05.28.12

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Tiny Pluggable Linux ARM Computers Are Red-Hot

  The new wave of fun geek toys is inexpensive, hackable, tiny Linux-powered ARM computers, and they’re red hot. This is the year to go small.

  The ARM platform has been around for a long time, and nearly everyone has used an ARM-powered device. ARM CPUs come in 32-bit, 64-bit, and multiple core flavors. They are paired with amazing tiny powerful GPUs that deliver high-end video in mobile phones, tablets, media players, game consoles, calculators, routers, backup drives, GPS devices, e-readers, set-top boxes and digital video recorders, robots, 3D printers, home automation, and cameras. ARM Holdings claims that over 20 billion ARM-based chips have shipped since they were developed.

• Why Ubuntu for Android is the most important Linux project today

  Desktop Linux is slowly gaining market share but its advancement is excruciatingly slow. The desktop itself is loosing market share to mobile operating systems like Android and iOS primarily because Internet usage is shifting towards mobile devices. A lot of people use their mobile phone as their primary computing device and mobile phone hw is developing leaps and bounds to serve these use-cases (bigger screens, quad-core processors…etc).

  Due to its touch-oriented, mobile-centric features + Google’s strong push, Android is rapidly expanding its market share among the mobile operating systems and is the most successful Linux distribution ever.

• Desktop

  • Intel Celeron Powered Chromebooks Coming

    The second generation Chrombooks are coming. These Chromebooks are more powerful from the previous generations and run on Intel Celeron processor instead of sluggish Atoms chips. We know this because of some leaks. NewEgg listed SAMSUNG XE550C22-H01US aka Samsung ‘Edison’ Chromebook priced at $549.

• Kernel Space

  • This Cadillac Is Powered by Linux

    The brand once known as the “Standard of the World” has fully embraced the Standard of Geeks for its latest play for the hearts, minds and cash of the upwardly mobile. This is the all-new 2013 Cadillac XTS, and while it certainly isn’t your great-great (great) grandfather’s Cadillac, it’s designed to appeal to everyone from octogenarians to their baby-boomer spawn, and maybe — just maybe — even you….

    While the XTS’ spate of processors and controllers isn’t running the open source offspring of Linus Torvalds, the game-changing infotainment intender known as the Cadillac User Experience (CUE) is.

  • What does the Linux 3.4 kernel have to offer?

    Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of the 3.4 version of the Linux kernel. While Linus notes that there have been no majorly exciting changes since the last release candidate, it’s worth taking a look at some of the things that have made their way into this release of the Linux kernel and what it means to the Linux community as a whole.

  • Better Input Support In The Linux 3.5 Kernel

  • Graphics Stack

    • New DDX X.Org Server API Changes Are Pushed

• Applications

  • QuiEdit: An Editor for Anyone Who wants a Quiet Life

  • Grive: A free open source Google Drive client has arrived on Linux

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • FLOSS Manuals Adds Workbooks to its Mix of Free Tutorials

    • Access to the Linux kernel via the / proc filesystem

    • Tech Toyz: Learn about Canonical’s Ubuntu

    • xTreme Triple Booting: Linux, Mac & Windows

    • Apache OpenOffice made easy with YUM

    • Lib-Ray Video Standard: Handling Languages and Localization

    • Burning a Data CD/DVD with Nautilus

    • Development of software for UNIX with Eclipse

    • Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support (LEMP) On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

    • fail2ban Intrusion Prevention Framework

  • Games

    • Linux Gamers Are Going Crazy For This New Game

      There’s another Kickstarter-backed game that may be coming to Linux and it’s causing Linux gamers to become extremely excited. In the past day I’ve received no less than 30~40 emails from readers talking about this possible Linux port of Carmageddon: Reincarnation.

    • Xenonauts confirmed for Linux

      Okay so I am still catching up on the news, Xenonauts the game heavily inspired by one of my all time favourites X-COM has been confirmed it will head to Linux! It’s another kickstarter project but has already hit way over it’s goal so it’s confirmed it will come out!

    • Moebius Adventure Game Confirmed for Linux

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Akademy 2012 Sponsors Announced

      Akademy, the KDE community summit, is happening in just a few weeks, from the 30 of June to the 6 of July, in Tallinn, Estonia. The Akademy Organizing Team is pleased to welcome this year’s Akademy sponsors whose support is critical to the success of the conference.

    • My Thoughts on QML and the Desktop

• Distributions

  • KISS simplicity: Arch Linux

    I’m not going to provide screenshots of the installation process, it has been years since I do not do this. I’m going to tell that installation of the base system of Arch Linux is easy, but you will end up with bare bones system. Just the console and the base Linux system, more like a server than a Desktop system.

  • This Week in Linux

    Mageia 2 arrived a few days ago as well. “”We’re the Mageia community, and we are very happy to announce the release of Mageia 2! We’ve had a great time building our community and our new release, and we hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed making it. Here are some of the nice things included in Mageia 2: KDE 4.8.2 SC, the current release of the popular KDE desktop; GNOME 3.4.1, Xfce 4.8.3; VLC 2.0.1; Flash Player plugin 11.2; Chromium Browser 18; GIMP 2.8 featuring the all new single window interface, and Amarok 2.5.”

    The public release of Fedora 17 was pushed back to May 29 last week, but in their traditional pre-release Go No Go meeting yesterday, the release team agreed the fourth RC can be tagged final and that “The Beefy Miracle” would be shipped on Tuesday, May 29. kparal didn’t even wait for the meeting to adjourn to go “partying.”

  • New Releases

    • Tiny Core 4.5.3

    • Webconverger 13.0

  • Red Hat Family

    • RPM 4.10 brings better consistency checking

      The RPM project has announced the availability of RPM 4.10.0, which includes great number of changes since the 4.9.x branch. The RPM package management tool was originally developed by Red Hat and is used by many Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, PCLinuxOS and more.

    • Red Hat Names HP, IBM Vet Arun Oberoi Global Sales Lead

    • Red Hat appoints Arun Oberoi as executive VP, global sales

    • Red Hat Falls After Piper Sees Billings Growth Slowdown

      Red Hat Inc. (RHT), the largest seller of the open-source Linux operating system, fell after an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co. projected a slowdown in billings growth.

      The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company declined 3.4 percent to $54.43 at the close in New York, for the third-worst performance in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. The stock has climbed 32 percent this year.

    • Red Hat lures in JRuby power pair

      Red Hat has lured two of the brains behind JRuby, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, who once worked at Sun Microsystems.

    • Core JRuby developers move to Red Hat

    • Red Hat Earnings: Two Months Later

      It was about two months ago when the now $10 billion open source software provider Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) blew up – in a good way – for shareholders. The company had just released fiscal Q4 numbers and tech geeks everywhere were all aflutter. Revenue was up – again – and management guidance for the balance of 2012 and 2013 was unwavering.

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 17 ARM Beta Release

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu One Adds PayPal Support

        • Ubuntu One vs Dropbox: Which Cloud Do You Use?

        • Ubuntu One Vs Dropbox: Has Ubuntu One Lost The Personal Cloud Market?

        • Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin review

          How the whimsical naming scheme of Mark Shuttleworth managed to dodge adding a P-adjective to ‘Penguin’, we’ll never know. As founder of Canonical, the commercial company behind Ubuntu, it’s Shuttleworth who pulls these names from his imaginative hat.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint 13 Review – Ubuntu for Human Beings

            The Worlds Favourite Distribution gets a new version based on all the good parts of the Ubuntu LTS, and bundled with two traditional desktop environments

          • Linux Mint 13 ramps up for KDE release

            Fans of Linux Mint 13 can look forward to getting their hands on KDE and Xfce variants before the end of June, if predictions by project leader Clement Lefebrve pan out.

          • Distro Review: Linux Mint 13 “Maya” Cinnamon Edition

            On May 23, 2012, Linux Mint 13 “Maya” was released. There are two desktop flavors available, the MATE Edition and the Cinnamon Edition. MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop since the GNOME project has abandoned GNOME 2 in order to work on GNOME 3 development. Cinnamon is a project started by Linux Mint in order to include a classic GNOME 2 style interface in a GNOME 3 environment. Both of these flavors are available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Raspberry Pi faces challenge from Android-based rivals

  • Phones

    • Even Linux Has A Greater Smartphone Market Share Than Windows Phone

      However, before it sets its sights on the big players, it first needs to overtake the little players, and one of those is Linux.

      Yes, Linux.

      So how come Linux has a presence on smartphones? It’s mostly down to Samsung and its Bada operating system. By the end of the quarter, Samsung accounted for over 80 percent of all Linux-powered smartphone shipments. Interestingly, Samsung is also the dominant player when it comes to Android too, accounting for over 45 percent of shipments.

    • Android

      • HTC confirms Android 4.0 update timeline for their Android phones

      • Sony confirms Xperia Play won’t receive Android 4.0

      • Toshiba AT300: The quad-core 10.1-inch ICS Android tablet

        Toshiba has unveiled a quad-core powered tablet that may pack a punch, but also – the manufacturer hopes – won’t look out of place at Paris Fashion Week.

        The Toshiba AT300 boasts a 10.1-inch LED backlit display with a resolution of 1280×800 pixels, with 10-finger multi-touch support, should you need it. The screen itself is Corning Gorilla Glass, which should ensure it stays scratch free for the foreseeable.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • The Portal Cube Shown On Open-Source Linux

      Embedded below is the video of the Portal Companion Cube on Linux via Google’s Android platform and running on the hardware that makes up the Vivaldi Tablet.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Galician Autonomous Region of Spain has a Plan 2012 to use Free Software

  Years ago it was Extremadura switching to GNU/Linux over a weekend, more recently Andalucia switched. Now Galicia is investing nearly €1 million in promotion of FLOSS for business and government. They have already saved €2.5 million last year.

• Puppet Partners with EMC on Open Source Razor

  The open source Puppet configuration management system is widely used to get software onto servers. Now the developers behind Puppet are going a step further, taking aim at bare metal provisioning in an open source effort with EMC called Razor.

• Events

  • GNUmed conference wrap up

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Meet Webmaker: Mozilla Launches “Summer Code” Web Love-in

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • VirtualBox 4.1 update brings Linux 3.4 fixes

    The eighth update to the 4.1.x branch of VirtualBox has been published with compile fixes for the recently released Linux 3.4 kernel. The new version, 4.1.16, of the open source desktop virtualisation application improves the overall stability of the software by rectifying various regressions, including some that could lead to crashes, and a problem that caused some rpm-based packages to have an incorrect help file path on Linux hosts.

  • Java creator unhappy with Oracle trial outcome

    Most observers are applauding Google its successes in the Oracle v. Google case… but not everyone is thrilled about it.

    The jury for the Oracle vs. Google trial delivered their verdict for the second phase of the case–the patent phase–and as you probably know by know, found absolutely no patent infringement on the part of Google.

    With no patent infringement found, and only minor infringement found in the earlier copyright phase of the trial, Judge William Alsup dismissed the jurors early, since the planned damages phase was pretty much rendered moot by yesterday’s decision.

    The trial is not over, of course: Alsup will probably rule on damages himself, and there’s still his ruling on the copyrightability of application programming interfaces to come sometime next week. That API ruling is now arguably the most important remaining part of the case.

• Funding

  • Help create a new free standard, by funding a great Kickstarter project!

    As part of a project to create a non-DRM fixed media standard for high-definition video releases, Terry Hancock has launched a Kickstarter campaign which will produce two Lib-Ray video titles and player software to support them (“Sita Sings the Blues” and the “Blender Open Movie Collection”).

• Openness/Sharing

  • Flarf and the prospect of open source poetry

    From the beginnings of human literature, there has been an instinct to identify with the community, the collective, more than with any individual author. Many of our most valuable texts have been created by social groups and belong to those groups. Multiple, anonymous authorship brought China its cherished Classic of Poetry, gave England Beowulf, and even accounts for parts of the Christian Bible, such as the book of Hebrews—author unknown. The Bible, by the way, tells not one definitive account of the story of Christ, but four that contain conflicting details. So despite the current celebrity mystique surrounding the individual, named author, it’s safe to say that at the core of human civilization lie values of collaboration, shared experience, and shared ownership. And certain movements in literature today remind us of those values.

• Programming

  • Libc++ Has Landed

    As I reported on Phoronix earlier this month and was widely-carried by other news outlets after that, FreeBSD 10 will using the LLVM/Clang compiler and deprecate GCC. The BSD camp wants to get rid of the GPL-licensed compiler from the Free Software Foundation and replace it with the younger but promising Apple-sponsored and BSD-style-licensed LLVM and Clang; see the earlier Phoronix articles on the topic for greater detail.

Leftovers

• Microsoft corrects itself: ‘We expect fewer people to use Windows 8′

  Microsoft doesn’t really expect that 500 million “users” will have Windows 8 next year, but it’s still juggling the numbers.

  The company has said reported comments by chief executive Steve Ballmer on Windows 8 uptake in 2013 are a “restatement of data” by a company employee in December 2011, and that these stats relate to Windows 7 licence upgrades.

  Ballmer was reported by the AFP to have told the Seoul Digital Forum in South Korea this week: “500 million users will have Windows 8 next year.”

• Finance

  • Goldman’s bad board seat… Wall Street’s marquee investment bank is having a hard time finding an untainted board director.

    In times like these, companies might need a scorecard to keep track of the alleged misdeeds and missteps of those at the top. Take, for example, an especially problematic seat on the Goldman Sachs (GS) board. On March 19, 2010, Goldman put out a press release announcing the nomination of a new board member — former Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott. Goldman was still feeling the heat in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and Scott had the right résumé and experience. After all, he had led Wal-Mart through its own public relations troubles.

  • Hagens Berman Files Securities Class Action against Facebook, Zuckerberg and Underwriters: Continues Insider Trading Investigation Against Selling Shareholders

• Copyrights

  • Analysis of the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012

    There are some welcome provisions in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012, and some worrisome provisions. Pranesh Prakash examines five positive changes, four negative ones, and notes the several missed opportunities. The larger concern, though, is that many important issues have not been addressed by these amendments, and how copyright policy is made without evidence and often out of touch with contemporary realities of the digital era.

    There are some welcome provisions in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012, and some worrisome provisions. Pranesh Prakash examines five positive changes, four negative ones, and notes the several missed opportunities. The larger concern, though, is that many important issues have not been addressed by these amendments, and how copyright policy is made without evidence and often out of touch with contemporary realities of the digital era.

    The Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012 has been passed by both Houses of Parliament, and will become law as soon as the President gives her assent and it is published in the Gazette of India. While we celebrate the passage of some progressive amendments to the Copyright Act, 1957 — including an excellent exception for persons with disabilities — we must keep in mind that there are some regressive amendments as well. In this blog post, I will try to highlight those provisions of the amendment that have not received much public attention (unlike the issue of lyricists’ and composers’ ‘right to royalty’).

  • ACTA

    • Stop ACTA – Protests 9th June