10.19.12

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Google Releasing New Samsung Chromebook For $249

    Google is releasing it’s latest Chromebook next Monday for the savoury price of $249.

    This time round it has an ARM chip instead of Intel (lower cost?) is powered by a Samsung Exynos 5 Dual Processor (making it the very first device to use ARM’s new Cortex-A15 architecture) and is filled to the brim with everything Google.

  • Can Google Disrupt The PC Market With $249 Chromebook?

  • Google, Samsung unveil $249 laptop

  • Google offers low-budget ARM-based Chromebook

  • Samsung S5 550 Chromebook: All in after a week

    Chromebooks are not for everybody, it’s important to make that clear. Folks who need certain programs may find being constrained to web apps in Chrome to be a liability. I work online in Chrome on every system I use so the Chromebook is tailored for my work routine.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 475

  • Going Linux Oct 17 #187

• Kernel Space

  • Btrfs File-System Tuning On Linux 3.7

    Earlier this week I posted new Reiser4 file-system benchmarks that compared the non-mainline file-system against EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and ReiserFS. Continuing in the Linux file-system performance theme, in this article are more Btrfs benchmarks from that same system but when using the early Linux 3.7 development kernel and trying out different Btrfs mount/tuning options.

  • Graphics Stack

    • NVIDIA 304.60 Driver Fixes Bugs

      NVIDIA has issued a stable Linux graphics driver update in the 304.xx series to address outstanding bugs.

    • Bickering Continues About NVIDIA Using DMA-BUF

    • NVIDIA 304.60 Driver Fixes Bugs

    • Intel On Haswell Under Linux: “We’ve Screwed Up”

      Intel admits that it botched the early Haswell Linux support, which has been worked on publicly since March although the actual Haswell hardware won’t begin shipping until H1’2013. Intel has had the support now within their DDX driver, Mesa, and Intel DRM driver, but the DRM driver is still being problematic.

    • X.Org Foundation Revises Its Purpose

      The X.Org Foundation has finally updated their Wiki page to reflect that they aren’t only about the X Window System.

    • Intel Mesa To Force On S3TC, Floating-Point Textures

      Two patches from Intel’s Ian Romanick for their open-source Mesa DRI driver will now enable S3TC extensions always plus floating-point textures. These two features previously were not enabled by default out of patent fears.

• Applications

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How Much Swap?

    • New Version of Calibre Brings a Slew of Improvements

    • A few links you might find interesting

    • 11 Basic Linux NMAP command Examples for System administrators

    • Using ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) On Ubuntu 12.04 (Initiator And Target)

    • Recover inaccessible instances using QEMU

  • Games

    • Red Orchestra coming to Linux (Steam) latest CDR info

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Akademy 2013 in Bilbao

      In Basque (the primary language of Bilbao), the letter K is used to change verb case and also to make plurals of some words. For the hard C sound, Basque uses the letter K.

      Lots of Basque words include K: Kaixo (hello), teKnologiaK (technologies), Kalitatea (quality), BerriKuntza (innovation), asKatasuna (freedom), Kultura (culture), Kidetasuna (fellowship), Komunitatea (community), esKuluze (generous), etorKizuna (future), eusKera (Basque language). The letter K is at home in Euskal Herria (Basque Country).

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • OpenELEC is a DIY Linux HTPC

    • Snowlinux 3.1 Review: Now Crystal got even better!

      Last month, during my experiments with Linux distros, I mentioned that on Snowlinux 3 Crystal, touchpad doesn’t work. Even I couldn’t get the touchpad settings on my Asus Eee-PC 1101HA. Possibly, the developers too noted the same and last week, the updated Snowlinux 3.1 with touchpad support got released. I did a live-boot on my Asus K54C laptop with 2.2 GHz Intel 2nd Gen Ci3 processor and 2 GB DDR3 RAM and later installed on the same.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat helps SMU information systems students be Linux professionals

      Red Hat will equip students of Singapore Management University with skills and certification through the Red Hat Academy programme.

    • Red Hat helps SMU information systems students be Linux professionals

      Red Hat will equip students of Singapore Management University with skills and certification through the Red Hat Academy programme.

    • Red Hat Releases Third Beta for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1

      Red Hat has released the third beta of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 platform, expected to be generally available later this year.

    • What’s the Real Story on KVM Usage?

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ay caramba, Ubuntu 12.10: Get it right on Amazon!

          There’s much to admire in Canonical’s Quantal Quetzal, which continues to refine and improve the Unity desktop, but you’d be forgiven if you missed the positives thanks to the late injection of a little Bezos since Ubuntu 12.04.

        • Canonical Releases Ubuntu 12.10 Linux OS

          The big day has arrived — in the Ubuntu world, at least. The latest version of the operating system, 12.10, has officially hit the virtual shelves. In case you missed, here’s what you can look forward to — or plan to complain about, as the case may be — in the new release.

        • What to Know About Ubuntu 12.10

        • Googlubuntu: Search Ubuntu Topics with Customize Google Search

        • 10 Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 12.10

        • Raring community skunkworks

        • Not the Runty Raccoon, the Rufflered Rhino or (even) the Randall Ross

          The dash to Copenhagen combined with a dash across the Atlantic has me righteously ramfeezled, but the roisterous reception we got at the OpenStack summit (congrats, stackers, on a respectable razzmatazz of rugible cloud enthusiasm) made it worthwhile. A quick shout out to the team behind the Juju gooooey, that puts a whole new face on cloud agility – rousing stuff.

          Nevertheless, it’s way past time to root our next rhythmic release in some appropriate adjective.

        • Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret, to escape the critics’ ire

          In a twist that is sure to raise eyebrows and cause no end of neckbeard scratching, Canonical founder and Ubuntu’s de facto spiritual leader, Mark Shuttleworth, has announced that key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret.

        • How-To Improve Gaming Performance in Ubuntu 12.10

          Ubuntu 12.04 and Unity interface has been criticized for poor gaming performance as many users were finding higher frame rate in 3D games while using other desktop environments like Gnome Shell, Unity2D and Classic Gnome.

        • What’s new in Ubuntu Desktop 12.10

          Ubuntu 12.10 has arrived; the first major version of Ubuntu since the release of the well-received Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. At the start of the release cycle, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth defined quality as the watchword for Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”. Fabian Scherschel looks at the new desktop release to see how well his definition stood up to six months of development.

        • Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth Tires Of Critics, Moves Key Ubuntu Developments Out Of Public Eye

          The move, which he writes about on his blog, will sure to create a firestorm in the Ubuntu community, which has in the past rained criticism on Unity, the interface Canonical developed for Ubuntu two years ago. You can read the full story about Unity here. Ubuntu is built on the Debian Linux distribution.

          The news comes on the day that Canonical introduced Ubuntu 12.10, with a number of cool enhancements that were all developed in the open.

        • Ubuntu 12.10 launches with web apps and search, Canonical plans for more secretive 13.04 development

        • Google Unveils $250 Chromebook, Ubuntu 12.10 is Out

          First up, Google unveiled a $250 chromebook running Arm, rather than the X86 that most of them have been so far. The 11.6″ device will have 6.5 hours of battery life, weigh 2.5 lbs, have a 100Gb hard drive plug Google Drive integration, and an HDMI port. What more could you want from a $250 device?

        • Canonical to Windows XP cliff-clingers: Ubuntu safety net’s ready… now jump

        • With Ubuntu Server 12.10 OpenStack Users Can Stay on the Cutting Edge

        • Canonical Ubuntu 12.10 brings the Internet closer to the desktop

          Canonical has released both the server and desktop editions of 12.10 Ubuntu, which offers a glimpse of how this Linux distribution will evolve in the next few years.

          Ubuntu 12.10 “effectively sets out the future direction of how Ubuntu will develop over the next two years,” said Steve George, who is Canonical’s vice president for communications and products. “The Internet has become an intrinsic part of user’s experience so we’ve been focusing on integrating online and offline services.”

        • Inktank Expands Open Source Cloud Partnerships

        • Canonical flings out Ubuntu 12.10 – now with OPTIONAL Bezos suck

          Canonical is bowed but undaunted after the bashing it took from Penguins over its recent integration of Amazon searches with its Linux desktop.

          The company has promised further integration between web and desktop as it today released Ubuntu 12.10.

        • Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal launch day

        • Ubuntu Phone And TV Ready For 14.04

        • Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal out now, 13.04 named

        • Ubuntu 12.10 Has Been Officially Released

          Dear Softpedians and Ubuntu fanatics all over the world, we are proud to announce (yes, we are the first again) today, October 18th, that the final and stable release of Ubuntu 12.10 is here, available on mirrors worldwide (see the download links at the end of the article).

        • Ubuntu 12.10 Released, attacking Windows 8

          Canonical has just released the new version of Ubuntu 12.10, also known as Quantal Quetzal. If you decide to download the new version from Ubuntu’s official webpage, you will notice a rather provocative message. Above the download button, a slogan appears urging the users to install Ubuntu 12.10 instead of Microsoft Windows 8, not because of Ubuntu’s superiority but just to avoid the drama of Metro UI. In a matter of fact, it says “Avoid the pain of Windows 8. The all-new Ubuntu 12.10 is out now“.

        • Tests Continue From The 5-Watt Ubuntu ARM Server

          After yesterday publishing the first extensive benchmark results for the Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 ARM Servers in the form of the 1.1GHz and 1.4GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 nodes running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.10, here are more benchmarks to share today from the “5-Watt ARM Server” on Linux.

        • Avoid The Pain of Windows 8? Is Ubuntu Ready For Windows Users?

          I am not going to talk about whether that message was OK or not as Mark Shuttleworth clarified “That banner was totally un-Ubuntu and was changed as soon as someone senior saw it. Apologies.”

        • Canonical To Develop Some Ubuntu Features In Private

          Some features of Ubuntu 13.04 won’t be openly developed by the Ubuntu Linux community but rather in a more covert approach by Canonical and select Ubuntu developers. Mark Shuttleworth calls these new features “some sexy 13.04 surprises” but he was sure to reinforce that the overall Ubuntu Linux development approach isn’t changing.

        • Ubuntu 12.10 Releases Using Direct Attack Ad Aimed at Windows 8

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Xubuntu 12.10 Released With Xfce 4.10 [Screenshots, Video]

            Xubuntu, the Xfce Ubuntu flavor, has been released today along with the other Ubuntu flavours. It’s a great alternative for those who do not want to use GNOME Shell or Unity and prefer a more traditional layout.

          • Fuduntu – And now for something the same but different

• Devices/Embedded

  • Penguin builds ARM-based Linux server on Calxeda SoCs

  • Phones

    • Ballnux

      • Kyocera Rise, Budget Android Phone With QWERTY Keyboard

        Then what about the Kyocera Rise, priced at $149 and a service plan from Public Mobile starting at $35 per month with unlimited talk, text, data and Siren Music. (It allows users to download music without per-song costs or limits on data usage and is available on the go with no computers, no syncing or extra devices required.)

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Miniconf: Gentoo on the OLPC XO-1.75

    • Acer’s 7-Inch Android Tablet Will Cost $230

      We’ve known it was coming for months, but the Acer Iconia Tab A110 finally has a due date and a pricetag. It’s going on sale October 30th, and it’ll only cost you $230. That puts it squarely in Nexus 7 territory.

      But what does that extra $30 get you? Well, more. And less.

    • Is Windows 8 an existential threat to Android tablets?

      Nagging questions shadow the impending launch of Windows 8, threatening to scuttle Microsoft’s plans to reinvent itself for the age of mobility. Will desktop users graciously accept the redesigned Modern interface? Will the Windows Store have enough apps to entice would-be Surface RT buyers? Can Windows 8 breathe life into sagging PC sales?

      Microsoft’s future success depends on its ability to make serious, quantifiable, no-nonsense headway in the mobile market, but it’s not the only company with a massive stake in the ultimate fate of Windows 8. The new operating system will also have a major impact on Google. Just look at the list of Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablet and hybrid partners—Samsung, Asus, Toshiba, and the rest. They all make Android tablets, too.

Free Software/Open Source

• Achieving Photorealism in Blender

  (Unfortunately the video I recorded on the day was too dark and difficult to hear, so I figured there was no point in uploading it. Sorry about that!)

• The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache OpenOffice™ as a Top-Level Project

  The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Open Office has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.

• OSI and OSHWA agree on logo usage

  The Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA), which was officially launched in June, has signed an agreementPDF with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to settle a dispute over its Open Source Hardware (OSHW) logo. Following concerns that the logo OSHWA was using to denote the open hardware nature of devices was too similar to the OSI’s trademark, both organisations worked out an agreement that clarifies the difference between the logos and the areas they are applied in.

• Open Call for Packagers!

  In the past, we’ve had people pull code right out of our master branch. There were a few problems with this technique for deployment; pulling out of the active branch of development meant that a podmin had no idea as to how stable the latest code for a pod could be. Secondly, we think that setting up a pod should be easier, as people shouldn’t have to mess around with a terminal and lots of config files to enjoy the benefits of a decentralized social web.

• Open Source Vendor Zarafa Solves Apple’s iOS Problems

• Events

  • LinuxCon Europe Co-located Events Offer More Opportunities for Collaboration

  • Next Up on FORA.tv: Open Science Summit 2012

• SaaS

  • OpenStack Summit Analyst Panel – Fragmentation and Commercialization

  • How to Make Money with OpenStack

  • Hadoop helps solve Oracle customers’ big data problems

  • Did OpenStack Let VMware Into The Henhouse?

• Databases

  • 10gen: Growing the MongoDB world

    10gen, the company set up by the creators of the open source NoSQL database MongoDB, has been on a roll recently, creating business partnerships with numerous companies, making it a hot commercial proposition without creating any apparent friction with its open source community. So what has brought MongoDB to the fore?

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Congrats Apache OpenOffice!

    Today the Apache Software Foundation announced that Apache OpenOffice ™ is a top level project, and I really wish to congratulate with the Apache OpenOffice Community to have achieved this important milestone.

  • LibreOffice 3.5.7 Released

    What’s a conference without a release announcement? The Document Foundation didn’t find out today because it announced the release of LibreOffice 3.5.7. 3.5.7 is “the seventh and possibly last version of the free office suite’s 3.5 family, which solves additional bugs and regressions, and offers stability improvements over LibreOffice 3.5.6.”

  • Mark Hurd: Oracle Accepts Cloud And Hadoop

    Oracle chief operating officer Mark Hurd says the company really is enthusiastic about open source, big Data and the cloud

  • Is Hadoop the Answer to Oracle Customers’ Big Data Problems?

    Oracle customers are facing a big data problem, and Hadoop is the answer – reluctant as Oracle is to admit it.

    Speaking at the Oracle product and strategy update in London yesterday, Oracle president Mark Hurd said that the company’s customers are growing their data up to 40% a year, putting tremendous pressure on IT budgets.

  • Apache Elevates Open Source OpenOffice – So What?

    There was a time when OpenOffice was where I spent a good chunk of my work day. Those days are now in the past, as I’ve moved on and so has every single major Linux distribution. We’ve all moved to a faster more agile open source office suite. We have moved to LibreOffice.

• Education

  • Parents of non-traditional learners advocate for open education

    While Thomas Edison is often lauded as the most prolific American inventor, his mother, Nancy Edison, and how she fostered an open education and an open mind in her son is often overlooked. When a headmaster labelled Edison as being ‘addled,’ slow, and unteachable, his mother disagreed and decided to withdraw her son from school and teach him at home. She knew her son was a bright, curious, creative child who thought divergently yet was often disorganized, disruptive, and hyperactive; today he would most likely be diagnosed as having ADHD.

• Healthcare

  • Open source tools, OSEHRA gain momentum at VA

• Business

  • Up to Date on Open Source Analytics

    I’ve been updating the computational analytics platform on my Wintel notebook the last few days. I’d fallen behind several versions on each of the main tools and decided to get them all back in synch at once. The good news for hackers like me is that there are so many freely-available, open source analytics products to choose from. The bad news is that it takes a focused effort to stay up to date on the latest largesse.

• Funding

  • Open source centre offers pre-incubation facility

    International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (Icfoss) at Technopark will now support pre-incubation programmes.

• BSD

  • NetBSD 6.0 released with initial Raspberry Pi support

    The developers at the NetBSD Project have released version 6.0 of NetBSD, a major update to their BSD-based operating system that includes a wide range of upgrades and enhancements. Among the notable changes are scalability improvements on multi-core systems, support for thread-local storage (TLS) and a new Logical Volume Manager (LVM).

  • NetBSD 6 Announced With Expanded Processor Support

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • New Features Coming Up For The GCC 4.8 Compiler

  • Initial ARMv8 Support For 32-bit GCC Port

    Developers from ARM Holdings have published their initial ARMv8 patch for the GNU Compiler Collection for the 32-bit “AArch32″ compiler port.

    ARM developers had already been working on their 64-bit ARM / AArch64 compiler port, which was officially approved just days ago. The latest ARM open-source compiler patch is ARMv8 in the AArch32 port with basic functionality.

• Project Releases

  • VLC Media Player 2.0.4 supports Opus decoding

    Version 2.0.4 of the VLC Media Player has been released by the VideoLAN project. While the minor version number change may not reflect it, the new release is described as a major update by its developers as it fixes numerous regressions and introduces support for the IETF’s Opus lossy audio compression format. It also brings several other improvements and platform-specific changes.

• Public Services/Government

  • French finance ministry awards 15 million euro open source contract

    France’s Ministry for Economy and Finance recently awarded a support contract for open source, worth between 15 to 19 million euro. The four-year contract was won by a consortium comprising 25 companies, including many small and medium sized enterprises. “It is the biggest such contract so far”, announces the company heading the consortium, French open source IT service provider, Linagora.

  • United Kingdom’s central e-services site an open source showcase

    The United Kingdom’s government unveiled its new central services and information website, GOV.UK, this week Tuesday. The site is completely built on open source, saving the government some 70 million GBP (about 86 million euro) compared to the previous site, according to Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office. He expects the site to achieve further savings “as more departments and agencies move to on the platform”.

  • Community Spotlight: Denis Parfenov, restoring trust in politics through open government

• Programming

  • The Growth of Google Summer of Code

    I recently sat down with Chris DiBona to talk about the 15th anniversary of Slashdot. In addition to discussing the joys of heading an email campaign against spamming politicians, and the perils of throwing a co-worker’s phone into a bucket, even if you think that bucket is empty, we talked about the growth of Google Summer of Code. Below you’ll find his story of how a conversation about trying to get kids to be more active with computers in the summer has led to the release of 55 million lines of code.

  • Subversive brings Subversion to Eclipse

Leftovers

• The Pioneers of UNIX

  Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs didn’t do jack. If you want to know who is responsible for the modern world you have to look at the people working at Bell Labs in the 1970s and 1980s. The people who created UNIX. It was from that invention that we have the modern world. UNIX led to Linux which led to Android. UNIX led to the BSD family of operating systems which led to Apple OSX. UNIX led to the C programming language in which most system-level software today is written. Ever wonder why URLs use forward slashes? It’s because UNIX was instrumental in the creation of the Internet.

• Security

  • Kaspersky Lab announces a brand-new OS focused on security

• Finance

  • Why I Left Goldman Sachs, Chapter Three: “My Alleged Competition”

    On Monday morning, Grand Central Publishing will release Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story, a memoir penned by former Goldman employee Greg Smith, based on his op-ed for the New York Times entitled, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs.” When Smith’s piece came out last March, few if any senior executives inside the bank were pleased, in part because it came as a total shock. No one at Goldman had known Smith was planning to have his resignation letter printed in the paper. No one had known he had issues with the firm’s supposedly new and singular focus on making money at all costs. No one, at least at the top, even knew who Greg was. Obviously all this left the bank at a competitive disadvantage in terms of fighting back and for the time being, Smith appeared to be handing Goldman its ass. Getting cocky, even. Perhaps thinking to himself, “When all of this is over, I could be named the new CEO of Goldman Sachs.” As anyone who has ever won a bronze medal in ping-pong at the Maccabiah Games will tell you, however, winners are determined by best of threes. And that anyone going to to the table with Goldman Sachs should be prepared for things to get ugly.

  • Big Oil and the U.S. Chamber Fight to Keep Foreign Bribery Flourishing

    In a new lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), big energy extractors are pushing for carte blanche in their interactions with foreign governments, making it harder to track whether their deals are padding the coffers of dictators, warlords, or crony capitalists. The United States Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and the National Foreign Trade Council filed a lawsuit on October 10, 2012 against a new SEC rule, which requires U.S. oil, mining and gas companies to formally disclose payments made to foreign governments as part of their annual SEC reporting.

• Censorship

  • Bangladesh Seeks To Throttle Independent News Sites And Their Awkward Stories

    One of the great things about online news sites is that they are so easy to set up: you don’t need a printing press or huge numbers of journalists — you just start posting interesting stories to the Web and you are away.

• Privacy

  • New “Surveillance-Proof” App To Secure Communications Has Governments Nervous

    Lately, Mike Janke has been getting what he calls the “hairy eyeball” from international government agencies. The 44-year-old former Navy SEAL commando, together with two of the world’s most renowned cryptographers, was always bound to ruffle some high-level feathers with his new project—a surveillance-resistant communications platform that makes complex encryption so simple your grandma can use it.

  • Apple Has Quietly Started Tracking iPhone Users Again, And It’s Tricky To Opt Out

• Copyrights

  • Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom returns with “Mega” file-sharing service

    Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom (shown above in his Twitter image) is out of jail and ready to start his next venture—but from the looks of things it’s not much different than his last.

  • U.S. Museums Concerned About Unartful Impact of SCOTUS Copyright Case

    The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a copyright case later this month that could have serious unintended consequences for the nation’s art museums: If a decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals is upheld, every museum in the U.S. that exhibits modern art created overseas could potentially be infringing copyright.

  • Indie film legend accuses Apple, Google of Web piracy