• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

BT Vision plans to leave Mediaroom

BT Vision is apparently preparing to drop the Microsoft Mediaroom platform and put in place a browser-based replacement running on Linux. The migration away from Mediaroom would be an embarrassment for Microsoft, which developed a special variant to cater for the BT Vision hybrid broadcast and broadband service. BT is a partner in the planned YouView platform, which also specifies a Linux operating system.

Microsoft created Mediaroom as a platform for IPTV or internet protocol television services, aimed at top tier telcos. BT was an early customer. Others include Deutsche Telekom and AT&T. With more than eight million households through over 40 operators, it is one of the most widely deployed commercial IPTV middleware platforms.

Hail the penguin

Last year Linux celebrated its 20th birthday. The operating system began life as a cut-down version of the commercial Unix system, which turned 40 last year, and has become the largest distributed software development project in history.

The kernel – the bit between the hardware and software – consists of more than 11 million lines of code contributed by more than 500 companies and tens of thousands of developers around the world. It has been estimated that commercial redevelopment of Linux would cost more than US$3 billion, yet it’s yours for free.

Desktop

• Writing and GNU/Linux

  He really expects e-books to dominate in book publishing and is at the tipping point. He likes the way FLOSS works for him.

  FLOSS has so many tools for writing. I like LyX for larger projects because it scales nicely. The applications does less during writing and saves the heavy lifting for the rendering process so I can maximize my productivity. The less my PC does to get in my way, the better I write. I use LibreOffice for routine stuff and it also provides a good spreadsheet for handling tabular data. I should also use a FLOSS database to keep track of stuff but WordPress does that already and Google is great so I have not done that yet. I could probably scrape MrPogson.com for hyperlinks and generate a good database for my writing automatically. Whatever we imagine we can do with FLOSS.

• Don’t Get Excited Over Coreboot Laptops Yet

  There was the Coreboot main track session today at FOSDEM 2012 about Coreboot support on laptops and other areas, but unfortunately, there isn’t much to get excited about at this point.

  While Coreboot has made much progress in providing a “free” BIOS / UEFI for modern systems (particularly those based upon new AMD hardware), there is still much work left to be accomplished. There was an expectation that at this FOSDEM event there would be a new laptop shown off running Coreboot with the expectation that a new vendor might be shipping this device with Coreboot this year.

• Scholarly work using Linux

  In Linux, I do not have to install anything for my computer to do all that: the OS includes all the functionalities I need. From KOrganizer, I get the computer to wake me up with a song and to launch Firefox and LibreOffice with my article without exposing my computer to any malware. I simply used the process for a song but selected “application/script” instead of “sound”. Then I wrote libreoffice3.4 for “application” and added the path where the file was in “arguments”.

  But that’s not all: Linux has a great tool for copying citations from PDFs: Okular. Its fabulous feature to select text from virtually any PDF, copy it, and paste it truly facilitates the process of adding citations to one’s article. Even in the rare cases when it is not possible to get the selection as text, you can paste it as an image with Okular…simple and quick.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel Gallium3D For Mesa 8.0

    With the Mesa 8.0 release right around the corner, in recent weeks there have been a number of benchmarks on Phoronix looking at this latest open-source OpenGL library and its drivers, including Gallium3D. In this article though are new benchmarks from one of the areas not explored yet: the Intel Gallium3D driver performance.

  • Intel Haswell Graphics Driver To Be Opened Up Soon

    While the Ivy Bridge launch is still a number of weeks out, Intel will soon be publishing their initial hardware enablement code for next year’s Haswell micro-architecture.

    There’s already been Haswell compiler support patches, but for the open-source graphics drivers there will soon be the first bits of public code. The Ivy Bridge Linux support code is mostly all molded into shape, so some attention has already turned to the Ivy Bridge-successor Haswell.

Applications

• 4 Best Free Linux Script Writing Tools

  Script writing is the art and craft of writing scripts for the general public. The script can take the form of musicals, plays, novels, films, television programmes, and more. Each time you watch a show on television, visit the cinema, or read a book you are consuming the trials and tribulations of a script writer.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Running ownCloud3 On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10

  • What to do if your mail server is blacklisted

  • Moving from Windows to Linux: Easy Steps and Resources

  • How to Use Facebook through the Command Line

  • Understanding the /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin Split

• Games

  • Now Battle of Wesnoth 1.10 comes with New Campaign and Features

  • Project Zomboid, the final countdown!

  • Turrets, Capital Ships, and Explosions

    Remember that scene in Star Wars where Luke, Leia, and Solo are escaping from the Death Star and some Tie Fighters give chase? Solo commands to get to the turrets, Leia pilots, and together they’re able to shoot down the fighters. Scenes like that are something I was hoping to capture a small part of when adding turrets to the game. I wanted players to be able to play the role of a gunner, while one of their buddies pilots them through a war zone. Or command one of the many on a capitol ship, defending it from the threat of maneuverable fighter craft.

  • Explore The Land of Hyrule, Play Zelda Classic on Linux

    Zelda Classic (ZC) is a tribute to one of the greatest video games of all time: Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda. It has been developed into an exact replica of the NES version.

  • Mind-Controlled Game, Mind Labyrinth, Comes To Linux

    Linux has yet to become a platform for gaming. Ubuntu is doing a decent job by increasing focus on polish and looks of the Debian-based operating system to make to more appealing to users and OEMs. Linux may be missing the high-end games, but there are quite a lot of games that one can play under a GNU/Linux system such as Ubuntu, openSUSE or Linux Mint.

    Now, there is game called Mind Labyrinth which uses Neurosky’s Mindwave headset (read our story on how the headset works) to control the game.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Integrating Shutter With KDE 4.7

    Did you know that you can integrate Shutter with KDE 4.7? Yes, you sure can. Shutter is an excellent tool for screen captures regardless of your desktop environment.

  • KDE Development – A Beginner’s Guide

    During a recent 5 day sprint, four KDE contributors planned and produced a handbook for beginning KDE developers. We had assistance from several generous organizations, worked hard, and learned a lot.

Distributions

• RebeccaBlackOS – First Live CD Running Wayland Display Server

• New Releases

  • Berry Linux Mini 1.13 released. (2012-2-6)

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • PCLinuxOS 2012.2 has been released

    Bill Reynolds announced the availabilty of PCLinuxOS 2012.2 with Linux Kernel 2.6.38.8 and desktop environment KDE 4.6.5. It is available in 32-bit and 64-bit architecture. PCLinuxOS is mainly forked from Mandriva and very easy to use operating system.

  • PCLinuxOS 2012.02 Review

    There are quite a few distributions out there that are geared towards the novice user, and PCLOS does a great job at it. The website does have a community where one could ask for help and there is even a monthly magazine that they publish monthly with tips and tricks for Linux users. That right there is worth a few bonus points as they are trying to keep a community and help a new user. They have also published a

    What I found strange in PCLOS is what the developers chose to have on the desktop by default. The applications they chose doesn’t make much sense in my opinion as there could have been better ones selected, say Firefox and Thunderbird, compared to LibreOffice Manager, Network Center, Firewall Setup and Localization manager.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • inux Mint 12 KDE review

          Linux Mint 12 KDE is the latest update to the line of Linux Mint editions that are based on Ubuntu Desktop and use the K Desktop Environment. It is actually the first release of the KDE edition in a very long time. The last release before this one was Linux Mint 10 KDE, which was released in February 2011. (See Linux Mint 10 KDE review.)

          So we moved from Linux Mint 10 KDE to Linux Mint 12 KDE because Linux Mint 11 KDE did not make it out of the developer’s box.

        • LinuxMint12 KDE has been released! | Screenshots Tour

          LinuxMint 12 KDE has been released, this edition comes with the latest and recently released KDE 4.7.4. This is the first release of Linux Mint using Hybrid ISO images. Traditionally, tools such as ‘Startup Disk Creator’ or ‘UNetbootin’ were needed to install Linux Mint via USB. With hybrid images, you can simply use the ‘dd’ command or a graphical front-end to make a bootable USB stick with no efforts which acts exactly like a live DVD.

        • Xubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 2 Screenshot Tour

          On February 2nd, Canonical unleashed for testing the second and last Alpha version of the upcoming Xubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

          Xubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 2 is powered by Linux kernel 3.2.2 and is built on top of the Xfce 4.8 desktop environment. It features a new greeter and desktop theme, as well as minor changes to various packages and default settings (including the size of the Terminal font).

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • U.S. government, military to get secure Android phones

      Some U.S. officials this year are expected to get smartphones capable of handling classified government documents over cellular networks, according to people involved in the project.
      The phones will run a modified version of Google’s Android software, which is being developed as part of an initiative that spans multiple federal agencies and government contractors, these people said.

    • 10 beautiful Android Live Wallpapers

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Details Emerge About the Spark Linux-Based Tablet

    There’s a new tablet in town (well, on its way to town, at least) called the Spark. The Linux-based tablet, based on the Zenithink C71, was announced several days ago, but the fellow behind the project, KDE developer Aaron Seigo, released more details on his blog in a convenient Q&A format.

  • Linux unveils open source tablet

    The Spark, an open source tablet that will be available for purchase by May this year, is part of the Linux-based MeeGo project, which is hosted by the Linux Foundation, iTWire reports.

    The device will run open source software, as well as a mix of free content, such as digital books from Project Gutenberg, as well as content and apps for purchase, PC World states.

Help OSI – Complete Our Survey!

HP Opens Up Its Switches to OpenFlow

HP has been a supporter of the OpenFlow effort for several years, but previously had not offered full commercial support on its switching platforms.

“We have been working with OpenFlow and had a special licensed version available for over four years,” Saar Gillai, Vice President, Advanced Technology Group, and CTO at HP Networking told InternetNews.com. “Now, based on strong demand from our customers, we’re putting out a fully supported commercial release that any of our customers can download and use on their switches.”

Big Switch releases open source controller for OpenFlow

OMB Shared First should include open source, says group

Open source advocates urge the Office of Management and Budget to expand its Shared First strategy to include open source software development in a Feb. 2 comment posted online.

Open Source Initiative affiliates announced at FOSDEM

Open Source Initiative (OSI) board member Simon Phipps has announced a group of affiliate organisations who will be providing advice to the OSI as it reforms itself from a self appointed board-based organisation eventually to a member-based organisation. The affiliates, announced during Phipps’ presentation at FOSDEM in Brussels, are the Apache Software Foundation, Creative Commons, Drupal, the Eclipse Foundation, FreeBSD, Joomla (via Open Source Matters), KDE, the Linux Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, Plone, Sahana and Wikiotics. The OSI is also undertaking an anonymous survey to gauge what a future personal membership of the OSI should mean in practice.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 3.5 Will Be Released on February 8

  The Document Foundation proudly announced on February 4th that the third and last Release Candidate version of the upcoming LibreOffice 3.5 open source office suite is available for download and testing.

• LibreOffice making steady progress

  A little more than a year after The Document Foundation was set up to look after LibreOffice, the fork of the former OpenOffice.org project, it seems that Oracle did the users of the latter office suite a great favour by neglecting it.

Education

• Software sans royalty for education

  Open-source software has proven to be cost-effective wherever it has been implemented, including the� education sector.

Healthcare

• Peace Corps Selects OpenEMR

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Alfresco Embraces SaaS and the Cloud with Its New CMS Platform

    In a big endorsement of the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model, enteprise content management system (CMS) maker Alfresco is embracing cloud- and mobile-based usage of its platform with its new Alfresco 4 release. The open source CMS platform is used by 2,500 enterprises in 55 countries according to the company, and users need to access the content from their mobile devices, share and sync on the go, and more. The new platform is accessible from tablets as well as smartphones, and also allows users to publish straight to social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

Public Services/Government

• New Hampshire Passes ‘Open Source Bill’

• How Did This Get Past Microsoft? New Hampshire Passed An Open Source Software Bill

  New Hampshire (motto: “Live Free or Die”) has passed HB418, a House bill which legislates the requirement that state agencies “consider open source software when acquiring software and promotes the use of open data formats by state agencies. This bill also directs the commissioner of information technology to develop a statewide information policy based on principles of open government data.”

  Whew! According to bill author and Linux kernel contributor Seth Cohn (commenting on Slashdot), this is the first open source and open data bill to pass in any state, ever. Now, it does not require state government officials to pick the open source alternative over the proprietary one at any point in time, but simply to officially document their justification for their software policy.

• Live Free or Die in New Hampshire

Openness/Sharing

• API: Three Letters That Change Life, the Universe and Even Detroit

• Open source players share their experiences in CC-BY-SA book

  Forty-two contributors from a variety of open source projects have shared their open source development experiences in a new book entitled “Open Advice”. Each author has written a short piece based on their personal experience on what they wished they had known when they started out in open source. Not all of the authors are programmers – contributors also include those who have contributed to open source as, for example, designers, organisers and package maintainers.

Programming

• Google Summer of Code 2012

  Google’s 8th year of its program that gives students the chance of working in open source software development during their summer break was announced at the FOSDEM open source conference in Belgium.

• Google Summer of Code 2012 announced

Finance

• Goldman Sachs cooked Greece books

Intellectual Monopolies

• White House Petition Demands TPP Process Be Open & Transparent

  It seems that, with every issue that comes up around here, people are quickly putting together White House petitions on the White House’s “We The People” site. The latest, in response to all of these stories about secrecy concerning the negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), is a petition demanding that the process be more open and transparent.

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • ACTA Attack

      ACTA is perhaps one of the most sinister developments in the history of the Internet, and beyond, not only because of the Draconian legislations it proposes, but also because of the manner in which they were proposed.

      You see ACTA has never been democratically scrutinised or debated. It was created and negotiated entirely in secret by private corporations, not transparently by democratically elected representatives, and then ratified without any democratic mandate (by “executive order”). Indeed, the US government actually went so far as to describe these boiler-room “negotiations” as “a matter of national security”.

    • The EU Commission’s Repressive Plans Beyond ACTA

      The EU Commission is relentlessly defending ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which faces widespread opposition in Europe and beyond. Falsely portraying ACTA as an acceptable agreement, the Commission is paving the way for its ultra-repressive copyright enforcement agenda, as revealed in documents just released. Citizens and their elected representatives across Europe must denounce this dangerous drift of the policy-making process, which is bound to undermine freedoms online and the very architecture of the Internet, and instead require a thorough reform of copyright.

    • European spring is over

      The European Parliament has sent me the legal service’s opinion on ACTA. It is almost completely blacked out.

      On 4 October the Legal Affairs committee requested the opinion of the Parliament’s legal service on ACTA. The service concluded the opinion on 8 December. I requested the document on 10 December.

      On 19 December the Legal Affairs committee decided to make the opinion public.

      There was a first indication things were going wrong on 11 January. The Parliament’s register wrote me: “Due to ongoing consultations in view of disclosure of the requested documents, we would like to inform you that in accordance with Article 7(3) of Regulation 1049/2001, we need to extend the reply’s time limit by adding 15 working days.”

      On 4 February (letter dated 31.1) I received the blacked out document. Apparently, the Legal Affairs committee’s decision was overridden. By whom? Probably by the Parliament’s Bureau.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Lenovo Wants to be Number One in PCs. Look What They Do in India.

  They are off to a good start clinching a deal for 300K (3 lakh) notebooks running GNU/Linux for ELCOT in the Tamil Nadu state of India.

Kernel Space

• Talk Of A Brand New API For KVM Virtualization

  A discussion has been started about a next-generation API for Linux KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualization.

  Avi Kivity of Red Hat has written to the KVM developers in a proposal for a brand new API for KVM. The API would rework syscalls, state accessors, KVM’s device model, ioeventfd/irqfd, guest memory management, and the vCPU FD mmap area, among other potential improvements over the existing API.

• Graphics Stack

  • Is Compiz On Its Deathbed?

    It’s been brought up in the forums about the state of upstream Compiz developments. Some Phoronix readers go as far as calling upstream Compiz being dead. Those comments were largely based upon outstanding Compiz bugs, the lack of Compiz releases, and the lead developer apologizing for the “failure” of the Compiz project on his blog. In his blog posting from December, Sam Spilsbury apologized for the lack of new direction, lack of development, and not any increased stability for the project.

  • Wayland 1.0 Is Set For H1’2012 Release

    A few days ago I wrote that the Wayland Display Server is preparing for a stable 1.0 release and now this weekend from FOSDEM new information has been learned.

    Kristian Høgsberg shared during his session on Saturday afternoon in Brussels that they are indeed planning the 1.0 release. In fact, the Wayland 1.0 stable release should be here soon. This stable (i.e. non-experimental) release is planned to be out in the first half of 2012. So before the summer, we should have a stable Wayland release where the core protocol and APIs will not be broken after that point.

  • Intel’s Brewing New Linux Graphics Driver Features

    Eric Anholt of Intel spoke on Saturday at FOSDEM 2012 in Belgium about the state of the Intel Linux graphics driver user-space and some of their future plans.

    At the bottom is the video I recorded of Anholt’s presentation about the Intel Linux graphics driver developed out of their Open-Source Technology Center. Here are some of the keynotes from his FOSDEM 2012 presentation:

Applications

• Proprietary

  • Dropbox offers an additional 5GB of cloud storage to beta users

    For users willing to be guinea pigs, Dropbox is offering an opportunity to score 5GB of free space through the popular cloud storage service. PCWorld is reporting the 5GB is actually in addition to the standard 2GB issued to free users, making the possible total for free Dropbox users a roomy 7GB.

    Some of you may also be interested to know that Microsoft’s Skydrive is still offering 25GB of cloud storage. Despite the enormous amount of storage space Skydrive offers, limits imposed on the service have made it unappealing for many. Microsoft claims it’s working on alleviating those concerns though, for what it is worth.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Synergy! as many PCs as you like with just one keyboard and one mouse!

  • How to Jailbreak iPhone 4S and iPad 2 on Linux

  • How to : Download Google Maps for Offline Purpose in Android

  • How to create facebook application using PHP and graph api

  • Top Boxee Box tips and tricks

  • Automatically Detect File Changes on Your Server

• Wine

  • Bordeaux 75% off sale

  • Wine 1.4-rc2 released

• Games

  • What The New Linux Game Publishing Will Look Like

    Clive Crous, the new CEO of Linux Game Publishing following the resignation of founder and CEO Michael Simms, has issued a message to Linux gamers concerning the future of LGP.

    The key items brought up in the message by the new Linux Game Publishing CEO are listed below while the message in full can be read via this copy in the forums.

    - Michael Simms will still be involved with Linux Game Publishing in an advisory capacity and in porting some titles over to Linux.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 22nd January 2012

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Latest Release: Hanthana 15.5 i386 DVD ISO ~ 3.8 GB

  • Netrunner 4.1 version (32/64bit)

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin Updates: Unity 5.2 Is Available to Update

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Bouncing malware from Android Market

      The battle between malware writers and those trying to make their life miserable is a never ending one, will forever be a never ending one. The nature of the battle field makes it so.

      The bad guys will always find a way, sooner or later, to penetrate the security wall around an application. And as soon as one hole is patched, they will find another one. It is like a movie that never ends, with your device as the stage.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Spark Linux tablet specs updated, going up for pre-order next week

SaaS

• Banks Push Hadoop Envelope to Open Big Data’s
  Secrets

  Given the promise of new analytics technologies, becoming more data-driven is on the minds of most IT decision makers these days. In a recent report on the impact of big data on analytics, “More than half of the organizations polled identified analytics as among their top five IT priorities,” says Julie Lockner senior analyst and VP of data at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), an IT strategic advisory firm based in Milford, Mass.

  “With the promise big data is poised to bring,” says Lockner, “organizations are exploring their options for solving business challenges with emerging [data] technologies. It’s just not practical or cost-effective to use traditional [database] platforms and technologies that were designed before the big-data era.”

• Big Data: Will Open Source Software Challenge BI & Analytics Software Vendors

Semi-Open Source

• Analyzing Magento Community Edition

  Magento Community Edition is an open source system, which means that it can be downloaded for free, and modified to suit specific programming and/or design requirements. What’s unique and valuable about this model (compared to hosted solutions-where one is locked into a specific company for hosting and support) is that an ecommerce entrepreneur can have complete control over his/her website.

BSD

• KMS For FreeBSD Is Still A Work In Progress

  FreeBSD still lacks mainline support for kernel mode-setting (KMS) on modern hardware, but at least it’s still being worked on.

  As I routinely get such questions via email, for those wondering about the state of kernel mode-setting (KMS) or the ability to use the latest Linux DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) drivers on FreeBSD, it’s still out-of-tree and is considered a work-in-progress to be used by experienced BSD desktop users.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Lecture on free software

  A lecturer on ‘Copyright v/s Community in the Age of Computer Networks’ was delivered by Richard Mathew Stallman developer of GNU/Linux at the BKB Auditorium at Gauhati University today.

Open Access/Content

• Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics

  Elsevier, the global publishing company, is responsible for The Lancet, Cell, and about 2,000 other important journals; the iconic reference work Gray’s Anatomy, along with 20,000 other books—and one fed-up, award-winning mathematician.

• U of T and Western sign agreement with Access Copyright

  I am very pleased to announce the agreement of a voluntary licence between Access Copyright, University of Toronto and Western University (formerly University of Western Ontario). The attached press release went out at 7:00 pm today (Monday) and is now on our website.

• U. of T. and Western Capitulate to Access Copyright

  In an astonishing development that has caught all but a handful by surprise, U. of T. and Western have signed copyright deals with Access Copyright that appear to be an early and complete capitulation to an important battle over the costs and parameters of access to knowledge in Canadian post-secondary institutions.

Programming

• Google Summer of Code 2012 is on!

Microsoft Loses US Smart Phone Market Share — Again

Finance

• Goldman to face mortgage debt class-action lawsuit

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc was ordered by a federal judge to face a securities class-action lawsuit accusing it of defrauding investors about a 2006 offering of securities backed by risky mortgage loans from a now-defunct lender.

Censorship

• Transport Canada Issues DMCA Takedown Over On-the-Record Response

  Transport Canada has reportedly issued a DMCA takedown notice to Scribd over an on-the-record response it provided to a journalist. The move is particularly odd (though not unprecedented, see here and here) given the document was issued to a journalist and the government changed its crown copyright licence last year to allow for private and non-commercial public use without the need for further permission.

Civil Rights

• Assange followers give a stand-out performance

  WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange faces a tense wait after seven judges of the British Supreme Court adjourned to decide whether he will be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault.

  The two-day appeal by Assange against a lower court’s decision to uphold the validity of a Swedish arrest warrant marks the end of a year-long legal battle to avoid extradition, sparked by allegations by two women in 2010 that he sexually assaulted them.

  The appeal ended in a war of words between Assange’s barrister, Dinah Rose, and Clare Montgomery, QC, representing the Swedish Judicial Authority, as each sought to persuade the judges to support their respective positions not only on the fate of Julian Assange, but on the future of a controversial extradition treaty that operates throughout the European Union.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Rogers vows end to Internet ‘throttling’ in 2012

  Rogers Communications Inc. RCI.A-T will stop “throttling” Internet traffic on its network later this year – a long-awaited move that follows a similar decision by rival BCE Inc. BCE-T

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You

  • Ten Key Questions and Answers About Bill C-11, SOPA, ACTA, and the TPP

    In recent days there has been massive new interest in Canadian copyright reform as thousands of people write to their MPs to express concern about the prospect of adding SOPA-style rules to Bill C-11 (there are even plans for public protests beginning to emerge). The interest has resulted in some completely unacceptable threats and confusion – some claiming that the Canadian bill will be passed within 14 days (not true) and others stating that proposed SOPA-style changes are nothing more than technical changes to the bill (also not true). Even the mainstream media is getting into the mix, with the Financial Post’s Terrance Corcoran offering his “expert” legal opinion that CRIA’s lawyers are likely to lose their lawsuit against isoHunt.

  • ACTA

    • Acta goes too far, says MEP

      The French MEP who resigned his position in charge of negotiating the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (Acta) has said it “goes too far” by potentially cutting access to lifesaving generic drugs and restricting internet freedom.

    • Maladministration complaint against the European Parliament

      I just filed a maladministration complaint with the Ombudsman against the European Parliament for systematically lying about the existence of documents:

      The European Parliament cultivates secrecy.

      On 21 June 2011, the coordinators of the International Trade committee (INTA) decided to ask the Parliament’s legal service an opinion on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The INTA committee’s Chairman, Mr Moreira, sent a letter to the legal service. In the letter, the Chairman allegedly left out a question on safeguards against disproportional criminalisation. While this was known in Parliament, no Member took action to solve this. I requested, among other documents, the coordinators’ minutes of the INTA committee.

    • Ambassador Apologises for ACTA, Anonymous Announces Attacks (adds)

    • Smoking gun on ACTA Criminal Sanctions

      We discovered a smoking gun on the criminal sanctions aspect of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). A declassified document reveals that the Commission made proposals and fundamentally steered the negotiations on criminal sanctions in ACTA for which no corresponding EU harmonisation exists. There is no “Acquis” element on criminal enforcement of intellectual property rights, yet. Criminal sanctions in ACTA were formally negotiated by the Council “Presidency” on behalf of the EU member states.

    • Can Poland stop ACTA?

      The EU Council and Commission have opposing opinions on whether Poland can stop ACTA. Who is right? – only the Court of Justice may tell.

      According to ZDNet, Poland may not ratify ACTA, which could spell the end of ACTA for the entire European Union:

      “Tusk’s backtracking could spell the end of ACTA for the entire European Union. If Poland or any other EU member state, or the European Parliament itself, fails to ratify the document, it becomes null and void across the union.”

      ZDNet added: “The European Commission confirmed to ZDNet UK that if just one member state does not ratify ACTA, the deal will not enter into force anywhere within the EU.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

More FUD Gone

One of the key elements spread by FUDsters is the doubt about being able to do real stuff using */Linux. The naysayers trot out some pet application that they may never have used as an example of an application not available on FLOSS systems. The reality is that FLOSS on a general-purpose computer can do just about anything. Take Android/Linux, for instance. It’s on hundreds of millions of personal computers now and things like AutoCAD are available to run on it. The ISVs cannot pass up platforms that popular. And, yes, Android/Linux is a Linux distro…

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel RC6 Support On The Sandy Bridge Desktop

    While RC6 support remains off-by-default as Intel developers are faced by RC6-related bugs affecting a small minority of Sandy Bridge users, this power-savings feature is not limited to only Intel mobile graphics. As discovered at Phoronix, RC6 can manage to boost the graphics performance beyond just extending your battery life. The RC6 performance boost is also quite visible on Intel Sandy Bridge desktop hardware too.

  • Codethink Senior Engineer Launches Open Source 3D Device Driver Project: LimaDriver.ORG

  • Radeon R600 Tiling Patches Are Ready

Applications

• The Best Calendar App for Linux

  The Best Calendar App for LinuxLinux users have a few calendar programs to choose from, but none of them are particularly spectacular—in fact, most of them aren’t very good at all. As such, we’re bending the rules of the App Directory and recommending that you use the awesome Google Calendar webapp for all your scheduling needs.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Compare And Synchronize Folders With FreeFileSync

  • Wget Download Manager

  • Hardening Postfix For ISPConfig 3

• Games

  • Linux games compilation 11 – Don’t fear the numbers!

    Long time no see. It’s been a while since I’ve last written a mega-game compilation. You may believe that I’ve given up Linux games. Not at all. Linux gaming is alive and kicking. Not moving forward quite as fast as I’d like, but some games are making tremendous progress, others are sending awareness waves through the fabric of humanity, others yet are fresh new titles, a testament to the slow, yet persistent growth of Linux on the domestic market. More commercial games would be nice, but we’re not here to debate finance or politics. Not much anyway.

    Truth to be told, one day, I am going to run out of available titles for these kinds of reviews, so we will have to switch back to single game articles only. Not today. Luckily for you, I’ve managed to lay my hands on several more useful games, which you will probably like. Let’s see what we have.

  • MegaGlest: a fantastic, free software strategy 3D game

    When the Glest team started “Glest” as a college project a few years ago, they probably didn’t expect their game to go such a long way. While “Glest” stopped being developed a couple of years ago in 2009, it was forked in two different projects: GAE (Glest Advanced Engine) and Megaglest (the game I am reviewing in this article). So, how is it? The answer is simple: this game is incredible, polished, enjoyable, addictive, smart, and plain simply fantastic.

    A few years ago, the general consensus was that games could only be developed thanks to big investments, and that there could never be a really good games released as GPL. This theory was proved wrong several times, and I can say that MegaGlest is yet more evidence that fantastic games released for free can — and do — exist.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 15th January 2012

  • Akademy 2012 Call for Papers; Registration opens

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Alpine 2.3.6 released

  • Salix Live Xfce 13.37

  • KahelOS 020212

  • SimplyMEPIS 11.0.12

• Debian Family

  • Iceweasel/Firefox 10.0 now in the Debian Mozilla APT Archive

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Video Review: Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 2 – Screenshots

        Well with the release of the Alpha for Ubuntu 12.04, I had to do a short video and screenshot tour. Join in the bandwagon parade of sorts leading up to the main release. Hey, dont get me wrong, I like parades….. I also have used Ubuntu for many years but currently I use Xubuntu but… I still enjoy Ubuntu…..

      • Comment: Unity can’t go it alone

        Open source experts like Red Hat and SUSE learned long ago how difficult and often unwise it can be to try to establish bigger projects with just their own distributions. If Canonical realises this, too, and changes its methods of operation accordingly, the Unity desktop will have a much better chance of becoming the third major desktop alongside GNOME and KDE.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android, Tizen and the End of Java

    I wanted to call this piece Life, the Universe and Everything. If you’re an avid sci-fi reader, or you’ve at least read Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, then those words might mean something to you, but this argument is not about the book, or Douglas Adams. Allow me to explain.

  • HP CEO says webOS will be better than ‘fragmented’ Android and ‘closed’ iOS

  • Android

    • Android is the number one mobile OS in the US

    • 5 Best Android Apps For Reddit Lovers

      When does the narwhal bacon? If you know the answer to that question, there’s very little doubt that you’re a regular Reddit user. Reddit, apart from being a social news website, has also become a cultural phenomenon. It has reached millions of internet users and has changed many lives since its inception. Though most users prefer browsing the site in its original avatar, that is the web-based version, there are some Redditors who need to upvote/downvote stuff even while they’re travelling. So, to fulfill that need, here are some of the best Reddit Apps for Android which will let you browse the site from anywhere.

    • MIUI Android ROM is going open source

    • Chinese OEM Xiaomi publishes MIUI open source code

    • DROID 4 rumored to launch February 9th for $199.99 on Verizon [updated]

    • Crittercism: “iOS apps crash more than Android apps”

      Startup mobile app monitoring firm Crittercism has released a new report which is bound to get people talking about Apple vs. Android all over again. As if the fanboys ever take a break. The crux of the finding is this: Apple and its various OS iterations is not any more stable than Android and its ‘fragmented’ ecosystem.

    • LG Reveals Pair of Unknown Androids in Certification Filing

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • 6 Reasons Why Windows 8 Tablets Are Not A Threat To Android

    Microsoft has lost the mobile war. The disappointing performance of Windows Phone even after two years of its release is evident that the market has moved on. Microsoft’s last bet is Nokia which dropped all of its own open source projects and promising OS such as MeeGo to become a hardware delivery truck for Microsoft’s Mobile OS.

Open Source Based Workflow Management Systems

Open Source Migration Checklist

Next Gen File Systems for Open Source

Taking the Open Source Pill

My Experiences With Open Source

Events

• National Conference on “Emerging Trends in Open Source Applications and Cloud Computing (OSACC – 2012)” at Jamia

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 11 to get add-on sync

    Following the update to Firefox stable earlier this week, Mozilla released today updates to its Aurora and Beta versions that introduce some pretty hefty changes for the Firefox on PCs.

  • Which Firefox is right for you — 10, 11, 12 or 13?

    As always, the rapid release cycle — a new version of Firefox ships every six weeks — means that changes aren’t as radical as you might expect considering the regular version number jumps. However, the latest batch of updates hints that some major updates are heading Firefox’s way over the next few months. Get a head’s up on what’s coming and discover which build is best for your personal needs with our updated guide to what the future holds in store for Firefox.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice stats: 400 total contributors, thousands of code commits every month

  The Document Foundation (TDF), which launched in 2010 to develop LibreOffice, has published statistics that illustrate the project’s rapid growth. Approximately 400 total developers have contributed code to the project. The number of contributors who are active each month generally ranges from 50 to over 100.

• LibreOffice Development Status Report

CMS

• Open Source Software Helps Fitness Professionals Save Money, Time Inexpensive WordPress Themes eliminate the need for costly web design

Healthcare

• Open Source Tackles Healthcare In Places Microsoft Can’t

  At one hospital in Kano, Nigeria, 50 babies are born each day. And it’s not exactly prepared to handle them all. “We’re talking about one midwife taking three deliveries at a time,” says Evelyn Castle.

  Nonetheless, Castle aims to create digital records of those births and the hundreds of others happening across northern Nigeria each day — even as she and another American expatriate, Adam Thompson, are working to digitize the health records of adults across the region, including polio cases and expectant mothers who’ve tested HIV positive. It’s an enormous task, but the size is only part of the problem. Castle and Thompson are introducing western technology to facilities that aren’t familiar with it — and may not have the resources to handle what they are familiar with.

  “This is one of the most difficult places on the planet — in many ways,” says Andrew Karlyn, who spent three years as the country director in Nigeria for the Population Council, a nonprofit that seeks to improve living conditions in places across the globe. “If you’ve got a barely literate medical technician, who only knows how to use a microscope to look for Malaria and fill in a form, you can’t just put a fancy computer in front of him and expect him to use it.”

  Or, as Castle points out, if a midwife is juggling three deliveries at a time, recording the details isn’t high on the list of priorities.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Alfresco Enterprise 4 adds a free public cloud option

    Building on the enterprise CMS’s open source foundations, Alfresco has announced that, alongside the release of its subscription offering Alfresco Enterprise 4, it is rolling out a hosted, multi-tenant cloud version of the platform. Designed for enterprises that want control of their content with their own installations of Alfresco but would find it useful to have a globally accessible, controllable document store in the cloud, Alfresco are offering organisations, with or without its enterprise CMS, free accounts with ten gigabytes of storage on the Amazon EC2 hosted system.

Funding

• Science Startups and Basic Researchers Turn to Crowds for Funding

  Having branded itself “the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects,” Kickstarter has become a hub for artists, writers, performers, and filmmakers to connect with philanthropists interested in underwriting their projects. But science is a creative endeavor too, and, like artists, inventors and researchers face dwindling support from traditional sources.

Public Services/Government

• Open-government advocates share their wish lists

  We asked open-data advocates to share their top wishes for a Quebec open government, and what provincial data they’d most like to see liberated.

Programming

• Craigslist Donates $100,000 To the Perl Foundation

• Hands-on with Node.js support in Komodo IDE 7

  ActiveState has released a major new version of the Komodo integrated development environment (IDE). The update, which is called Komodo 7, introduces several useful new features and support for additional programming languages.

• Bridging Git Over Open Source and Commercial

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Hey Advertisers! Stop Believing The NFL’s Lies About Trademark Law And Call The Super Bowl The Super Bowl

• Copyrights

  • The SOPA War: Why the GOP Turned on Piracy (Opinion)

    For Republicans, opposition to intellectual property laws is starting to look like a political winner, and that should terrify Hollywood as it misreads where the pop-culture power base now lies.

  • SOPA Is Top Story for Young People

    Young people under 30 followed protests over SOPA more closely than news about the upcoming presidential election, according to a recent Pew Research Center study.

    That makes sense to librarians. They know young people, who spend so much of their lives online would be likely to follow news involving sites they visit.

  • Tell The USTR To Stop Being A Pawn Of Hollywood Lobbyists

    Every year, the USTR puts out its infamously laughable Special 301 report (as I’ve pointed out in the past, I’ve seen people in the ideologically-aligned US Copyright Office mock the Special 301 report openly — showing that even those who support it know that it’s ridiculous). The way it works is that the USTR asks for comments about what countries aren’t doing enough to protect US intellectual property abroad, and then puts out a “who’s been naughty” and “who’s been extra extra naughty” list to publicly shame countries. It’s been so ridiculous that Canada — whose copyright law is much stricter than the US in many ways — is frequently listed as naughty, and has officially stated that it does not consider the Special 301 process to be legitimate.

  • Paramount Wants To Talk To Students About How They’re All Thieves & Then Ask For Ideas On What To Do

    As Hollywood struggles to come up for breath and understand the nature of what hit them last month in the SOPA/PIPA debate, it appears they’re still thinking that part of this is an “education” issue — and if they could just tell young people how evil file sharing is that everything would be good. A whole bunch of folks have been passing on variations on the news that Paramount Pictures (owned by Viacom — one of the major backers of SOPA/PIPA) wants to go talk to college kids.

  • Opposing Copyright Extension

  • Corporate Copyright Scofflaws 0012 – Sony Corporation

    The largest copyright pirates are the large corporations, particularly in the content distribution business. Yes, those companies who scream the loudest that their customers are ‘pirating’ movies, songs, books, etc. In this series, we are going to look at cases where these companies have engaged in large scale copyright infringement, or in other ways have been ripping off artists.

  • ACTA

    • Swedes out in force to protest anti-piracy law

    • Bulgarian MPs Wear Anonymous/Guy Fawkes Masks To Protest ACTA

    • ACTA’s EU future in doubt after Polish pause

      The chances of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement becoming law in Europe dwindled suddenly on Friday, after Polish prime minister Donald Tusk said he was suspending ACTA’s ratification in his country.

    • ACTA’s EU Future In Doubt As Poland Suspends Ratification

    • Watch Out: Widespread Protests Against ACTA Spreading Across Europe

    • Is The US Meddling In Polish ACTA Voting?

      Assuming this really was someone from the US embassy checking up on the whether Polish politicians were following the party line on ACTA — there’s been no independent corroboration yet — it does seem pretty extraordinary. Judging by the generally outraged tone of the 1100+ comments on this piece, the Poles themselves don’t seem very happy either. I think we can expect to hear much more about Poland’s resistance to ACTA in the coming weeks.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Format 155 On Sale Today – Discover Linux!

Desktop

• 2012 Linux Computer Buyer’s Guide

• The Rise of GNU/Linux on the Desktop

  don’t know what has changed in NetApplications’ world but in the real world, a rate of growth like that would make GNU/Linux the dominant desktop OS in 3.5 years. Android/Linux is on a more modest pace and will take over the world in 4 years.

• Soon You Will Be Running Android On Your PCs

  In an exclusive interview with Muktware, Greg-KH one of the leading figures of the Linux world, told us “The 3.3 kernel release will let you boot an Android userspace with no modifications, but not very good power management. The 3.4 kernel release will hopefully have the power management hooks that Android needs in it, along with a few other minor missing infrastructure pieces that didn’t make it into the 3.3 kernel release.”

  Google will finally wash the last remaining stain from their linen as they bring back the Android kernel to the mainline Linux kernel.

• Coreboot Is Set To Start Booting Laptops

  This weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM along with many interesting X.Org discussions and laying out the plans for Wayland 1.0, the Coreboot project has an exciting announcement: showing off the first mainstream laptop with Coreboot support.

Server

• Cray cuts the cost of its midrange supercomputers

  Supercomputer outfit Cray has announced that it is trying to make its mid-range efforts cheaper.

• Oracle Drags Microsoft, Red Hat Into Itanium Lawsuit Swamp

  As Oracle and HP’s lawsuit over the doomed Itanium chip drags on like some Dickensian subplot, it’s time to introduce two new characters: Microsoft and Red Hat.

  Both companies were served with subpoenas last Thursday by Oracle, which seems hell-bent on unearthing every embarrassing detail on Itanium and then flushing them into the public record.

  On Monday, thanks to Oracle’s lawyers, we learned that HP is paying close to $700 million to keep Intel cranking out its unpopular Unix superprocessor until 2017. Oracle is trying to make the case that HP’s public act of pretending that people liked Itanium was not marketing but fraud. We’ll leave that one for the courts to decide.

• How Web savvy are Romney, Gingrich and Obama?

  President Barack Obama recently held a Google+ video Hangout; Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich promised to have a permanent U.S. moon-base by 2020; and fellow Republican Mitt Romney, along with Gingrich and Obama, are against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA). So, as politicians go, these guys are all pretty tech-savvy right? Well, yes and no. If you look at their Web sites, which is what Strangeloop, a Web site optimization company, did, you’ll find that neither Republicans nor Democrats are as up to speed as you might like.

• [Case Study] Lessons in High Performance Computing with Open Source

• BT Vision throws Microsoft Mediaroom under a bus for Linux

  UK hybrid TV service BT Vision plans to be the first customer to discard Microsoft’s Mediaroom software, almost imminently, after at least a year-long effort to put in completely new software building blocks to rejuvenate the service.

Kernel Space

• Hauppauge USB Receiver Tested Under Linux 3.2

  Support for the Hauppauge Aero-M USB receiver under Linux has improved with the release of the 3.2 kernel earlier this month. After some initial testing I’m happy to report its performance operating under Linux is as good as it is in a Windows environment. The Linux drivers also come with a unique feature that isn’t easily available in Windows.

  I tested the Aero-M using Arch Linux with the latest kernel, 3.2.2-1 and the Kaffeine media player, which I find superior to WinTV under Windows in that it supports the ATSC program guide and scheduling recordings using the program guide.

• Linux 3.3 Will Let You Boot Into Android: Greg-KH

  Greg KH has quit SUSE and joined The Linux Foundation as a fellow. We interviewed Greg to understand if there will be any change in his role and responsibilities and engagement with the Linux community. We also asked about the status of Android kernel in the mainline Linux kernel.

• Graphics Stack

  • The First Shots Of “Limare” Running On Linux

    Limare is the open-source program (the code will be dropped by early next week) that was designed to assist in reverse-engineering the ARM Mali 200/400 graphics processors. It’s a simple program, similar to reNouveau or the r600demo back in the day, for drawing simple objects to the screen.

Applications

• Final GIMP 2.6 series update arrives

  The GIMP development team has released version 2.6.12 of its open source GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) image editing software. The twelfth point update to the 2.6.x branch is a maintenance update that adds no new features and focuses on addressing “a ton” of bugs found in the previous build from October 2010.

• GIMP 2.6.12 Released – The Final 2.6 Release2012-02-01

• Final GIMP 2.6 series update arrives

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (CentOS 6.2 x86_64)

  • Radio Software Airtime 2.0 Released With Easier Icecast And SHOUTcast Configuration, More

  • Running ownCloud3 On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10

  • Create Your Own Gubuntu Or Pure Gnome Shell 3 Ubuntu

  • How To Install Arista Transcoder In openSUSE

  • TomHenderson
    Understanding Syslog Managers and How to Use Them

  • Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (CentOS 6.2 x86_64)

  • Laptop overheating, causing thermal shutdown during prolonged, CPU-intensive tasks

  • Some Useful Command Line Tips For Linux

  • Weekend project: Zap Your Coworkers’ Minds with Multi-Pointer X

  • A second addendum to the second installment

    I really do have things other than outlining with nano to write about. Really I do. For example, there’s the project of installing the Tinycore distribution on some older machines in our computer lab to write about–something I did about a month ago and about which I’ve already started an article; there’s an article about the newsbeuter rss client; one about how to set a weather map as the desktop background; and so forth. But I’ve gone on kind of a jag with this nano project lately, and it’s complex and foreign enough to me that if I don’t record it now, I’m liable to forget important details. So, you’re forced to endure another installment on it.

• Wine

  • Wine 1.4 Gears Up For Release With More Bug Fixes

• Games

  • Linux Game Publishing…the return?

    So anyone who has been in the Linux gaming scene for a while will have probably heard of LGP (Linux Game Publising) who port and distribute games for Linux at quite a premium as they tend to go for older AAA titles as opposed to indie titles.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Tablet Sparks Starts Shipping In May

    Slowly but steadily KDE project has positioned itself at the right spot when tablets are becoming mainstream. You can pick KDE Desktop for your main PC, KDE netbook for your netbook and now Plasma Active 2 for touch based devices such as tablets. Aaron Seigo, the lead of the KDE team, has revealed more information about the KDE powered tablet.

  • Spark answers

    I’m going to attempt to answer as many questions about the Spark tablet as possible here. The questions I’ll be answering are ones found in comments in my blog, on discussion sites around the Internet and that came in by email or irc. Let the fun begin!

  • Spark, free-software Linux tablet, to ship in May

  • The Hunt for Unobtrusive Chat

    Once apon a time, Instant messaging or ‘Online Chat’ was a primary task on it’s own. That is, I remember the days when I would switch on my computer, sign in to ‘MSN Messenger’ (as it was called back then), have a voice conversation with my father (who was working in England at the time), and then be done with it. However, over the last few years, not only have we started to rely more on it, but it’s also become more of a secondary (or even tertiary) task. For example, these days I keep in contact with the rest of the telepathy-kde (or is it kde-telepathy now, or just ‘ktp’ yet?) team on IRC while I’m developing; talk to my friends (with a steam voice call) while playing a game and so on.

    The thing is that, things like that need to be able to be done simultaneously while still maintaining maximum efficiency. Which becomes painfully impossible when you have to switch windows, or the way most IM clients are implemented these days.

    So, shortly before joining the Telepathy-KDE team, I set out to figure out what would allow me to talk to someone while doing my work with the minimum overhang (interruptions).

• GNOME Desktop

  • Five most downloaded extensions of awesome (gnome) shell

Distributions

• Video Review: DreamLinuix 5.0 Really Dreamy?

• Parabola GNU/Linux: Freedom Packaged

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • PCLinuxOS 2012.2 Released

    oday, February 2, is Bill “Texstar” Reynolds’ birthday, but it’s the community who received the present. PCLinuxOS 2012.2 KDE was released today in a full sized version as well as a mini.

    This release ships with Kernel 2.6.38 and KDE 4.6.5. It comes packed with lots of your favorite apps like LibreOffice (installer), Firefox, TvTime, VLC, and the GIMP. The appearance hasn’t changed since the last release, but some additional goodies have been added. One of which is the PCLinuxOS Documentation Portal which will take users to the various features of the PCLOS Website or service.

  • PCLinuxOS KDE 2012.02 Has Been Released

    The PCLinuxOS KDE and KDE MiniME 2012.02 operating systems have been released today, February 2nd, and are now available for download.

    PCLinuxOS KDE 2012.02 is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.38.8bfs, optimized for maximum desktop performance, and the KDE SC 4.6.5 environment.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • About Fedora 16

      Before Fedora 16 was released, I was quite excited about all the features that were being planned for Verne. I was looking forward to installing both the GNOME and KDE versions on the same computer and test each back to back, under the same hardware and OS. Unfortunately, I had my share of ISSUES, and that kind of put me off a bit. After a while testing other distros, I had some spare time and decided to go for Fedora 16. Like I said, I tested GNOME and KDE back to back, but before I go on about that comparison (which will be an article in itself), I wanted to share some of my impressions on Verne, both from KDE and GNOME perspectives.

    • Review: Installation and first Look: Fuduntu 2012.1

      Fuduntu started off as a customized Fedora install, but recently forked Fedora to create their own special distro that borrowed a bit from Ubuntu and a bit from Fedora. It has a very nice look when it first starts up and I almost forget that it’s Gnome 2.x:

    • Anaconda to the Rescue

    • Compiz Is Likely To Get The Boot From Fedora 17

      While Fedora 17 has a massive amount of features to look forward to, updates to Compiz is likely not on the agenda. In the coming days, Compiz and its related packages for this compositing window manager are likely to be removed from the Fedora 17 package-list.

      Compiz is on the list of packages that are set to be “retired” from Fedora. There’s a whole list of the packages set to be retired from Fedora 17 in this mailing list message.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Precise Pangolin Alpha 2 Released!

        The Ubuntu team has announced the release of Precise Pangolin Alpha 2, which will in time become Ubuntu 12.04.

        Kate Steward writes on a mailing list, “Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone images that will be released throughout the Precise development cycle. This is the first Ubuntu milestone release to include images for the armhf architecture, for the ARM CPUs using the hard-float ABI.”

      • Precise Pangolin Alpha 2 Released!

        Pre-releases of Precise Pangolin are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Development update

      • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 2 arrives for testing

        As expected, the Ubuntu release team has published the second alpha of version 12.04 of its Ubuntu Linux distribution, code-named “Precise Pangolin”. Aimed at developers and testers, the development milestone release uses the 3.2.0-12.21 Ubuntu kernel which is based on the recent 3.2.2 Linux kernel.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin Alpha 2 Released

      • How Much Gnome 3.4 Will Be There In Ubuntu 12.04?

        Ubuntu 12.04 is an LTS version so the team has to be very careful about what they pick or drop as this is the version which is used by enterprise customers or by those who want a stable system well supported for a longer period of time. They have to be careful about the individual applications as well, so they are picking different versions of applications from the Gnome stack.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 ARM Performance Becomes Very Compelling

      • Unity: Very Intrusive & A Nightmare To Maintain

        Along with the discussion around a rolling-release version of Fedora Linux, having been discussed recently has been the possibility of providing Ubuntu’s Unity desktop as an alternative desktop environment for Fedora. This is obviously a topic that gets some riled up.

        The discussion about Unity desktop packages as a possibility for Fedora has basically died since there’s no Fedora package maintainers interested in doing the legwork at this point and most importantly is that Unity doesn’t take advantage of many of the upstream GNOME APIs. With incompatible API implementations for some packages, this makes working with Unity a pain if wishing to still fully support the GNOME 3.x desktop in a streamlined manner.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Make Switching From Windows To Linux Easier With Zorin OS

          Despite the many reasons why people preach the use of Linux, actually going through with the switch is a completely different story. I know this only too well as I went through the exact same process before everything came together and I fell in love with Linux. However, I have to admit that it took a while with numerous attempts at using Linux for more than a week.

          It’s not that Linux is hard to use or understand, but it simply doesn’t fit the Windows mindset that most people have. Expecting to do everything in Linux exactly like in Windows is where problems start appearing, which can easily deter a good number of users. Thankfully, there is now a Linux distribution that could make the process a whole lot easier.

        • Linux Mint 12 KDE released!

        • Linux Mint 12 KDE released

        • Can Lubuntu Lure Windows 8 Users?

          One of the biggest challenges that Windows users will soon face is the transition to an unknown territory called Metro which will be introduced with Windows 8. The PC interface has remained same ever since Apple took the concept from Xerox and made it popular through Lisa. It has improved and evolved over ages, but just like the front seat of a car has remained same for some good reason, just the way QWERTY keyboard has been around for ever.

          Given the monopoly that Microsoft has in the desktop market, Windows 8 will come pre-installed on new PCs and users will be forced to use it. I don’t know how the market will react to this massive change. Windows 8 could be yet another Vista in the making. Yes, it will be an incredible OS for touch based devices which is in the league of GNU/Linux’s Gnome 3 Shell or KDE Plasma Active which is optimized for touch-based devices.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspbmc – XBMC Linux Distribution for Raspberry Pi Announced

  First, XBMC playing HD video on rPi was shown shown off at Scale 10x. Now a specific Linux distribution Raspbmc is being developed by Stm Labs which is specially optimized for Raspberry Pi.

• Openmoko smartphone reborn as hackable GTA04

  German manufacturer Golden Delicious has begun shipping a hackable open source smartphone that runs a variety of Linux software, including a newly optimized Openmoko distro. The Openmoko GTA04 is available as a finished phone or as a board that slips into earlier Openmoko Neo Freerunner GTA01 and GTA02 cases, providing an 800MHz Texas Instruments DM3730 processor and a full range of sensors and wireless features.

• Defunct email service offers handhelds to hackers

  Peek has discontinued its low-cost, email-and-texting service but is challenging hackers to “build something great” with the leftover handhelds, according to The Verge. The Peek devices include a 2.5-inch screen, a QWERTY keyboard, an ARM7-based processor, and a GSM cellular modem, according to the company.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Honeycomb on a Budget: Sprint debuts the $99 ZTE Optik

    • Android Isn’t as Fragmented as You Think, Report Says

      Fragmentation is often held up as one of Android’s biggest problems, posing all kinds of challenges for developers and users alike.

    • Google Android Winning The Open-Source War

      Unlike Apple and Microsoft, Google’s Android is a utopic OS. With it, the company brings the open source philosophy that anyone capable can use, customise and apply it with the end goal of fuelling innovation. In fact, it’s part of the company’s philosophy:

    • Xiaomi opens up Android ROM Source code

    • Android near 50% Market Share in latest comScore results

    • Android fragmentation not so serious, says study

      Android is regularly blasted for fragmentation, but most Android smartphones and tablets use similar builds, screen sizes, and resolutions, according to a study by app analytics firm Localytics. Currently, 73 percent of Android smartphone app sessions use Android 2.3, with 23 percent at Android 2.2, while 41 percent originated from 4.3 inch screens and 22 percent from four-inch screens, says the study.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • ASUS ‘TF300T’ slate makes an appearance, could be the next Transformer?

    While ASUS is still trying to get a firm grip on its latest Transformer, a purported next-gen member of its Eee Pad family is now happily circulating the web. Taiwanese site NCCC claims to have come across what could be a followup to the Transformer Prime.

  • Spark Tablet Coming for the FOSS Crowd

  • Sprint’s seven-inch tablet is just $100 on contract

    Sprint says it will offer a seven-inch tablet featuring a dual-core Snapdragon processor, 3G, and Wi-Fi for just $100 — with a two-year service agreement priced at $20 to $80 per month. The ZTE Optik includes Android Market support, GPS receiver, Bluetooth, a microSD slot, and a bundled headset, according to the carrier.

FTDI adds touch capability to its open source platform

Future Technology Devices International (FTDI) has added a touch control input/output application boards for its Vinco development module.

The Vinco Touch Key applications board, which the supplier calls a shield mates with the Vinco motherboard, and incorporates a STMicroelectronics STMPE821 8-channel general purpose input/output (GPIO) capacitive touch key controller IC.

Open source software should be used to secure public sector systems, IT bosses are told

Free Software Is Just Fine

FOSS is supported in many ways:

* Open source – Make the source openly available.
* Open standards – Use or create common available specifications.
* Open development – Accept development contributions (source, review, test) from outside contributors.
* Data ownership – Allow users to maintain ownership of their data by being able to move their data between their choice of solutions or remove their data entirely.

Events

• SambaXP 2012 conference call for papers

  The Samba eXPerience organisers have announced that the eleventh international Samba conference will take place from 8 to 11 May 2012 in Göttingen, Germany at the Hotel Freizeit. The event is open to both users and developers of the open source Windows interoperability suite for Linux and Unix.

  The conference will include tutorials on 8 May, with the main conference taking place on 9 and 10 May. For the first time, there will also be a BarCamp on Friday 11 May at which attendees can speak to members of the Samba Team about conference topics and Samba in general.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla developing Web push notification system for Firefox

    Mozilla is developing a push notification system for the Firefox Web browser. It will allow users to receive notifications from websites without having to keep those sites open in their browser. The system will also be able to relay push notifications to mobile devices.

    The project is part of Mozilla’s broader effort to ensure that the Web is a competitive platform that can match the capabilities of native applications. Introducing support for push notifications will help to close the gap, because the feature is one of the major advantages that native mobile clients have historically offered over the browser for accessing Web services.

  • Seamonkey review: Firefox’s Lightweight Hyper-Functional Cousin

    Seamonkey has an interesting history, in that it is both older and younger than Firefox. Older, because originally it was built from Mozilla Suite code (for those of you that don’t know, Mozilla Application Suite is the parent of Firefox, and was originally built from the code of Netscape Navigator which was open-sourced in 1998). Seamonkey is also younger than Firefox in that Seamonkey’s first version, 1.0, was not released until 2006, 2 years after Firefox 1.0. Quite a few people are not even aware of the existence of Seamonkey or the Mozilla Suite, thinking that Firefox was the successor to Netscape Navigator, created deliberately to enact their vendetta against Microsoft for their monopolistic practices that killed Netscape. But glorious fantasies aside, Mozilla Application Suite was the real successor.

SaaS

• 2 Ways To Ease Hadoop Growing Pains

  Interest in Hadoop is booming, so it should be no surprise that commercial vendors are piling on with products that promise to make the open source big data platform more reliable, more versatile, less expensive (by reducing required hardware investments) or faster.

  Enter EMC Isilon and RainStor, both of which say they’re plugging gaps in Hadoop to meet enterprise-grade needs. Each vendor brings a new twist to HDFS, Hadoop’s distributed file system. EMC Isilon has tied its network-attached storage to HDFS, while RainStor has added a database on top of the file system that promises high compression as well as support for SQL analysis.

CMS

• The Drupal Release Model and Why it Needs to be Revamped

  Drupal today released a total of four versions of the popular open source CMS. Yes, I said four. Drupal 6.23, 6.24, 7.11 and 7.12 releases were put on the servers today.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • ActuateOne Demonstrates Leadership by Scaling to 40 Million End Users

  • Continuent Partners With ForLinux In UK

BSD

• GhostBSD 2.5 review

  GhostBSD is a desktop distribution based on FreeBSD. It comes as an installable Live DVD image and is developed by Eric Turgeon and Nahuel Sanchez. The latest edition, GhostBSD 2.5, based on FreeBSD 9, is the project’s fourth release, and was made available for public download on January 24 (2012).

  This article provides the first review of this distribution on this website, and it is based on test installations of the 32-bit version. The boot menu is shown below.

Project Releases

• SMPlayer 0.7.0 Brings YouTube And Mplayer2 Support

• Cinnamon 1.2 Released

  Version 1.2 of Cinnamon, the Gnome 3-based desktop, is now available for free download for use with Linux Mint 12, Ubuntu 11.10, Fedora 16, openSUSE 12.1, Arch Linux, and Gentoo. All APIs and the desktop itself are now fully stable, according to the blog announcement from lead developer Clement Lefebvre.

• idutils-4.6 released [stable]

Public Services/Government

• UK Looking at GNU/Linux for Web Portal

  Glyn Moody has more details on the new web portal being tested by gov.uk. It runs on GNU/Linux on Amazon EC2. They should save a ton of money by running that way combined with centralizing web services.

• Open thread: An open House of Representatives?

• 2012: Open innovation for government

  As we turn the calendar to the new year, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve done here at Civic Commons over the past year, what we’ve learned, and where we’re planning on heading next.

Licensing

• Understanding Open Source Licensing

  In works licensed under an open source license, anyone is permitted to modify and redistribute, as long as a given set of criterion are met. But, that’s the simple definition. Life in the open source licensing world is much more complex than that. Before going any further, let us catch a glimpse of what an open source license means and what are its associated caveats. Strictly speaking, an open source license must comply with the definition specified by Open Source Initiative, as laid out at http://opensource.org/ docs/definition.php:

• GPL enforcement sparks community flames

  The debate over enforcement of the GPL took an interesting turn this week, after one developer’s call for more projects to begin enforcement proceedings against alleged GPL violators of the Linux kernel.

Openness/Sharing

• Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age – By Philippe Aigrain

  Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age is out! Philippe Aigrain, co-founder of La Quadrature du Net, in collaboration with Suzanne Aigrain, describes the creative contribution, a financial model designed to sustain an expanding creative economy in a context where sharing is recognized as a right.

• Open thread: An open House of Representatives?

  Today, the US House of Representatives is hosting a 2-day conference about how they can be more open and transparent about what they do under the dome. They are exploring ideas and recommendations on how to create transparency on how legislative information is created and made available for public access. You might be following the conversation on Twitter (#LDTC) or watching the live webcast.

• Open Data

  • Open-source Weave liberates data for journalists, citizens

Programming

• Join the M revolution

• Programming is the new High School Diploma

• Zarafa launches git.zarafa.com

  Messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa has announced the launch of git.zarafa.com, its own Gitorious distributed version control system. The company says git.zarafa.com is intended to enable developers to “innovate, contribute and get real time updates from the Zarafa software development team”.

• Komodo IDE 7.0 adds Node.js, LESS and CoffeeScript support

  ActiveState has announced the release of version 7.0.0 of its Komodo integrated development environment (IDE) for Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Perl and web development. The new version includes a code collaboration tool for sharing changes to selected users in real time and a sync feature for synchronising key bindings and preferences across multiple machines. Komodo 7.0 language support has been extended with editing and syntax checking for Node.js, CoffeeScript, LESS, CSS, EJS and Mojolicious. New code profiling features have also been added, but currently only support PHP and Python.

Confused about iPads in Education

Maybe I’m just not “hip” enough to see the need for them, but it seems to me if we want to revolutionize how our students learn using technology they would be better served if that technology came in the form of something other than an “iPad” or capacitive tablet of any sort. Whats your take on it?

VeriSign, maintainer of net’s DNS, warns it was repeatedly hacked

VeriSign, the company that manages a key internet database for routing traffic to websites and email addresses, exposed private information after being hacked on multiple occasions in 2010, the company quietly disclosed late last year.

Health/Nutrition

• Whistle-blowing Scientists (Trying To Prevent Dangerous Products From Reaching The Market) Sue FDA For Snooping On Their Personal Email Accounts

  Last year, we wrote about the federal whistle-blowing act, which was designed to give protections to federal employees who blow the whistle on federal fraud and abuse. For reasons that still aren’t clear, that bill was killed by a secret hold by either Senators Jon Kyl or Jeff Sessions. That fact only came out due to an amazing effort by the folks at On The Media, who kept hounding all 100 Senators to find out who would possibly kill such a bill. Recently, On The Media revisited the topic, noting that there was a new version of the bill. The report also talks about just how vindictive the government has been against whistleblowers. Even as President Obama has insisted that whistleblowers are important and should be protected, that’s not what’s happening in real life, with many getting stripped of their responsibility and demoted — all for daring to point out waste, fraud and abuse. The worst example to date, remains the horrifying story of Thomas Drake, who was threatened with 35 years in jail in a bogus vindictive lawsuit against him, due to his blowing the whistle on a bogus NSA project.

Security

• Critical PHP vulnerability being fixed

Defence/Police/Aggression

• One Nation, Under Guard

  Bad news about the impending police state here in America: it’s already here. From the indefinite detention (without trial) of terrorism suspects both foreign and American to the escalating militarization of our nation’s police forces, there’s little to indicate that any level of government is willing to “walk back” the overreach of law enforcement, much of which stems from the Patriot Act’s anti-terrorism aims.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• ‘Gasland’ Journalists Arrested At Hearing By Order Of House Republicans (UPDATES)

  In a stunning break with First Amendment policy, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. Initial reports from sources suggested that an ABC News camera was also prevented from taping the hearing; ABC has since denied that they sent a crew to the hearing.

Finance

• Richard Siewert, Former Treasury Counselor, Could Move To Goldman Sachs

• Global Gold Production: How Sustainable a Rebound?

  Recently released data from the US Geological Survey shows that global gold production, after falling every year between 2001 and 2008, finally rose for the past three years. In 2011, production reached 2,700 metric tons.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• ALEC Education “Academy” Launches on Island Resort

  Today, hundreds of state legislators from across the nation will head out to an “island” resort on the coast of Florida to a unique “education academy” sponsored by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). There will be no students or teachers. Instead, legislators, representatives from right-wing think tanks and for-profit education corporations will meet behind closed doors to channel their inner Milton Friedman and promote the radical transformation of the American education system into a private, for-profit enterprise.

• ALEC Exposed, for 24 Hours

Censorship

• This Week in Censorship: Arrested Bloggers in Vietnam, Google’s New Censorship Policy, and China Blocks Tibetan-Language Blogs

  As we have previously covered, the Vietnamese government continues to crack down on bloggers and writers who have spoken out against the Communist regime. Alternative news site, Vietnam Redemptorist News, has been targeted by the state and several of their active contributors have been arrested. Paulus Le Son, 26, is one of the most active bloggers who was arrested without a warrant.
  Vietnam is increasingly applying vague national security laws to silence free speech and political opposition. He is one of 17 bloggers who have been arrested since August 2011. Charged with “subversion” and “activities aimed at overthrowing the people’s administration”, there is a campaign to release him and the others who have been detained

• When Judges Are Determining Whether Or Not Art Should Exist… We Have A Problem

  We’ve written about the somewhat horrifying ruling in the Richard Prince appropriation art case before. If you haven’t been following the details, Prince is an appropriation artist, who takes works he finds elsewhere, and modifies and transforms them into different pieces of artwork. The law around this kind of artwork is tragically murky — with some cases ruling that appropriation art is fair use, and some ruling otherwise. The Prince case got extra attention for a few reasons. One is that Prince is considered one of the biggest name artists around, and his works can sell for millions of dollars. The second is that this case also implicated the gallery that showed Prince’s work, raising some serious questions about secondary liability for galleries, and whether or not galleries themselves must become copyright experts. Finally, the ruling suggested that Prince’s artwork — valued at a few million dollars — might need to be destroyed..

Civil Rights

• Do You Like Online Privacy? You May Be a Terrorist

• WikiLeaks aside, Assange case strikes core of civil liberty

  JULIAN Assange’s current court appearance in Britain has nothing to do with sex or United States diplomatic cables or even with WikiLeaks. But it may make an important contribution to European law.
  The United Kingdom Supreme Court will be considering the point I raised on his behalf when a Swedish prosecutor claimed to be a ”judicial authority” empowered to issue a warrant to have him extradited to prison in Stockholm. My written argument began quite bluntly: ”The notion that a prosecutor is a ‘judicial authority’ is a contradiction in terms.”
  Judges must, as their defining quality, be independent of government. Police and prosecutors employed and promoted by the state obviously cannot be perceived as impartial if they are permitted to decide issues on the liberty of individuals.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Jenzabar Continues To Try To Censor Criticism Via Trademark Bullying

    Some people continue to insist that intellectual property and censorship are two totally separate issues, but that’s ridiculous. Yet another example is in the ongoing case concerning software company Jenzabar, which we’ve covered before. If you’re just picking this up now, one of Jenzabar’s founders, Chai Ling, many years ago, was one of the student leaders of the Tiananmen Square uprising — a point that the company regularly used in its PR efforts. A documentary film from Long Bow Productions showed Ling making some comments years ago about how she hoped the uprising would lead to bloodshed, in order to incentivize a wider uprising. Most people might write off such comments as extreme comments in the heat of the moment from a young, immature activist, and let it go. If Ling had just said that she regretted the comments, the whole thing would have probably blown over.

• Copyrights

  • The Supreme Court’s Golan decision gives short shrift to the public domain

    In a decision that favored the 1% (copyright owners) over the 99% (consumers and the public domain), the U.S. Supreme Court recently held that neither the Patent and Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution nor the First Amendment prohibits the removal of works from the public domain. Golan v. Holder, No. 10-545. Prior blog coverage of the case: certiorari granted and the 10th Circuit opinion.

    The majority opinion was written by Justice Ginsburg for herself and five other justices. Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Alito, dissented. (Justice Kagan recused herself, as she had participated in the case as Solicitor General before being named to the Court.) The line-up of justices was therefore essentially the same as the 7-2 opinion in Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), which upheld the Constitutionality of copyright term extension, with Justice Alito replacing Justice Stevens in dissent, and Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Sotomayor replacing Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice O’Connor, respectively, in the majority.

  • Book Review: Bounce, Tumble, and Splash! by Tony Mullen

    YouTube is good, but not ideal, and the lack of a download link is somewhat annoying. So I spent some time researching good free media hosting sites for large files and ISOs. Torrent sites are particularly good for hosting the high-definition versions.

    These days I get a little paranoid doing this, and indeed, if so-called “anti-piracy” laws are passed (like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, or others as-yet-unnamed), there really might come a time when I suddenly start running into walls because these sites have been cut off, blocked, and people like me who are looking for them are profiled as “potential copyright offenders” to be prosecuted or otherwise harassed. Because a list of what the MPAA and RIAA’s think of as “rogue sites” looks an awful lot like a list of “free distributor sites for free culture media”. Many of them have a mixture of legal free content and illegal pirated content. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which.

  • The Death of File Sharing

    Last week’s violent government attack on the hugely popular site Megaupload — the U.S. government arresting Belgian citizens in New Zealand, of all places, and stealing at gunpoint servers bank accounts and property — has sent shock waves through the entire digital world.

    The first shock was the realization that the gigantic protest against legislative moves (SOPA and PIPA) that would smash the Internet turned out to be superfluous. The thing everyone wanted to prevent is already here. SOPA turns out not to be the unwelcome snake in the garden of free information. The snakes have already taken over the garden and are hanging from every tree.

  • Shoe on the other foot: RIAA wants to scrap anti-piracy OPEN Act

    The Recording Industry Association of America found itself in an unusual position this week: opposing an anti-piracy bill that’s gaining momentum in Congress.

    “The OPEN Act does nothing” to stop online infringement and “may even make the problem worse,” the industry group says in a statement it is circulating on Capitol Hill this week. “It does not establish a workable framework, standards, or remedies. It is not supported by those it purports to protect.”

  • Book Review: No Safe Harbor by the US Pirate Party

    When I first heard the expression “Pirate Party”, I was sure it was some kind of a joke. When I found out they were actually getting elected to representative seats in Europe, though, I certainly started taking the idea seriously. But could a political party in the USA actually get somewhere with a name like the “United States Pirate Party”. Certainly not without a good platform introduction — and that’s what this book of essays is all about.

  • Rather Than Bitching About The Failure Of SOPA/PIPA, Rupert Murdoch Should Take A Closer Look At His Own Policies

    Danny Sullivan recently put forth an open letter to Murdoch, talking about the difficulty of getting The Simpsons legally, despite paying for it…

  • Neil Young on music and Steve Jobs: ‘piracy is the new radio’

  • Why History Needs Software Piracy

    Amid the debate surrounding controversial anti-piracy legislation such as SOPA and PIPA, our public discourse on piracy tends to focus on the present or the near future. When jobs and revenues are potentially at stake, we become understandably concerned about who is (or isn’t) harmed by piracy today.

  • Red Box To Warner Bros: Shove That 56-Day Rental Delay Up Your Ass!

  • BEACH BOYS LYRICIST TELLS PAINTER TO CEASE-AND-DESIST

    Perhaps no one was more excited by the long-awaited release of the Beach Boys’ unfinished 1966 album Smile than Erik den Breejen. Even before Smile came out late last year, the young painter (and lifelong Beach Boys fan) had set to work on a series of paintings that transformed the lyrics into brightly colored text-blocks, assembled into shapes of ocean waves and smiling lips.

  • ICE Seizes 300 More Sites; Can’t Have People Watching Super Bowl Ads Without Permission

    Despite the massive failures of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) program to seize domains on questionable legal theories, it’s right back at it. ICE has just seized over 300 domains apparently all related to the Super Bowl (of course). They did this last year too… and now the US government is in court over it with the Rojadirecta sites. Many of the sites were selling counterfeit merchandise, which is a more reasonable target, but still seems to be overblown. I’m still at a loss as to how this is any of the government’s concern, rather than a civil issue that could be taken up by the NFL itself. Do we really want law enforcement officials spending time working for the NFL?

  • The SOPA/PIPA Protest Shows Why There Needs To Be Complete Transparency With TPP

  • Before the Movie Begins

    Please note that the use of any recording equipment to capture this film is strictly forbidden, including: camcorders, cameras, cell phones, charcoal, ink, paint (oil or water-based), and the human brain. On leaving the theatre, you will be assaulted by baseball-bat-wielding ushers, who will pummel your skull until you forget what you have seen.

    Any remaining memories are yours to keep and enjoy, provided you do not discuss them with others or make them available via mankind’s collective unconscious. In addition, your experience of this film may not be remixed in any form; dreams involving any of its characters must adhere strictly to the film’s actual plotline and running time, and must also comply with copyright laws in your state or territory. Any sexual fantasies based on it may not exceed the film’s M.P.A.A. rating.

  • Steele files an opposition to EFF’s brief: nothing but insults

  • If Politicians Pushing SOPA/PIPA Want To Create Jobs, They Should Support The Internet — And Stop Treating Copyright Companies As Special

    A key element of the political rhetoric around SOPA/PIPA was the idea that it was about jobs, and that jobs are so critical in the current economic climate that safeguarding them overrides any other concern the Net world might have about the means being proposed to do that. But then the key question becomes: who are really more important in terms of those jobs – the copyright industries, or companies exploiting the potential of the Internet that would be harmed if the Net were hobbled by new legislation?

  • ACTA

    • Full Text Of Slovenian Ambassador’s Apology For Signing ACTA

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Userful releases Multiseat Linux virtualisation

  SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Userful has launched its Multiseat PC sharing software for Linux with added Ethernet compatibility.

  Multiseat enables businesses and schools to turn one Linux system into multiple stations using HP’s t200 thin client. The software is bundled with the t200, keyboard and mouse for $99.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast 95 Gentoo LiveDVD 12.0

  In this podcast, create a best off cd with soundconverter and gnomebaker. The new Gentoo LiveDVD with persistance. The Northeast Linux Fest Saturday March 17, 2012, Worcester MA. Samsung ML3312 and Linux plus an Interview with Milan Kazarka.

• Linux Outlaws 248 – Rantastic

• Autotest

Kernel Space

• A Short Q&A with New Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman

• Exclusive Interview With Greg Kroah-Hartman [Video]

  Kroah-Hartman created and maintains the Linux Driver Project. He is also currently the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of different subsystems that include USB, staging, driver core, tty, and sysfs, among others. Most recently, he was a Fellow at SUSE. Kroah-Hartman is an adviser to Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, a member of The Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board, has delivered a variety of keynote addresses at developer and industry events, and has authored two books covering Linux device drivers and Linux kernel development.

• Graphics Stack

  • Introducing Wayland’s Weston Launcher

    The other Wayland-related news yesterday besides the surprise announcement that the Wayland 1.0 stable release is approaching was the first-shot attempt at “weston-launch”, an easy launcher for the demo Weston compositor.

  • Using An OpenCL Kernel In GStreamer

    There’s now a GStreamer plug-in to utilize OpenCL within this popular Linux video framework so that an OpenCL kernel can be applied against a video stream.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Type In Hindi In Ubuntu

  • [How To] Fix Ugly Fonts in Google Earth 6.2 on Ubuntu

  • The Perfect Database Server: Firebird 2.5.1 And FreeBSD 9

  • Learning Linux Commands: ls

  • The Best Filesystem for an external hard disk of 1TB with cross platform support.

• Games

  • 75% Off on Hacker Evolution Linux Games

    Popular Linux games ‘Hacker Evolution: Untold’ and ‘Hacker Evolution: Duality’ are 75% off for one week on Linux game store Gameolith.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE 4.8 is really really nice! Congrats! Just KMix popup is confusing

• GNOME Desktop

  • Nice dark GTK themes by CrazyT

  • New GTK3 and Gnome Shell Themes (Elementary Dark, Orion, Gaia)

    Satya who designed many cool GTK3 and Gnome Shell themes has recently released/updated 3 new themes – Gaia, Elementary Dark and Orion.

  • GNOME Components Version Clarifications For Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Endian Firewall Community 2.5.1 released

  • SalineOS 1.6

  • Tails 0.10.1 is out

  • IPFire 2.11 – Core Update 56 released

    Today, we are releasing Core Update 56 for IPFire 2.11. It is a minor bugfix and security update.

    The most exciting new feature can be found in the preinstalled images, that automatically scale up the partitions at the first boot. If you use a 8GB SD card, you install the 2GB image and it will grow the partition sizes to use all space that is available on that SD card.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva lives to fight another fortnight

    Chief operating officer Jean-Manuel Croset said that an “external entity” that had expressed an interest in buying the company had not been able to do so because of objections by a minority shareholder.

  • MCLinuxPC 2012 – The Whole Kitchen Sink

    Kind of bubble sort, distributions come up, tumble down, some grow, some die unmaintained. First we had Slack, then Redhat, Mandy, Mepis, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS… and now Mint. Most often the popularity of a distribution depends on the degree of “out of the box” functionality it offers, plus how well it integrates the various bits and pieces. IMO, only three distributions championed in this regards – Mepis, PCLinuxOS and Mint.

    Now on to the business. Here I am reviewing MCLinuxPC 2012, a remaster that comes from one of my favorite distributions that manages rpm packages on synaptic, by Sefy. No awards for guessing. But I won’t reveal the name for two obvious reasons: first, this remaster has gone too far in including the software not allowed to be legally redistributed, second, it’s not been publicly announced.

  • Should Mandriva Have Focused On More Than Just the OS?

    If you follow the Linux scene, it’s been hard to miss the brinksmanship with bankruptcy that Mandriva has been involved in. Susan has been covering the drama, and many OStatic readers have weighed in on it, some bewildered at how a respected platform went so awry, and some not surprised at all. Among those who follow commercial Linux vendors, though, there is a growing concensus that Mandriva S.A. failed to offer more than just an operating system.

  • February 2012 Issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine Released

• Debian Family

  • From Mint to Debian on a server

    Not too long ago I posted that I’d switched my two servers from Ubuntu to Linux Mint. I was impressed by Mint’s polish and ease of setup, and was using it everywhere else, so for consistency when I built new servers, I used Mint 10 for those too.

    They’ve been working fine – flawlessly, in fact – but in retrospect I think it was a mistake. Mint 10 is reaching the end of its support life in April, and there’s no upgrade path. You have to reinstall. I’ve tried “unauthorized” methods for version upgrades to Mint in the past, and they don’t usually work all that well. I knew I’d eventually face this issue, but now that it’s almost upon me it seems like much more of a hassle than it did back when I built these boxes. So when I came upon an opportunity to move to 64-bit on one of the servers, I decided to change now.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Obsidian joins Ubuntu Advantage Reseller programme

        Leading open source software and services provider, Obsidian, is pleased to announce that it has strengthened its relationship with Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system, by joining its Ubuntu Advantage Reseller partner network.

        Ubuntu Advantage is a package of services and tools that help customers deploy and manage Ubuntu on servers, desktops and in the cloud. Delivered by Obsidian, supported by Canonical, it includes support services from Ubuntu experts as well as Web-based software for the ongoing management and monitoring of physical and virtual systems.

      • Desktop-Tweaking Tools For Ubuntu Linux

        Ubuntu Linux got a new look when the much-debated Unity was unveiled to users. The modern, search-based interface was liked as much as it was hated, making it one of Canonical’s most controversial decisions. The problem with Unity was not just that it was a new interface; the main issue this reborn Ubuntu faced was of basic usability gone wrong. So, as obvious as it may seem, many people are trying hard to disencumber themselves from this ‘innovation’. While most of those efforts are spent making alternative distros, some are busy tweaking the desktop.

      • Multi-Monitor Update and Greeter Prototype

      • [Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter] Issue 250

      • Unity 5.2: What’s new, and a call for testing

      • Are You Ready to Test Unity 5.2 in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?

        Canonical announced a few minutes ago, February 1st, that the Unity 5.2 interface is ready for testing on the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) platform.

      • Alternatives to Ubuntu

        Old-school Ubuntu fans who aren’t a fan of the new Unity-based direction of the operating system might find something to like in some of the official Ubuntu spin-offs.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Meet Linux Mint 12 ‘Lisa’: A Tour in Pictures

          With its longtime focus on usability, Linux Mint is now the fourth most widely used home operating system in the world, its makers say. Here’s a taste of what the free and open-source OS is like.

        • Xubuntu website soon ready to be published!

        • DEFT Linux 7 Is Based on Lubuntu 11.10

          After months of hard work, the DEFT Linux team proudly announced that the final and stable version of the DEFT Linux 7 operating system is now available for download.

Devices/Embedded

• Screenshot tour: Roku 2 streaming media player

  This Screenshot Tour was created to accompany our upcoming detailed review of Roku’s latest streaming media player device family. The tour comprises about 140 screenshots showcasing the Roku 2 media player’s menu system; its extensive library of movies, TV shows, and Internet content channels; its ability to stream from USB drives and LAN shares; the device’s setup functions; and more.

• Phones

  • WebOS Swings Along the Open Road

    WebOS was “a beautiful thing when HP demonstrated it — HP just failed to get the world excited about it with a thorough advertising campaign and particularly getting ISVs and developers interested,” opined blogger Robert Pogson. “I hope that freeing the source code will have the desired effect. WebOS is too good a thing to lose.”

  • Android

    • NTT Docomo’s Android phones have Mickey Mouse user interface

      NTT Docomo announced a pair of 4.3-inch Android 2.3 smartphones whose styling, user interface, and content all have a Disney theme. Both have dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4430 processors, but the “Disney Mobile on docomo F-08D” is clocked to 1.2GHz, offers HD resolution, and has a 13-megapixel camera, while the “Disney Mobile on docomo P-05D” offers 1GHz performance and a 960 x 540-pixel OLED screen.

    • CyanogenMod v9 Experimental Build for Sprint Epic 4G Touch

    • Whitepaper for Sony Xperia S gives us a detailed look at its specs

      While we’re not expecting to see the Sony Xperia S until early March, we’re gradually seeing more and more details on the device trickling out. British retailer Clove has received a copy of the Whitepaper for the Xperia S and within its 18 pages we get a pretty detailed look into its specs.

    • Kernel source released for AT&T Galaxy Note

    • Huawei Honor spotted at the FCC with AT&T bands

      One of Huawei’s most popular mid-range phones, the Honor (also known as the Glory, or the Mercury on Cricket) may soon be headed to AT&T. The phone was spotted going through the storied halls of the Federal Communications Commission, seeking certification for a US release. The phone had radios compatible with AT&T’s 3G and HSPA+ bands. As always with FCC filings, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s coming to any particular carrier – phones are often certified for the benefit of showing them off to potential partners.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • SDG Systems Announces Trimble Yuma® with GNU/Linux®

    SDG Systems announced today the availability of the Trimble Yuma rugged tablet computer running the Linux operating system. The Yuma with Linux provides an open source alternative for field data collection, military or industrial applications.

SFC director Kuhn reacts to BusyBox flame war

Kuhn was reacting to the flame war that has grown out of Linux developer Matthew Garrett’s criticism of efforts to develop a replacement for the popular BusyBox program that provides minimalist replacements for the most common utilities usually found on a UNIX or Linux system.

Interview: Jaisen Mathai of OpenPhoto

Google is killing Free Software

I’m not sure I should presume intent because of Hanlon’s razor, but a lot of smart people concerned about Free Software work at Google, so they should at least be aware of it.

The first problem I have with Google is that they are actively working on making the world of Free Software a worse place. The best example for this is Native Client. It’s essentially a tool that allows building web pages without submitting anything even resembling source code to the client. And thereby it’s killing the “View Source” option. (You could easily build such a tool as Free Software if instead of transmitting the binary, you’d transmit the source code. Compare HTML with Flash here.)

Events

• Get Your Embedded Linux On: Join Me at Yocto Project Developer Day

  Building an embedded Linux distribution can be a daunting task. From the Board Support Package (BSP) to Kernel configuration, root file system setup and the selection many additional software package there are many choices to make and taking the wrong turn can easily lead to a dead end and many hours of wasted time.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Delivers Firefox 10, Shifts Approach to Extensions

  • Mozilla’s first Extended Support Release arrives

    As expected, Mozilla has released the first Extended Support Release of Firefox, based on Firefox 10, for organisations. The release is the culmination of what began as complaints from the enterprise community that the rapid release schedule of Firefox was leaving them unable to qualify Firefox for use within their organisations. Mozilla reactivated its Enterprise Working Group who worked to create the ESR proposal for particular versions of Firefox to be supported for up to a year. The proposal was later refined and scheduled to launch with Firefox 10. The ESR release of Firefox 10 is not for individual users who Mozilla expect want to see the latest features and technologies in their browser.

  • Firefox 10 and Thunderbird 10 Arrive on Ubuntu 12.04

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• TDF To Base Foundation In Germany

  The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced that it will base its community-driven entity in Berlin, in the legal form of a German Stiftung. This kind of structure is recognized worldwide as a legally stable, safe and long term entity, providing the ideal cornerstone for the long term growth of the community and its software.

  “For the first time in 12 years, the development of the free office suite finally takes place within an entity that not only perfectly fits the values and ideals of the worldwide community, but also has this very same community driving it. The future home of the best free office suite is built and shaped by everyone who decides to participate and join. And the best is: Everyone can contribute and is invited to do so, to further strenghten the free office ecosystem,” says Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board at TDF.

CMS

• Your CMS Is Not Your Web Site

  First and foremost, the job of a CMS is (not surprisingly) to manage your content. It keeps content in raw form, separate from the presentation layer in which it eventually should appear. A CMS also allows you to deliver content in multiple formats, such as JSON, RSS and Atom feeds. Many legacy and proprietary content management systems rely on creating static HTML output to use for a Web site, but most newer or open-source content management systems are developed in a way that they can be queried directly and return Web-friendly markup.

Business

• Magento’s e-commerce platform surpasses 4 million downloads

• Semi-Open Source

  • Pentaho Open-Sources ‘Big Data’ Tools

BSD

• FreeBSD and PC-BSD installers in pictures

  In January, FreeBSD hit its 9.0 release, and PC-BSD followed soon after with its FreeBSD-based 9.0 release.

  FreeBSD takes the tried and tested method of having a text-based installer. Although this release contained a new installer called bsdinstall, it is very similar to the older sysinstall process.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• You did your part, now it’s our turn to do more for you!

  Well, you did it! We raised $300,000 for free software during our winter fundraising drive, thanks to your contributions.
  Even better, we also exceeded our “behind the scenes” goal, which was to sign up at least 400 new members over the two months. I’m really thrilled to welcome so many new supporters, including our 423 new associate members.

• GNU spotlight with Karl Berry (January 2012)

  In addition to the usual releases, a new installment of the Lilypond Report has been published. It includes release news, an interview, Prelude #1 in Scheme, and more.

Project Releases

• GNUnited Nations 0.5 released

• Automake 1.11.3 released

Licensing

• Some Thoughts on Conservancy’s GPL Enforcement

  As most of those who know me are aware, I’ve been involved in GPL enforcement for more than 12 years, across three different organizations, the most recent one being here at the Software Freedom Conservancy. Since 2001, I’ve written dozens of articles, blog posts, and given at least fifty talks and CLE classes about how to do GPL compliance, and how enforcement actions tend to occur.

  This weekend at SCALE, I gave a version of a talk I’ve given many times (also available as an oggcast), which I’ve usually entitled something like 12 Years of Copyleft Compliance: A Historical Perspective. I decided to retire this talk last weekend at SCALE (in part because it’s now coming up on 13 years), but before I put that material aside, I thought I’d write a blog post summarizing the more salient points that I make in that talk.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Education Initiatives and Open Edu Resources in Earth Sciences from Penn State

• Open source municipalities: twitter, transit and apps a focus of Cities Summit – live blog

• Open Data

  • Open Works for Bloomberg

Programming

• C development on Linux – Structures – VII.

• Komodo 7.0 IDE Syncs Up Development

  Developer tools vendor ActiveState is out with a major new release of their Komodo IDE. Komodo 7 is the first big update to the IDE since Komodo 6 was released in October of 2010.

  Komodo 7 adds new developer collaboration and synchronization tools as well as new support for popular frameworks like Node.js and LESS.

Standards/Consortia

• Ending the Symphony Fork

  A fork is a form of software reuse. I like your software module. It meets some or many of my needs, but I need some additional features.

  When I want to reuse existing functionality from another software product, I generally have four choices:

  1. If your module is nicely designed and extensible, then I might be able to simply use your code as-is and write new code to extend it.
  2. I can convince you to modify your module so it meets my needs.
  3. I can work with you in your open source project to make the module (“our” module in this case) meet our mutual needs.
  4. I can copy the source code of your module and change the code in my copy, and integrate that modified module into my product.

Finance

• Holder & Obama’s Propaganda is “Belied by a Troublesome Little Thing Called Facts”

  Elite financial institutions officers engaged in fraud face a dramatically reduced risk of prosecution compared to 20 years ago when financial fraud was far less common. TRAC reports that the number of financial institution fraud prosecutions under Obama is less than one-half the number 20 years ago. Bush (II) was slightly better than Obama in prosecuting non-elite financial institution frauds, but both were pathetically bad.

Censorship

• The End Of The Global Internet? Google’s Blogger Starts Using Country-Specific Domains To Permit Local Censorship

  Twitter has taken quite a lot of heat for putting in place the capability to block tweets on a geographical basis. This begins to look a little unfair in light of the fact that Google quietly adopted a similar policy before Twitter. That’s shown by the answer to a question on Google’s Blogger site about blogs being redirected to country-specific URLs,

Privacy

• Google Bursts Microsoft’s Myth About Privacy Policy

  Google has clearly stated that users can opt-out of Google’s ad targeting as well as prevent Google for logging your search history. Google has in fact consolidated information at one place so it is easier to understand and be controlled by users as compared to lengthy documents full of incomprehensible legal jargons. Users are still in full control as they always were while using Google service.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Estonia Next In Line To Receive US ‘Encouragement’ To Adopt Harsher Anti-Piracy Laws

  Numerous Wikileaks cables have highlighted the pressure that the US has brought to bear on several foreign governments behind closed doors in an attempt to get the latter to pass maximalist copyright laws. But it’s worth noting that plenty of arm twisting takes place openly. Here, for example, is a letter (pdf) from the American Chamber of Commerce in Estonia addressed to the Minister of Justice, and the Minister of Economic

• Copyrights

  • The Sky Is Rising!

    For years now, the legacy entertainment industry has been predicting its own demise, claiming that the rise of technology, by enabling easy duplication and sharing — and thus copyright infringement — is destroying their bottom line. If left unchecked, they say, it is not only they that will suffer, but also the content creators, who will be deprived of a means to make a living. And, with artists lacking an incentive to create, no more art will be produced, starving our culture. While it seems obvious to many that this could not possibly be true, since creators and performers of artistic content existed long before the gatekeepers ever did, we’ve looked into the numbers to get an honest picture of the state of things. What we found is that not only is the sky not falling, as some would have us believe, but it appears that we’re living through an incredible period of abundance and opportunity, with more people producing more content and more money being made than ever before. As it turns out… The Sky Is Rising!

  • White House Says It Can’t Comment On Possible Chris Dodd Investigation

  • Hollywood Gets To Party With TPP Negotiators; Public Interest Groups Get Thrown Out Of Hotel

    We’ve been talking about the ridiculous levels of secrecy around the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) agreement — a trade agreement that is being designed to push through basically everything that Hollywood wants in international copyright law. Last week, we mentioned that various civil society groups were planning to hold an open meeting about TPP in the same hotel where the negotiations were being held (in Hollywood, of course).

  • Angry Birds boss: ‘Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business’

    Rovio Mobile learned from the music industry’s mistakes when deciding how to deal with piracy of its Angry Birds games and merchandise, chief executive Mikael Hed told the Midem conference in Cannes this morning.

  • CreativeAmerica Literally Resorts To Buying Signatures

    Remember CreativeAmerica? This is the slickly produced operation that claims to be a “grassroots” organization in favor of SOPA and PIPA… but which is actually funded by the major studios, staffed by former MPAA employees, and has had all the major studios directly pushing employees and partners to sign up for the program — even to the point of threatening to take away business if they don’t sign.

    This is also the group that was caught copying an anti-SOPA activism letter, and using the exact same words as if it was written by themselves (I guess they’re fine with plagiarism). It’s also been caught using funny math to pump up its tiny number of supporters.

    In December, we joked that CreativeAmerica had resorted to buying support, after it released a big (and expensive) advertising campaign all over TV and on some big screens in Times Square. Not exactly a “grass roots” operation.

    Either way, it appears the group has gone more direct now: to the point that it’s literally paying people for signatures.

  • iPhone Data Debunks Recording Industry’s Report On How French Three Strikes Law Increased Sales

  • New tactic in mass file-sharing lawsuit: just insult the EFF

    An old legal aphorism says, “If the facts are on your side, pound on the facts. If the law is on your side, pound on the law. If neither is on your side, pound on the table.” After reading the latest salvo in the P2P porn copyright wars, it’s clear that some poor table has been abused horrifically.

  • Venn diagrams: the intersection of morons and judges

    So what’s next? Outlaw links to proxies and anonymizers? Outlaw access to proxies and anonymizers? Outlaw sites who offer proxies, anonymizers, TOR or VPN? Outlaw technologies like proxies, anonymizers, TOR and VPN? Outlaw writing about proxies, anonymizers, TOR and VPN? Maybe I should emigrate to North-Korea or China. As long as you leave politics alone, you can at least blog about technology!

    Of course it doesn’t stop there. The weakest link in the current torrent architecture are the centralized torrent repositories. However, other technologies will emerge that eradicate this flaw as well and become completely decentralized. All that is left then is deep packet inspection, a technology that ironically has recently been banned by that same juridical system.

  • ACTA

    • Due diligence of negotiating criminal laws in the ACTA process

      Just an test inspection into ACTA negotiations formerly covered by secrecy. These allegations are pretty serious. Be reminded, the Criminal chapter of ACTA directly corresponded to the yet unadopted IPRED2 directive. The Commission had no competence to negotiate Criminal sanctions (because IPRED2 is not adopted, though the negotiating mandate mentions criminal enforcment which are also directly referenced in the Digital chapter).

    • Stop ACTA in Europe, February 11th

      More news on the ongoing ACTA protests in Europe. 1000 people attended a protest against ACTA in Poland last week, and more protests are on the way.

    • Slovenian Ambassador Apologizes For Signing ACTA [Updated]

      Update: As a few of you have sent in here is a Google translated version of her “apology.” The translation isn’t great… but it appears she’s saying that the government told her to sign it, and she didn’t know if she could push back, but now that she understands ACTA, she doesn’t like it, and she appears to hope that people will protest ACTA and stop it from getting implemented. If anyone has a better translation, please let us know…

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

TLWIR Special: GNU/Linux Petition Featured on WhiteHouse.gov!

On January 30th, 2012, I started a petition requesting that the U.S. government broaden their use of Free Software and Open Source software to save money. I deeply believe that this one step is PART of the solution to the problem of the crushing national debt that the United States is currently facing. Will shifting to Free Software completely solve the crisis? No, it will not. Software expenditures are a very small part of our national budget. However, at some point, if we do not want our nation to go bankrupt, we will have to have the discipline and the fiscal restraint to say “no more”. The United States is not an infinite repository of cash, as many vendors seem to think. Decades of overspending have left us in quite a mess, and I believe that Free Software can help.

Heads Up for Linux

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Find Apps That are Using Your Net Connection in Linux

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • SMPlayer: A Flexible, Feature-Filled Media Player With a Frustrating Flaw

    SMPlayer is a media player that suffers from no lack of features — drilling down into its menus will quickly convince you. And despite the extent of these features, using them is nothing but simple. But SMPlayer unfortunately does lack one feature that some users may sorely miss: It can’t seem to read directories from CD/DVD music collections inserted in the optical drive.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Improves Realtime Linux

    Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is out with its first major enterprise supported Linux release will full support for the Linux 3.0 kernel. The Red Hat MRG 2.1 platform provides Messaging, Realtime and Grid capabilities and was last updated in June of 2011 with the 2.0 release.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Update Improves Multi-Monitor Experience

        An update to Ubuntu 12.04 (daily builds) has tweaked the Unity UI to make the systems more useful on multi-monitor set-up. I noticed it when I rebooted the system after an update. Now, launcher is available on all monitors, in addition to the top banner and menu items.

Devices/Embedded

• Boxee kills computer clients to focus on Boxee Box

  If you are a fan of the Boxee app on your Mac or PC, you had better hold onto your copy the software and be sure to back it up. Boxee has officially killed support for its computer clients and the last version of the software for Windows, Mac, and Linux has been removed from company servers. As of yesterday, the software is no longer available for download on the Boxee website.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Review: Razr Maxx boasts best Android smartphone battery

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • LibreTab… not?

    In a perfectly orchestrated marketing campaign for a 100% free-libre tablet called Spark that will run KDE Plasma Active, Aaron Seigo writes today about the problems they are facing with GPL-violations.

    Apparently, every Chinese manufacturer is breaking the GPLv2 by not releasing the sources for their modified Linux kernel. Conversations and conversations with Zenithink (designers of the Spark), Synrgic (designers of the Dreambook W7), etc have arrived nowhere. To the point that CordiaTab, another similar effort using Gnome instead of KDE, has been cancelled.

BusyBox replacement project fuels animated verbal spat

BusyBox gained a measure of fame a few years ago when it became the subject of a lawsuit in the US, some say the first case in courts in that country to test the GPL. A number of similar suits followed, the contention always being the same: BusyBox was being used by some company or the other in violation of the terms of its licence, the GPL.

Local development company offers affordable open source solutions

EnterMedia Open Source Digital Asset Management Releases Version 8.0

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 10 Released, Running On Ubuntu 12.04

    Mozilla team has announced the release of Firefox 10. The latest version is available for Linux and Android, in addition to other platforms. The latest version is already available in the Android market. It may arrive on different Linux distros gradually. If you are running openSUSE you may want to enable the Mozilla repository to keep your Firefox/Thunderbird updated.

  • Mozilla releases Firefox 10, adds developer tools

    Mozilla has released version 10 of its Firefox browser as part of its accelerated six-week build cycle, and has also included a pack of developer tools aimed at simplifying life for website operators.

SaaS

• Why Hadoop caught on

Business

• OpenMEAP Delivers an Open Source Mobile Enterprise Application Platform

• Talend Selected by Leading Analyst Firm in “Who’s Who in Open-Source Data Quality” Report

Project Releases

• Airtime 2.0 features improved Icecast, SHOUTcast, SoundCloud integration

  The latest version of Sourcefabric’s open source radio automation software now adds the ability to configure Icecast and Shoutcast streams in the browser, a button to listen to the station’s output and multiple improvements to the playlist and calendar views.

Public Services/Government

• Petition the Governement of the USA to Use FLOSS

• The open source behind gov.uk revealed

  While the UK government’s plans for wider adoption of open source have been uneven in their application, the new beta version of the gov.uk web site should give proprietary software vendors and contractors pause for thought, as it is almost entirely built on or with open source.

Openness/Sharing

• Open collaboration: living or dying by a community

  People like me tend to get the credit when things go right, and the axe when things don’t, but in the open source world it’s you who ultimately decides the fate of a project. Engineers and managers and designers work hard, this is true. None of that matters unless we have an involved community simultaneously pointing at the shiny object up in the clouds while holding our feet firmly to the ground.

• Open Data

  • The imperative of openness for data society

  • Another Reason We Need Open Government Data: To Avoid Information Asymmetries

    Inspired by this work, Nicklas Lundblad has written an interesting speculative piece about what the rise of predictability through the analysis of huge data sets might mean for society and openness. He notes that one of the “theorems” of psychohistory is that for it to be effective the data sets and the predictions derived from them must be kept secret from the populations involved – the idea being that if they were able to analyze that same data themselves, they might change their actions and thus nullify the predictions.

• Open Access/Content

  • Industry-Funded Software Research Goes Open Source

    Universities like open source licenses because they allow a community of developers to grow up around efforts such as Sakai or Kuali. But what about large technology companies that fund software research on university campuses? In some cases, it turns out that they prefer open source, too. When Intel launched Science and Technology Centers (ISTC) at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University in 2011, for example, its policy was open source all the way…

Programming

• Teaching software libraries by example
  

  Many libraries use Doxygen or a similar tool to convert comments in their code into HTML documentation. This goal here is to explain what each function and class is and does. In some cases, this is all the user gets. This is equivalent to saying “This is a hammer. It is used to hit nails. This is a nail, it is used to hold wood together.” and then expecting the user to be able to build a house. This is simply not the right kind of information for the user to be able to learn to use the tool for their needs.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The Price of Growth

  Growth. It’s what every economist and politician wants. If we get ‘back to growth’, servicing debts both private and sovereign become much easier. And life will return to normal (for a few more years).

  There is growing evidence that a major US policy shift is underway to boost growth. Growth that will create millions of new jobs and raise real GDP.

Censorship

• Dutch ISPs Refuse To Block The Pirate Bay Without A Direct Order

  While some Dutch ISPs have been ordered by a court to block access to The Pirate Bay (after fighting it in court for years), the order only applied directly to two ISPs: xs4all and Ziggo. BREIN, the local anti-piracy group, had then demanded that other ISPs also start blocking access.

Privacy

• Microsoft’s Bogus Attack On Google’s Privacy Policy

  Microsoft, the abusive monopoly in the Desktop segment, is slamming Google for its recent policy changes through an ad campaign claiming that Microsoft puts user ahead. Which, too me and many other is further from the reality. [A very good analysis by Danny Sullivan]

  While Google is trying to simplify things for users so they know about the privacy policies, Microsoft has its privacy policies spread out so its very hard to understand what your rights are and how much control you really have.

• More Bad Ideas from the E.U.

  Now that the European Union’s member states are flailing around attempting to implement their miserable cookie directive, the European Commission has decided it’s a good time to further retard the Internet.

Civil Rights

• Tourists deported from U.S. for Twitter jokes (Updated)

  Two U.K. tourists landing in L.A. were detained and deported because of tweets joking about “diggin’ up” Marilyn Monroe and “destroying” America.

  According to DHS paperwork, Leigh Van Bryan was matched to a “One Day Lookout” list, placed under oath, and ultimately denied entry and put on a plane back to Europe.

DRM

• Channeling That Anti-SOPA Energy Into Getting Important DMCA Exemptions

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Four sources for Free-Licensed 3D Modeling Textures

    This week I discovered some new resources for texture graphics to use in 3D modeling. Textures are essential for most 3D modeling projects of any complexity, and good textures can sometimes make very simple “low-poly” models look much better.

    I just came across a post about different source materials for Blender modeling. The original included a lot of non-free materials, but along with it, I found some very nice sources for free-licensed textures:

  • ACTA

    • ACTA: Commissioner De Gucht Lies to the EU Parliament

      The EU Commission “Trade” Directorate-General is lobbying the EU Parliament, presenting a one-sided and plainly distorted view of ACTA to face the growing citizen opposition. The EU’s executive branch, which negotiated ACTA behind citizens’ backs, is now shamelessly relaying the copyright industries’ lobbying pitch, in yet another sign of its collusion with business interests.

    • The Avaaz Petition on ACTA and the Commission campaign

    • ACTA’s Back

      Now that the US bills SOPA and PIPA have been put on ice, attention has returned to their parent, an international treaty called ACTA. I’ve written extensively about ACTA before, but in summary it is an international treaty that has been secretly negotiated to ensure as little input as possible from the citizens of any country.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux at CES 2012: Everything You Need to Know

Linux has been gaining some serious mileage over the years. Linux and other high-end Open Source software like Blender are not some hobbyists-only stuff anymore and the whole technology world is slowly starting to realize the positive and unbiased influence Open Source and Linux has on everything technology. Linux was quite prominently featured at just concluded International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2012 in various different forms. Let’s go find out what those ‘various forms’ were. Read on.

User Friendly? I Choose Expert Friendly

I don’t know about you but to me the term user friendly is everyday becoming more like a pejorative rather than a feature. Let me explain: I’ve realized than almost everything requires time and effort (sometimes a lot) in order to have it just the way you want it. This is specially true if you really care about customizing your environment . Let me give you an example: vim. Vim is a fantastic editor and in my opinion the best editor around. Nevertheless I’ve spent a lot of time and effort just to learn how to edit with it and playing with the configuration file just to make it perfect for my needs. At almost every level of software tools or programs there’s at least one that take this approach.

Desktop

• Linux: A Getting-Started Guide

  Are you fed up with Microsoft Windows and ready to give Linux a try? Here’s how to get started. This guide for Linux discusses who the Linux OS is right for, what you need to get started, and how to turn your Windows PC into a dual-boot computer so you can have the best of both worlds–Linux and Windows.

• Userful Releases Next Gen MultiSeat Linux Solution for $99 HP t200 Thin Client

• The Dilemma of the Linux Desktop

  Both Unity and Cinnamon are reactions to GNOME 3. However, Unity is the result of Ubuntu’s inability to work with the GNOME project, not a difference in design policy. While Unity and GNOME 3 are very different interfaces, both are the result of a top-down process, in which the design is chosen by lead developers and allegedly supported by usability principles.

• Linux multiseat solution advances to Ethernet with HP thin client

  Userful Corp. announced a new version of its multiseat Linux PC sharing software, now Ethernet-ready and bundled with a $99 HP t200 thin client. The “Userful MultiSeat with HP t200 thin client” solution turns one Edubuntu-based Linux PC into up to 15 computer stations, enabling faster networking than the previous USB-only release, says the company.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.3-rc2 Kernel Is Out Late Due To “Mind-Fart”

  The second Linux 3.3 kernel release candidate is now available, which is coming a bit late due to Linus Torvalds falling behind.

• Graphics Stack

  • Cleaning Up The R600 Gallium3D Driver

    Marek Olšák, the well-known independent contributor to Mesa that’s made a great deal of enhancements to the Radeon driver stack over the past few years, has a new patch-set. The latest patch-set he published last night cleans up the R600g driver and reworks its cache flushing code. This patch-set affects more than 2,000 lines of code, which is significant for this open-source Gallium3D driver.

  • Having SNAppy Intel 2D Acceleration In 2012

  • Radeon HD 7950 Launches, Linux Support Questionable

  • Wayland Preparing For 1.0 Stable Release

Applications

• Jeff’s List of his favorite FOSS Applications

• Miro Internet TV: Internet TV for Ubuntu Desktop

  Miro, a new application for Internet video has been designed to be an easy app that will give users an amazing full-screen show. With over thousands of free videos that can be viewed from the Internet, Miro gives the user the ability to download all the chosen videos they enjoy as soon as they are released.

  Miro, first launched in 2005 then revamped in 2007 (it was first launched as Democracy Player), is written in Python. Miro has an embedded WebKit for Linux and(Mozilla Gecko/XUL until 3.0.2). With the updated version of 3.0, Miro offers GTK for new Windows and Linux systems.

• Casper, the Friendly (and Persistent) Ghost

  Creating a live Linux USB stick isn’t anything new. And, in fact, the ability to have persistence with a live CD/USB stick isn’t terribly new. What many people might not be aware of, however, is just how easy it is to make a bootable USB stick that you can use like a regular Linux install. Using the “Startup Disk Creator” in any of the Ubuntu derivatives, creating a bootable USB drive with persistence is as simple as dragging a slider to determine how much space to reserve for persistence!

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How I Manage Bandwidth Using Trickle On Ubuntu

  • Virtualization With Xen On CentOS 6.2 (x86_64) (Paravirtualization & Hardware Virtualization)

  • New To Linux: Part 3 – Customizing Ubuntu 11.10

  • How to setup a basic firewall in Ubuntu Linux

• Wine or Emulation

  • Emulators on Linux, part 4

    I’m continuing my look at what emulators you can use in Linux with ones for Nintendo 64 (is this console REALLY over 15 years old?) and the Nintendo DS.

  • SNES Emulator on the PlayBook in Action!!!

    I grew up playing SNES. It started with MarioWorld and MarioKart and moved into Super Punch Out, StarFox, Street Fighter 2, and UN Squadron. Needless to say, as soon as I found out this SNES emulator was available for PlayBook, I sprinted for my PC, PB, and USB cable to get the retro goodness rolling! I chose UN Squadron as my first screenshot because it is a less well known game that I absolutely LOVE. Sidescrolling airplane fighting action with awesome upgrades and lots of challenging levels. I highly recommend it.

• Games

  • The Battle for Wesnoth 1.10 Released with New Campaign, Features and Improvements

  • Humble Bundle For Android Now On Sale

  • New Humble Indie Bundle Launches For Linux, Android

    The games that comprise “The Humble Bundle for Android” are Anomaly, Osmos, and EDGE. If you pay above the current floating average price (currently at $4.73 USD), you also get a copy of World of Goo. All of these titles are supported under Android, Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux. There’s no Digital Rights Management coupled with the titles and when contributing to the Humble Bundle a portion of the proceeds can be donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

  • Name your price! Humble Bundle brings pay-what-you-want gaming to Android in style

  • Linux Game Publishing Shake-Up: CEO Steps Down

  • LGP History pt 4: The end of the ride, but not the end of the company

  • Desura Is A Great Indie Game App Store For Linux

  • id Software Consolidates Open-Source Code

    While id Software may have recently lost its main Linux game developer (Timothee Bessett), they haven’t abandoned their open-source ways. This afternoon John Carmack had an interesting tweet.

Distributions

• Clonezilla Live 1.2.12-10 Has Linux Kernel 3.2

  Steven Shiau proudly announced today, January 30th, a new stable release of his popular Clonezilla Live operating system, used for cloning hard disk drives.

  Clonezilla Live 1.2.12-10 is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms and includes major improvements and assorted bugfixes.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • The diminishing of the operating system

    Mandriva S.A., the company behind the Mandriva Linux distribution, has been given a temporary reprieve from fiscal collapse, following a shareholder skirmish that has left the ultimate fate of the Linux vendor still in doubt.

    COO Jean-Manuel Croset made a brief statement in a blog post yesterday indicating that even though the funds from the minority stakeholders from Russia had not been received, Mandriva had found financial assistance from the Paris Region Economic Development agency that would carry the company through until mid-February.

  • Bid for Mandriva fails

    The external bid for financially troubled Mandriva has been blocked by a minority shareholder. The news was announced by Mandriva COO Jean-Manuel Croset in a brief blog posting. Croset says the company’s financial situation is though “far better than expected” and this will allow the company until the middle of February to find a new solution to its problems.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat extends Red Hat Enterprise Linux lifecycle to ten years

    I’m a big believer in “It’s not broke, then don’t fix it.” So is leading Linux company, Red Hat. The company has just announced that it is extending the production lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6 from seven to 10 years in response to enterprise customer demand and Red Hat’s hardware original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners.

  • Stella – a Centos desktop remix

    Hello everybody, I’m doing a Centos 6 desktop oriented remix called Stella. This has been brewing since the summer and it’s starting to get ready.
    I’ve backported a lot of packages from Fedora and Rpmfusion and bundle several other repos, too, resulting in a big range of software available, including but not limited to:
    LibreOffice, VLC, MPlayer, Shutter, Arista, Java, Flash, GParted etc

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Stability Drives Demand for More Flexibility in Long-Term Operating System Deployments

  • Short-term Underperformance Detected in Shares of Red Hat in the Systems Software Industry

  • Fedora

    • Ambigious Fedora 16 LXDE

      The paradox. The higher the speed of the CPU, memory, bus, etc., that hardware companies try to sell us, the more people tend to use low-resource operating systems and desktop environments.

      Of course, being light on system resources is not the only reason, but one of many reasons why more and more people switch from heavy DEs like KDE, GNOME3 and Unity to lightweight DEs like XFCE and LXDE.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Linux Users Will Get A Heads-Up Display Instead Of Menu Tabs. Say What?!

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Dash Gets Rid Of Default Shortcuts

        As we earlier reported Ubuntu Dash is getting rid of default useless huge icons (I haven’t seen any use of it yet). The update has arrived. We are running Ubuntu 12.04 to keep an eye on the progress and we just noticed updates to Unity which removes those default 8 icons from the Dash and replace them with more useful shortcuts.

      • Canonical Adds Unity Settings in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

        At the request of many Ubuntu users who hated the Unity interface, introduced with the Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) release, it looks like Canonical is trying hard to make it more user friendly by adding new functionality and allowing users to easily configure it.

      • Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit Sponsorship Open

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Mint’s Cinnamon: The Future of the Linux Desktop? (Review)

          Over the last few years, we’ve seen radical changes to the Linux desktop. Some, despite initial opposition, such as the KDE 4.x re-start, took a while to gain favor, but eventually became popular. Others, such as GNOME 3.x have alienated many users and first Ubuntu’s Unity and now it’s Head-Up Display (HUD) have not been greeted with overwhelming approval even by hard-core Ubuntu Linux users. So, Linux Mint’s developers have decided to go back to the past with a GNOME 2.x style desktop: Cinnamon. So, how well have they done? I give them an “A” for effort, but only a “B” for execution.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux-based home energy gateway supports ZigBee Smart Energy 2.0

  Digi International announced a ZigBee-based home energy gateway that runs Linux on a Freescale i.MX28 processor. Compliant with the upcoming Smart Energy 2.0 standard, the “ConnectPort X2e for Smart Energy” enables ZigBee devices on a Home Area Network (HAN) to communicate with an energy service provider, says the company.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Motorola Faces Protest To Unlock Bootladers

      Motorola was infamous for locking the bootloader of some of their devices. But Google’s proposed acquisition of Motorola gave us an indication that the company may shed its policy of locking the bootloader of their devices.

      The company did promise last year that they will unlock the bootloaders of all their devices by the end of 2011. It’s 2012 and the promise has not been met. To make matters worse and raise doubts over company’s intentions Motorola recently announced the Developer Edition of Motorola Droid RAZR with an unlocked bootloader. This made many wonder if Motorola is shifting from its promise to unlock the bootloaders.

    • Samsung’s Android tablet/smartphone hybrid will debut in mid-February

    • DOCOMO Unveils First 2 “Disney Mobile on docomo” Android Smartphones

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • B&N readying yet another Nook for spring

Proprietary Software Support vs. Open Source Support – Common Misconceptions

Pandora’s Box 2.0: Opening proprietary code

What does it take to open up a proprietary application and make it a successful open source project? To answer this, Glyn Moody takes a look at some prominent successes and failures and identifies the best practices.

Mentors fuel growth for open-source communities

Mentorship programs help people working on open-source projects build a community, make decisions and to maintain projects beyond their initial idea. Some communities use programs that require one-on-one mentorship, while others allow existing members to on-board new members at their own pace. Either way, these programs all aim to ensure the success of the projects.

Foradian Technologies’ open source software soon in 50-plus languages

After implementing open source school management software in 15,000 schools under the Kerala Government’s Sampoorna school management system project, the Mangalore-based Foradian Technologies Pvt Ltd is looking at India and overseas for growth.

Fact: Open Source Software saves money

Just today, I ran across an experience with Microsoft Excel. A need for generating Code 128 barcodes in Excel came up. Immediately upon looking, there are naturally additional plugins for Excel that will do this. And there are several of them out there, all developed by a different party. They are not super cheap, however, and are about half of the cost of Microsoft Office itself. Not only this, but they are victim to very strict licensing as well. Some offer a one-time cost per workstation, and others offer a site license which must be renewed by year. But the same concept applies, the more you want to use the software, the more you must pay.

Unfortunately where the Code 128 barcode solution is needed, Microsoft Office is deployed currently. Just for personal knowledge, I looked and found that OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc has a plugin for generating Code 128 barcodes, and it’s FREE. In fact, the plugin itself is open source as well.

Taming knowledge with open source

Events

• The Open Bastion Announces First of Six New Open Source Conferences for 2012

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Working On Developing A Reset Button For Firefox Browser

    Mozilla is currently working to develop a ‘reset’ button for Firefox, which would enable users to work around errors in installation or start-up crashes and fix the problem without losing their data, bookmarks, history and more. The feature would be accessible in several ways, around the Firefox browser.

  • Firefox 10 Now Available for Download

    Mozilla today made the latest update of its open-source Web browser, Firefox 10, available for download in Windows, Mac, and Linux editions. The update, the latest in the organization’s “rapid release” program, improves the way the browser handles add-on updating, and adds a gaggle of new tools and capabilities for Web developers to use, which in turn, means more powerful and compelling sites for end users.

  • A Look At Mozilla’s Enterprise Plans for Firefox and Thunderbird

  • Firefox 10 arrives with new dev tools and full-screen API

  • Firefox 10 relieves add-on updating pain

  • Thunderbird 10 Fixes Add-On Compatibility, Adds Right-Click-to-Search and More Keyboard Shortcuts

Databases

• PostgreSQL cloud database announced

  PostgreSQL specialist EnterpriseDB has announced the availability of Postgres Plus Cloud Database on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Users can run either PostgreSQL or the PostgreSQL-based Postgres Plus Advanced Server with the database-as-a-service (DBaaS) cloud service without needing to undertake major installation or configuration work.

CMS

• Alert: What’s Coming for Open Source CMS in February 2012

Education

• Open Source Higher Education

  Open CourseWare and other open educational resources are beginning to draw the attention of higher education policymakers and other leaders. Why? These web-based educational tools hold the promise of both reducing the cost of high education and helping learners to complete their degrees by providing access to top quality course materials and instruction.

Business

• Start-up Snapt: making money from open source

  Johannesburg-based open-source software start-up Snapt launched only in August 2011 but already it’s drawing interest from top drawer customers, mainly international clients, including US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (Nasa).

  The company uses open-source software as a basis to build server and network management software. With all of its marketing and sales activities being Web-based, the company is finding there’s huge demand for free and open-source solutions that are backed by support, particularly from US companies looking to cut costs by avoiding proprietary software solutions.

• Treadstone 71 Selected to Deliver Open Source Intelligence Training

• Learn How Open Source Software Benefits a Successful GIS Business

BSD

• FreeBSD Made Much Progress Last Quarter

  The FreeBSD project has published their quarterly report outlining some of the advancements made by this leading BSD operating system in the last quarter of 2011. A lot of progress was made, but still there’s some work left to be accomplished.

Public Services/Government

• MPs suggests legalizing use of open-source software by state agencies

  A group of deputies of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, has proposed to legalize the use of open-source software by state agencies.

Licensing

• open beyond licensing

  When I first let the world in on our “little” project to create an open tablet there were some who wondered openly about the licensing of the software. It’s an important question that deserves a clarifying answer:

  We are not using the OS (Android, in this case) provided by the hardware manufacturer. We are also well aware that some of the people in the hardware supply chain are violating the terms of the GPL. This was amazingly frustrating for us and caused significant delays as we went in search of GPL friendly vendors. We found that in the market of affordable device makers in China, they just don’t exist. There’s a cultural as well as legal hurdles that have led to this unfortunate situation, and I personally think Google has a lot to answer for when they allow such companies open access to their app store while they must be aware of the license violations that are going on. So it’s an unfortunate situation, but we’re problem solvers, we’re bad-ass Free software developers who see a problem and bang on it until it falls over, right?

  We decided to go with Mer, the community continuation of MeeGo, as our base OSS. With the amazing help of the Mer community, we have been able to bring up a non-Android, built-from-source kernel on the device and even boot into Plasma Active. There is still work left, and we still do have some binary drivers, but this progress is already one massive crowbar that’s prying open the doors that have been shut on the world of ARM based devices.

• The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

  GPL enforcement is a surprisingly difficult task. It’s not just a matter of identifying an infringement – you need to make sure you have a copyright holder on your side, spend some money sending letters asking people to come into compliance, spend more money initiating a suit, spend even more money encouraging people to settle, spend yet more money actually taking them to court and then maybe, at the end, you have some source code. One of the (tiny) number of groups involved in doing this is the Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organisation that offers various services to free software projects. One of their notable activities is enforcing the license of Busybox, a GPLed multi-purpose application that’s used in many embedded Linux environments. And this is where things get interesting

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Open-source Weave liberates data for journalists, citizens

    Data nerds from government and academia gathered Friday at Northeastern University to show off the latest version of Weave, an open-source, web-based platform designed to visualize “any available data by anyone for any purpose.” The software has a lot of potential for journalists.

• Open Access/Content

  • Will Academics’ Boycott Of Elsevier Be The Tipping Point For Open Access — Or Another Embarrassing Flop?

• Open Hardware

  • Micah Ganske creates open-source sculptures for MakerBot 3D printer

Programming

• Git Gets Enterprise Equipped

  Developer tool provider AccuRev will release a package designed to help enterprises incorporate the increasingly popular Git open source version-control software into their development operations, the company announced Tuesday.

• Learning Python: a good IDE can help

  Recently, I started trying to learn Python. And, no, not because everyone seems to be learning to code this year. Doing this has been on my back burner for a while, and I’ve finally decided to take the reins.

• 7 Best Free Alternative Git Clients

Beer ‘must be sold’ at Brazil World Cup, says Fifa

Beer must be sold at all venues hosting matches in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, football’s world governing body, Fifa, has insisted.

M$, It’s Just Not Happening

It’s not going to happen, M$. About 30% of PCs are running XP and many of them are a bit old. To buy 450 million new PCs to replace them, in 800 days would need 500K machines per day, about 45 million per quarter. The world is only shipping 90 million PCs per quarter and many are getting GNU/Linux or MacOS. Don’t hold your breath expecting a 50% pop in revenues the next few quarters. M$ has been selling 50 million licences for “7″ per quarter but that includes consumer, business, replacements and new purchases. The replacement part is not the whole ball of wax.

Health/Nutrition

• Paying for Cancer Treatment for Children in America with a Car Wash, Bake Sale and Fish Fry

  “It shouldn’t be this way,” read the subject line of an email I received Friday morning from a conservative friend and fellow Southerner. “People shouldn’t have to beg for money to pay for medical care.”

  At first, I thought he was referring to my column last week in which I wrote about the fundraising effort to cover the bills, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, that the husband of Canadian skier Sarah Burke is now facing. Burke died on January 19, nine days after sustaining severe head injuries in a skiing accident in Park City, Utah. I noted that had the accident occurred in Burke’s native Canada, which has a system of universal coverage, the fundraiser would not have been necessary.

Finance

• John Reed on Big Banks’ Power and Influence

  Bill Moyers talks with former Citigroup Chairman John Reed to explore a momentous instance: how the mid-90s merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group and a friendly Presidential pen — brought down the Glass-Steagall Act, a crucial firewall between banks and investment firms which had protected consumers from financial calamity since the aftermath of the Great Depression. In effect, says Moyers, they put the watchdog to sleep.

Copyrights

• Pirate Party Docks at Berlin’s Parliament

  The recent U.S. shutdown of the Hong Kong-based file-hosting service Megaupload has led other file sharing sites to tighten their content sharing practices, for fear of facing criminal charges. Seven of Megaupload’s executives were charged with copyright violations, racketeering, and money laundering, while CEO Kim Dotcom, a German-Finnish citizen, was arrested along with four others and could face up to 55 years in prison.

• Copying Is Not Theft, But Censorship Is

  This morning a friend shared with me some amusing American Sign Language videos, and in return I wanted to share with him my favorite ASL video of all time: B. Storm’s interpretation of the Gnarls Barkley song Crazy. Only I couldn’t because it was gone. Why? Because “This video contains content from WMG (Warner Music Group), who has blocked it on copyright grounds.” This is appalling for many reasons, not least of which being the video is almost certainly fair use.

• Former Survivor member sues Newt Gingrich for using ‘Eye of Tiger’

  Newt Gingrich might feel like Rocky Balboa when he takes the stage at campaign events to Survivor’s 1982 hit “Eye of the Tiger,” but it’s the co-writer of the song who is ready for a fight.

• Pro-SOPA Folks Push Fact-Challenged Op-Eds

  It seems that, in the wake of the big protests that helped shelve (for now, at least) SOPA and PIPA, the pro-SOPA folks have started pushing people to write op-eds in various publications about how important SOPA/PIPA are — while simultaneously dismissing the concerns of those who opposed the bills. I keep seeing more of them, but wanted to dig into three recent examples, all of which show how the pro-SOPA folks are trying to distort the debate through either outright falsehoods, or carefully misleading statements.

• Pro-SOPA Folks Push Fact-Challenged Op-Eds

• ACTA

  • As Anonymous protests, Internet drowns in inaccurate anti-ACTA arguments

    After the Internet’s decisive victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act earlier this month, online activists have been looking for their next target, and a growing number of them have chosen the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which was signed by the EU last week. Indeed, the renewed focus on ACTA even led a group of Polish politicians to hold paper Guy Fawkes masks—the symbol of Anonymous—over their faces in protest at the way ACTA has been pushed through. In the US, over 35,000 people have signed a petition urging the White House to “end ACTA,” despite the fact that it has already been signed by the US.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Weather in UK

  The weather office in UK has quit providing widgets for GNU/Linux desktops thanks to Adobe dropping support for AIR in GNU/Linux. There is a workaround. On my PC, running Debian GNU/Linux, there is an app called “metar”…

• The satisfaction of an online course on Linux

  My mother, who successfully migrated from Windows to Pardus GNU/Linux, is always alert trying to find news about FLOSS in our little country. Two weeks ago, she called me with information that seemed like a dream: a reputable University that promotes online learning was offering a course named “Linux OS”.

  To be honest, although I really wanted to register, I hesitated. After all, online learning is not fully developed here and the platforms are Windows based. Paying only to discover that you are barred out because the software that the institution uses is not Linux inclusive is, obviously, no fun at all. So, before registering, I decided to find as much as possible about the course program and the platform. My inquiries gave positive results; everything seemed suspiciously fine.

• Making Music on Linux; It’s A Thing

  I was never a great, or even good, guitar player, but it’s something I really enjoyed doing for a decent chunk of my life. But as life and work grew more complex, it kind of fell by the wayside, a casualty of the demands of adulthood.

  But recently, I’ve been actively trying to carve out time to mess around with my guitar. Because I live in an apartment, I became intrigued by the idea of amp and pedal modeling, where instead of playing through a physical amp or guitar pedal, one plays into a computer, with the amp and pedal sound created by software.

Server

• Oh Boy! Tilera Servers Out in March

  Wow! A Tile processor uses a bunch of RISC CPUs on a chip in a mesh. They have 64bit processing and 40bit addressing. The idea is to get close to one processor per thread so that fewer context switches and massive parallelism will get a lot of throughput at lower cost than x86 with SMP. For servers this makes a lot of sense and because they are optimized for Linux and have tools, porting is trivial. Lots of software that runs on GNU/Linux will be able to move quickly to servers running these things. Sampling is happening and production will happen in March. 2012 will be even more interesting than Android/Linux v world.

• Linux on POWER

  Anyone familiar with GNU/Linux will not be surprised by the fact that this operating system runs on almost all known processors. However, very few people are aware that mere support just might not be enough. You’ll also need to keep an up-to-date repository of code. This is especially true when it comes to serious hardware such as POWER.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.2 Kernel: What To Consider Before Updating

  There are few things in life more exciting than a new system update for your favorite Linux distribution. Often, system updates can bring performance enhancements or simply address problematic security issues. These updates are generally considered a good thing. But when it comes to installing kernel updates, there are some critical factors that must be considered.

  By now, you’ve likely heard all about the new 3.2 Linux kernel. While the new 3.2 kernel does offer some worthwhile benefits, this doesn’t always mean that everything is going to work as expected for every person upgrading.

• Graphics Stack

  • Wayland Is Almost Ready For Showing Off

    If you haven’t tried out the Wayland Display Server as of late, after there being a stream of new announcements, you probably should or at least check out the videos in this posting. The Wayland Display Server is becoming more lively and slowly reaching a point where it may be possible for some to use it on a day-to-day basis.

Applications

• The Ever-Changing Linux Filesystems: Merging Directoris into /usr

• Linux for Users: A Bulletin Board Window for Notes

  This piece did not set out to re-define the term, “computer bulletin board,” but that is the easiest way to describe Wboard, a window that provides a background for text notes and allows you to manage and save groups of notes easily.

• Proprietary

  • TeamViewer(R) Launches Version 7 for Linux

    TeamViewer, one of the world’s most popular providers of remote control and online presentation software, today announced TeamViewer 7 for Linux. The new version incorporates a host of new features for remote computer support and introduces for the first time the ability to participate in online meetings of up to 25 people conducted with TeamViewer 7.

  • Google Earth 6.2 Released With A New Way Of Rendering Imagery, More

    Google Earth is an application that provides a virtual globe, map and geographical information which you can use to travel the wold virtually, see images, 3D buildings, maps and more.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Converting A VMware Image To A Physical Machine

  • Share And Discover Cool Bash Tricks With Bash One-Liners

  • How to Change Your Terminal Hostname in Ubuntu [Quick Tips]

  • My sound hardware didn’t vanish, honest

  • Drush: Managing Drupal from the Command Line

  • How to Create Beautiful Photomosaics in Linux Using Metapixel

  • Command-line programs for everyday use in Linux

• Games

  • We Review Open-Source RTS Game 0 A.D.

    Do you think gaming on Linux has improved over the past few years?

    Although variety and graphics might be a little off that available for OS X and Windows there’s no denying that with every passing month Linux as a gaming platform grows ever more viable.

  • Interviewing the Naev Team

  • OpenRA, Free and Open Source RTS Game Engine Supporting C&C and C&C: Red Alert

Desktop Environments

• Razor-qt 0.4 – Qt based Desktop Environment

  Razor-qt is a new desktop environment based on the QT toolkit. I installed it from the PPA and gave it a quick go. It’s early days for the project, but it might eventually become a refuge for lovers of KDE 3 in the same way that Xfce has become popular with people who want to recreate the Gnome 2.x experience.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Can a $265 Tablet Help Fuel Mobile Open Source Development?

  • How to Install KDE SC 4.8 on Ubuntu 11.10

  • Helper Plugin For KATE

  • What’s new in Gwenview from KDE 4.8

    Now that KDE 4.8 has been released, it’s time to recap all changes you will find in Gwenview.

    The main change is the addition of animations when viewing images: crossfading between images and nicer-to-use comparisons. You can learn more from this previous blog article.

  • KDE 4.8 minor tweaks, major improvement

  • Why KDE is the future

    If you haven’t been living under a rock this past week you probably know that the KDE Software Compilation version 4.8.0 has been released. This version brings a lot of great improvements and in my opinion is the best KDE release to date. Among the rather large list of new features, this release includes several kwin optimizations, the blur effect has been fixed, a new dolphin view engine, improvements to gwenview, a new QML splash screen (as well as most of the plasma widgets being ported to QML), the new Secret Service framework and many more. Rather than bore you with all the details which can be obtained from the announcement page, I’m going to visually showcase why KDE had it right all along.

  • Configuration heaven

  • A look at KDE SC 4.8

    KDE looks and works better than ever!

• GNOME Desktop

  • Soup Up GNOME 3 Desktop using Opera Widgets

  • 3 Reasons Why Gnome Shell Is Better Than Ubuntu’s Unity [Opinion]

    There’s absolutely no denying the fact that there has been a lot of bickering between people about which desktop environment is the best. However, in more recent times, the discussion has been expanded and refocused, from not just Gnome vs. KDE but now Gnome Shell vs. Unity, two desktop environments that are both dependent on the Gnome framework.

    The difference between the two is simply the desktop shell, which is much more a difference in looks and functionality than a technical one. However, Gnome Shell has finally started to build itself a place in my heart, while Unity has not.

Distributions

• Arch’ed in a day; a noob experience

  Before beginning with my arch story, let me tell you a bit about myself, or rather about my experience with Linux OS. I am software engineer by profession (used to be…but that is another story) worked in enterprise java and client solutions. My first experience with Linux was in 2003 or 2004 when I learned about an operating system called Red-hat and given a 3-cd install for the OS. I installed the OS in my computer, did not like it at all. Looked very bland and a cheap imitation of windows; I immediately realized being free means being cheap.

• On switching to Arch Linux

  So you’re thinking about switching to Arch. Here are some things you should probably know first.

  (I’m assuming you already know all the great things about Arch — otherwise, you wouldn’t be thinking about switching — so I’ll skip that part).

• Dreamlinux 5 review – Splendid

  You all know that I don’t like the Xfce desktop. For some reason, nearly every single implementation thereof lacks something so important, so basic. Recently, it’s been hailed as the replacement for Gnome 2, the new hope for Linux users disillusioned by the cartoon fever of new touch-like interfaces so wrongly mated to the traditional desktop. But I’m skeptical.

• Tiny Core Linux 4.2 is a complete operating system in 64MB or less

  Once upon a time operating systems shipped on a stack of 1.4MP floppy disks. These days most come on DVDs because the installer files can’t fit on 640MB CDs. And then there’s Tiny Core Linux.

• New Releases

  • Endian 2.5.1

  • Frugalware Linux 1.6 RC2 has been released

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • The Mandriva waiting continues

    According to this laconic post by Jean-Manuel Croset-0, there was not a solution for the Mandriva dilemma. He claims that the financial situation is “better than expected”, which allows the company to try to find a new solution and the new deadline is “mid February”.

  • Mandriva Bankruptcy Crisis Averted, For Now

    Mandriva users have been anxiously awaiting word from corporate whether the first user-friendly distribution would be forced to cease operations. The decision, which has been postponed twice in the last week, has finally come down. Too bad it’s really a “good news, bad news” situation.

  • Mandriva 2011: A Different Linux Experience

    The Linux landscape has become pretty interesting as of late, with all the new desktop environments and changing popularity between distributions. It seems that now is the best time for all the distributions to make their mark and differentiate from each other wherever possible, especially when it comes to major players.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Quietly Joins the OpenStack Effort

    Word is that Red Hat refused to sign on to OpenStack when it was announced, because it didn’t like the governance model. Red Hat also has its own cloud management software projects. But the company that once dismissed OpenStack seems to be coming around. Look closely at the OpenStack community and you’ll find quite a few Red Hat engineers, including some that have become core contributors to OpenStack projects.

  • Red Hat developer explains open source color calibration hardware

    Color management has historically been a weak area for the Linux desktop, but the situation is rapidly improving. Support for desktop-wide color management is being facilitated by projects like KDE’s Oyranos and the GNOME Color Manager.

    Red Hat developer Richard Hughes, who started implementing the GNOME Color Manager in 2009, launched a small company last year to sell an open source colorimeter–a hardawre device that is used to perform color calibration. The Linux-compatible device, which is called the ColorHug, will retail for £60 (early adopters can currently order it at a sale price of £48). He has already received a few hundred orders and is building more units to meet the unexpected demand.

  • Fedora

    • Another Week, Another Round Of Fedora 17 Features

      The last few Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) have seen a large number of features being approved for this next Fedora Linux release due out in May. This Monday’s meeting wasn’t any different with many more features being officially approved for this next Red-Hat-sponsored distribution. Below is a listing of the items that were just approved this week.

• Debian Family

  • Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.4 released

  • Download Debian 6.0.4 Squeeze

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 vs. Mac OS X 10.7.2 Performance

        As you can see, the performance results between Mac OS X 10.7.2 and Ubuntu 11.10 are definitely mixed, at least when using the latest-generation Intel Sandy Bridge hardware. One trend though is that using LLVM/Clang 3.0 within Apple’s Xcode4 package these days is a much better option than using the GCC 4.2.1 release they have shipped for a while. Depending upon the particular workload you’re interested in, you can run the given tests relevant to you under both operating systems using the Phoronix Test Suite with OpenBenchmarking.org to determine what platform is able to meet your performance needs, aside from any other software platform features to consider.

      • Beginning Linux : Part 4 – Exploring the Unity interface

        Ubuntu’s Unity interface is a step away from traditional graphical user interfaces. The intention is to make it the basis of a standard interface for everything from PCs to tablets to phones, and it’s implementation has been somewhat controversial. It’s predicated on two main ideas; that most users only ever use a handful of applications, and that people prefer to search for things by typing — as they do on the web — rather than going through going through arcane menus and clicking on drop-downs. I take issue with the second of those, but before abandoning the interface entirely — this is Linux, after all! — it’s worth exploring Unity to see what it has to offer.

      • Canonical Promotes Standard Ubuntu Branding with New Website

        When it comes to branding, the open source world is rarely at the front of the pack. Free software hackers tend to be much better at writing code than they are at designing logos, inventing names and developing elegant color schemes. But Canonical has long stood out as an exception, and its latest stride — a new website devoted to helping the community adhere to Ubuntu branding conventions — is no exception. Here’s a look.

      • Ubuntu’s New ‘HUD’ Factor: A Step Forward or Back?

        Ubuntu seems to have shifted lately “from trying to make a rock-solid desktop distribution to playing around with cool ideas for next-generation interfaces,” observed Slashdot blogger Chris Travers. “A lot of these ideas are very untested in terms of overall usability, and they represent a sort of ‘back to the future’ approach, thinking of the old X applications before menus became prevalent … .”

      • Ubuntu Should Be Forked!

        I have been a long time Ubuntu user, been using it since 2006. I loved it and have been installing it on user’s PC’s until version 11.04 came out with Unity. Before you get a wrong impression let me make it clear that I love to try new things as long as they don’t come in between me and my work. [Also read: You Don't Have To Quit Ubuntu]

        I started using Unity since its alpha days and am currently running Ubuntu 12.04 with HUD and KDE 4.8. The reason is simple — I am curious and love trying new things. I am also running openSUSE with Gnome 3 to stay updated with the latest developments.

      • You Don’t Have To Quit Ubuntu!

      • Why It’s A Good Thing That Unity Is Based On DBus

        With the announcement of Unity HUD, Mark Shuttleworth tried hard not to use a technical language. While I certainly applaud the effort, it seems that it may have been just a little bit too non-technical, seeing the number of people who misunderstood his points.

        He was really announcing two different things; the HUD itself, and the underlying technology that enables it; libdbusmenu. Because so far, it’s only been used to hide menus when they’re not in use and that’s not particularly innovative.

      • More Ideas About Ubuntu HUD Design, Mock-up

      • Sick of Ubuntu’s bad breath? Suck on a Linux Mint instead

        If the jump from the GNOME 2 desktop to the new GNOME Shell or Unity desktop in Ubuntu has left you feeling dissatisfied, one increasingly popular distribution just might offer something that turns out to be the best of both worlds – Linux Mint.

        Originally created as a spinoff of Ubuntu, Mint has long since come into its own and offers a number of advantages over other distros, including a desktop that dares to stay firmly in the Middle Earth of the ongoing desktop holy wars.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 2 Getting Ready For Testing

        Good news for Ubuntu fans. The second alpha of 12.04 is expected to be available tommorow for testing. If you are planning to upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04 it’s time for you to help the team in testing and ensuring there will be fewer or no bugs in the final release.

      • Featured Ubuntu Software Centre apps for January 2012

      • Full Circle Magazine #57 – out now!

      • How to install Ubuntu the way you’ve never done it before.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’: The Basics of What to Expect

        The first thing I wish to point out about Ubuntu 12.04, is the fact that the new release will no longer be targeting the much loved final ~700MB CD sized ISO. At first, this came as a shock to the Ubuntu community. But any long term users and community members of Ubuntu will know that this is a debate which has been raging among the developers and users for some time. It was always inevitable that Ubuntu would grow beyond a mere 700MB ISO. It was a classic example of not “if”, but “when” it would happen. Fortunately, it has only grown an extra 50MB, which will push the final ISO up to ~750MB. So when Ubuntu 12.04 goes gold, it will require either DVD media or USB stick for installation.

      • Beginning Linux : Part 4 – Exploring the Unity interface

      • Where Mozilla Ubiquity Failed, Ubuntu HUD will Succeed

        The HUD is based on a concept that I really believe in and supported (though my own usage and newb attempt at script) when Mozilla tried the same idea a few years ago with Ubiquity. Mozilla however has this obnoxious habit of killing projects that I like (or in there parlance – putting them on the backburner – ubiquity, prism, skywriter just to name a few). Ubiquity was supposed to become something called Taskfox in Firefox 3.6 but that never happened.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 2 Getting Ready For Testing

          I am sure you have heard of Ubuntu Studio, an Ubuntu derivated targetted at multi-media, especially film and audio editing. Ubuntu Studio uses XFCE instead of Unity as its DE. The team is also known for one of the best wallpapers. Here is the latest Ubuntu Studio wallpaper.

        • Ozone 3

          Almost there. The default theme for Lubuntu, Ozone, is near to its final version. Lubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin is getting more and more polished. But if you can’t wait, or you have another version (or a distro with the LXDE environment) feel free to test it. Download here.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Early-Stage DirectFB For Android Devices

      When checking whether or not DirectFB 1.6 is released yet with its many new features, which was slated to happen in January, I discovered some interesting activity within the main Git repository for this lightweight graphics acceleration (and input, among other features) library. Landing in the DirectFB code-base in the past two weeks since last writing about the project has been early-stage Android support.

    • Google Asks Android Developers To Adopt Menus

      Its quite a coincidence, Android team says good bye to physical menu buttons in order to focus on ActionBar (something similar to MenuBar) the same week Ubuntu announces its desires to do away with MenuBar.

    • Samsung spins another S phone, and Motorola announces unlocked Razr

      Samsung announced a 1GHz “Galaxy S Advance” phone running Android 2.3 on a dual-core 1GHz processor and featuring a four-inch Super-AMOLED screen — slated for Russia in February. Meanwhile, Motorola announced a Europe-targeted, unlockable “Razr Developer Edition” and is preparing a similar Android device for the U.S. “in the coming months.”

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • NOOK Tablet hacks: Flash a custom ROM or boot Ubuntu to restore OS 1.4.0

    NOOK Tablet hackers have added a few new tools to their arsenal this weekend. Developer Cobroto has put together one of the first custom ROMs for the tablet, while developer AdamOutler has put together a rather impressive tool based on Ubuntu Linux which you can use to reformat the NOOK Tablet and roll back from OS 1.4.1 or later to NOOK Tablet OS 1.4.0.

  • Kindle Fire Neck and Neck with Galaxy Tab

  • First Test Photos: HTC Runnymede, Samsung GT-I9210/20, & More

  • Asus to launch PadFone at Mobile World Congress?

    If you remember, Asus introduced the PadFone, a tablet/smartphone hybrid, last year. Although we haven’t heard much about the PadFone in quite some time, MoDaCo has some juicy news that caught our attention. They’re reporting that Asus has confirmed that they will launch the extraordinary device at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on February 27th.

  • New Open Tablet Will Come with Linux and KDE Preinstalled

  • New KDE tablet to liberate Linux enthusiasts from walled garden

  • The Dead Simplest Way to Root Your Nook Tablet

  • Kindle Fire stokes interest in Amazon earnings

  • Tablet Shipments To Reach 383.3 Million By 2017, 46% In Emerging Markets

NetLogic Microsystems Announces the Industry’s First Open–Source Xen(R) Hypervisor for Multi-Core MIPS64(R) Processors

Byteman 2.0.0: Bytecode Manipulation, Testing, Fault Injection, Logging

JBoss has released Byteman 2.0.0, an open source Java bytecode manipulation tool licensed under GNU LGPL 2.1. Byteman is a Java agent which helps testing, tracing, and monitoring code. It allows developers to change the operation of Java applications, either as it is loaded or during runtime. It works without the need to rewrite or recompile the application, and can even modify Java Platform classes like String, Thread, etc.

Pentaho changes ETL license for big data push

Pentaho is moving its open-source business intelligence capabilities to the Apache license to make them more compatible with big data technologies. Pentaho’s Kettle extract, transform, load (ETL) technology was previously available under the LGPL or lesser Gnu General Public License.

WANdisco Announces Professional Support Option for Jenkins, Backed by CloudBees Expertise

Pentaho open sources ‘big data’ integration tools under Apache 2.0

IDG News Service – Business intelligence vendor Pentaho is releasing as open source a number of tools related to “big data” in the 4.3 release of its Kettle data-integration platform and has moved the project overall to the Apache 2.0 license, the company announced Monday.

FOSS is __FUN__: Get the Basics Right

There are a plethora of free/open source databases around, from the good old Berkeley DB, SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and the newer NoSQL DBs like MongoDB, to mention a few. Most of these have easy-to-use GUI interfaces too. As a result, the threshold to becoming a “database administrator” has become very low, and the quality of the average database is abysmal. People who do not know the A or B of database design are happily doing mission-critical stuff. Referential integrity is unheard of, and in the interests of temporary speed gains, the concept of normal forms is discarded.

As for security, don’t make me laugh. SQL injection was discovered in the last century, and the prevention is simple and well known — but guess which is still one of the most popular ways of cracking websites?

Sourcefire FireAMP Brings Big Data Analytics to Enterprise Security

Open Source Development Uses AJAX and Flash for Rich Internet Development Solutions

NetLogic to launch Xen virtualisation hypervisor

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 12 Tab Features May Have Been Prematurely Hyped

  • Mozilla Readies Firefox 10 With Better Extension Updating

    The next Mozilla browser update, Firefox 10, is on track for release tomorrow, as confirmed by a Mozilla meeting report from last week.

    The update pertains to the desktop formats—Windows, Mac, and Linux—and the mobile edition, for Android. For those who never upgraded to Firefox 4, version 3.6 will also be updated to version 3.6.9, which only adds security and stability fixes (though 3.6.9 is expected to be retired this April).

SaaS

• Open Source File, Sync and Share Project Adds Cloud Text Editing and More

• ownCloud 3 Released, New Improvements & Functionality

  “In many ways Version 3 is a leap forward for the ownCloud project — not just in the technology, but also as a measure of the contributions from our expanding community,” said Frank Karlitschek, founder of ownCloud. “Aside from the new functionality, the calendar and contacts have been given major improvements both in capabilities and interfaces.”

• ownCloud 3 – Applications, Features, Improvements

• ownCloud 3 released

• ownCloud 3 Gets Built-In Text Editor, PDF Viewer, Other Improvements

  - Built-in cloud text editor that supports 35 programming languages for syntax highlighting, keyboard shortcuts support, automatic indent and outdent, unstructured / user code folding and live syntax checker (for JavaScript, Coffee and CSS). Editing more advanced file types like .doc and .odt is planned for a future release:

Databases

• New Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialization for MySQL Enables Partners to Showcase Expertise

Education

• GNU Project renews focus on free software in education

  The GNU Project today announced the relaunch of its worldwide volunteer-led effort to bring free software to educational institutions of all levels.

• GNU Project renews focus on free software in education

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Talend Confirms Enterprise Open Source Leadership in 2011

  • Pentaho open sources ‘big data’ integration tools under Apache 2.0

  • Pentaho Open Sources Big Data Capabilities with Kettle

BSD

• Reviews: PC-BSD 9.0 “Isotope”

Project Releases

• OpenShot 1.4.1 Has Been Released | What’s New | Download

• OpenShot Video Editor 1.4.1 Released

• OpenShot 1.4.1 Brings Fish Eye Effect

  Jonathan Thomas, the developer behind the famous Linux video editor, announced earlier today the immediate availability for download of the OpenShot 1.4.1 application.

• GNU Health 1.4.3 released

• VLC 2.0 “Twoflower” getting ready to bloom

  Version 2.0 of the open source VLC media player is one step closer to a final release as release candidate source code and binaries for Mac OS X and Windows are made available. The source code was released last week when the developers “tagged” the first release candidate for testing. VLC 2.0, code-named “twoflower” is what was VLC 1.2 until early January when it was decided to bump the version number to reflect the changes.

Public Services/Government

• Open source software powers EU petition initiative

  Open source software is at the heart of a European Commission initiative to allow European’s a voice through Europe-wide petitions. At a conference in Brussels on 26 January, the European Commission officially launched its European Citizens’ Initiative, due to come into effect on 1 April 2012. Under the terms of that initiative, if a petition gathers more than a million signatures across a minimum of seven member states, the European Commission will have to consider enacting relevant legislation. The petitioning system will use open source software for collecting and storing signatures. The OnLine Collection Software (OCS) has been developed by the Commission’s Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations.

• EU draft guide standards and procurement aims to reduce vendor lock-in

  “The appropriate use of standards will help alleviate lock-in”, says a draft guideline prepared for the European Commission, on the link between ICT standardisation and public procurement. The draft text was published on 21 December 2011.

• New Release of KonaKart with jQuery Library

Openness/Sharing

• Solving the common standards problem in the open data space

  Last year during my Open Government Data Camp keynote speech on The State of Open Data 2011 I mentioned how I thought the central challenge for open data was shifting from getting data open (still a big issue, but a battle that is starting to be won) to getting all that open data in some common standards and schemas so that use (be it apps, analysis and other uses) can be scaled across jurisdictions.

• Open bio lab scopes out DNA

  At the Boston Open Source Science Lab, or BOSSLab — an example of the burgeoning movement of biology projects shifting out of laboratories — people are investigating their own DNA, or growing art materials in petri dishes.

• Open Access/Content

  • Utah schools start adopting open source textbooks; officials say they’re cheap, easy to update

    Utah classrooms may soon be making the switch to open-source online textbooks that can be cheaper and easier to update.

  • Utah schools start adopting open source textbooks

Programming

• Google Code-In 2011 Accomplishments

  Google’s 2011 Code-In, which is a winter program similar to their Summer of Code, ended earlier this month with many contributions to some leading open-source projects.

  While not as popular as Google Summer of Code, Google Code-In is an eight-week program that takes place each winter where Google organizes pre-university students to help out on various open-source projects. This year there were over 500 students working on 18 open-source projects for a period of up to eight weeks.

Standards/Consortia

• Coming soon: An ‘IBM Edition’ of Apache OpenOffice

  IBM’s Lotus Symphony office suite has offered users a free Microsoft Office alternative since 2007, but last week saw the release of what’s very likely the last version of the software.

• IBM to realign Symphony with Apache OpenOffice

  This one didn’t go quite the way I thought it might: it turns out that, as I speculated back in October, IBM is indeed dropping production of its Lotus Symphony office suite, ending a five-year run on the Microsoft Office alternative.

  According to a brief blog post last week from IBM’s Ed Brill, the latest release of Symphony, 3.0.1, is also likely to be the last, ending IBM’s fork of the OpenOffice code.

  “Our energy from here is going into the Apache OpenOffice project, and we expect to distribute an ‘IBM edition’ of Apache OpenOffice in the future,” Brill wrote.

• IBM to close down Symphony, its OpenOffice fork

  Going forward, IBM will be putting its efforts behind the Apache Foundation’s OpenOffice instead of its own OpenOffice fork.

Finance

• A modern Pecora Commission could right Wall Street wrongs

  What shall we make of this surprise pronouncement in President Obama’s State of the Union address? A belated investigation has been launched into the role of fraud in the financial crisis.

• Is Obama’s ‘Economic Populism’ for Real?

  There is a lot to digest in a recent series of events on the Prosecuting Wall Street front – the two biggest being Barack Obama’s decision to make New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman the co-chair of a committee to investigate mortgage and securitization fraud, and the numerous rumors and leaks about an impending close to the foreclosure settlement saga.

Censorship

• US Government is a Website Vandal

  I can see a lot of lawsuits in the future and liability for taxpayers who may have to pay the bills. I can see people all over the world refusing to store any data on any server in US jurisdiction. This is yet another sign that the USA is going down the technological drain. The world does not need the bureaucracy of the US messing up IT.

• Twitter users protest new Twitter policy with #TwitterCensored; #TwitterBlackout

• What Does Twitter’s Country-by-Country Takedown System Mean for Freedom of Expression?

  Right now, we can expect Twitter to comply with court orders from countries where they have offices and employees, a list that includes the United Kingdom, Ireland, Japan, and soon Germany.

• Using Wikileaks To Figure Out What The Government ‘Redacts’

  We’ve talked in the past about the ridiculousness of the US government pretending that the State Department cables that were leaked via Wikileaks are still confidential. The reasoning, obviously, is that they’re afraid that declaring anything that’s become public is no longer confidential is that it creates incentives to leak more documents. But the actual situation is simply absurd. Documents that everyone can see easily and publicly… live in this world, a world where anyone in government has to pretend that they’re still secret and confidential. There have even been cases where officials have gotten into trouble for using information from a “public” document, because they’re supposed to create this fiction that it’s not.

  Still, there is one way in which this has actually turned out to be enlightening. A few months ago, the ACLU filed some Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the State Department on some issues, getting some of the very same documents that were leaked via Wikileaks. Except… the kind that came with the FOIA had redactions. The Wikileaks documents, for the most part, do not. That created an interesting opportunity for Ben Wizner at the ACLU. He could now compare and contrast the two version of the document, to see just what the government is redacting, and figure out if they’re redacting it for legitimate reasons… or just to do things like avoid embarrassment.

• Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Censorship

  At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The ‘Free Internet Act’ – A Bold Plan To Save The Internet

DRM

• The Daily Digital Lock Dissenter: The Series To Date

  Throughout the fall, I ran a daily digital lock dissenter series, pointing to a wide range of organizations representing creators, consumers, businesses, educators, historians, archivists, and librarians who have issued policy statements that are at odds with the government’s approach to digital locks in Bill C-11. While the series took a break over the Parliamentary holiday, it resumes this week with more groups and individuals that have spoken out against restrictive digital lock legislation that fails to strike a fair balance.

• Apple’s iBook EULA exemplifies Everything that’s wrong with Proprietary Software

  Lovers and users of free and open source software are a hardy bunch. They’ve seen it all: Microsoft EULAs, DRM, UEFI, proprietary software and constant attempts to prevent end users jailbreaking and rooting the devices they paid for with hard-earned cash. If you think you’ve seen and heard it all, well, you haven’t. Apple may have trumped them all with a possibly unique EULA.

Copyrights

• The Sky Is Rising: The Entertainment Industry Is Large & Growing… Not Shrinking

  Today, in Cannes, at the Midem conference, I did a presentation that was something of a follow up to the presentation I did here three years ago, about how Trent Reznor’s experiments represented the future of music business models. This time, the presentation coincided with the release of a new research paper that we’ve spent the past few months working on, sponsored by CCIA and Engine Advocacy, in which we did a thorough look at the true state of the entertainment industry. For years, we’ve been hearing doom and gloom reports about how the industry is dying, how customers just want stuff for free, about analog dollars turning into digital dimes… and (all too frequently) about how new laws are needed to save these industries.

• The real problem with media pirate culture: Punishing artists for making art

  There is a problem with the world of illegal piracy that we have online today, but it’s not what the RIAA and MPAA want you to think it is. It’s that we’ve become accustomed to participating in illegal copying, and yet it is still illegal. This means that we have the illusion of a body of work that can be built upon, remixed, and combined with new work, but if real artists practice this commercially, we are exposed to legal attack. Being a remixer is revered by culture, but being a commercially successful remixer is punishable by massive lawsuits, and if SOPA ever passes, maybe even prison time.

• NBC News Doesn’t Understand Fair Use; Demands Mitt Romney Remove Ads That Use TV News Clips

  Here we go again. Four years ago, during the presidential campaign, we had CBS News threaten the McCain campaign for using some news footage clips in a campaign ad. And here we are, four years later, with NBC Universal demanding that the Romney campaign remove an ad it’s using against Newt Gingrich, making use of old TV news footage. This strikes us as bizarre (and ridiculous) as it did four years ago. In many cases, these ads are likely to be considered fair use. But, secondly, is it really any harm to NBC News if Romney uses classic footage? I mean, the news reports are what NBC News had reported in the past. Essentially acting like it hadn’t — by trying to block the use of the footage — just seems silly.

• UNCENSORED – A personal experience with DMCA – UMG vs Veoh

• MegaUpload User Data Soon to be Destroyed

  MegaUpload has received a letter from the US Attorney informing the company that data uploaded by its users may be destroyed before the end of the week. The looming wipe-out is the result of MegaUpload’s lack of funds to pay for the servers. Behind the scenes, MegaUpload is hoping to convince the US Government that it’s in the best interest of everyone involved to allow users to access their data, at least temporarily.

• The SOPA/PIPA Protests Were Not Pro-Piracy… They Were Anti-Crony Capitalism

  And it is that final point that many in Hollywood still fail to understand. They positioned this whole battle as if it was about the right to enforce laws on a lawless internet vs. those who wanted to pirate. But pretty much everyone can see through that facade. And, as we’ve said before (and will say again), this was never about just this bill. You can see that in the continued focus of people on other efforts by these industries to push through bad policies — such as ACTA and TPP. No, this was a rejection of crony capitalism — an attempt by one industry to push through laws that solely benefit some of its biggest players, at the expense of everyone else.

• Is The ‘Legislative Solution’ To Online Infringement To Create A Content Use Registry?

  However, are there more creative legislative solutions that come from thinking out of the box? Ian Rogers, the CEO of TopSpin, who has been a vocal opponent of SOPA/PIPA, (despite his close relatioinship with many in the recording industry) has an interesting proposal that he’s put forth that’s worth thinking about. It starts from a different perspective. Rather than using the opportunity to directly tackle this undefined “problem,” he looks at solving a different problem: the fact that it’s difficult (to impossible) and expensive to license music for an online service. So his suggestion is really based on dealing with that issue by creating a giant registry whereby copyright holders could indicate what they’re willing to license and at what price. He notes that this is an idea that doesn’t directly need a legislative solution — and, in fact, notes that he’s tried to build something like that in the past. However, multiple attempts to build this haven’t gone very far. He suggests a more official version might be able to really go somewhere.

• ACTA

  • Debunking the EU Commission’s Lies About ACTA

    The EU Commission is engaging in an all-out offensive to portray ACTA as normal trade agreement harmless to fundamental rights or access to knowledge. In several published documents, the Commission’s attempts to impose ACTA onto the EU Parliament while silencing legitimate criticism. But these misrepresentations don’t resist scrutiny.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 184

Linux System Administrator Career Kickstart!

Desktop

• Met Office cuts off Linux users with new weather widgets

  Linux users face increased inconvenience getting a weather forecast from March onwards when the Met Office will withdraw its web-based weather gadgets and replace them with desktop widgets – for Windows and Mac only.

  Previously the Met Office’s Firefox and iGoogle weather gadgets allowed anyone with internet access to check the weather from their homepage: now you need to be running either a Mac or Windows OS to get the latest weather news piped to you by the second.

Server

• IBM Throws The Books At Big Power7 Shops

  If you are shopping for a big bad box to run IBM i, AIX, or Linux–or a combination of the three–then Big Blue has a deal for you on its enterprise-class Power 770, 780, and 795 servers. The deal that IBM offered to customers of System p5 590, System p5 595 machines in October 2007 and then in March 2010 on the Power 595 in the wake of the initial Power7-based servers, which came out a month earlier.

• Tilera Targets Intel, ARM With 36-core Server Chip

  The Tilera chip has attributes of a general-purpose CPU as it can run the Linux OS and applications commonly used to serve web data. The fast throughput chip has fewer parallelized cores but is faster than Tilera’s 64-core predecessor chip, which shipped a few years ago. A 2U server with eight 36-core chips will draw roughly 400 watts of power, the same as eight Tilera 64-core chips in the box.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org Server 1.12 Steps Closer To Release

    Keith Packard released X.Org Server 1.12 RC2 in time for weekend testing. At the same time, Apple’s Jeremy Huddleston released the X.Org Server 1.11.4 stable version.

    Keith Packard put out X.Org Server 1.12 RC2 (a.k.a. xorg-server 1.11.99.902) as the last release before the non-critical bug window closes in one week. While eating chocolate and drinking beer next weekend, Keith Packard intends to release X.Org Server 1.12 RC3 during FOSDEM 2012 in Belgium.

  • Wayland Can Now Do Surface Transformations

    Patches have landed so that the Wayland Display Server can now handle surface transformations. Separately, there’s also an easy-to-understand guide for using the Qt 5.0 tool-kit with Wayland.

  • Reclocking Hits For Open-Source NVIDIA Driver

    Committed to the kernel repository for the open-source Nouveau driver for providing reverse-engineered NVIDIA hardware is now the initial GPU core/memory re-clocking support.

    A few days back I reported on re-clocking support coming to Nouveau for the newer NVIDIA hardware. Hitting nouveau/linux-2.6 yesterday were a slew of patches that work on the re-clocking code along with support for adjusting the graphics memory timings, among other support work.

  • R600 Gallium3D Can Now Do OpenGL 3.0, GLSL 1.30

    Marek Olšák has made another exciting commit to the Mesa mainline Git repository this weekend… What he’s accomplished now is making it possible to successfully advertise OpenGL 3.0 / GLSL 1.30 support within the R600 Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 2000 series and later.

  • Nouveau Reclocking: Buggy, But Can Boost Performance

Applications

• A Fight between email clients. Here’s how to choose the one that best suits your needs and to your Linux box

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to make GNOME Shell look like Ice Cream Sandwich

  • Redirect all (TCP) traffic through transparent socks5 proxy in Linux

  • How to Scan for Viruses in Windows Using a Linux Live CD/USB

• Wine

  • Wine 1.4 Release Candidate 1 Released | What’s New | Download

• Games

  • Unigine & Mesa Move Closer To Playing Along

    While Mesa/Gallium3D is still a ways off from fully supporting the Unigine Engine’s advanced OpenGL 3/4 renderer with decent frame-rates, there is work both by Mesa and the Unigine Corp developers to better this open-source graphics support.

    With Unigine OilRush now officially shipping, there’s now a popular multi-platform game using the Unigine Engine so handling the engine by Mesa/Gallium3D is now a bit more important than to just ensure the Linux drivers can run a couple tech demos (Unigine Sanctuary, Tropics, and Heaven).

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Meet Spark, First Linux Tablet Running KDE Plasma Active

  • $265 Spark tablet runs Plasma Active Linux software

    A new tablet called the Spark is on the way. At first glance it looks like most of the cheap Chinese tablets we’ve seen in the past few years, but the Spark won’t run Google Android. Instead it will run an open source Linux-based operating system with the KDE Plasma Active interface running on top.

  • KDE Telepathy releases first beta version

    In the 3 months since KDE Telepathy 0.2, members of the team have closed over 100 bugs. With the added stability and polish, the project has been moved to KDE Extragear starting new life as an accepted KDE application.

  • KDE’s Plasma Active Shipping On New ARM Tablet

  • Spark Linux tablet revealed: modest specs and Plasma Active for €200 ($264)

  • First KDE Tablet Announced

  • First open tablet released by KDE developer

    The first open tablet, running free and open source software, has been announced by senior KDE developer Aaron Seigo.

Distributions

• Racy Puppy- Wary On Steroids!

  For those of you who don’t know, Puppy Linux is an independently-developed Linux distribution started by Barry Kauler in 2003, with the purpose of creating a modern and fully-functional Linux that could run smoothly on older hardware. Since then, several (it’s in the hundreds now!) derivatives of Puppy have been made, with 3 officially recognized main projects: Puppy (main), Wary, and Quirky. Most puppies being built using the “Woof” development system (puppy can also be built using the original T2 build system, but this is not advised).

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • GLE 4.2.4b Released, Available For Fedora 16

      The Fedora team has announced the availability of GLE (Graphics Layout Engine) 4.2.4b. For those who don’t know GLE is a graphics scripting language designed for creating publication quality figures (e.g., a chart, plot, graph, or diagram).

• Debian Family

  • Debian 6.0.4 Released

    Debian, the mother of Ubuntu and Linux Mint, has announced the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 (codename “squeeze” ).

    This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments to serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

  • Debian 7.0 ‘Wheezy’ To Include Linux 3.2

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu’s HUD: Why It’s A Terrible Idea

        In fighter aircraft the idea of HUD was to allow a pilot to see important stuff while looking through the windscreen for important stuff allowing intricate operations without taking the eye off either. That‘s a good thing. Ubuntu’s HUD is not.

        There are times when searching is useful, say, when you have a zillion things on the table and you need one of them quickly but that’s not what menus are about. A properly designed menu allows a few choices to bring you to what you need. The emphasis is on few.

      • Making the Evolutionary Leap from Meerkat to Narwhal

        I’m very happy with Ubuntu as a desktop operating system. I’ve used it for years with no significant issues. In fact, Ubuntu excels where other disributions fail. Even Linux arch rival Windows, is often left in the last century compared to the innovations perpetrated by the Canonical group. But what about Natty Narwhal? Is the hype worth the effort? I’d have to say, “Yes.” Although, I’m not 100 percent sold on Unity, I’m impressed with its boot speed, shutdown speed, and snappy performance. Oh, and there’s that little matter of The Launcher.

      • Ubuntu HUD: Solving A Problem That Doesn’t Exist

        I found Canonical to be the bravest company that has the courage to introduce a new UI for an LTS version just two months before its release. I don’t know why it has taken Microsoft so many years to release Windows 8! I was shocked when Mark Shuttleworth announced that they are working on HUD, which will ultimately replace menus in Unity applications.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Creating Your Own Distributable Ubuntu DVD (Relinux)

Devices/Embedded

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Strategy Analytics: Consumers are increasingly buying tablets in preference to netbooks and even entry-level notebooks or desktops

    26.8 million is 150% more than the same quarter last year so stay tuned for more growth and more slippage by M$ in the PC market. “Others” includes BlackBerry, WebOS and MeeGO, I suppose. M$ is thick with that bunch… Android/Linux is gradually overtaking iOS. I predict they will be even within a few months.

  • Chromebooks are the electric car of laptops

    The only people I know who own Chromebooks received them for free, from Google. In my case, I have two, both free. But despite the very small-bore hole Chromebooks have made in the laptop market, in the midst of a major project shakedown at Google headquarters, Chromebooks are, apparently, going to be around for a while, and the Chrome OS project has the CEO’s support.

Open source developer Q&A: Rockbox’s Björn Stenberg

Open source community gets WebOS

Need software, open source it

FLOSS for Science Books December 2011

Events

• SCaLE 10x: Onward and Upward

  As I walked into the Hilton on Saturday morning I knew something was up. I saw lots pf people wearing lanyards with a silhouette of a Penguin seemed SCaLE 10x was upon me already in full swing. I walked right onto the exhibitor floor and ‘did a loop’ through the Expo as it were..

Project Releases

• GCC 4.7 Moves Along Into Stage 4

  GCC 4.7 is still on track with its development plans for an official release in March or April and this popular open-source compiler will deliver on many new features.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • World’s Largest One Stop Shopping for Free Online Courses!

    Looking for free, open source learning materials about any subject, from top experts in the world? I used to think that MIT’s OpenCourseWare and Yale’s OpenYale courses were a “one stop shopping” source for this, until I came across this stunning, worldwide, multi-lingual collection of course materials.

• Open Hardware

  • Arduino: the face of Free hardware

    ‘Free’ and ‘Open Source’ are today common parlance in the world of technology, software in particular. What was once perceived to be a concept alienated from business, and economically impractical, has now proven to be a business model that not only works but also delivers.

    But when it comes to hardware, the idea of ‘freedom’ or ‘open-ness’ is yet to arrive. Many believe that it is only a matter of time before the idea of Open Source Hardware makes an impact.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Panic Attack: Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal Finds 16 Scientists to Push Pollutocrat Agenda With Long-Debunked Climate Lies

  A lot of folks have asked me to debunk the recent anti-truthful Wall Street Journal article with the counterfactual headline, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” I’ll combine my debunking with the rapidly growing list of debunkings from scientists and others. And I’ll update this as new debunkings come in.

  That the WSJ would publish an amateurish collection of falsehoods and half truths is no surprise. The entire global Murdoch enterprise is designed to advance the pollutocrat do-nothing agenda (see Scientist: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change”).

• Global Oil Production Update: A Strange Future Has Arrived

  Since 2005, European oil consumption has fallen by 1.5 million barrels a day. And, in the same period, US oil consumption has fallen by 2 million barrels a day. If oil was priced at $60 a barrel, rather than $100 a barrel, then a fair portion of that lost demand might return. Instead, since 2005, global crude oil production has been bumping up against a ceiling around 74 million barrels a day. Thus, the tremendous growth in oil demand which emanates from the developing world, in Asia primarily, has been supplied by the reduction of demand in Europe and the United States. Why doesn’t the world simply increase the production of oil to 77, or 78 million barrels a day? After all, that is precisely the history of global oil production: a continual increase in supply to capture the advantage of rising prices.

Finance

• Michael Hudson: Banks Weren’t Meant to Be Like This

• Pension fund ABP to sue Goldman Sachs over junk mortgages

  Dutch civil service pension fund ABP is taking mechant bank Goldman Sachs to court for providing it with misleading information over the sale of junk mortgages, the Telegraaf reports on Saturday.

  Before the economic crisis began, ABP invested in bonds which were coupled to American mortgages. But ABP claims it was wrongly informed about the credit-worthiness of the investment and the mortages were riskier than Goldman Sachs had said.

• Close Ties to Goldman Enrich Romney’s Public and Private Lives

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Are we too dependent on the USA for “our” WWW

  By now you’ll have heard and experienced the anti-SOPA protest. Wikipedia, Wired, WordPress, Google, Twitpic and even this very tome were joined by probably thousamds of smaller sites as large sections of the web went black to demonstrate what the web might end up like should SOPA be passed. As a Brit I joined in – even though the bill is a US one – because the effects of this nefarious piece of “leglislation” would most certainly be felt on the fair green isles that make up my homeland. The good news is both SOPA and PIPA were shelved after the protest – which proves if nothing else the power of protest. Yes they may wel return in some other form so the fight may not be over but the protest itself (for me) raised another question: is the [English-speaking] web too US-centric?

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Senator Ron Wyden’s Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

    It’s been a pleasure to connect with Techdirt readers this week. Just as I appreciate Mike and Techdirt’s involvement in the PIPA/SOPA debate over the last year, your active involvement sent Washington a clear signal that the future of Internet policy can’t be decided without engaging the Internet. I hope you will remain engaged in the policy process, as there are many important debates ahead where your voice will be needed.

  • The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

    The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multi-nation trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property laws across the globe.

    The nine nations currently negotiating the TPP are the U.S., Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, and Brunei Darussalam. Expected to be finalized in November 2011, the TPP will contain a chapter on Intellectual Property (copyright, trademarks, patents and perhaps geographical indications) that will have a broad impact on citizens’ rights, the future of the Internet’s global infrastructure, and innovation across the world. A leaked version of the February 2011 draft U.S. TPP Intellectual Property Rights Chapter indicates that U.S. negotiators are pushing for the adoption of copyright measures far more restrictive than currently required by international treaties, including the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

  • ACTA

    • [ALEV-FULL] Hearing on ACTA (Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement)

    • Thousands Take to the Streets to Protest ACTA

    • Malta’s support for controversial ACTA treaty mobilising opponents

      Malta’s decision to sign the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement last Thursday is mobilising opponents to the treaty, who are concerned about its possible effect on the internet.

      Many objectors took to the Internet, including social networking site Facebook, to express their displeasure, as news that a representative for Malta had signed ACTA in a ceremony in Japan broke out.

    • We Have Every Right to Be Furious About ACTA

      If there’s one thing that encapsulates what’s wrong with the way government functions today, ACTA is it. You wouldn’t know it from the name, but the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is a plurilateral agreement designed to broaden and extend existing intellectual property (IP) enforcement laws to the Internet. While it was only negotiated between a few countries,1 it has global consequences. First because it will create new rules for the Internet, and second, because its standards will be applied to other countries through the U.S.’s annual Special 301 process. Negotiated in secret, ACTA bypassed checks and balances of existing international IP norm-setting bodies, without any meaningful input from national parliaments, policymakers, or their citizens. Worse still, the agreement creates a new global institution, an “ACTA Committee” to oversee its implementation and interpretation that will be made up of unelected members with no legal obligation to be transparent in their proceedings. Both in substance and in process, ACTA embodies an outdated top-down, arbitrary approach to government that is out of step with modern notions of participatory democracy.

    • The ACTA Fight Returns: What Is at Stake and What You Can Do

      The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. (excellent analysis from Benkler and Downes) and elsewhere (mounting Canadian concern that Bill C-11 could be amended to adopt SOPA-like rules), but it is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that has captured increasing attention this week. Several months after the majority of ACTA participants signed the agreement, most European Union countries formally signed the agreement yesterday (notable exclusions include Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia).

    • Blog blast births boffin boycott of publisher Elsevier

      The ongoing world protests against SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA have helped inspire a revolt among scientists over the role of academic publisher Elsevier and its business practices.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Linux: a lot of hullabaloo about a vulnerability

  A lot of noise has been made about a security vulnerability affecting the Linux core. The fault has been corrected and Linux editors are updating all of their systems after exploits appeared on the web.

Applications

• Beets Music Tagger: Command Line Tool To Fix Metadata And Organize Your Music Library

• Fedora relocates operating system under /usr/

  The Fedora developers are currently working on implementing the plan to move all files stored in the Linux distribution’s /bin/, /sbin/, /lib/ and /lib64/ directories to equivalent sub-directories in /usr/. Symbolic links will ensure compatibility with scripts and software that may otherwise be caught out by the change. The restructuring was first mooted last autumn, before being earmarked for inclusion in Fedora 17. The development team has since discarded the idea of moving all files stored in /sbin/ and /usr/sbin/ into /usr/bin/ and deleting the sbin directories.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Weekend Project: Take Control of Vim’s Color Scheme

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • The Reveal

    The first tablet computer that comes with Plasma Active pre-installed.

Distributions

• PacApt Brings Arch Linux’s Amazing Pacman Package Manager to Other Linux Distributions (Well, Sort Of)

• PacApt Is Arch Linux’s Package Manager For Other Distributions

  It’s no secret that we love Arch Linux and one of Arch’s best features is the simple, easy-to-use package manager, Pacman. Here’s how to get Pacman’s simple command structure in other Linux distributions.

• Debian Family

  • People Behind Debian: Josselin Mouette, founder of the Debian GNOME team

    People Behind Debian: Josselin Mouette, founder of the Debian GNOME team
    Josselin Mouette is one the leaders of the pkg-gnome team, he takes sound technical decisions and doesn’t fear writing code to work-around upstream issues. He deserves kudos for the work he has put into packaging GNOME over the years. He can also be very sarcastic (sometimes he even enjoys participating to flamewars on debian lists), and there are quite a few topics where we have long agreed to disagree. But this kind of diversity is also what makes Debian a so interesting place…

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical Brings Apps to Life on Ubuntu Linux Desktop

        Linux vendor could change the way users interact with enterprise applications with its Heads Up Display. The intelligent HUD interface will understand user needs and respond to them.

      • Introducing Ask Ubuntu Lens for Unity

        Following our previous articles, Ubuntu Flickr/Shotwell Photos Lens, Ubuntu Spotify Scope, Ubuntu DeviantArt Scope, Ubuntu SSH Lens, Ubuntu Binary Clock Lens, Ubuntu YouTube Lens and Scope, Ubuntu Calendar Lens, Ubuntu Web Sources Lens, Ubuntu Gwibber Lens, Ubuntu Books Lens, Ubuntu Cities Scope, Ubuntu Grooveshark Scope, Ubuntu Calculator Scope and Pirate Bay Torrents Lens for Unity, today we are introducing the Ubuntu Launchpad Lens for the Unity interface.

      • Ubuntu moves beyond the desktop with new TV interface, menu-killing navigation system

Devices/Embedded

• Pandora Handheld to Go Into Mass Production Next Month

  Open Source Linux based gaming handheld and mini-laptop Pandora has created lots of buzz when it was revealed 4 years back.

  Since then the project has gone under numerous rough stages, production issues, tech spec changes and financial problems. A limited batch of 4000 units was available for pre-orders but not everyone has got the device on time.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Verizon-bound ZTE V66 slate gets photographed, looks just like you imagined

Top five open source social networking platforms available in the market

In this era of technology and internet, social networking sites are getting more and more popularity. People are spending hours in front of them. For creating a social media website a platform is necessary, to make this easy came the social networking platforms. In the case of social media software, market the competition is very high. If you are looking to start a social media website then it is difficult to choose the platform. Before choosing social media software just get all available information about it and conclude weather, it will benefit you or not. Let us now take a look of the five most popular open source-networking platforms available in the market

Open source: The Best Choice For Big Data

Just 12 months ago, even the largest organisations lacked the infrastructure, tools and skills to turn large datasets into business insight. Today, though, the world has changed. A combination of low-cost, commodity hardware and great open-source software are lowering the Big Data bar for organisations of all types and sizes. Put simply, open-source solutions are allowing organisations to spin up hundreds of servers to support Big Data services in seconds, and pay only for the resources they use.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chrome and Chromium: small golden rules to get the perfect browser !

    I bet that when you turn on your PC, one of the first programs that you start is your Browser .
    Indeed, many say that the browser that we have installed in our computer show a part of us! There is, therefore, who prefer Opera: a browser elegant and very
    particular, for those who prefer the aesthetics at the practicality, there are those who, following the mass chose the Firefox browser, which has won a great battle against IE in a recent past.

Project Releases

• FFmpeg 0.10 Gets New Filters, Decoders, Encoders

Openness/Sharing

• S. Korea to open integrated information centre on N. Korea

  The Open Source Centre is designed to collect foreign information made public by media reports, press releases and announcements by international organizations, said the official at the Unification Ministry.

Standards/Consortia

• Web video framework company publishes State of HTML5 Video document

  As Flash’s ubiquity begins to erode, standards-based Web technologies are going to become the path forward for developers who want to offer a user experience that works across all screens. The HTML5 video element is already widely supported in modern Web browsers, but the capabilities and codecs that are available differ between implementations.

Security

• Security Theater… Or Why I Had To Go Dumpster Diving At The US Capitol Last Week

  However, at security to get into the Capitol, I was told I could not bring the canteen in, even though it was empty. I asked if there was any reason for this. I was told I just couldn’t bring it in. I asked if there was any place I could “leave” it, and I was told to go outside and there were dumpsters to the right. I even asked if someone could hold it for me, since it would just be an hour or so. No luck. Dumpsters, outside to the right. The canteen isn’t anything special, but I do like it. According to the price tag still on the bottom, it cost $11 when my wife bought it for me. I can buy another canteen, but really, there’s a bit of a principle thing to all of this. If the canteen itself is dangerous, then, putting it in a dumpster outside isn’t going to change that.

Civil Rights

• Hawaii may keep track of all Web sites visited

  Hawaii’s legislature is weighing an unprecedented proposal to curb the privacy of Aloha State residents: requiring Internet providers to keep track of every Web site their customers visit.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Knowledge Is A Universal Natural Resource — And Locking It Up Hurts Everyone

  One of the more important points in understanding some of the fights over the ridiculousness of today’s copyright and patent laws is to recognize how knowledge (information) is a natural resource. It is the input that makes other great things. Economist Paul Romer’s famous research really showed how knowledge and information as a resource is what creates economic growth. Once you recognize that fact, you begin to run into problems when you think about locking up that natural resource. Think of other natural resources. Do we think the world is better off if there’s a greater supply of each of those? An abundance? If we have an abundance of wheat, that’s a good thing. If we have an abundance of energy, that’s a good thing. There may be side effects of such abundances, but the overall abundance is something worth cherishing.

• Copyrights

  • [Satire] Internet Against SOPA, PIPA

  • UK Court Says You Can Copyright The Basic Idea Of A Photograph

    We’ve talked a lot in the past about the “idea/expression dichotomy.” This is an important concept in copyright law that says you can only copyright the specific expression, and not the idea. This is supposed to protect people from getting accused of copyright infringement for basically making something similar to what someone else made. Unfortunately, as we’ve been noting with dismay over the past few years, the idea that there’s some bright line between “idea” and “expression” has been slowly fading away, and courts are, increasingly, effectively wiping out the distinction. In the US, we’ve seen this with the ridiculous case between a photographer, David LaChapelle, and the singer Rihanna, because some of her videos were clear homages to his photographs. The expression was entirely different, but the judge didn’t think so, and Rihanna ended up having to pay up.

  • Reduce the term of copyrights to a maximum of 56 years

  • An Infographic Showing Just How Frequently Hollywood Has Cried Wolf About ‘Piracy’

  • The SOPA War: A Frantic Call, an Aborted Summit, and Dramatic New Details on How Hollywood Lost

  • Karaoke CD Manufacturer Strikes Back At Sony’s $1 Billion ‘Scheme’

    Karaoke might be fun, but it’s also proved legally dangerous over the years. One publisher of karaoke discs is taking a publisher co-owned by the Michael Jackson estate to court over alleged abuse.

  • Universal Music Claims Copyright Over Song That It Didn’t License, Just Because One Of Its Artists Rapped To It On A Leaked Track

  • ACTA

    • Acting on ACTA – What We Can Do

      Earlier today, Loz Kaye, leader of the Pirate Party, published a statement highlighting a major threat to the Internet, to civil liberties, and our political and legal systems; ACTA. Following this, the Party has received many requests asking what we, ordinary citizens, can do about this and the best way to stop it.

    • The ACTA Fight Returns: What Is at Stake and What You Can Do

      The reverberations from the SOPA fight continue to be felt in the U.S. (excellent analysis from Benkler and Downes) and elsewhere (mounting Canadian concern that Bill C-11 could be amended to adopt SOPA-like rules), but it is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that has captured increasing attention this week. Several months after the majority of ACTA participants signed the agreement, most European Union countries formally signed the agreement yesterday (notable exclusions include Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Cyprus and Slovakia).

    • As USTR Insists ACTA Doesn’t Need Congressional Approval, Wyden Asks State Dept. For A Second Opinion

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• ZaReason Alto 3880 Review: Fastest $1000 14″ Laptop

  At first glance, the Alto 3880 will not strike envy into the hearts of any. Like any standard PC laptop, it’s dressed in glossy, molded plastic pieces. The design decisions here are almost certainly OEM driven as the laptop takes a 3-tone neutral color scheme that presents itself in a bit of an awkward way. The lid emulates a brushed metal look with an attractive ZaReason screen-print right in the center. This is the first of a couple nice touches on ZaReason’s behalf. If this unit is closed on your coffee table, your guests will probably ask you, “What’s a ZaReason?”. In this respect, I think it’s quite effective. The brushed metal look for laptop lids is a little dated now, so this will not trend well in the vanity department.

Kernel Space

• The quiet colossus

  A day in the life of the Linux kernel starts just a few microseconds after midnight. The kernel, a thin layer of software that provides a consistent interface between the hardware of a computer and the systems library, is hard at work at stock exchanges in the US, where it has almost completely supplanted other alternatives. Because the kernel’s licence encourages copying and modifying, the financial industry has done just that, tweaking it to perform at the utmost speed without breaking. Linux handles billions of transactions every second, passing information between processes, and managing multitasking environments for the world’s financial markets. Linux is the most portable piece of software in the world. Despite being over six million lines of code, it has been ported to more hardware platforms than anything else. Its size belies its organisation, though. The functions that any kernel must provide – switching between processes, memory management, access to hardware resources and networking – are clearly separated out, with only the really low-level hardware-dependent functions differing by platform.

• Graphics Stack

  • Unity Desktop, Nux Get Upstream OpenGL ES 2.0

    The OpenGL ES 2.0 work is part of this Launchpad Blueprint. For a while now the Linaro and Ubuntu developers have been after upstream OpenGL ES 2.0 support for their Unity (non-2D) desktop, and it looks like the goal will be realized in time for the Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” LTS release in April and the Linaro releases shortly thereafter.

  • Announcing The Lima Open-Source GPU Driver

    There’s still one week until the work will be officially announced, but the open-source “Lima” open-source graphics driver project has surfaced.

    The Lima driver? This is going to be the open-source driver built for ARM’s Mali graphics processors. Lima is what the project’s being called for the story Phoronix exclusively broke last week, An Open-Source, Reverse-Engineered Mali GPU Driver.

  • Interlaced Support For Intel’s Linux Graphics Driver

Applications

• More Automation With AutoKey

• 8 Best Linux Alternatives to Windows Software

• The Best Twitter Client For Linux

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Fix for dummy audio output

  • Basic Backup Script in BASH

  • Using DeVeDe to create DVDs on Linux

  • Simple Linux Auditing

• Wine

  • Wine 1.4 Nears Release: Code Freeze, 1.4-rc1

    Phoronix has been reporting for a while a now that it looks like Wine 1.4 would be released by April of 2012. This looks like it will all pan out with Wine 1.4 now entering a code freeze and 1.4-rc1 was released this Friday rather than a Wine 1.3 development point release.

• Games

  • id Software’s Main Linux Game Developer Resigns

  • Onwards !

    I resigned from id earlier this week. Folks who know me well were not terribly surprised, but I suppose I need to put that out there officially. I joined a small startup in Dallas, gaming related, but not fps or esports. Great people, great tech, and we’re going to have a blast.

  • Review: Oil Rush (PC, Mac, Linux)

  • OilRush Final Released Officially

    Global war for oil has just started as naval strategy game OilRush has been released today. The critically acclaimed game was in beta testing period for quite a long time and today final stable version is shipping officially.

  • Urban Terror second review – Fun over realism

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE 4.8 released with QML bits and new password framework

    Kubuntu 11.10 users who want to get their hands on 4.8 can obtain it from the backports PPA.

  • How-To: Make KDE Like Unity

  • KDE Plasma And Applications 4.8 are Available To Update For Kubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Using PPA

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 8th January 2012

Distributions

• The Best Linux Distributions For Every User

  On this page, we feature 20 of the best Linux distributions, with a short but extremely detailed description, a link (so you know where to download it from) and our review of the distribution. The distributions are categorised according to their purpose. We hope that our Best Linux Distributions will help you decide which flavour of Linux you’d like to run on your computer.

• Red Hat Family

  • GlusterFS advisory board established

    A few months after its acquisition of Gluster, Red Hat has established the GlusterFS Advisory Board to oversee and promote the technical development of GlusterFS, the filesystem that is the basis of Red Hat’s Storage Software Appliance. The board includes Anand Babu, a co-founder of GlusterFS, and open source experts from Red Hat, Facebook, Citrix and Eucalyptus. The nine board members do not represent their employers, instead serving on the board as individuals.

  • Red Hat RHEVS Virtualization

  • Red Hat Taking Gluster from Open Core to Open Source

    Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) wants to return the Gluster filesystem to its open source roots. Red Hat acquired Gluster for $136 million in October 2011 and is now moving to help further accelerate its innovation.

  • Fedora

    • The Grand /usr-fication of Linux

      The Fedora Project is currently mounting a concerted effort to merge Linux filesystem directories into a more organized structure, an effort known as /usr merge.

    • Fedora 17 Moves Forward With Unified File-System

      Fedora 17 is moving forward with plans whereby the entire base operating system will live within /usr by condensing several common directories that have been long-standing to Linux distributions.

      Directories such as /bin, /sbin, /lib, and /lib64 are now being moved to their respective locations within the /usr directory as trying to unify the Fedora file-system. However, as to not break compatibility, symlinks will be in place for redirecting from the old locations. Solaris was actually the first operating system to begin migrating everything into /usr, with the transition having been completed last year with the release of Solaris 11.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu’s HUD: Why It’s A Great Idea

      • Ubuntu 12.04 to replace traditional menus with new HUD

      • HUD = How Ubuntu Disappoints?

      • A first look at Ubuntu Linux’s Head-Up Display (Gallery)

      • Ubuntu Unleashed 2012 Edition

      • Canonical previews voice driven Heads-Up Display for Ubuntu

      • How Ubuntu 12.04 Is Trying To Drop Power Usage

        After illustrating Linux power regressions and other problems for months, with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS developers at Canonical are finally taking a serious look at Linux power management and how it can be bettered.

        Going back to the last Ubuntu Developer Summit they began working out ways to improve the energy efficiency of Ubuntu Linux. They’re work isn’t really about contributing upstream improvements and optimizations to better the Linux power management situation, but determining what options can be safely enabled or better tuned to drop the Ubuntu power usage for primarily mobile systems. (Separately, they’re finally getting back to looking at the regressing boot performance state.)

      • 10 of the Best Unity Lenses & Scopes for Ubuntu

        It’s somewhat apt that Ubuntu’s ‘Lenses’ feature has brought Unity into clearer focus for many of its initial critics.

        The search-orientated display windows – called ‘Lenses’ – make finding specific files, apps or information easy to do thanks to their tuned ‘search backends’ – called Scopes’.

      • Yup, Ubuntu again. Number 11.10.

        Notice how the eleven comes before the ten. This does signify that eleven is, indeed, louder than ten. Everyone loves hating Unity. It’s new. It’s different. It’s pretty. It’s everything that Linux typically isn’t. People also love hating Ubuntu in general. While people struggle to make their Linux desktops look and feel more like OSX every day and there are over 9000 different OSX-like docks out there, people apparently really hate having something that looks and acts like an OSX desktop. It’s very odd.

        I decided to try Ubuntu 11.10 and make my own judgement. I have to admit that I was loathe to do so, but felt it only fair. So, I downloaded Ubuntu 11.10 Desktop 64. I burned it to a disc. I put in my DVD drive. I rebooted, hit f8, chose the DVD drive, and off I went. Soon, I was at a menu telling me to choose “Try” or “Install”. I was feeling risky so I chose to install.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Video Review: Xubuntu 11.10 – Elegant, Simple XFCE

          Short video on Ubuntu‘s little brother/sister Xubuntu 11.10 with it’s XFCE Desktop Manager. Fast and Simple is what I feel Xubuntu 11.10 is. Fast to load and simple to use. Runs well on a VM if thats all you have. Enjoy and download it free today!

Devices/Embedded

• PHYTEC Announces Linux Support for the phyCORE-OMAP4430 System on Module

• Phones

  • It’s True. More People Use Smartphones Than Desktop/Notebook PCs

    A survey of 2000 people 18 and over in several developed countries/markets found that 68-86% used desktop/notebook PCs but 76-96% used smartphones. USA was on the low end while UK, France, Germany and Japan were successively higher in both categories.

  • Former Palm CEO Rubinstein Exits HP to ‘Take a Well-Deserved Break’

  • Android

    • Samsung’s Earnings Illustrate the Economic Power of Android

    • Amazon offering Droid Razr Maxx for $199

    • Wi-Fi versions of Droid XYBOARD tablets begin shipping

    • 8 Best Free Android Launchers

      The Android platform is arguably one of the most flexible mobile operating systems in the customization stakes. Almost every part of the Android interface can be modified to meet the requirements of the user without having to gain privileged control (often referred to as “root access”). Customization extends far beyond simply changing the wallpaper, sounds, and widgets.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • OLPC in Australia

  • Android Reaches 39% Tablet OS Market Share (Standing On Amazon’s Shoulders)

  • Motorola shipped a whopping 1 million tablets in 2011

  • ZTE Android tablets popping up everywhere

    ZTE is readying a number of seven-inch Android tablets, starting with a dual-core, Android 3.2-based ZTE Optik tablet heading for Sprint Feb. 5 and a similar, but 4G LTE-equipped V66 tablet headed for Verizon, reports say. Meanwhile, a seven-inch ZTE V9A Light Tab 2 just went on pre-order in the U.K, and we’re still waiting for two tablets ZTE showed at the Consumer Electronics Show: a seven-inch T72 tablet and quad-core T98.

Open source: the default choice

When it comes to open source software, the question that needs to be asked today is not which businesses are using open source – but rather which businesses are not.

So says Obsidian Systems‘ Muggie van Staden, a 17-year veteran of the open source world, who says that for many businesses today, open source software is the default choice for backend systems.

Events

• Open Source meet held in Bangalore

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 12 will feature long-awaited New Tab Page and Home Tab

    After a long gestation period, it now appears that Firefox 12 — which moves to the Aurora channel at the end of the month — will feature the long-awaited New Tab Page and Home Tab. The new tab page is very like Chrome’s feature of the same name. The home tab builds off the new tab page popularized by Chrome and Opera, but then throws in ton of Firefox-unique functionality.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Merged executive committee proposed for the JCP

  The Java Community Process (JCP) standardisation body is taking the next step in its reorganisation. The recently proposed JSR 355 (JCP Executive Committee Merge) would combine the currently separate executive committees for Java SE/Java EE (Java Standard Edition/Java Enterprise Edition) and Java ME (Java Micro Edition) development. The reasoning behind this is that “Since Java is One Platform, it ought to be overseen by a single Executive Committee”.

• Oracle proposal would create single committee to oversee Java specs

Project Releases

• FFmpeg 0.10 “Freedom” released

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • N – Free access to UK research?

Standards/Consortia

• Apache OpenOffice – The IBM Edition?

  If anyone had any real doubt, IBM is the one solid reason why OpenOffice still exits. Linux distros big and small have all left for the superior open source experience that is LibreOffice, yet IBM is stuck in the past.

• ODF Toolkit gets first Apache release

Finance

• Explaining Modern Finance And Economics Using Booze And Broke Alcoholics

• The MF Global Bankruptcy Filing: Did the Regulators Sell Out the Public for JP Morgan?

  What seems fairly obvious is that the law calls for MF Global to file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy in which customers are given seniority to creditors, rather than a Chapter 11 non-broker bankruptcy in which the customer interests are not upheld. The rationale for Chapter 11 has always seems to be contrived to favor a particular creditor bank.

  Prior CFTC rulings and ‘Rule 190′ seems to have dealt with this in the past. Statements by various CFTC commissioners of late also seem to suggest that customers absolutely have a senior claim to any assets.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • Ryan Heath twitter propaganda or counter-noise

      I guess this is how Parliament would like it to be but they know it’s not. The European Commission is no Government, they are not elected but appointed, and speak with a single voice. Article 17 EU Treaty explains it all.

      I think it is a real pity that the Concours was abolished and replaced by logic riddle testing from the United States. You would expect a person working for the Commission to be better informed about the institutions he speaks for.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Katherine Noyes: I’m a Linux fan, and I enjoy helping to bring Linux to the forefront

If you have enjoyed two interviews I made with women in Linux world before, I am sure you will love this one too. I’ll not talk too much in the beginning. Let me introduce my today’s guest: Katherine Noyes.

Desktop

• Geography of GNU/Linux

  NetApplications used to restrict geographic reports of web stats to subscribers. Today they will let anyone have the information:

Audiocasts/Shows

• Remind

Kernel Space/Free Desktop

• The Case for the /usr Merge

• LPI Joins the Linux Foundation

• Compilers Mature For Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge, Prep For Haswell

  The leading open-source code compilers — namely the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and LLVM/Clang — now have maturing support for Intel’s Sandy Bridge microarchitecture with further optimizations for the forthcoming Ivy Bridge successor. With the current and next-generation Intel support covered, open-source compiler developers have already moved onto beginning work for supporting Intel’s Haswell microarchitecture that will not be launched until 2013.

• Graphics Stack

  • New ATI Video Driver Supports Ubuntu 11.10

  • NVIDIA’s LLVM CUDA Compiler: Open-Source, 10% Faster

    Back in December there was an announcement from NVIDIA that they would open-source their CUDA compiler based upon the LLVM back-end. NVIDIA today released their new CUDA implementation that’s based upon LLVM. Besides being open-source, which will allow it to be ported to new (non-NVIDIA) architectures/hardware, there’s also a measurable speed boost in the switch over to LLVM.

Applications

• Publish Photos with PhotoShow

• SyncWall – Wallpaper Changer with Synchronization Features

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Fixing Sound Startup on KDE

  • sdcv: command-line based Dictionary for Linux

  • Getting started with SELinux

  • How to Make Programs Start Automatically in Linux Mint 12

  • [How to] Play with Unity ‘Keyboard Shortcuts Overlay’ In Ubuntu 12.04

  • Finding “lost” computers on the web the homebrew way

  • Finding instances by name with boto in pythonv

  • Manage Your PDF Documents With Mendeley

  • Create Temporary Desktops For Applications

  • Cinnamon Bread oops Cinnamon Desktop is piping hot

  • Newrez- A great nautilus script to change screen resolution to one higher than your display’s physical dimensions

  • Creating and Customizing New Entries and Fields using Pybliographic

  • Using Pybliographic and Lyx for Citations and Bibliography Part 1

  • Using Pybliographic and Lyx for Citations and Bibliography Part 2

  • Unpacking Boxes…

  • Linux Time Command Examples

  • Dualbooting Windows 7 And Linux Mint 12

  • Resize Linux storage with LVM

  • Bulk renaming using Thunar

    Thunar is a lightweight file manager that comes with Xubuntu and other Xfce-based distributions. It has several useful features not found in other popular file managers, like ‘Bulk Rename’. To use this feature, select a group of files in the Thunar file pane and hit the F2 key, or choose Rename from the Edit menu. A window appears with ‘before and after’ views of your file names, and a drop-down list showing the renaming possibilities.

• Games

  • ‘Lttle Dew’, Cute Zelda Like Action Adventure Game Coming Soon to Linux

  • Fallout Meets Minecraft in New Linux RPG: 3079

    The game is a mix of Minecraft and Fallout style gameplay. Minecraft because of its blocky graphics and art and Fallout because of its open ended sandbox style exlporation based gameplay. All areas, buildings, items, quests and characters are randomly generated. This game is still under active development, so lots of new features and improvements will land overtime.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE 4.8 adds adaptive power management, new windowing tricks

  • Status Update: KDE Partition Manager

    There hasn’t been any substantial development work being done on KDE Partition Manager for quite some time. This is indeed very deplorable and mostly owed to the fact that I am so far the only developer working on the project. The time I was able to devote to open source work has been severely limited over the last couple of months due to, as they say, circumstances beyond my control.

    So the project has remained in a rather dormant state since my series of blog entries about the upcoming featurs in version 1.1 and the post about the new partition widget design that had been so magnificiently done by Hugo.

    As an aside, this design has again been improved quite a bit after that post, so here’s a current KDE Partition Manager screenshot (also, everyone likes screenshots):

  • First Impression on KDE 4.8.0

    I have just finished upgrading my desktop to use KDE 4.8.0, which was just released by KDE team few hours ago while i was sleeping. Thanks to Eric Hameleers, i could get the early release of KDE packages and downloaded this packages as i slept last night. When i woke up this morning, all i have to do is to make sure everything is already up to date by running the rsync script once again.

    Next on, performed the command written on the README and performed the upgrade. Don’t forget to have a complete look on the README as there has been a renamed packages. After i rebooted my machine, KDE started to be loaded and there was a new splash screen called Air and Ariya Splash Screen which is very minimalistic, but it does look more professionals.

  • KDE 4.8 on Cauldron

    Wizards, sorcerers, witches, shamans, pajés and other mystical creatures that are KDE and Linux users celebrate: KDE 4.8 is avaiable in Mageia Cauldron repositories!

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3.3.4 Development Release Is Here

    The GNOME Project announced a few minuntes ago, January 26th, the immediate availability for testing of the fourth development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which brings various fixes and improvements.

  • Bringing Ubuntu (GNOME) Classic To 12.04 LTS?

    While Ubuntu’s Unity interface has come a long way since it made its full-on debut a year ago, it’s still not desirable to everyone. Likewise, GNOME 3.x is maturing, but not everyone is happy there with the radical changes from the GNOME 2.x desktop that many have become to know and love.

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • MEPIS 11.5…

      Although MEPIS 11.5 is nowhere near completion yet (actually, the process has just begun), I am very happy because the rumor about it was true: Warren Woodford is currently updating some packages…

    • vical/Ubuntu

      • Time to Kill Compiz Config Settings Manager in Precise?

        A very interesting discussion on Ubuntu Desktop mailing list has been started by Ubuntu developer Jorge O. Castro where he has proposed removal of Compiz Config Settings Manager (CCSM) completely from the archive.

      • Nuvola Player Might Just be the Perfect Replacement for Banshee in Ubuntu

        Nuvola Player is so unlike any of the music players for Linux we have featured here so far. What Nuvola Player does is, it runs web interface of cloud music service in its own window and provides deep integration with the Linux desktop (system tray, Ubuntu sound menu, dock menu and notifications). Nuvola Player’s currently supported services include Google Music, Grooveshark, Hype Machine and 8tracks.

      • Behind Ubuntu’s shift into mobile

      • Development Update

      • Ubuntu TV vs. Google TV: Battle of the Linux-based Smart TV

        Google TV, despite being launched and relaunched with much pomp and expectations, has not quite managed to reach the market it intended to. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to proclaim that the foray of Internet on our television screens previously has been an utter failure. And this, you see, is despite the fact that there are giants like Apple and Google scampering for the top spot.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Adds Launcher Customization

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi – Size doesn’t Matter

  Raspberry Pi, a newly launched credit-card sized computer, weighing about 45g, can be plugged into your TV and a keyboard. The main purpose of this innovation, by the Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charitable one; by building the cheapest computer at $25, can provide an assured fundamental level of functionality.

• [Video] Working Prototype Shown for New Linux Based Gaming Handheld ‘GameGadget’, To Be Released in March

  Couple of months back, we reported about a new Open Source Linux gaming handheld GameGadget. At that time we were a bit suspicious as many such projects were announced in past and they have now gone into oblivion.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Best GarageBand-like Apps For Android

      You are busy strumming at that beautiful guitar, moving from the verse to the chorus. Just as the word SOLO appears on the lyrics page, with a flourish of excitement and a slight fumble of fingers, you manage to finish what seemed like the most difficult riff of your life. You complete the song and then, wiping the sweat from your brow, you shout out loud “I need to start a band.”

      Starting a band eh? Well, it’s not as easy as it looks, well, at least, that’s what I’ve heard many people say. And anyway, who’d go through the trouble of looking for new bandmates? No, no, not me sir; I’m just happy sitting here in front of my computer and having the world come to my desktop. And what better way to do that than to have a cool app like GarageBand instantly downloaded on my desktop?

    • Amazon selling Galaxy Nexus for a cool $100

      Wanna grab the hottest new Android experience but without burning a hole in your pocket? Head to Amazon and pick up the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for $100 with a two-year service agreement. The promo price is only good with any new Verizon Wireless contract, family or individual. We’re not sure how long this deal will last so don’t waste time wondering if the price will get better. It hasn’t yet and we don’t suspect it will anytime soon.

    • New Verizon MAP Shows DROID 4 Price Drop to $199, Bionic and 32GB RAZRs Discounted Too

    • Vignette Lets Android Photogs Get Their Art On

What is Zorp?

Briefly Zorp is an open source proxy firewall with deep protocol analysis. It sounds very sophisticated at first, however, the explanation below will make it easy to understand.

Events

• Free Embedded Linux Training at Yocto Developer Day on February 14th

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Thunderbird 9.0 Officially Lands in Ubuntu 11.10

    After the official upgrade to Firefox 9 in Ubuntu 11.10 at the beginning of the month, Canonical announced on January 24th that the Mozilla Thunderbird 9.0 email client is now available on the official software repositories of the Oneiric Ocelot operating system.

BSD

• GhostBSD 2.5 – Now with an Easy Graphic Installer

  GhostBSD 2.5 was released a few days ago and the headline on ghostbsd.com reads “Now with an Easy and Secure Graphic Installer.” GhostBSD is obviously a free BSD (and not coincidently, a FreeBSD derivative), but it aims to be a user-friendly free BSD and to improve the GNOME experience on FreeBSD.

Project Releases

• Samba 4.0 Dances Closer To Release

  After a very long and exhausting development process that’s been going on since 2003, while simultaneously developing the Samba 3.x series, Samba 4.0 is dancing closer to an official release this year.

• FFmpeg 0.10 Gets New Filters, Decoders, Encoders

• Airtime radio software hits version 2.0

  Sourcefabric has announced the release of version 2.0 of Airtime, its open source radio management software. According to its developers, the focus of the major update was to “reduce the time and effort station managers and DJs spent on behind-the-scenes work”.

Public Services/Government

• Europe Sees Another Mass Migration of Government IT to FOSS, This Time in Spain

  At a time when Europe is facing a hard time in a financial crisis and Apple is worth more than Greece, price cuts of any form are always welcome. Perhaps for this reason, a slew of European countries have moved to FOSS technologies for use in their internal operations. France, Germany and many prominent European economies have started using FOSS technologies, and have benefited hugely in saved IT costs. This time, Spain’s autonomous region Extremadura wants to move to open-source solutions in place of their current proprietary desktop software.

Licensing

• Sorting Out the Sharing License Shambles

  At the heart of the various movements based around sharing — free software, open content, open access etc. — lie specially drawn-up licenses that grant permissions beyond the minimal ones of copyright. This approach has worked well — too well, in fact, since it has led to a proliferation of many different licenses: the Open Source Initiative recognizes over 60 of them for open source. That’s a problem because slight incompatibilities between them often make it impossible to create combined works drawing on elements released under different licenses.

Openness/Sharing

• Digital Textbooks Go Straight From Scientists to Students

  “When we approached them, they essentially told us we were too small,” Johnston said. Frustrated by the experience, Johnston set out to create open source software to publish the book himself.

Programming

• Avoiding The Vendor Perl Fad Diet

  It looks like Red Hat is distributing Perl without the core library ExtUtils::MakeMaker. If you’re not familiar with the details of the Perl 5 build chain, all you need to know is this: without MakeMaker, you’re not installing anything from the CPAN.

  Ostensibly Red Hat and other OS distribution vendors split up Perl 5 into separate packages to save room on installation media. Core Perl 5 is large and includes many, many things that not everyone uses all the time… but the obvious reaction to defining a core subset of Perl 5 that a vendor can call “perl” is another of those recurring discussions which never quite goes anywhere.

• Binpress Integrates with Github, Adds a Commercial Layer Over Open-Source

Health/Nutrition

• The High Cost of Allowing Health Insurers To Continue Keeping Us In The Dark

  In his State of the Union address, President Obama said very little about health care reform, but what he did say was a reminder of how tight a grip the insurance industry has on the U.S. health care system — and will continue to have if the Affordable Care Act is not implemented as Congress intended. And it is largely up to the President to make sure that it is.

Censorship

• Is Twitter Helping Users Get Around Its New Censorship Rules?

• Twitter Decides To Censor Locally, Rather Than Block Globally, In Response To Government Demands

Civil Rights

• FBI seeking social media monitoring tool

DRM

• EFF petitioning to extend legal protection for jailbreaking phones and tablets

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation is petitioning to renew a US Copyright Office ruling that makes smartphone jailbreaking explicitly legal. In 2010, the Office added an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allowing users to modify phone firmware to run software that’s not approved by the manufacturer. Since exemptions only last three years, however, the ruling must be renewed over the coming months; the EFF is also adding protection for tablets to the new exemption. The Copyright Office is currently taking public comments on the proposed rules.

• Tales From Ubisoft DRM: Latest DRM Goes From Horrible To Slightly Less Horrible

  We all know Ubisoft. That company that seems to think that piracy is such a huge problem on the PC and that DRM is the only way to stop it — even when fans complain about how horrible the DRM is. So it is really no surprise to find out that Ubisoft is still at it. It still thinks that annoying legitimate customers is going to prevent piracy of its games. This latest story of Ubisoft DRM woe comes from Guru3d.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Dude! Where’s My Data?

    In light of the recent TERMINATION of operation of MegaUpload by Agent Smith and his colleagues, one has to wonder what happens to all the legitimate data that was stored on those servers? Are you one of the unlucky ones who is quite possibly having your private data scoured by the IT department gnomes at BIG BROTHER Central? Disturbing thought, huh?

  • SOPA and PIPA: What Bills Like These Mean to Open Source Software

  • Public Interest Groups Speak Out About Next Week’s Secret Meeting In Hollywood To Negotiate TPP (Think International SOPA)

  • Court Finds Copyright Trolling Lawyer Evan Stone In Contempt; Orders Him To Pay Attorneys’ Fees

    Remember Evan Stone? He’s one of a “new breed” of copyright trolling lawyers, who has been trying to sue large groups of John Does based on IP addresses, claiming they infringed on a client’s work. Of course, the end game of these lawsuits is not to actually take these people to court, but to find out who they are, send them a nastygram… with an offer to “settle,” and then get as many people to settle as possible. It’s basically a way to use the court system to force lots of people to give you money. Thankfully, the courts have been cracking down on many of the more egregious players in these games. Evan Stone was one of the earlier players in this space in the US, but one who made a pretty big mistake last year while representing porn producer Mick Haig. One of his cases came before a judge who recognized how sketchy these lawsuits were, and told Stone that he couldn’t subpoena for the Does’ identities just yet, and in the meantime, he asked Public Citizen and EFF to represent the interests of the still anonymous users. Amazingly, Stone sent the subpoenas anyway. The appointed lawyers discovered this when they heard from one of the Does in question. When they confronted Stone about it, he dropped the case in the most petulant manner possible (basically whining about the judge appointing these meddlesome lawyers who kept him from getting his way).

  • ACTA

    • ACTA: Note from Marietje Schaake, Member of the European Parliament

      As a Member of the European Parliament (EP), I am concerned about the ACTA treaty in the international trade committee (INTA). Please find some information about the procedure of the ACTA treaty in the EU, especially the EP, below. You can reach me on Twitter via @marietjed66, where I will also post a message about this post.

    • ACTA ‘Is More Dangerous Than SOPA’

      While panelists talked about what they saw as the relatively secrecy under which ACTA was authored, ACTA is by no means a new initiative. Posts about the act started emerging online as early as 2008 (the initiation began with the U.S. and Japan in 2006). Canada’s Foreign Affairs and International Trade site offers a comprehensive look at the act, and even tackles the claim that ACTA was built and ratified in secret:

      “This process has not been kept from the public. On October 23, 2007, the partners involved in ACTA at that time publicly announced that they had initiated preliminary discussions on ACTA. Several countries involved in ACTA have conducted public consultations on the key proposed elements of the ACTA.”

      One thing is clear: The temperature is finally rising for ACTA, and at least one Congressman now publicly sees it as a greater threat than SOPA. You can see the entire panel in the exclusive video above.
      What do you think? Is ACTA bigger, badder and more worrisome than SOPA and PIPA, or is Issa simply trying to steer votes to his own legislation?

    • Stop ACTA in Europe

      We’ve been hearing a lot lately about SOPA and PIPA in the United States. In the meantime, ACTA has been creeping along under the radar.

    • Polish Politicians Don Guy Fawkes/Anonymous Masks To Protest ACTA Signing

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• Govt agencies fatten Linux, Unix server environments

  The Federal Government has revealed a 6.4 percent increase in the use of *nix servers among agencies that spend over $2 million a year on IT.

  The increase occurred exclusively in larger agencies between 2008-9 and 2009-10, according to an iTnews’ analysis of figures [xls] contained in a new benchmarking study [pdf].

  The study involved a mix of undisclosed large and medium-sized agencies.

  By the end of 2009-10, surveyed agencies were using a total of 3039 physical machines running *nix software, including Unix, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD “and related platforms”.

  Large agencies deployed 996 new *nix servers between 2008-9 and 2009-10, while medium-sized agencies retired at least 45 *nix units over the same period.

Kernel Space

• Linux turns 20

  In August 1991, a Finnish student announced on Usenet that he was developing a free operating system for Intel’s 386 processor. That same month, Tim Berners-Lee released the first code for what he called the World Wide Web, also on Usenet. Twenty years later and both projects have taken over the world: one very visibly – the Web – and one almost invisibly: Linux.

• Linux vendors urgently patch a security flaw

  OPEN SOURCE Linux distributors are quickly patching a security flaw recently found in the Linux kernel.

• Btrfs To Go Production-Ready In Oracle Linux

  Btrfs, the quite promising next-generation Linux file-system that’s been in-development for years by Chris Mason and others, is about to take on a big role within Oracle’s Enterprise Linux distribution.

• Linux Foundation: How to contribute to open source projects

  The Linux Foundation has published a paper titled “Upstreaming: Strengthening Open Source Development “. In the ten-page PDF document, the two authors explain, among other things, why it is in the best interest of everyone involved that in-house improvements to open source software be submitted back to the original authors of that software (upstream) for inclusion in the next version. The document, which can be accessed after registering, also touches on how best to go about this process.

• Kernel Log: Coming in 3.3 (Part 1) – Networking

  Version 3.3 of the Linux kernel offers another way to team multiple Ethernet devices. Support for “Open vSwitch”, a virtual network switch that was specifically developed for virtualised environments, has also been added. Byte Queue Limits are designed to reduce the latencies that cause the much-discussed “buffer bloat”.

• More Systemd Fun: The Blame Game And Stopping Services With Prejudice

  Systemd, Lennart Poettering’s new init system that is taking the Linux world by storm, is all full of little tricks and treats. Today we will play the slow-boot blame game, and learn to how stop services so completely the poor things will never ever run again.

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa Beginning To Need Application Workarounds

  • Nouveau For A $10 NVIDIA Graphics Card?

    In this article is a look at the state of the open-source Nouveau Gallium3D driver on low-end NVIDIA GeForce graphics hardware. In particular, a $10 USD NVIDIA retail graphics card is being tested under Ubuntu Linux on both Nouveau and the proprietary NVIDIA driver and is then compared to a wide range of other low and mid-range offerings from NVIDIA’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon graphics card line-up with a plethora of OpenGL benchmarks.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Make Programs Start Automatically in Linux Mint 12

• Games

  • Oil Rush Available Now

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • play

    Sometimes I get the sense that technology has been getting more and more unplayful and that saddens me.

  • KDE Software Compilation 4.8 Officially Released

Distributions

• Arch Linux: Only the Hardcore Need Apply

  In search of a different distro (term of endearment for Linux distributions) to try, I decided to try installing probably one of the harder distros to install, Arch Linux over the weekend. I thought I would gather some thoughts into a post and share what I think of this interesting distro that doesn’t get the press that Ubuntu does.

• New Releases

  • Big 11.10

• Debian Family

  • Answering questions of Debian users on various support channels

    It’s not always an easy task. Some users are more skilled than others and there might be difficulties related to the language, English is not always the native language of a user who asks a question in English.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Developer Week for 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” announced

        The Ubuntu development team has announced that the Ubuntu Developer Week for the 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” cycle will take place from 31 January to 2 February 2012. Over the course of the three days, contributors and members of the Ubuntu community will present various online workshops including tutorials and hands-on sessions focused on Ubuntu development.

      • Linux users cautiously optimistic about Ubuntu’s Head-Up Display desktop

      • Ubuntu plans shift to mobile

        Ubuntu has embarked on a shift in strategy that recognizes the growing use of smartphones and other non-PC devices for access to data and services.

      • Ubuntu 12.10 will bypass menus via predictive search

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Sublime Text on Linux Mint 12

          What particularly draws me to this swift, polished, accomplished, customisable and truly delectable editor is that it is cross platform. And as I’m still in the front end dev contracting game, this is a real boon: Mac, Windows or my own Minority Linux, I can have the same text editor across the board. Delight.

        • Linux Mint 13 gets back to desktop basics

          Bucking the trend of increasingly experimental desktop interfaces, the developers behind the Linux Mint are adopting a simpler desktop for the next version of the open-source Linux distribution.

          Linux Mint 13 will feature an entirely new user interface, called Cinnamon. Earlier this week, the Linux Mint developers released a version of the shell. Previous editions of Linux Mint used a standard version of the Gnome environment.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • HP gives timetable for Open webOS

  • Four Signs That WebOS Is on the Right Track

    It was exciting news back in December when HP announced that it was planning to open-source webOS, but at least as exciting now is how quickly and decisively it’s moving to make that happen.

  • HP Begins Mobile Platform Open Source Shift

  • HP’s webOS Arriving as Open Source by September

  • Android

    • Droid Razr Maxx is ‘longest-lasting’ smartphone

      Verizon is now offering Motorola’s Droid Razr Maxx for $300, with a claimed battery life of up to 21 hours. With a dual-core, 1.2GHz processor, 4.3-inch screen, and an eight megapixel camera, the device is otherwise similar to the previously released Droid Razr, but it’s thicker by approximately 2mm.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Apple’s grip on tablet market said to be loosening as Android shipments tripled in Q4

  • AT&T announces record Android numbers for Q4

  • ZTE Optik Honeycomb tablet coming to Sprint with a $99 price tag

  • PocketBook unveils seven-inch Gingerbread tablet

    PocketBook International announced a seven-inch tablet that runs Android 2.3.7 on a 1GHz TI OMAP3621 processor. The PocketBook A 7″ is equipped with 512MB of RAM, 2GB of accessible onboard storage, a seven-inch, 1024 x 600 touchscreen, a two-megapixel camera, and Android Market access, according to the company.

FOSS’ Factious Gender Divide

“For every ‘geeker girl’ there are probably 100,000 that only want to use a PC long enough to get the job done and get away from the stupid thing,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. In the end, “as long as there is a decent workplace so if little Sally wants to be a programmer she can, that should be all that matters. You will NEVER get a 50/50 ratio of women to men in that profession … .”

Don’t Do It Yourself – Learning to Trust Open Source

It’s scary that people don’t know enough about open source and how development in Java is done to rely on well-known and trusted libraries. The runtime library is kept small on purpose. It gives us the most flexibility and power to do what’s best.

Events

• OpenGeo Announces Gold Level Sponsorship for 2012 FOSS4G-NA

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • 6 Google Chrome remixes worth trying

    Chromium-based spinoffs bring privacy, security, social networking, and other interesting twists to Google’s Chrome browser

  • Chromebooks pick up steam in the classroom

    Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer running Google’s Chrome OS may not be catching on with consumers, but hundreds of schools across the country have adopted the web-oriented notebooks, the search giant claims. Earlier this month at CES, Samsung showed off a sleeker new version of the Chromebook that switches to a faster Intel Celeron processor, also promising it would release a “Chromebox” mini-PC.

• Mozilla

  • A Look at the Upcoming Firefox Developer Features

  • Mozilla releases Rust 0.1, the language that will eventually usurp Firefox’s C++

  • 6 Useful about:config Tweaks You Should Know for Firefox 8+

CMS

• NYSE Takes Stock of Open Source CMS

  Few global organizations can match the size, scale and importance of NYSE Euronext. (NYX). The leading global operator of financial markets, NYSE Euronext’s markets represent fully one third of the entire world’s equities trading-and the company is a major player in derivatives and technology services. NYSE Euronext is in the S&P 500 index and Fortune 500.

• Joomla gets search, database reinforcements

  The newly released edition of the Joomla open source content management system now comes with a new search engine, and can use Microsoft SQL Server or PostGreSQL, in addition to MySQL.

Education

• Stevens Institute of Technology Moves Financial Systems to Open Source Kuali

  New Jersey’s Stevens Institute of Technology has transitioned its financial systems to an open source platform. To replace its 30-year-old legacy system, Stevens adopted the Kuali Financial System, a tool developed and maintained by a partnership of higher education institutions and private companies.

  The Kuali Foundation is an open source organization for education institutions and other organizations dedicated to developing open source tools for higher education. The Kuali Financial System is Kuali’s flagship project. Based originally on Indiana University’s Financial Information System, KFS is a modular, enterprise-level financial system comprising accounts receivable, general ledger, purchasing/accounts payable, budget construction, and other major financial functions.

Healthcare

• Misys Open Source Solutions (“MOSS”) Demonstrates Leadership at IHE North America Connectathon 2012 for the Fourth Year

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Talend Seeks More Partner ‘Mindshare’ For Its Open-Source Software

Funding

• Bocoup, Atlas launch website to open-source VC deal data

  How much money are Internet startups getting in Cambridge? How much is a year-old software company typically worth, on paper? Can an entrepreneur really get a higher valuation just by moving to San Francisco?

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Debugger update brings Python scripting improvements

  The GNU Project Debugger team has announced the arrival of version 7.4 of the GNU Debugger (GDB). The open source debugger is the standard debugger for the GNU software system, and supports a number of programming languages including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Free Pascal, Fortran and Java.

Licensing

• A Very Short Rant About “Copyrighted” Code

  This morning I was reading a site that regularly covers free and open source software. To protect the guilty party (because I suspect the error was one of rushed writing rather than ignorance), I’ll leave out the publication and author. However, I do want to surface the error. The author wrote about making sure that “copyrighted code” doesn’t get into the Linux kernel. What?

Openness/Sharing

• Build software or community with the Mobility Lab

  Are you fascinated by transportation and passionate about using technology to help people? The Mobility Lab Transit Tech initiative is looking for Software Development Fellows and an Open Source Community Manager to help create innovative technology tools around transportation and foster open source collaboration.

• Open source research techniques can revolutionize medicine

  What happens when Facebook meets medicine? And I’m not talking about poking your doctor when you want an appointment. What happens if all of a sudden, instead of pharmaceutical companies hiding their recipes behind closed doors and keeping their active compounds a closely guarded secret, they were to share?

  This is exactly what Jay Bradner, a researcher at Harvard and the Dana Farber Institute in Boston, did. When his lab discovered a compound that showed promise against pancreatic cancer and other solid tumors, he asked himself the question: “What would a pharmaceutical company do at this point?” And he did the opposite. Instead of keeping it a secret, he sent the compound out to researchers around the world, who sent back their findings. Instead of keeping his success in house, as a secret until he could patent a product, he created the most competitive research environment possible for his lab.

• Open Data

  • Graph database Neo4J heads to the cloud

    Version 1.6 of Neo4J, the NoSQL graph database, has been released and includes a beta of Neo4J for the Heroku cloud, an improved query language, and web admin with a full shell. The developers say they are taking a careful approach in their cloud plans, and the beta of Neo4J for Heroku offers the ability to access Neo4j servers through their REST interface. Details of the cloud support are available in the Heroku Dev Center.

• Open Access/Content

  • Elsevier — my part in its downfall

    The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Combinatorics, Historia Mathematica, Journal of Algebra, Journal of Approximation Theory, Journal of Combinatorics Series A, Journal of Functional Analysis, Journal of Geometry and Physics, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, Journal of Number Theory, Topology, and Topology and its Applications. For many years, it has also been heavily criticized for its business practices. Let me briefly summarize these criticisms.

  • Goodbye Elsevier, Goodbye Tet Lett etc

    Over the last few years my interest in open science has grown, and inevitably I’ve had to confront the power of open access literature, which is a necessary condition for open science if we are to avoid the absurdity of research conducted in the open disappearing behind a subscription once it’s done. My doubts about contributing to a system of closed access journals, which totally dominate organic chemistry, were becoming overwhelming when Tim Gowers’ post came along about the need to declare publicly that we would no longer support the system.

• Open Hardware

  • Open source controller framework lets you add the finishing touch

    There are plenty of off-the-shelf controllers out there, but what if you fancy something a little more… you? How about fully customized, with a good seasoning of affordability and style? Design student Alex S has built a framework to help you build just that. The units shown above are for DJ-based programs, but you can create interfaces for any software that takes HID or MIDI input, and as they’re modular, create endless ultra-custom set-ups. Keen to dismantle any technical barriers, Alex created a step-by-step Instructable, but you’ll still need to get your hands dirty with Arduino and some circuitry. The whole project is open source, and while it’s a step up from Lego, until we can just print these things,

Programming

• Martin Odersky on Scala

Standards/Consortia

• First release of the Apache ODF Toolkit

  The Apache ODF Toolkit 0.5 (incubating) release is now available for download. Detailed change notes are also posted. The ODF Toolkit is a Java library for reading, writing and creating ODF documents. It is entirely in Java and does not require that you install a desktop editor like OpenOffice. It operates directly on the file format and is suitable for server-side use, for tasks such as document automation, report generation, information extractions, etc.

• Out With IBM’s Lotus Symphony, In With Apache OpenOffice IBM Edition

• ISO ODF 1.1 Amendment final ballot results

[Neelie Kroes] I’ll be Tweet-chatting next Monday, 30 January

Opportunities Lost

The score: In a decade of error,

* 10 billion person-years of computing was lost,
* $100 billion in profits was lost by M$ alone,
* billions were kept in poverty years longer than they should have,
* Earth was polluted/raped by the material wasted/used in PCs replaced every few years, and
* the world spent $billions more fighting the malware and bloat and re-re-reboots of that other OS.

Finance

• Stress Testing Tim Geithner

  Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, in the State of the Union this week President Obama struck some of his most populist themes yet. He wants to tax millionaires, bring back manufacturing and prosecute the big banks. He touted his Wall Street reforms saying the big banks are “no longer allowed to make risky bets with customers deposits” and “the rest of us aren’t bailing you out ever again.”

  But are we safe from the next big bank bailout? Many experts are dubious and Wednesday the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen decided to test the theory in the most direct way possible. They used the administrative law process to formally petition the nation’s top bank regulators to move swiftly to break up Bank of America (BofA) asserting in their petition: “The bank poses a grave threat to U.S. financial stability by any reasonable definition of that phrase.”

• Goldman Sachs a key player in managing Romney’s wealth

  Romney’s tax returns show portions of his family fortune in an elite division of Goldman open only to clients with more than $10 million to invest and another in bank-run hedge funds.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• ALEC Model Bill Behind Push To Require Climate Denial Instruction In Schools

Censorship

• 10 percent of Israeli academics labeled ‘anti-Zionist’ by campus watchdogs

  Survey comes up with the names of more than 1,000 Israelis, 800 of whom are academics but also including authors, journalists, public intellectuals, and past and present cabinet ministers.

Privacy

• How the government will monitor your cell phones

  In general, mobile phone penetration is extremely high in Canada. 78% of Canadian households had a mobile phone in 2010, and in young households 50% exclusively have mobiles. In addition to owning mobile phones, we carry them with us most of the time.

  While many Canadians think of mobile phones as convenient tools to communicate with each other, we tend to not really think of mobiles as surveillance systems that are stuck in our pockets and purses.

Civil Rights

• FBI seeks to track Social Media en masse

  There’s a brand new job alert out there this week, engineers and developers, and you should hop right on it if you want to help the FBI work on a tool which will provide them with an “Open Source and social media alert, mapping, and analysis application solution.” What I want to do right now is, in a very basic way, debunk how this situation will almost certainly be blown out of proportion by the same crew of people that ultimately (and thankfully) took down the SOPA and PIPA bills. This tool, if I’m to trust the job offer I’m reading here from the Federal Business Opportunities website, is not going to be hacking into your personal or secured information in any way. Instead it will be a mass organization and search tool for the FBI to keep track of all social and open source sites on the internet at all times.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • It Ain’t Over: ‘Ireland’s SOPA’ To Pass Without Parliamentary Vote

    Ireland is soon to have a law similar to SOPA passed that would give music and movie companies the power to force Irish ISPs to block access to sites suspected of having copyright infringing material on them.

  • After Years Of Near Obscurity, Atari Turns To Copyright Trolling

    A long, long time ago, Atari was king of the gaming world. It was the manufacturer of the first mainstream home video game console and was making a ton of money. That was until the video game crash of the 80s. Even though Atari was king of the world, it was not able to manage the prospect of home gaming very well and the market became saturated with terrible games that were extremely overpriced. The inability for Atari to rectify the problem ended up with gaming lying on its death bed. While the rest of the gaming world moved on after the video game renaissance, Atari was not able to keep pace with the new generation of consoles and games. After several failed consoles, it fell into obscurity.

  • Once More, With Feeling: It Wasn’t Silicon Valley Or Google That Stopped SOPA/PIPA, It Was The Internet

    Over the last week, after SOPA and PIPA were put on life support, we’ve noticed an incredibly tone deaf response from the supporters of these bills, lashing out at the wrong parties and trying to figure out where to place the blame. The usual target has been “the tech industry,” by which they usually mean “Google.” That’s why the MPAA’s Chris Dodd wants to sit down with “tech companies” at the White House to discuss this. It’s why the head of the movie theaters’ lobbying group, NATO, brushes this whole thing off as Google “flexing” its muscles. As we’ve said all along, that not only misses the point, and is totally tone deaf to what happened, but it pretty much guarantees the wrong response from supporters of the bill.

  • From Deadwood to Opportunity: CRIA Changes Its Tune on the Canadian Online Music Market

    For many years, the most prominent critic of the Canadian online music market has been the industry itself. The Canadian Recording Industry Association (now known as Music Canada) has consistently argued that few would want to invest in Canada due to the state of our copyright laws. For example, in 2009, CRIA President Graham Henderson published an op-ed that said our trading partners were racing ahead of Canada, which he argued was a product of Canadian copyright law. A year later, Universal Music Canada appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and told MPs the legal uncertainty meant that the investment was going to other countries.

  • Seven Lessons from SOPA/PIPA/Megaupload and Four Proposals on Where We Go From Here

  • Bill C-11: copyright, the movie

  • Weak Copyright Laws? Recording Industry Files Massive Lawsuit Against isoHunt

    As the debate over Canada’s copyright reform legislation, Bill C-32, continues to rage before a legislative committee, one of the most frequently heard claims is that tough reforms are needed to counter Canada’s reputation as a “piracy haven”. The presence of several well-known BitTorrent sites, most notably B.C.-based isoHunt, is cited as evidence for Canada’s supposedly lax laws that the industry says leaves it powerless.

  • The SOPA War: A Frantic Call, an Aborted Summit, and Dramatic New Details on How Hollywood Lost

  • Who Really Stopped SOPA, and Why?

    I split my time these days between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill, and last week was a very good week to be in Washington. In the fall, I witnessed the beginnings of a unique revolt over proposed legislation that would have dramatically changed the Internet’s business landscape. Last week, that revolt achieved a stunning victory, sending Congress into a tailspin of retreat from bills that seemed certain, only months ago, to pass with little notice or resistance.

  • ACTA

    • MEP quits ACTA ‘charade’ in protest at EU signing

      A French MEP has quit the process of scrutinising ACTA for the European Parliament, calling the treaty’s passage through the EU legislative system a masquerade.

      In a statement on Thursday, Kader Arif denounced the signing of ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) by the EU and 22 member states earlier in the day. He said the European Parliament was being undermined and the process was a “charade” in which he would no longer participate.

    • European Parliament Official In Charge Of ACTA Quits, And Denounces The ‘Masquerade’ Behind ACTA

    • ACTA rapporteur denounces ACTA mascarade

    • People In Poland Come Out To Protest ACTA In Large Numbers; Polish Gov’t Calls It ‘Blackmail’

      Wow. We’ve noted that the folks who got revved up around SOPA weren’t just focused on that one bill, but have remained active and interested in related issues — with ACTA being an important one, especially given the effort by the government in Poland to sign on. Following on the big anti-SOPA protests, it seems that a bunch of folks in Warsaw decided to take to the streets in protest of ACTA… and it looks like an awful lot of people showed up, despite this being about a copyright trade agreement and the fact that it was below freezing temperatures outside. There are some photos on the site linked above that show a very large group gathering. This is really fantastic. Just a month ago, you would have never expected over a thousand people to show up in the freezing cold in Warsaw to protest a bad trade agreement about copyright issues. But it shows just how badly the entertainment industry is miscalculating on these things. The further and further the entertainment industry pushes, all it’s doing is educating and activating a large and growing group of folks who are sick of bad copyright laws interfering with their own basic rights and civil liberties.

    • Poland is not lost – could challenge ACTA at the ECJ

    • EU Commission propaganda on ACTA

      The European Commission published a document in defense of ACTA, “10 Myths about ACTA“. It is pure propaganda. The document is widely distributed by polish authorities.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

More Market Forces Squeezing the Monopoly

The desktop monopoly of M$ is looking very old today. Emerging markets are consuming an ever larger piece of the PC pie (Asia/Pacific exluding Japan shipped about 1/3 of PCs with per annum growth of 11%) and they are not loyal servants of M$. Consumerization of IT means stuff consumers drag in to work will have to be accommodated. No more “M$ shops”.

The numbers are spectacular. Last year folks were expecting the world to ship 45 million tablets and revised estimates to 60 million. It turns out Apple, on its own, shipped that many. The global shipments of tablets were close to 100 million. And then there are the smartphones which shipped in greater numbers than desktop/notebook PCs.

Kernel Space

• Did Linus Jump the Gun on a Kernel security fix?

  On January 17th, Linus Torvalds committed a patch to the mainline Linux kernel for a memory handling flaw. As it turns out the flaw was exploited quickly once Torvalds put out the patch with a proof of concept emerging rapidly.

• Vendors rush to patch Linux flaw

• New Kernel Vulnerabilities Affect Ubuntu 11.04

• Graphics Stack

  • The OpenCL State Tracker Nears Working State

    There’s an update to the ongoing X.Org Endless Vacation of Code work, which is currently funding a developer to work on the OpenCL upbringing within the open-source world for graphics drivers. The latest work going on has been redesigning and largely rewriting the Clover state tracker that will provide the OpenCL support to Gallium3D graphics drivers.

Applications

• Best 60 Linux Applications For Year 2011 [Editor's Pick]

• Proprietary

  • Will Linux Users Ever Be Able to Ditch Microsoft Office? (Ed: false supposition)

    To be clear, I don’t use Microsoft Office exclusively. I process my words in LibreOffice whenever possible, since it runs natively and has a lot of features that I miss in MS Office. I especially like the autocomplete functionality and built-in support for exporting to PDF.

    Thanks to the wonders of the Wine emulator (actually, Wine is not an emulator, but we’ll call it one for simplicity’s sake), however, I can run Microsoft Office — in my case, Office 2003, since that was the last copy I bought — just as easily as LibreOffice on my Ubuntu system. As a result, I’ve had it installed for years and keep it updated regularly.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • AVG Antivirus For Linux/FreeBSD Plus Postfix Mail Server

  • Jailbreak iPhone 4S and iPad 2 On Linux With Absinthe

Desktop Environments

• Introducing E17′s Notification Module

  The Enlightenment developers are busily hacking away as always. There are so many SVN commits to the E repository that it is easy to over look new features if you aren’t looking for them. A nifty little module recently made its way into the core of Enlightenment though – its called “Notification”. Notification is a native E alternative to other notification daemons such as notify osd.

Distributions

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo-based Toorox Releases 01.2012 GNOME Edition

    Toorox 01.2012 GNOME was released on January 20. Toorox is a Gentoo-based binary distribution that installs additional software and updates from source. It ships with an easy and fast installer that results in a complete out-of-the-box system.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat juices speed freak MRG Linux

    Red Hat updated its core Enterprise Linux operating system stack to 6.2 in December and its Enterprise Virtualization commercial-grade KVM server hypervisor to 3.0 last week. Now Shadowman has polished up a new release of a special stack of Linux and systems software called MRG aimed at hard-core messaging, real-time, and high performance computing workloads where generic Linux just don’t cut it.

  • Fedora

    • Install KDE 4.8 On Fedore 16

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • [How To] Install Unity’s HUD Feature in Ubuntu 12.04

      • Ubuntu to sport new ‘head-up display’ menu

      • Ubuntu’s new heads-up display: the future of UI?

      • Ubuntu Developer Week: 31st January-2nd February

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 249

      • Simple But Handy Tips to Make Ubuntu Linux Run Faster

        Over the years, people have pinned Windows down as the slowest of all operating systems. While Mac still remains a class product, our beloved Ubuntu Linux has shot to fame because of its amazing speed and power, even on low-end systems. Windows, after months, or sometimes weeks of usage, tends to bloat and behave like a sluggish car beyond repair. Ubuntu on the other hand, tends to stay as agile as it was when you first installed it, making it one of the most preferred operating systems on low-end computer users.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Is ARM-ing Up For Better Performance

        As shared on Phoronix in many articles already, Canonical has big plans for Ubuntu in the ARM-space. They are looking forward to making Ubuntu Linux be the first operating system to support the forthcoming ARM Cortex A15, but before that and the other achievements they have planned, they must first ship Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. With Ubuntu 12.04 there is already some exciting improvements on the ARM front, including ARM hard-float support, better OMAP4 support, and other packaging improvements. In this article are some early benchmarks of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” from the PandaBoard ES. For some workloads, Ubuntu 12.04 is remarkably faster than Ubuntu 11.10.

      • Could Ubuntu Linux 12.04 turn Canonical into the new Apple?

        Xerox PARC, Apple, Microsoft: these companies and more have contributed to the ubiquitous but evolving WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointers) user interface. According to Mark Shuttleworth Ubuntu is poised to revolutionise the menu this April.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Meet the Gentlemen Behind Gentlemint

Devices/Embedded

• Graphics hardware in $25 Raspberry Pi Linux box outperforms iPhone 4S GPU

  The Raspberry Pi Foundation is building a low-cost Linux computer with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU. The board, which is roughly the size of a pack of playing cards, entered the manufacturing stage last month. There will be two models, priced at $25 and $35, with different specifications.

• Pandora Linux Based Open Source Gaming Console Finally Available To Pre-order (video)

  Four years ago a project was started to create Pandora, an open source Linux based handheld gaming console, powered by an ARM processor. Now after a long development process and funding to the tune of around half a million Euros from dedicated fans of the Pandora console, its now available to pre-order.

  The specifications of the Pandora console haven’t really changed much since the project started, so a handheld gaming device that was at the top of the curve regards specifications four years ago, is now looking a little more down to earth. The Pandora does still pack in some great features though that are not available on other handheld gaming consoles.

• Phones

  • HP webOS to be fully open-source by September

  • Open source WebOS to be made available in September

  • Android

    • Sony Tapioca and Nypon spotted in the wild

    • ZTE Optik to hit Sprint online February 5, retail March 11

      Sprint hasn’t launched many new devices lately, but they are planning to bring another tablet to the table next month. Known as the ZTE Optik, it features decent specs at a great price.

    • Android’s share of tablet market jumps

      Google’s Android operating system’s share of the global tablet computer market has risen sharply at the expense of Apple’s iOS, research suggests.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Cisco working on a Atom-powered Ubuntu Linux tablet

  • No, Really: This Tidbit Means HP’s WebOS Could Rise From The Dead

    WebOS is partly based on Linux (just as Android is).

    Today, the keeper of Linux, the Linux Foundation, said that WebOS will once again become part of Linux.

75 Open Source Apps That Could Improve Your Life

‘Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions. But if you’re like many Americans you may have already fallen off the wagon. One study by psychologists at the University of Scranton found that 36 percent of the people who made New Year’s resolutions had already broken them by the end of January, and less than half (44 percent) were still going strong in July.

Events

• LCA 2012 Bruce Perens on Status of Open Source and James Applebaum on Anonymity

• LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

  Bruce Perens wore a suit and tie for his linux.conf.au 2012 keynote for a reason, he said: it reflects our community’s need to think more about how it appears to the rest of the world. Despite our many successes, he said, we have failed to achieve the goals that our community set for itself many years ago. We have failed to engage and educate our users, and are finding ourselves pulled into an increasingly constrained world. To get out of this mess, we will have to make some changes – and expand our scope beyond software and culture.
  The open source (he always used that term) movement’s goal, he said, was once to help a population that increasingly does everything – from entertainment to finances and voting – through computers. We wanted to enable people to do, not to be done to. But we find ourselves in a world where people are increasingly slaves to their tools. Yes, he said, tools like the iPhone empower their users, but they also constrain those users. They are designed not to allow their users to do things that might reduce the profits of their makers or of a number of related industries.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Solution Finds A Problem

    Google has expressed surprise that Chromebooks are popular with schools. I’m not surprised.

CMS

• Joomla! Open Source CMS Gets Security Update

Funding

• The Taxman Cometh for Kickstarter

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new business model, recently acquiring financial success, must be in want of taxation. So it appears to be for Kickstarter, as I discovered, now that the first business tax filing deadlines are approaching me.

  It turns out that the taxman is not very pleased with “exchanges that are a mix of commerce and patronage” — he’d really prefer these to be clearly distinct activities. Because gift income or patronage may generally be treated as non-taxable, while commerce is subject to taxes at multiple levels — both as income and as sales.

  Several questions are relatively difficult to determine: is the money you receive in a Kickstart to be interpreted as a payment for delivery of a product (i.e. the reward)? Or is the money a donation (gift) with the reward being a nominal acknowledgment.

Programming

• Actuate’s ActuateOne Achieves VMware Ready Status

Tiny server offers modular design

Finance

• Merkel aims to solve Europe’s debt crisis as Davos leaders say Western capitalism has widened income gap

  German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed determination Wednesday to solve Europe’s debt crisis through greater political unity, but dashed hopes of a big injection of money for the region’s bailout fund.

  Urging the European Union to act more like a central government for the region, she acknowledged that the countries that share the euro don’t have the “political structures” to make the common currency work properly.

  She spoke at the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where members of the global business and political elite are looking to Germany to prevent a breakup of the euro, which could hurt the economy worldwide. Many participants said they see increasing evidence that Merkel will do so.

Copyrights

• Global failure: No Global e-book library

  While waiting in my doctor’s office with nothing to read, I picked up a copy of the Washington Lawyer, the journal of the DC bar. It had a long piece on the “March Toward a National Digital Library” by Sarah Kellogg that I think worth reading. And pondering. It is online here .

  A lot has been happening, but it remains slow going as the lawyers and the interest groups continue to try to find a workable deal on the remaining issues. Still the author is hopeful. But she also notes that we have had the technology to digitize print matter since 1971 when Project Gutenberg published it first e-book. Forty years. Think about that.

• New Righthaven To Offer ‘Hosting With A Backbone’; Will Avoid Unnecessary Takedowns

  Last week, some folks here pointed out that the new Righthaven.com — bought during the asset auction of Righthaven’s domain for $3,300, as part of the effort to fulfill Righthaven’s obligation to pay legal fees for one of its (many) bogus lawsuits — had put up a page joining the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests. That certainly seemed encouraging, and suggested that (not all that surprisingly, really), the domain had been bought by someone who took a dim view on copyright maximalism.

• State Of The Union Address Highlights The Dirty Trick Of Hiding More Draconian IP Rules In ‘Trade Agreements’

  As we’ve been discussing, it’s great that the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests have awakened many to the horrors of ACTA. It seems that this may also help people finally learn about the nefarious practice of industry trade groups and governments to sneak bad IP legislation through “international agreements.” With President Obama mentioning the importance of trade agreements and dealing with infringement in his State of the Union address, many people were wondering if it was a signal about SOPA/PIPA.

• Once Again, If You’re Trying To Save The $200 Million Movie, Perhaps You’re Asking The Wrong Questions

  I’m a bit behind on this (the SOPA/PIPA stuff took up a lot of time), but filmmaker/actor/director/writer Ed Burns, who came to fame a couple decades ago with the massively successful indie film The Brothers McMullen, likely had every opportunity to follow the path of plenty of successful indie moviemakers: go mainstream. He could have hooked up with a big studio and been filming the latest of those $200 million bubble-gum flicks. And while Burns has appeared in a few big studio films (Saving Private Ryan), over the last few years, he’s really focused on staying close to his indie roots. In fact, he’s stayed so close to them, that you could argue his latest efforts are even more indie than his first film.

• The Pirate Bay Launches Promo Platform For Artists

  Hollywood and the major music labels frequently describe The Pirate Bay as a piracy haven that ruins their businesses. On the other side, however, there are many independent artists who would like nothing more than to be featured prominently on the world’s largest torrent site. For the latter group The Pirate Bay team have just released a new platform where artists can have their content promoted on the site’s homepage, free of charge.

• Why SOPA and PIPA are bad for open source

  The widespread internet blackout last week in protest at unbalanced legislation being rushed through the US Congress was dramatic and notable. I did have some questions though on why it was important to the open source community. The way the laws have been framed by their proponents makes them look as if they are all about file sharing and specifically music and video sharing. However, the problem with them is they create badly-bounded new powers that are likely to exploited in ways that fall outside the frame.

• Discussing SOPA/PIPA Over At On The Media

  Been meaning to get to this for a few days now, but finally had the chance now. Last week the always ex