debate

      When Red Hat (RHT) announced strong quarterly results yesterday, the figures essentially ended a recent debate about Red Hat Enterprise Linux vs. Ubuntu Server. Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth recently suggested Ubuntu is more popular than RHEL for some server applications. But when it comes down to dollars and cents, business-centric applications, and partner engagement, most evidence still points to Red Hat as the overwhelming Linux market leader.

    • Red Hat Sets a Date for OpenShift Source Release

    • A billion thanks to the open source community from Red Hat

      Sixteen years ago, few imagined that a handful of people at a Linux start-up in North Carolina were laying the groundwork for an open source business with more than a billion dollars in annual revenue. Yet as we stand at that milestone, and as we take the opportunity to reflect, we believe our success speaks volumes about the power of community.

      This billion dollar milestone is not only a win for Red Hat—it is a victory for open source advocates everywhere. Our fight has always been about something greater than just access to software code. The open source movement is rooted in shared values about knowledge; it is founded on ideas that are both ordinary and revolutionary. As members of this community, we elevate transparency over secrecy. We prize freedom rather than control. This is the open source way: sharing ideas and information, contributing to an intellectual commons that leads to greater innovation and benefits us all.

    • Fedora

      • Test Day:2012-03-29 Gnome Shell Software Rendering

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • What Ubuntu users think about Ubuntu 2012

        • Ubuntu Precise Pangolin – Another KDE user tastes Unity

          The new Ubuntu LTS release looming in the horizon tempted me to try it out as a candidate for a my next Linux OS. Here’s what I think.

          Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is pretty stable for its current status as beta. The linux kernel at version 3.2.0-20 feels good and seems to support wider range of hardware. The AMD Turion CPU seemed to be reasonably cool while idle. But still Linux has a long way to go in terms of prolonging battery usage. All applications are up to date at least to the latest stable versions which is the best thing in Ubuntu.

        • Ubuntu TV? It’s not a science fiction but pure reality … Here’s how!

        • Poll: Do We Need Gubuntu?

        • Here’s Top 16 Beautiful Wallpapers Chosen for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

        • Canonical Integrates Landscape with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

          Canonical launched Landscape system management tool without much fanfare sometime ago. Now, in a most recent update, they have integrated Landscape with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, again without much hoopla. In line with a recent move by Canonical integrating handy Privacy Management tool into Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, this is yet another bold initiative by them.

        • 75% of Ubuntu Users Also Use Windows (And Other Fun Stats)

        • [How To] Easily Skin Ubuntu’s Unity Desktop

        • Unity 5.8 Lands in Ubuntu 12.04

          Unity 5.8 landed in Ubuntu 12.04 this weekend – but what’s new and what’s improved? Let’s take a quick gander…

        • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 258

        • On Old Hardware, Think Twice About Ubuntu 12.04

          With the official release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” being less than one month away, the feature freeze having long passed, and the kernel freeze being imminent, it’s time for the usual biannual Ubuntu Linux benchmarking festivities at Phoronix. In the coming days and weeks there will be numerous articles looking at the performance of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when it comes to its desktop/workstation performance, boot performance, power consumption, and all sorts of other figures to judge the performance of Ubuntu’s Precise Pangolin release. One area from the testing thus far that has stood out has been the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS performance on older PC hardware, but unfortunately it’s not standing out for a good reason.

        • Holistic UI is smarter UX

          In the open source community, we celebrate having pieces that “do one thing well”, with lots of orthogonal tools compounding to give great flexibility. But that same philosophy leads to shortcomings on the GUI / UX front, where we want all the pieces to be aware of each other in a deeper way.

          For example, we consciously place the notifications in the top right of the screen, avoiding space that is particularly precious (like new tab titles, and search boxes). But the indicators are also in the top right, and they make menus, which drop down into the same space a notification might occupy.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Tweak Pear Linux Comice OS 4 dock

          • Xubuntu Project Leader Resigns

          • Ultimate Edition 3.2 Screenshots

• Devices/Embedded

  • First batch of $35 Linux computers arrives in UK, awaiting CE compliance testing

    The Raspberry Pi foundation issued a statement today with a status update on their much-anticipated $35 Linux computer. The first 2,000 completed units have arrived in the UK, but the devices aren’t ready to be shipped out yet because the foundation’s retail partners won’t distribute them to purchasers until they have been stamped with the CE marking.

    The CE marking, which you can find on many consumer electronics products, certifies that a product conforms with the regulatory standards of the European Economic Area. In order to apply the CE marking to a product, it has to undergo a conformity assessment and the manufacturer has to produce certain documents.

  • Raspberry Pi: What You Need to Know (Features, Details and More)

    Raspberry Pi’s Linux-based Fedora operating system, which was developed primarily to encourage kids to code, looks potent enough to compete with Microsoft’s Windows 8 when it arrives. It is even powerful enough to handle everyday jobs which are done with word processing and spreadsheets.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Samsung boasts of five million Note sales

        The Note, which bridges a divide thanks to its large screen and smartphone connectivity, has a role and is selling well, apparently.
        It’s an odd one, the Note, with its 5.3in screen. It looks like a small tablet in a giant hand or an oversized phone in small one. We quite liked it when we reviewed one.
        Overall, five million have been sold, Samsung says, which is pretty high. Just in the UK, for example, the Note is not cheap and the white version is exclusively sold through John Lewis, which limits its opportunities a bit.
        The Note has been on sale for five months thou
        Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/18mXC)

      • Google 7-inch tablet PCs to bring price-cut pressure on other vendors

      • Lenovo Launches Android App Store For Enterprise Customers

        Android is a market leader in consumer segment, however it needs to catch-up with iOS in the enterprise segment. Android partners are building solutions to boost enterprise adoption of their devices. Lenovo has launched its Android app store targeted at enterprise customers.

      • Amazon Kindle Touch 3G Available In Europe

      • Epson Moverio: World’s first wearable Android display

      • Motorola XOOM WiFi receiving Android 4.0.4 update – Includes quicker screen rotation, camera improvements

      • Samsung GT-I9300 coming in May with dual-core and ICS

      • Sprint to debut EVO One at NY Event on April 4?

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Refurbed Kindle Fire $139 at Amazon today

      Curious about the low-cost Amazon Kindle Fire Android tablet? If you’re quick, you might be able to snag a refurbished unit for $139 at Amazon today. The company introduced the Fire at the end of 2011 at the loss-leader price point of $199, though it’s rumored to cost over $190 to build. So at $139, you’d be getting the Android-powered tablet well below cost.

    • OpenTablets.org: A Brand New Community For Mobile Open Source!

      A fresh new community has recently come together in the form of OpenTablets.org. The brain-child of Matthias Lee, the community’s primary effort centers around MakePlayLive’s premier tablet, Vivaldi. There is a lot of productive discussion there concerning Plasma Active, and making it run proper on this device, but the community also welcomes discussion about any other open tablet platform or open-source software running on various other hardware.

Free Software/Open Source

• Success is in the future of open source software

  Recently I read an article from Wired Magazine about the creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds. The article portrays him as a family man, yet when it’s time to get to work he does just that. And we already know this, as he is the chief of the Linux kernel which as we know is a lot of work. But, as with the nature of open source software, he takes a lot of pride with his work, which is clearly evident as he turned down an invite to Apple directly from Steve Jobs. This says a lot. Many of those that use proprietary software and purchase it over and over, have a hard time absorbing the fact that open source software is free and that developers write the software not to make a profit, but because they enjoy doing it and saw a need for the software they write. As I’ve mentioned before, the end result is quality software that any developer can open, look at, and tweak if they wish. Or, they can inquire with the main team in charge of the particular software title and offer their help. It’s a huge system of collaboration, and a very effective and powerful one.

• Slashdot TV Launches Online, Including Many Open Source Videos

• Interview with Jeffrey D. Long, author of Longitudinal Data Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences Using R

  This is an interview with Jeffrey D. Long, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa (USA) and author of the book “Longitudinal Data Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences Using R“. Dr. Long answers questions about his book and how he uses R in his work in behavioral sciences.

  F4S: Hello Jeffrey. Please, give us a brief introduction about yourself.

  I am a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa (USA). My expertise is applied statistics in the behavioral and medical sciences. I am the head statistician for Neurobiological Predictors of Huntington’s Disease (PREDICT-HD), funded by the National Institutes of Health and the CHDI Foundation, Inc. PREDICT-HD is a longitudinal observational study of individuals at-risk for Huntington’s Disease (HD), which is an inherited neurodegenerative disease. PREDICT-HD has several scientific sections that concentrate on different aspects of HD, including brain imaging, cognitive functioning, motor impairment, and psychiatric problems. My biostatistics team analyzes data from the scientific sections to answer substantive research questions.

• Ubuntu 12.04 KVM/Xen Virtualization: Intel vs. AMD

• Events

  • Topics For Next Week’s Linux Foundation Summit

    Among the items on the 2012 LF Collaboration Summit schedule worth pointing out (and the ones where likely I’ll be at) include:

    - The Importance of Linux at Intel

    - OpenMAMA

    - The Linux Kernel: What’s Next [Panel]

    - Intro to Tizen and Community and Architecture Overview

    - Kernel in the Way: Bypass and Offload Technologies

    - Introduction to Tizen SDK

    - The Decline of the GPL and What To Do About It

    - Architecture of a Next-Generation Parallel File System

    - Upcoming Technologies: Wayland & oFono

    - Dtrace

    - LLVM Toolchain – Update and State of Building Linux with LLVM

    - UEFI as the Converged Firmware Infrastructure

    - Btrfs Filesystem: Status and New Features

    - GCC, C++ and Transactional Memory

    - The Future of the GNU C Library

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Inside Mozilla’s Amazing Office Space In San Francisco

      Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that runs the Firefox project, has more than 450 million users worldwide and is known for its open source projects.

      It’s just as open in real life. Mozilla treats volunteer developers as nicely as they treat their staff. They even give them office space.

    • Firefox’s Rapid Releases Are Still Causing Hiccups, But They’re Necessary

• SaaS

  • ownCloud Partner Program for Cloud Infrastructure Software

    ownCloud Inc., which develops open-source software for building cloud infrastructure, has existed as a commercial entity for only a few short months. But it has already begun racking up partnerships throughout the channel, highlighting the plentiful opportunities available at the juncture of the cloud and open-source. Read on for the scoop, and what it means for the open-source ecosystem more broadly.

    ownCloud has been around as an open-source project for a while, but its launch as a commercial venture dates only to late last year. Since that time, ownCloud has pushed out an important point release of its platform that brought novel functionality not only to the ownCloud package, but to the open-source channel as a whole, where ownCloud currently has no real contenders — which is probably for the best, since competition from proprietary platforms like Dropbox and iCloud should keep the team busy enough.

• CMS

  • How to Build an In-Vehicle Infotainment System with Drupal

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • 2011 Free Software Awards announced

    Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF’s annual free software awards at a ceremony on Sunday, March 25th, held during the LibrePlanet 2012 conference at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

  • Enabling GPS location in ModemManager

  • Ruby creator Matz wins Free Software Award

    At the Free Software Foundation’s Libre Planet conference in Boston, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the inventor of the Ruby language, was honoured with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Luis Falcon received the FSF’s Award for Projects of Social Benefit on behalf of GNU Solidario for its GNU Health project.

• Programming

  • Go version 1 is released

• Standards/Consortia

  • Happy Document Freedom Day!

  • Document Freedom Day: Promoting document freedom

    Today is Document Freedom Day. It’s not the easiest subject to explain. It’s easy to explain why being free to video a police encounter in the USA is important, or why it’s wrong for your eBook to be remotely controlled by a vendor, but many people fail to understand the subtlety of why a document format is important.

    Having your work in a format that will still be readable in 20 years makes sense, and being able to be sure when you share a document with others that they will be able to read it and work on it is good, but people glaze over when you try to explain that an ISO standard is not enough. Having a document format standard that is beyond the control of any individual vendor and is fully implemented in multiple products is crucial, but seems esoteric.

Leftovers

• Is Office 365 the best thing that’s ever happened to Linux?

• YubiKey Review: Next Generation Authentication

• The Magic of Editable PDFs

• Security

  • Critical Java hole being exploited on a large scale – Update

• Finance

  • Goldman Ex-Prop Traders Flopping on Their Own

    Long standing readers may recall the 2009 row over the pay level of Andrew Hall, the head of a Citigroup oil trading unit. He had made $100 million in 2008 on a long-standing pay arrangement that gave him a pay deal for his team that was just below 30% of profits, a level unheard of since Mike Milken at Drexel (and we all know how well that turned out). Kenneth Feinberg, Obama’s pay czar, refused to back down, leading to the predictable hue and cry as to how terrible it would be to break Hall’s contract (we pointed out that there were likely ways to do just that, that big producers like Hall were often guilty of expense abuses that would allow for termination for cause).

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Eye Opener: Turkish Charter Schools Sweep Across America Funded By Walmart Family

    Sharon Higgins, the independent researcher and blogger who helped found Parents Across America, reported in the Washington Post this week that the largest charter school network in the United States is a Turkish religious sect that few Americans know about.

  • Faces of NRA/ALEC “Stand your Ground” Law

    The Florida “Stand your Ground” law that may protect George Zimmerman, the man who recently shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, became the template for an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “model bill” that has been introduced in dozens of other states. As the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has reported, the bill was brought to ALEC by the National Rifle Association (NRA). (The law at issue is also known as the “Shoot First” bill or the “Castle Doctrine” law in various states.)

• Privacy

  • The Privacy Pickle

    It’s “offensive that several courts have ordered accused people to decrypt, possibly incriminating themselves,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “Police have all kinds of other options for their investigations, including access to computers powerful enough to decrypt, surveillance and search. An accused person should not have to convict himself.”

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • The EU agrees to end the roaming rip-off

    “Great news: this new deal puts an end to roaming rip-offs. This is really great news for anyone who’s been stung by high charges when using a mobile abroad.

    For the first time ever, there will be new consumer rules for mobile data – so you can browse the web abroad with confidence.

    And most importantly, for the first time ever, we will open the market to competition. Because competition is the best guarantee of long-term, low prices.

    Users will see dramatic price cuts in time for the summer holidays: and prices will continue to tumble until 2014.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • ACTA

      • European Parliament Committee Rejects ACTA Delay as MEPs Seek to “Bury” the Agreement

        The European Parliament’s INTA Committee yesterday soundly rejected a proposal to refer the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to the European Court of Justice for review. ACTA critics viewed the proposal as a delay tactic designed with the hope that public opposition to the agreement would subside in the year or two it would take for a court review. The 21-5 vote against the motion means that the INTA committee will conclude its ACTA review later this spring with a full European Parliament vote expected in June or July. The lack of support for ACTA within the European Parliament is now out in the open with multiple parties indicating they will not support the agreement. For example, MEP Bernd Lange stated: