04.22.12

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 196

• Desktop

  • New Chromebooks boot in 5 seconds thanks to open source BIOS

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • CAOS Theory Podcast 2012.04.20

• Kernel Space

  • Extended File Attributes Rock!

  • Verbose GPU, CPU Information Under Linux

    There’s more improvements building for Suldal that yield greater CPU and GPU verbosity when detecting graphics and processor comparisons under Linux.

  • Linux 3.4-rc4

  • Open source driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics under development

    ARM-based chips are all the rage these days in tablets, smartphones, set-top-boxes, and other low power computing devices. But while many of the latest chips can support HD video, 3D graphics, and other high-performance graphics, you generally need to use supported software to get all the benefits — because chip makers don’t offer open source graphics drivers.

  • Texas Instruments man creates open source Snapdragon driver

    TI’s ARM man Rob Clark, who is famous for Texas Instrument’s OMAP DRM driver, has spent his spare time building a natty open sauce driver for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon.

    Clark’s open-source Linux graphics driver for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon / Adreno is getting a lot of attention as it is a reverse-engineered Linux graphics driver for an ARM-based SoC.

  • Stem Cells vs Open Source: The 2012 Millennium Tech Award

    It’s no secret that this year’s candidates for the Millennium Technology Prize are set to be controversial outside scientific circles. On the other hand, the prize committee at the Technology Academy Finland are quite sure of themselves: Linus Torvalds and Dr Shinya Yamanaka are this year’s laureates. The prize this year for this prestigious award will exceed a a lovely 1 million Euros – certainly a pot to be sought after.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Testing Out The Major Nouveau libdrm Rewrite

      Committed to the Mesa and libdrm Git repositories last week for Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver, was the “major libdrm rewrite” designed to step-up this reverse-engineered driver. What impact did these invasive changes have on the Nouveau driver’s performance? Here are benchmarks comparing before-and-after as well as how the Nouveau driver compares to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

    • AMD R600/R700 Gallium3D Confirms GLSL 1.30

• Applications

  • Pigz: File Compression Tool work Over Multiple Processors and Cores

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Using mod_spdy With Apache2 On Debian Squeeze

    • How To Simulate Network Devices Using SNMP Simulator

    • shelr, broadcast your Linux shell on the net

    • Testing Codeigniter with Firebird

    • Some Notes On Migrating A Wubi Ubuntu Install

  • Games

    • Humble Botanicula Debut Disappoints Linux Users

      The latest Humble Botanicula Bundle is out, and for Linux users, it’s an extreme disappointment. As with all Humble Bundles, the same sales trends apply. Linux users are still paying the highest average dollar amount which is over $2 more than the encouraged, total average dollar amount. Windows users pay the least and Mac users fall right in the middle. It’s an economic phenomenon for sure, but even doubly so for this one.

    • Linux Game Preview: Tomes of Mephistopheles (Alpha)

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Provident License Agreements for KDAB

      (Matthias) Kalle Dalheimer is the President and Founder of KDAB, and also one of the founding members of the KDE project and KDE e.V. He hasn’t personally been very active in KDE lately, but some of the old-timers will remember that he served as President and Treasurer of KDE e.V. for a few years. He also wrote the first C++ class ever used in kdelibs (KConfig) even though it’s doubtful that any of the code is still left in today’s codebase.

    • Replace Oxygen with ROSA theme on any KDE-powered distribution

    • LightDM KDE 0.1.0 released

      During this Ubuntu cycle I have been working on-and-off on LightDM, mainly helping out David Edmundson on liblightdm-qt (the Qt wrapper for LightDM library), and the LightDM KDE greeter. The initial, quite ambitious, plan was to try to ship Kubuntu 12.04 with it by default. We quickly realized that would not happen, but we wanted to at least ensure LightDM KDE would be in a usable-enough state to be included in Ubuntu 12.04 archive.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Ojuba 16

    • Parted Magic 2012_04_21

    • Energy lab releases open-source tool for tracking cyberattacks

    • Snowlinux 2 “Ice” released!

      The team is proud to announce the release of Snowlinux 2 “Ice”.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu OS Can Run on Mele A1000 ARM PC

          It appears that Aliexpress is selling a small ARM-based device that runs Android 2.3, but can be easily hacked to run the popular Ubuntu operating system.

        • Linus Torvalds Appreciates Ubuntu’s User Centric Approach

          The Millennium Technology Prize is awarded ever two years for a technological innovation by Technology Academy Finland. This year, Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator, and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, maker of a new way to create stem cells without the use of embryonic stem cells, are both laureates for the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize. The two innovators will share over a million Euros and the final winner will be announced by the President of the Republic of Finland in a special ceremony on June 13, 2012.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Open source platform offered for photonics IC design

  • Mentor embraces open source with Bridgepoint xtUML move

    Mentor Graphics intends to place the front-end UML editor of its BridgePoint xtUML environment into the open source domain.

Free Software/Open Source

• RIM may make BlackBerry OS open source

  Research In Motion, which makes BlackBerry phones, may be looking at making the operating system open, which will allow other manufacturers to make smartphones using the platform.

• BlackBerry to go open source?

• Scientists: All Research Should Be Open Source

  Phys.org is reporting on a recently published paper that suggests all scientific journals should require the full disclosure of source code as a condition of publication. The paper states that only 3 science journals currently require source code.

• Why Google secretly switched to an open-source networking technology in 2010

• CSCO, JNPR: ‘OpenFlow’ Takes Stage, Says ISI (Correction)

• Google revamps network via OpenFlow

• Ex-Magento CTO And Co-Founder: eBay Doesn’t Understand The Meaning Of Open

• Open source WEM from Rivet Logic

  Consulting and systems integration firm Rivet Logic has released Crafter Rivet V. 2.0, an open source Web experience management (WEM) offering built on Alfresco 4. The WEM solution is the latest addition to Rivet Logic’s suite of solutions for content management, collaboration and community leveraging open source software.

• Research lab extends host-based cyber sensor project to open source

  A Department of Energy (DOE) lab is taking research done to develop a host-based security sensor and open-sourcing the software to encourage community feedback and participation.

• Open Source Integrity Report : Key Findings

• Open Source Integrated Photonics Software Launched

  Ghent University and nanoelectronics research center imec of Leuven have launched IPKISS, an open source software platform for designing photonic components and complex photonic integrated circuits, they announced.

• Photonics integration goes open-source with IPKISS

• Radical Idea: Open source social networking

• First Open Source Online Gambling Platform Launched by Cubeia Ltd.

  In a recent press release from Stockholm Sweden the software developer Cubeia Ltd, has announced its launch of the first open source multi-player server focused on the online gambling industry.

• Events

  • Digium Announces Ninth Annual AstriCon to be Held October 23-25, 2012

  • In Mid-May, CamelOne Event Explores Surge in Open Source Integration by Large Enterprises

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Custom Firefox Toolbar Development

• SaaS

  • High stakes for open source in the commercial cloud

    Cloud computing has been described by some of the more radical thinkers as a profound challenge to the heart of software freedom. There’s some justification to this accusation.

    First, you need more than your software’s source code to take your cloud activity into your own hands. Although open source gives you the freedom to use, study, modify, and distribute the software, it doesn’t necessarily allow the use of the place it runs or the APIs needed to access that place. As such, considering your software-freedom-derived business flexibility in the area of cloud computing is more complex than for in-house desktop or server solutions.

  • Puppet equipped to be OpenStack interface

  • OpenStack Is Not A Proprietary Cloud, Kemp Argues

    Former NASA CTO and Nebula founder Chris Kemp says private clouds will need to be based on a flexible, general purpose set of open source code that can work with public clouds.

  • Open vs. proprietary debate heats up the cloud

    The familiar debate of open source vs. proprietary IT offerings now seems in full swing in the cloud, and the rhetoric shooting back and forth between some of the major vendors is intensifying. The most recent round really picked up a few weeks ago when Citrix announced it would bring its CloudStack cloud building platform to the Apache Software Foundation, creating a competing model to OpenStack. Before that, OpenStack had been gaining momentum in the open source cloud worlds. While Citrix’s move was initially seen as a competition to OpenStack, both companies have more recently taken aim at a common foe: VMware.

• Databases

  • Korean Telecom Giant KT Corporation Steps Up Its Cooperation With EnterpriseDB on Their Open Source-Based Database Solutions

  • SkySQL raises $4M for database support services

    SkySQL, a company that helps businesses use open-source databases MySQL and MariaDB, has raised $4 million in first round funding. SkySQL consults with businesses to set them up with MySQL and MariaDB services. It will also train employees to use the database services. OnCorps led the round with Finnish Industry Investment Ltd., Spintop Ventures and Open Ocean Capital.

• CMS

  • Joomla’s CMS Surges in Popularity

    The organization behind the Joomla open source content management system (CMS) says downloads of its product increased by almost 40 percent over the past year, and now rests at 30 million total downloads since it started tracking the statistic in 2007.

  • Fastspot Releases BigTree CMS as Open Source

• Funding

  • Apache announces Huawei, GoDaddy and Twitter as new sponsors

    The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that GoDaddy, one of the largest domain registrars worldwide, and Chinese networking and telecommunications specialist Huawei have become its newest Silver sponsors. Huawei and GoDaddy join Basis Technology, Cloudera, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, PSW Group and VMware’s SpringSource at the third level of sponsorship, for which the ASF requires an annual donation of $20,000 to help fund its work.

  • Twitter signs up to sponsor open source Apache Software Foundation

  • This Startup That Angered A Lot Of Open Source Fans Just Got $30 Million In Funding

  • ‘Tube’: the open-source 3D animation experiment funded by Kickstarter

  • Microfinance: Why Open Source Means Bigger Impact

    Big Idea: Mifos is an open-source, back-end operating system — built and backed by a community — to track the many loans and payments involved in microfinance.

• BSD

  • PC-BSD 20120418

• Public Services/Government

  • Get rid of ‘digital handcuffs’, says European commission vice-president

    The openness of the web needs to be protected and “digital handcuffs” need to be removed, Neelie Kroes, the vice-president of the European commission with responsibility for Europe’s digital agenda, has said.

    Speaking at the World Wide Web (WWW2012) conference in Lyon on Thursday, Kroes examined the idea of an open web and spoke of its benefits. “With a truly open, universal platform, we can deliver choice and competition; innovation and opportunity; freedom and democratic accountability,” she said.

    Holding up a pair of handcuffs sent to her the previous day by the Free Software Foundation along with a letter asking if she was “with them on openness”, she said: “Let me show you, these handcuffs are not closed, not locked. I can open them if and when I want. That’s what I mean by being open online, what it means to me to get rid of ‘digital handcuffs’.”

  • ‘Make M’sia open-source software hub’

    Malaysia should take the lead and implement policies to transform the country into an international open-source software (OSS) hub, Consumer Association of Penang (CAP) said here today.

    CAP president SM Mohamed Idris suggested that the government form a specific agency to formulate policies to make Malaysia the leader in the promotion and development of OSS.

    He urged the government to take the initiative to make the country an OSS hub that would save millions of ringgit for Malaysian consumers and companies.

    He said it would create jobs and develop skills for local manpower, providing the competitive cutting-edge expertise and support services for the huge OSS market worldwide.

  • Dev: keep government tech open source

    Linux admin Richard Harvey has made an impassioned plea for support in influencing UK government policy on open source.

    The government is currently consulting on the use of open standards and open source as an alternative to proprietary software. Corporations that stand to lose out are lobbying the government in an attempt to discredit open source and open standards, he claimed on his Support Open Standards website.

    “As the open source community, we have generally not responded to the consultation because we may have read it and thought ‘that’s really good’,” said Harvey on the site. “We need to feed this back, otherwise this will become a one-sided debate. Don’t let large corporates buy UK policy.”

• Openness/Sharing

  • Real-life, working Tricorder developed by Trekkie-scientist and made open source available

    Sometime at the beginning of the year I mentioned in post that once stepping into the age of Terahertz electromagnetic waves (T-rays), which can penetrate any molecule and and then interpret it for identification, we will come to know a slew of new, grand applications, from surveillance , to medical, but possibly the most interesting prospect would be the passing of Star Trek’s iconic handheld device, the tricorder, to the realm of reality. It might take a while for a full fledged tricoder to be created, not until T-ray scanner/emitters become reasonable enough, however Dr. Peter Jansen, a PhD graduate of the Cognitive Science Laboratory at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, has come up with the best working tricorder-spin off so far. His handheld device is capable of sensing temperature, pressure, humidity, distances, location, motion and even electromagnetic measurements to test magnetic fields, and is open source available – anyone has access to the device’s plans and can build one at home.

  • Updated: Virtual MS research community emerges

    Stakeholders in the development of multiple sclerosis drugs have taken their fight against the neurodegenerative disease online with the launch of a virtual community intended to connect researchers of MS and related disorders. The effort has emerged after earlier crowd-sourcing and open source efforts to discover new treatments.

  • Open Data

    • City to Allocate $50,000 for Open-Source Data

      Raleigh is talking the talk and walking the open-source walk. In a 6-to-2 vote, city councilors agreed Tuesday to provide $50,000 annually for an open-source data catalog.

      The funding will be included in next year’s budget, which will be presented by City Manager Russell Allen next month. Councilor and Technology and Communication Committee Chair Bonner Gaylord, who originally proposed the idea, said the catalog is a necessary step for a more open and transparent government.

    • The Open Source Public Tree Inventory Platform – OpenTreeMap

    • Opening Up the Inner Workings of New York City

      One of the most fascinating impacts of the open data and open source (software code that’s available to the public to improve and reuse) movements has been the influx of new web tools, developed by private companies and nonprofits, that help people better engage with, and navigate, their city.

      In March, Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a law mandating that all city agencies put their data online over the course of the next six years.

      The Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), which oversees how new technologies are being used by other city agencies, began putting city data online in a Socrata site — technology created in Seattle — in 2011, and will enforce the city’s new requirements.

      The benefits of open data can be seen in the work of the nonprofit company OpenPlans, which has been at the forefront of the open source movement in New York City. The products and services it creates using data and code from the MTA and other city agencies illuminate how New Yorkers might live in the near future, as the physical and digital versions of the city merge together.

  • Open Access/Content

    • A cornerstone for success

      An open source textbook library that would be available to students free of charge is a promising step toward the future.

  • Open Hardware

    • Open-source Hardware Movement Seeks Legitimacy

      Inspired by the success of the open-source software movement, a group of technology enthusiasts is looking to unite the fragmented open-source hardware community in an effort to promote hardware innovation.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Report: Html5, Linux’s Lifeline?

Leftovers

• Study Calls on EU Regulators to Free Up the Airwaves

  The European Commission released a ground-breaking study on shared access to radio spectrum. The study, conducted by SCF Associates Ltd, calls for a sweeping reform of wireless communications policies, so as to free up more airwaves and pave the way for “super-WiFi” networks. The EU is severely lagging behind the US when it comes to adapting spectrum policy to new needs and possibilities, and this study should sound as a wake-up call for policy-makers.

• Security

  • A Week After Apple’s Fix, Flashback Still Infects Half a Million Macs

• Finance

  • SEC, CFTC Retreat On Swap Dealer Regulation

    Corporate America, with help from the Obama administration, has struck yet another blow against the scary financial regulations it claims will hurt the economy.

    On Wednesday they undercut new regulations on derivatives, which the detail-obsessed among us might point out didn’t just hurt the economy but nearly destroyed it. Just a few years ago.

    It’s just the latest in a growing string of defeats and surrenders by regulators to the same financial industry that helped nearly destroy the economy, and needed massive bailouts as a result. Just a few years ago.

    Under heavy pressure from the energy industry and other corporate interests, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission are retreating from a plan to regulate many reaches of the U.S. trade in financial derivatives known as swaps, including the credit derivatives that nearly brought down the financial system.