02.19.14
Posted in News Roundup at 8:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A roundup of some recent developments involving Red Hat, its partners, and its desktop-centric operating system
Hortonworks
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HDP combined with Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization integrates Hadoop with existing information sources, including data warehouses, SQL and NoSQL databases, enterprise and cloud applications, and flat and XML files. Among the results are business-friendly, reusable and virtual data models with unified views created by combining and transforming data from multiple sources, including Hadoop.
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Open source technology is slowly finding its way into the public sector as governments seek to build infrastructures based on those tools, says Red Hat’s Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager for the Asia-Pacific region.
Server
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Red Hat (RHT) is taking off in the world of open source virtualization solutions for the cloud—or it has scored a major enterprise customer, at least. This week, it announced that British Airways (BA) is deploying the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform to power its private cloud, an important win for a Red Hat product that until now has seen few enterprise adoptions on this scale.
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It’s surely a testament to Red Hat’s prominence in the cloud arena that the makers of key enterprise technologies increasingly want to work with its cloud offerings, and on Tuesday, storage company Inktank provided a perfect example. Specifically, Inktank launched version 1.1 of Inktank Ceph Enterprise, an upgrade that’s certified for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
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Ceph is a massively scalable, open source, software-defined storage system that is playing a big role in many cloud computing deployments, as Patrick McGarry made clear in a guest post on OStatic. He noted: “Ceph, in particular, is one of these interesting pieces that plugs into both CloudStack and OpenStack. It has the potential to transform the storage industry just like the use of commodity hardware transformed the cloud industry. Built on the idea of using commodity hardware, Ceph’s innovative approach to reliability and near-infinite scalability delivers a storage platform unlike any other.”
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Fedora
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Fedora 22 is going to require applications that want to appear within their GNOME Software Center to ship an AppData file, which is a meta-data specification for providing basic data about the program. AppData is a GNOME-backed specification based on a subset of the AppStream meta-data proposal. An AppData file comes down to an XML file that specifies the basic program information like the license, name, and descriptions of the program. Screenshots of the program can also be specified via URLs. The AppData specification can be found on this web page.
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Dubbed Spherical Cow, the Fedora 18 distribution was released exactly one year ago, on January 15, 2013. The system was powered by Linux kernel 3.11 and it featured the GNOME 3.6 desktop environment for the main edition, MATE, Cinnamon, KDE 4.9, Xfce 4.10, and improved storage management.
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I’ve certainly used this feature in the Debian installer to create Xfce and LXDE systems, and I’m looking forward to doing it with the Fedora installer in the future. (Disclaimer: I did my recent Fedora Xfce installations from the excellent live media that are part of the Fedora Spins portion of the project.)
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Red Hat’s Fedora Linux distribution is in the process of being revitalized and will see some major changes this year. We still won’t see Fedora 21 come until at least August and there’s already lots of questions over the future of Fedora under this new “Fedora.Next” shift. How Fedora’s various “spins” will be handled also has yet to be determined given a new mailing list thread.
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For those in need of some open-source drama to get your Friday morning started, there continues to be a lot of dissenting views shared between Fedora users and developers over the future of the Linux distribution with the ongoing “Fedora.next” initiative.
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The main reason for that: Fedora.next is a huge effort that seems to make everything even more complicated. It imho is also sold pretty badly right now, as you have to invest quite a lot of time to understand what Fedora.next actually is. And Fedora.next to me seems like something the core contributors push forward without having really abort those Fedora contributors who don’t have Fedora as one of their top priorities in life.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Coverage of SliTaz GNU/Linux 5.0, Evolve OS, Distro Astro 2.0, NeuroDebian, Netrunner 13.12, m23 rock 14.1, SparkyLinux 3.2.1, Pinguy OS 13.10, Manjaro Linux 0.8.9, Tiny Core 5.2 and several other distributions which are compared and classified
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After two years of hard work, the development team behind SliTaz, an open source and minimalistic Linux distribution built from scratch, has announced that a new development (cooking) release is now ready for testing.
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Evolve OS is a new upcoming Linux distribution based on openSUSE and sporting a new desktop environment based on the Gnome 3 stack. You may immediately be thinking, is this yet another ‘Ubuntu Killer’ promising a lot and ultimately delivering little? But Evolve OS has a different philosophy and some interesting ideas. Read on to find out more.
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Distro Astro 2.0 is an excellent Linux OS to learn about the basics of a simple desktop environment as well as explore the marvels of the universe. It is also an excellent all-in-one Linux platform for astronomy enthusiasts and professional astronomers alike with some of the best celestial-studying software included. Distro Astro is an impressive and solidly performing Linux distro.
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In past articles, I have looked at distributions that were built with some scientific discipline in mind. In this article, I take a look at yet another one. In this case, I cover what is provided by NeuroDebian.
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The Netrunner distribution is a project based upon the Ubuntu operating system. Netrunner strives to be an easy to use desktop operating system that completes most tasks with free software while offering convenient add-ons and web-based solutions to round out the user experience. Netrunner ships with the KDE desktop to provide a mix of flexibility (for power users) and familiarity (for newcomers). The latest release of Netrunner, version 13.12, is based upon Ubuntu 13.10. The distribution comes with several appealing features, including multimedia support, Windows application compatibility via WINE and the Steam gaming portal software. Netrunner is available in just one edition and can be downloaded in 32-bit or 64-bit x86 builds. The project’s installation media is approximately 1.6 GB in size.
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The latest m23 release focuses on two main new features: For one, on support for Apache CloudStack® and on the other hand on the extended options to clone machines.
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The SparkyLinux development team has announced earlier today, January 31, the immediate availability for download of a new edition of their popular Linux operating system, this time based on the lightweight Xfce desktop environment.
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The desktop is mostly the same as before, so I won’t dwell on that for too much. The Axe Menu, which essentially brought the Linux Mint Menu to GNOME 3/Shell, is sadly gone, replaced by the slightly less nice GnoMenu. There is a Conky system monitor sitting on the top-right of the desktop background that also displays the date and time. Docky gives a dock on the bottom that has been expanded to full width, but for some reason it shows an opaque background until the desktop background changes (after which point the Docky background becomes fully transparent). On the whole, the desktop works decently well.
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Arch Linux is highly respected throughout the Linux community as a cutting edge, well designed, rolling-release Linux distro with superb documentation. But at the same time, it is also discarded as a non-option by many Linux users, including experienced ones, for being time consuming to install and configure.
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Tiny Core 5.2 was released yesterday as the latest version of the ultra light weight Linux distribution. The bare-bone version of this Linux distribution with the flwm window manager comes in at just an 8.9MB ISO while the “Core Plus” version with extra GUI functionality is still a mere 72MB.
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Change log:
* rebuildfstab: do not replace fstab entries for a device that does not have “Added by TC” on the line (thanks to Gerald Clark)
* init: increase the default inode count
* ondemand: don’t list extensions under subdirs in onboot maintenance
* ldd: add wildcard to support both x86 and x86_64
* busybox updated to 1.21.1 plus wget patches and split suid/nosuid for better security
* ldd: Added quotes for binaries with spaces in their names
* /etc/services: modified to suit rpcbind rather than portmap
* tc-functions: Removed the getpasswd stars to allow backspace to work
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What is a Bleeding Edge Linux Distribution ? Bleeding Edge Distribution is a distribution developed by technologies incorporating those so new that they could have a high risk of being unreliable. No matter how much we want to use these distributions, they will always have stability issues. Well, we are here to prove that wrong. Even if it sound impossible, I will give you 5 distributions that are bleeding edge as well as stable enough for daily use.
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Q. I want to install Linux on an old PC to get a few more years out of it, but I don’t know which version to use. What is the difference between Ubuntu and Mint for a new user and are there any free guides to using either?
A. Linux, an alternative computer operating system to Windows and Mac OS X, comes in many versions, or so-called distributions. Some Linux distributions are easier to use than others and each one has its ardent followers, but Linux Mint and Ubuntu have emerged as two of the easiest options for those new to the system.
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Users are confused when they first come to Linux about which distribution they should be using and I have heard people say “I was thinking of Ubuntu or Arch” or “I was thinking about Gentoo and how hard is it to use Linux From Scratch”.
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This article lists the top 10 distributions according to Distrowatch for 2013 and gives a brief outline of the purpose of those distributions and whether they are the sort of operating systems a new user or average computer user should be using as their first port of call.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Mandriva at 8:36 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Flags of the Baltic Sea countries
Summary: Russia continues to improve Mandriva, which used to be the most widely used GNU/Linux distribution for desktops (in the Mandrake days)
WITH Russia receiving Olympic limelight, it has become somewhat fashionable to publish Russophobic pieces in the Western media, focusing only on the negatives to distract from one's own shortcomings in the debt-saddled West (Russia has almost no debt and it has vast natural reserves). This is not a political post but an attempt to explain the state of Mandriva, which some years ago passed from French and Brazilian hands into Russian hands. Remember that Linux was created in Finland, a country highly influenced (and to some degree controlled) by the Russians — those whom Nils Torvalds worked with politically. Given what we now know about the NSA and GCHQ, it would only make sense for Russia to move to GNU/Linux everywhere as soon as possible. Given what Microsoft has done in Russia and has done with the NSA (espionage), only a “useful idiot” (to use Soviet terminology) would still put Windows on government or army computers in Russia.
Following the migration of Mandriva to Russia (finding financial asylum, so to speak) a new distribution called Rosa Linux came to us from Russia [1] with no language barriers, emerging out of nowhere and stealing some of the attention ALTLinux once enjoyed. There is a Russian (but English-speaking) blog that continues to cover Mandriva and its derivatives quite often (even days ago [2]) and Mandriva, which is now based and managed in Russia, makes new software releases [3]. A French derivative of Mandriva, called Mageia (employing several former Mandriva developers), is helping the good name of Mandriva (Mageia 4 was thoroughly reviewed some days ago [4]), not to mention the US semi-equivalent known as PCLinuxOS.
My experiences with Mandriva (main desktop operating system) have been mostly positive and it is important to assure the continued expansion of this GNU/Linux distribution, no matter who manages it. OpenMandriva gives it some independence from the Russia, and its community was led by a Frenchman until not too long ago. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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At the end of 90`s Mandrake Linux was the most popular distribution out there. Most thing that are today said about Ubuntu where first said about Mandrake. It was the number one distro from 1998 util 2004. User friendly, easy to use, easy to install, lot of preinstalled software, most popular by new users and Mandrake made at that point most users to change on Linux. All that is today said about Ubuntu. Yeah, Mandrake had also free shipping for DVDs back then. But soon the empire started to fall apart. In 2004 Mandrake had died. In 2005 Conectiva, the company who bought Mandrakesoft announced and released Mandriva and in 2006 they fired Gael Duval. Duval was the author of Mandrake. The new distribution, Mandriva, was nothing like good old Mandrake and it made lot of users to change their system. Fast forward to 2014 and let us have a look on the legacy of Mandrake Linux. Last stable release of Mandriva was in 2011 and it was not really stable. But in last 10 years Mandriva inspired many users and developers and new distributions popped out. One of them is Rosa Linux. Rosa Linux is a Russian Linux distribution.
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The French GNU/Linux company Mandriva has released a new version of Pulse, its IT systems management software.
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The project makes separate installation ISO images for the GNOME 3 and KDE desktop environments available for download. Support for other desktop environments – Cinnamon, Enlightenment (E17), LXDE, MATE, RazorQt and Xfce – are provided via the DVD installation and Network Install CD images
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Content management systems that challenge proprietary legacy
Drupal
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Drupal v7.25, a maintenance release with numerous bug fixes (no security fixes) is now available for download. Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is recommended.
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WordPress
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The open-source WordPress content management system (CMS) project officially released its 3.8.1 update on the evening of Jan. 23 and provided users with bug fixes and stability updates. The 3.8.1 release is the first update to the WordPress 3.8 platform, which was originally released in mid-December 2013.
Others
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Question2Answer (Q2A) is a popular open source Q&A platform for PHP/MySQL, currently running on more than 11,000 sites in 40 languages.
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Ease of use sets Concrete5 apart from other CMSes. You can do everything – from adding and editing content to managing add-ons – with a few mouse clicks. Concrete5 supports drag-and-drop for moving blocks of content to your pages, and lets you edit content inline.
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 7:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Like branding profiteering “goodwill”
Summary: Branding “change” using names like “Nadella” or “Gates” won’t change the reality that Microsoft continues to be a unique company of systematic crime
Microsoft is still a FUD company and racketeering giant which relies on briberies and other serious abuses all around the world. Don’t be confused by persona marketing. Merely changing a face does not change the policies, which are to embrace crime where possible and where legal action is unlikely to possible (or fines unlikely to exceed the “cost of doing business”). Microsoft is like its close partner, the NSA, in this regard. The law is not being obeyed unless the cost of breaking the law somehow becomes too much of a financial liability.
Nadella has been groomed as part of a Microsoft PR campaign. It was all over the Web and quoting Microsoft staff (posing as ‘journalists’), Ken Starks falls into the trap. He says: “Some of you have talked to me and think that Satya Nadella will be the peacemaker. He will be the one who finally shows the world how open source and proprietary software can work together, that sharing some of Microsoft’s code base is just a matter of time.”
This is nonsense. It’s just another Sam Ramji [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] routine. They think that by changing the face they’ll be able to find more fools to open the door to a Trojan horse.
To Starks’ credit, he says “Microsoft is still beholden to their shareholders and Linux bears some nasty scars from deep wounds. I’m not sure that some of the FOSS powers-that-be will want to work with Microsoft.”
They hopefully won’t. Ballmer and especially Gates are still in charge. They are just hiding their racketeering, bribery, FUD and back-stabbing behind yet another face, this time Nadella’s.
Microsoft is changing only in the sense that it’s becoming irrelevant. Its gross behaviour has not changed; it’s just trying harder to hide it. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, FUD, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 7:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft payments behind proxies that spread FUD about Google, Android, Chrome OS, etc.
THERE IS an extensive, well-coordinated attempt to discredit Google and its Linux-centric projects/efforts. A lot of it is a marketing campaign from Microsoft (sometimes known as “Scroogled”) and some of it comes from Microsoft-bribed academics or lobbyists, as we last demonstrated some days ago (the liar does not mention by name his relationship (payments) with Microsoft).
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN) has published this reply which cites the Gates-funded (bribed) Guardian (very notable for its FUD against Android and Google as of late). SJVN said: “The Guardian published a story, which they have since taken down, spreading FUD about Google, Android, Linux, open source, and licensing. The paper later published another article trying to get the Android facts right, but, well, they still don’t.”
Charles Arthur (from Gates’ ‘Guardian’) occasionally gives a platform to a Microsoft lobbyist, Florian Müller, especially after Bill Gates paid the paper to promote agenda. This makes ‘Guardian’ look more like Bill Gates’ private guardian and the paper now accepts payments from all sorts of corporations whose agenda it will promote in disguise (already a controversial move). For instance, ‘Guardian’ would happily complain about Google not paying much tax, but it would never mention the fact that Microsoft is by far a bigger offender and that Gates (its Sugar Daddy) is the world’s largest private tax evader. The ‘Guardian’ is a joke when it comes to many areas. It also stabs in the back its sources (Manning, Assange, Snowden, and several examples predating them).
These attacks on Google are not just due to its size. With Nokia, for example, Microsoft now uses moles like Elop (and patent troll whom he feeds) to launch frivolous lawsuits and make false accusations too. A lot of this FUD can be traced back to Microsoft funding as we already have examples of recent FUD that was spread to belittle or demonise Android, not just Chrome OS (which Microsoft broadcasts deceptive ads to discredit, pretending that Microsoft is privacy-respecting). Muktware has published an article titled “Chrome OS Myths Debunked”, hopefully helping to end myths such as the myth that it is not GNU/Linux (actually, it is).
Be careful when reading negative coverage about Android, Chrome OS, etc. A lot of it is spread by Microsoft boosters, people who are secretly bribed by Microsoft, media companies that Microsoft is paying, or even Microsoft staff masquerading as “journalists”. Misinformation is something that Microsoft is very good at. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 5:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: PRISM pioneer Microsoft wants to bring espionage-leaning NSA surveillance right into businesses
According to Microsoft boosters and puff pieces from so-called ‘journalists’ like Michal Lev-Ram at CNN, Microsoft brings its notorious NSA surveillance (with Skype) right into its business-centric communication tool. Any CIO or CTO that chooses to bring this bugging exploit into a business deserves to be fired (for compromising business security), just as anyone who goes to Microsoft for Android deserves to be suffering espionage and retribution. Only a fool would use Skype or Lync now, just like “Normandy”, which is how Microsoft Nokia turns Android into an enhanced surveillance platform (the rumours seem to have become more substantiated). █
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