Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Server

  • IBM Power Systems Server Buying Guide

• Kernel Space

  • UEFI On Linux Is Like A Pathogen

    Red Hat’s Matthew Garrett talked this week again about the troubles in supporting UEFI under Linux.

    With Linux support for PCI Express ASPM having been corrected to address the notorious Linux kernel power regression of last year, Matthew Garrett’s latest topic and focus of work has been on UEFI for Linux.

    Matthew’s commonly talking about the UEFI problems with Linux, especially when it comes to the Secure Boot functionality. Some past examples (and some reading for reference) include UEFI Secure Boot Still A Big Problem For Linux, Going Over The Good & Bad For UEFI On Linux, and Myths About Secure Boot: Security, Microsoft, Etc.

  • A Linux Driver For USB-Based Projectors

    There’s a new Linux graphics driver for allowing mini/pico/compact/handheld USB-interfacing display projectors to work under your favorite distribution.

    Earlier this week an email hit the Phoronix news inbox from Antonio Ospite, who has been working on this new driver support along with a Reto Schneider. While some of these small projectors have a VGA/HDMI interface (in which case no special Linux graphics driver is needed under Linux), a growing number of them are USB-based where only a Microsoft Windows driver is available. (If you’re not familiar with these types of mini/handheld projectors, see the Texas Instruments projector demo from X@FOSDEM.)

  • LF Collab 2012: Killing Blobs, Wayland, DTrace, Etc

    The 6th annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit concluding this week in San Francisco. In case you missed out on any coverage of the interesting sessions from the event, here’s a run-down of the worthwhile information that was shared and discussed, plus a few other extra tid-bits from the invite-only event.

  • Linux Kernel Developers Detail Top Gripes

  • Graphics Stack

    • Unigine Pushes Engine Changes; More Mesa Friendly

      Unigine Corp has announced a set of improvements to their cross-platform and visually-stunning Unigine Engine. With the Source Engine on Linux finally looking to be imminent for entering the public spotlight, new improvements to Unigine couldn’t come at a better time.

    • The Wayland Redux From This Week

• Applications

  • The Best FTP App for Linux

  • TermSaver: Pretty Cool Text-Based Screensaver, Try it in Ubuntu 12.04

    TermSaver is a pretty cool screensaver that can run from the command-line interface or terminal in Ubuntu/Linux. TermSaver isn’t supposed replace other screensavers that come with your desktop such as GnomeShell, Unity,KDE, or other Desktop Environment. And it also might not be able to carry out the actual purpose of a screesaver since it lacks a lot of pixel movements (screen animations), which otherwise helps to prevent “screen burns” on display devices

  • 7 Essential Linux Classroom Tools

  • mutt-kz – A fork of Mutt mail client has been released

  • Weekend Project: Bug Out with Entomologist

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Thread: ACLs finer grained permissions control

    • How to Easily Automount Windows NTFS partition in Ubuntu

    • Two methods disable swap partition ubuntu 11.10

    • Mount partition automatically at start up using PySDM

    • How to install Jitsi in Fedora

    • Easy Way to Create PDF Printer in Ubuntu 12.04

    • How to Install GIMP 2.8 RC1 in Ubuntu

    • 20 Examples: Make Sure Unix / Linux Configuration Files Are Free From Syntax Errors

  • Wine

    • Fallout Free Today, Supported By PlayOnLinux

  • Games

    • Shadowrun Returns Raises $500k, Linux Version Planned

      Kickstarter is doing lots of good to Linux gaming as more and more developers are adding Linux support.

    • Trine 2 – Preview

    • Wasteland 2 Hits $2 Million On Kickstarter

    • Casual game “Pudding Panic” now available for LINUX via Desura

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 1st April 2012

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Gloobus Preview Update Brings GTK3 And Ubuntu 12.04 Support, More

      Gloobus Preview is an quick file previewer which supports images, documents (pdf, odf, ods, etc.), source files, audio (mp3, wav, ogg and more), video (avi, ogg, mkv, flv, etc.), folders, archives, fonts, plain text files and more.

      Gloobus Preview was recently fixed so it now works with Ubuntu 12.04 too. Besides the Ubuntu 12.04 fix, the latest Gloobus Preview from BZR comes with GTK3 support, support for password-protected documents, a rewritten documents plugin, WebM support, fixed ttf, pdf and video plugins and other fixes.

• Distributions

  • Revisited: Linux Mint (KDE), Chakra, Fuduntu

    I had tried out all these distributions again last week (during spring break) and this week, but I didn’t think that each of them warranted their own posts (and this is also why there were no posts last week), so I have decided to combine them all into a short summary of my experiences. I’m doing this because I’m seriously trying to figure out what I should start using after Linux Mint 9 LTS “Isadora” GNOME. I tested the 64-bit (because my computer has 64-bit hardware) live USB sessions of all of these using MultiSystem. Follow the jump to see what each is like.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Report: Red Hat and IBM Joining OpenStack Cloud Effort

      It’s certainly been an interesting week on the open source cloud platform front. GigaOm reports that IBM and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) are planning to announce their respective support for OpenStack, perhaps as early as next week. Neither company was commenting on the deal, but it sounds like a fait accompli, albeit one that hasn’t been announced yet.

      If not next week, we may wait for the announcement until the OpenStack Design Summit starting April 16 in San Francisco.

    • Video: OFA Code in Linux Distributions

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 17 schedule slips

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • This Wild Visionary Wants To Turn His Linux Company Into The Next Apple

          Sure Red Hat just crested the $1 billion-revenue mark with almost $150 million in profit while Canonical, maker of Ubuntu Linux, still isn’t profitable after seven years in business.

        • Ubuntu used in a video about viruses?

          I was bored yesterday and this Yahoo! feature got my attention. It is about how tell if your “PC has a virus”.

          I might be mistaken, but the image they used to illustrate the first symptom of those annoying virus infections that plague Windows users seems to have come from… a computer running Ubuntu!

        • Meet Ubuntu 12.10: Queer Quagga

        • Why the Juju Charm Store Will Change the Way You Use Ubuntu Server

          For the past 6 months we’ve been travelling around conferences talking about juju and charms. We’ve had charm schools and training events, but it’s been difficult to explain to people the differences between service orchestration and configuration management, especially with a tool that wasn’t so complete. Thanks to the work for some volunteers though, we’ve managed to have 58 charms available in Ubuntu so far.

        • Translation Help Needed! How To Translate Ubuntu Accomplishments

        • Canonical Takes a Closer Look at the Ubuntu Linux User Base

          Midsize businesses that are considering the transition from Windows to Linux might want to take a look at the results of a recent user survey from Canonical.

          Canonical, responsible for products such as Ubuntu and Launchpad, polled over 15,000 English speakers (as well as more than 1,800 Spanish speakers and 1,700 Portuguese speakers) in an effort to better understand its user base. But the answers the company received might not be what some would expect.

        • Who uses Ubuntu Linux, and why? Survey offers new insight.

        • Ubuntu in South African Schools

          South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth has spent many years and huge sums of money producing the Ubuntu operating system. It’s the third most popular desktop operating system in the world and not only because it’s free, but also because it is extremely competitive and improving constantly.

• Devices/Embedded

  • [Raspberry Pi] Testing’s done!

    Good news! We just received confirmation that the Raspberry Pi has passed EMC testing without requiring any hardware modifications.

  • Will Google Glasses will be the Greatest Linux Device Ever?

    Google Glass is Google’s effort at wearable technology, a display that projects contextual information and communication information onto glass that you wear (like a pair of regular glasses kinda/sorta). Little is known at this point about the actual hardware/software technology and to be honest at first, I thought this was an April 1st joke — but it’s not.

  • Google Begins Testing Its Augmented-Reality Glasses

  • Raspberry Pi sails through CE tests, ready for sale

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Samsung expects profits to double from smartphone boost

        Samsung Electronics has said it expects its profit for the first three months of the year to almost double as its smartphone sales continue to grow.

      • TLWIR 35: Open Versus Closed Mobility – The Nokia N900 Versus The Nokia Lumia 900

      • Sprint: Android 4.0 arrives for Nexus S 4G

      • Android Espresso Cup Jump-Starts Your Personal Operating System

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Google’s rumored Nexus tablet reportedly delayed until July

Free Software/Open Source

• Orphaned areas help call

• Open-source data mapping tool CartoDB provides customizable views

• The Growing Number Of Open-Source Projects

• Insecure open source software libraries?

  This is a valuable report, because it points out a general problem not specific to OSS.

• Facebook Open-Sources Ringmark Mobile Test Suite

• New York Times Adapts Open Source Mini-Game For Some Meta-Journalism

• OmniOS: Open source OS for the Solaris community

  OmniTI announced OmniOS, an open source operating system for application developers in the Solaris community looking for data-intensive application deployment.

  OmniOS is a continuation of the OpenSolaris legacy and aims to address the longstanding issues that occurred when Oracle decided to discontinue open development of the operating system. OmniOS builds on Illumos to make a complete OS.

• Events

  • Five favorite Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit sessions

  • That’s a Wrap: 2012 Linux Foundation Collab Summit Pictures

• SaaS

  • OpenStack Cloud Consulting: Mirantis Leading the Way?

  • Owncloud Takes Open Source Storage Sharing to the Enterprise

  • OpenStack Essex Delivers Cloud Dashboard

  • CloudStack, OpenStack and the Significance of Support

    In the wake of Citrix’s decision to cut its support for the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform and move full steam ahead with the next phase of its CloudStack strategy, it still seems clear to most observers that OpenStack and CloudStack are headed for fierce competition. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. All the way back in 2009, open source platforms were emerging as the best way for IT departments to guarantee flexibility in their cloud deployments. But what many people are still missing is that support is going to be the key differentiator between OpenStack and CloudStack, and other cloud platforms.

• CMS

  • Getting Started with the Drupal CMS

  • Joomla Open-Source CMS Marks 30M Downloads

    The community supporting the popular Joomla open-source content management system announced that it has been downloaded more than 30 million times.

    The community attributes the continued growth in the number of individuals, companies and organizations using the CMS to an aggressive development road map that included the release of Joomla 1.7 in July 2011. The CMS also began adhering to a six-month release cycle meaning more product enhancements being introduced more often. New features in the latest version included multi-database support, one-click version updating, predefined search options and language-specific font settings.

  • Open Source Development Provides CMS Development Services

• BSD

  • Review: DragonFlyBSD 3.0.1 — the longest DragonFlyBSD review ever — Part 4: Exploring DragonFlyBSD and its GUI issues

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • The Good Stuff Out Of GCC 4.7, C++11

    Another one of the interesting presentations from the LF Collaboration Summit this week in San Francisco was covering the improvements made to GCC 4.7, which is the latest GNU compiler update with several new features for developers.

    At this week’s invite-only event Qualcomm was highlighting LLVM and Clang as a great compiler infrastructure and shared their ambitions to build the mainline Linux kernel for ARM with LLVM/Clang, while Oracle’s Paolo Carlini was covering GNU Compiler Collection 4.7 and C++11.

• Public Services/Government

  • How One Non-Profit Aims to Create Open-Source Government

    As a non-partisan, non-profit organization, the Sunlight Foundation is taking the ethos found among the open-source software movement and applying it to government. It’s one goal is to publish the government’s public data in an easy-to-access location, at no cost to users.

• Licensing

  • Why we need the GPL more than ever

    The latest “why we don’t need the GPL” argument comes from one Donnie Berkholz of an analyst firm called RedMonk. It begins with a falsehood: “In the early days of the GPL and copyleft software, it played an important role in forcibly training companies how free/open-source development worked.” No, it did not. The GPL, being a free software licence, had nothing to do with open source at all; it was about ensuring freedom for users, freedom of the political kind.

Leftovers

• 7 Mobile Operating Systems You Might Never Use

• Finance

  • Big Repairs Still Needed To Fix the American Jobs Picture

    No doubt, a few economists and some business leaders will be inclined to argue that the trend is not entirely negative. Fair enough. Perhaps it indicates flexibility in US labor markets, especially as the economy tries to recover through the formation of small business. Also, it makes sense that an economy trying to recover would first add back part-time work in equal amounts to full time work, before stepping up to the array of benefits extended to the full time worker. But therein lies the problem: American workers desperately need health-care coverage, which is not typically offered to part-time workers. Meanwhile, deleveraging of household balance sheets since the high debt levels of 2007 has been mild. The result is yet another way to see how deeply consumer demand is restrained: there’s not enough work to both pay down debt, and restart consumption.

  • Fed may fine firms not part of foreclosure deal

  • Kaplan, community members discuss city’s bond debt deal with Goldman Sachs

    Rebecca Kaplan was once a rabbinical student, and the Oakland City Councilmember still knows her scripture well. On Wednesday afternoon, Kaplan quoted the books of Isaiah, Leviticus and Exodus while speaking during a teach-in about the city’s bond debt with Goldman Sachs at Allen Temple Baptist Church in East Oakland.

    In 1997, Oakland and the investment bank Goldman Sachs agreed to a rate-swap deal relating to $187 million in city debt. The deal allowed the city to convert floating interest rates on the debt into a fixed rate of 5.6 percent. But what appeared to be a good deal at the time has proved costly in the long run, after the market collapsed in 2008 and interest rates dropped to below 2 percent. The city has come out on the short end of the deal, and has already paid out $26 million more than it owed and is currently paying $5 million annually.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • BREAKING: Intuit Out of ALEC; Coke, Kraft, Pepsi, too, while Koch Stands Ground

• Privacy

  • Dr Richard Stallman Says – Stop Using Facebook