Solution #10 – Recent efforts by 4chan to stop AT&T censorship has inspired me to start a “Spread FOSS” campaign as a meta-campaign for all free and open source software. Similar to Spread Firefox, but much more powerful and with much more exposure. 4chan was successful in bringing the issue to light because they had a majority of their community working towards the same goal of spreading awareness. Jack Wallen asks Why aren’t schools adopting open source? and the answer is simply exposure to open source. Getting thousands of students to call and write to schools asking for FOSS in the education system, getting FOSS to be a trending topic on twitter and other social networking websites, getting thousands of people to give out Linux Distribution CD’s on the streets; now that is exposure. The kind of exposure FOSS needs.
So volunteers and computer donars, please bring this article to the attention of a charity you know of. Charity workers, please contact your local LUG people (Linux User Group) for technical help. The technological solutions these LUG (or FLOSS) people offer may not be exactly the same as what I propose here. (Google for mk-boot-usb for technical details of my proposal.) For example, Sugar on a Stick, a technology related to the MIT's charity project OLPC, is also a bootable usb key. Its emphasis is more on the logic, programming, and social network aspects of education, but I was told that interesting geometry learning tools such as Dr. Geo may also be included. Some may offer FreeBSD or Open Solaris as equally powerful alternatives to GNU/Linux on a usb key. Yet others may propose DRBL or LTSP for different technical considerations. The latter two technologies are equally ethical and educational choices as they are also FLOSS, although arguablly they may have less powerful social impacts in the long run.
Charity is a spiritual endeavor that not only empowers the helped, but also inspires and elevates the helpers and the spectators like me. When it comes to the choice of computer software for donation, it requires a conscious and moral consideration of the chosen technology's ethical and philosophical foundation as well as its long term social consequences. Many of us in the FLOSS community look forward to contributing to your great cause if you make the right choice.
This issue includes...
PCLXDE: The PCLinuxOS LXDE 2009 Remaster Master The Remaster Repo Spotlight: addlocale and GetOpenOffice Behind The Scenes: Up Close With Old-Polack Through The Lens: Scanners With PCLinuxOS
Early registration closes on Aug. 15 for the Linux Foundation's inaugural LinuxCon event, scheduled for Sept. 21-23, 2009, in Portland, Oregon. LinuxCon intends to draw a mix of end-users, administrators, and top Linux developers, with speakers including Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth, and Greg Kroah-Hartman (pictured).
I don't know if Mr. O'Connor is serious or just having some fun. He does have some weird ideas about the purpose of the command line and computers in general. A lot of people make the exact same sweeping claims in all seriousness, as though they were spokespeople for a Silent and Dimwitted Computing Majority, and insist that until Linux is so easy that an unconscious person can use it it will never succeed. In my opinion it's a matter of how willing a particular individual is to learn; some folks just plain don't want to try. Which is their privilege, but as long as they're using a computer for any reason it makes no sense to resist learning how to use it efficiently. But then, trying to make sense of human behavior is a futile task, so I'm not going to think about it too much.
The two European Air Navigation Service Providers skyguide and Croatia Control Ltd. had ordered several new ARTAS systems based on the latest baseline Linux G5. In July the new redundant trackers have successfully been delivered to Geneva, Wangen and Zagreb.
Mentor Graphics announced the availability of a combined open-source Linux and Nucleus operating system (OS) solution for the Marvell Sheeva MV78200 Dual-core Embedded Processor.
For now, these will be my list of Linux newbie guides. I hope that newbies and not-so-new Linux users will benefit from these guides. After all, there’s something new that we could learn each day.
In this episode: SUSE Studio is out; Debian adopts timed releases, should we be giving coverage to companies who don't support Linux and should geeks prefer Free internet services over free internet services?
On this week’s show: Fab pits the iPhone against the Samsung I7500 Android phone, Podcasting gets patented, Alan Cox and Linus Torvalds get in a row, Debian gets time-based freezes and Microsoft once again confuses the hell out of everybody.
Linux Against Poverty amassed for us almost 100 ready-to-go computers. Plug 'em in and they are ready to go to work. It was in every sense of the word, a blessing.
Cloud computing is being hailed as a disruptive technology that will improve business and IT productivity. But emerging cloud architectures still call for delivering the computing experience through dedicated PCs, which threaten to keep costs high. NComputing virtual desktops offer an economical alternative—a $70 endpoint access device that is ideal for cloud computing.
The company recently announced its work on the new Google Chrome OS, a lightweight OS that sits atop a Linux kernel and will run on X86 and ARM chips.
Linux magazine HPC Editor Douglas Eadline had a chance recently to discuss the current state of HPC clusters with Beowulf pioneer Don Becker, Founder and Chief Technical Officer, Scyld Software (now Part of Penguin Computing). For those that may have come to the HPC party late, Don was a co-founder of the original Beowulf project, which is the cornerstone for commodity-based high-performance cluster computing. Don’s work in parallel and distributed computing began in 1983 at MIT’s Real Time Systems group. He is known throughout the international community of operating system developers for his contributions to networking software and as the driving force behind beowulf.org.
Adaptive's Moab software is widely used in high performance computing, including 12 of the 20 fastest computers on the Top 500 supercomputer list.
"As the needs of the data center change throughout the day for different types of application services, we can actually repurpose resources to different operating system characteristics, whether that's from Linux to Windows or between versions of Linux with different drivers," he said.
Interestingly, BTRFS was initially developed by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) — which is acquiring Sun — but is now licensed under the GPL and is thoroughly in the open source community, open for contribution from anyone. It is described on its own project pages as "a new copy on write file system for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration."
Although some X.org drivers have been updated for X server 1.7, development work is running behind schedule. New drivers from AMD, Intel and Nvidia and new Linux versions mean a number of corrections and enhancements in the graphics system. 3D support for newer Radeon GPUs is now adequate for Compiz. DRBD should make it into the main Linux kernel development tree in 2.6.32.
I have preschool aged kids who like to play games so I'm always looking around to try new ones. One game we've been playing for a while is SuperTux. SuperTux is styled after the classic Super Mario Bros games and features their classic sidescrolling action.
Although WordNet comes with a graphical browser, it can only be described as bare-bones. The browser doesn't offer any kind of desktop integration, and there is no support for color coding, rich text formatting, or hyperlinking. But thanks to Artha, you don't have to put up with these limitations. This nifty little dictionary tool wraps the WordNet database into a user-friendly interface and offers a few neat features that can help you to make the most of WordNet.
Linux/Windows: Whilst Mozilla is working hard to bring tabbed emails on an improved Thunderbird 3, amongst many other new features — tabbed emails are already present in pre-releases of Thunderbird 3, ThunderBrowse will add a new feature to Thunderbird 2 you didn’t miss, until now, when you read this.
If you have anything to do with IT or computers you know about the Google Chrome browser. No matter where you stand on your opinion of Google, you can not deny the Chrome browser is fast. In fact, Chrome is setting the standard for browser speed such that the competition is now playing a serious game of catch up. The Chrome browser is so fast (at both startup and page load) that the difference goes well beyond noticeable. Next to all of its competition Google Chrome looks as if it is running in a completely different gear all together.
KDE 4.3 was released this week with a number of intriguing improvements. Ars test the new version, which introduces KDE's Social Desktop initiative, an effort to bring social networking integration to the popular desktop environment.
I have always missed having something similar to “KDE Dot News” in Debian. I refer to KDE’s news place because it is the project I more closely follow after Debian, but there are similar news websites for other projects such as Ubuntu’s Fridge. The Debian project has http://www.debian.org/News/ but this is just a HTML version of the announce mailing lists.
So that’s my impression. I will always like DSL, and I admire it for its loyalty to outdated machines. But so long as Slitaz can do much the same thing, in less space, with fresher software and a cleaner, faster look, I will continue to choose it over DSL.
And that’s what it’s all about: choice.
Cloud computing — where software applications reside on the Internet rather than on individual PCs — is gaining interest among businesses, and open-source advocate Red Hat Inc wants in on this.
It believes more and more companies will be turning to cloud computing in the near future because the infrastructure makes good business sense.
Red Hat Inc, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, is committed to develop more open source solutions with local software developers via its Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI) initiative.
"In the first year, we expect 50-80 percent growth in partnerships," its president/chief executive officer, Jim Whitehurst, told a media briefing after deliverying his speech at the company-sponsored forum, entitled "Our Mothers Asked Us To Share", here Tuesday.
This is just a simple list of really useful, maybe basic applications available from the Ubuntu repositories. Again this is just my list and in time it might grow to more then 10. If you like to download and install them just go to the Synaptic Package Manager and search their names.
Let's start:
1. Compiz Manager
Something interesting is happening with Canonical's software portfolio. They're offering a new system-management server, but it's not an open source offering. If memory serves, it'll be Canonical's first venture into offering a closed-source product with open-source connectivity. Aberration or evolution?
All in all, things appear usable if undramatic at this stage and there are a few months to go before the final release anyway.
In June I was traveling with a notebook that was too damaged to run Windows, but it run Ubuntu almost flawlessly. The experience was not so bad. Back home I could choose again between Windows and Ubuntu. In past dual-boot situations I gradually reverted to fully use Windows. What happened this time?
Below are some notes about how I installed Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) on the device and got the Sony Playstation 3 remote control working. I chose Ubuntu 9.10 because I knew the video driver for the nVidia ION card was available in the repository, and I feel confident with it.
Stresslinux 0.4.111 is released and is a preview release
The main change is the use of susestudio as build system which uses kiwi.
More detailed changes can be found in changelog
With "YDL on a Stick," installation has never been easier--simply plug-in the USB stick, install the bootloader, boot into YDL--and you're running Linux on your PS3.
Atmel also sells a low-cost, hardware/software Linux development kit for network gateways introduced in 2007. While the Harmony shares many similar features with the kit, and likely builds upon Atmel's Linux BSP, the hardware layout and several specifications appear to be different (see photo above and block diagram below).
Timesys says its subscription-based LinuxLink development framework now supports a new dual-core, Freescale 8641D PowerPC-based single-board computer from Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury's Ensemble 5000 Series VXS HCD5220 offers dual PMC/XMC mezzanine sites and serial RapidIO, and is designed for sensor-networked environments such as radar installations and other military and industrial applications.
Sick of having your GPS tell you to turn the wrong way up a one-way street or lead you to a dead end? Fear not: Linux-based technology developed at NICTA is on its way to help make personal navigation systems more accurate.
Novatel Wireless announced a new multi-network version of its Linux-based "MiFi" mobile hotspot, supporting HSPA, UMTS, EDGE and GPRS. The MiFi 2372 appears to be similar to Novatel's Europe-targeted MiFi 2352, but adds UMTS (CDMA) support, and is accompanied with a new OpenCGI API designed to program the device.
VoIP provider Ooma is readying a Linux-based VoIP desktop phone for shipment this fall. Building upon the company's earlier Ooma Hub, the Ooma Telo adds up to six DECT 6.0 cordless handsets, improved voice quality, and advanced features including mobile transfer and a "connected phonebook," says the company.
Motorola was one of the first handset vendors to announce plans to ship an Android phone. Last fall, it shocked the industry by stating that it would replace its native Linux MotoMAGX platform with Android and also ditch Symbian UIQ.
The use of Android in devices other than cell phones may soon receive a big boost courtesy of MIPS Technologies. MIPS, which deals in processor architectures and cores, is making the source code of its Android port publicly available.
Art Swift, the vice president of marketing at MIPS, explained in a statement, "Android presents a compelling value proposition in bringing internet connectivity and a broad range of applications to MIPS-based digital home devices. We are working closely with customers and partners to ensure that critical technologies are available for developers to take advantage of Android for consumer electronics."
Google's mobile OS is poised for life beyond the mobile - and the netbook.
[...]
Of course, both ARM and Atom double as embedded processors, and the MIPS world has followed them onto Android. Embedded Alley - now owned by Mentor Graphics - offers its own Android MIPS port, and you can visit MIPS Technologies' newly open-sourced port here.
Mips Technologies released the source code on Monday, two months after it first said it had ported Android to the 32-bit version of the Mips architecture. This architecture is used in set-top boxes, digital TV sets, home media players, Internet telephony systems and mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and is a rival to the Arm technology on which Android already runs.
The Atom-based Aspire One will run Android instead of Windows XP
Google is tossing out hints that its Android may be enterprise bound -- perhaps as early as this year. RIM's BlackBerry currently has the strongest creds among professionals, and Apple is loading the iPhone with more business-friendly features and functionality. If there's no corner office waiting for the Android, is there at least an empty desk?
What follows is our class' process for developing the initial framework and vision for a new graphical user interface to run on top of an existing operating system (like Linux) that can take advantage of an ARM CPU chipset on something akin to a netbook or a smartbook. Though this case study will focus on the work of my class, there was much collaboration between the two courses' students, influencing the final outcomes of both.
These are only some of the advantages of Open Source. This is why I would always prefer to purchase hardware for which there is an Open Source driver, or application that are Open Source. It is not only a question of price!
In my opinion, our biggest problem right now is marketing. There are three categories of people we really need to reach out to:
1. Those who last tried a Linux distro more than 5 or 10 years ago 2. Those who’ve been told “only hackers can use it” 3. Those who’ve never heard of it
With its third-generation release, out this week, popular open-source management interface FreePBX has taken a bold step away from its longstanding ties to Asterisk, to embrace the up-and-coming VoIP alternative FreeSwitch.
The old world will meet with the new in an event this week that seeks to get cultural institutions working more closely with wiki projects
Laconica, billed as an open-source microblogging tool similar to Twitter or Jaiku, now has its own Mollom plugin to reduce comment and posting spam.
Open source ECM technologies like Alfresco, Drupal, Liferay, Lucene, and many others, are now at or beyond their closed source equivalents. If you are a developer who’s sick of the shackles closed source CMS places on you, why not suggest exploring open source alternatives?
If you’re looking for a virtualization solution, and you need one that makes the task of setting up virtual machines easy, VirtualBox is for you. If, however, you are looking for a tool that will allow you to serve out virtual machines you will need to purchase the full version and even then you might find it more challenging than, say, VMWare Server. But for standalone virtual machine needs, you cannot beat VirtualBox for its ease of use and price.
Lack of adequate documentation is frequently cited as a shortcoming of open source applications and platforms, but, for the popular choices, there are surprisingly good, free online books available. We round these up on a regular basis here at OStatic, and in this post you'll find five online books that you can jump right into. They introduce basic concepts for getting started with Linux, Firefox, Blender (3D graphics and animation), GIMP (graphics), and the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications.
We looked at Linux and we could customise it to meet our needs. We could also get good support from vendors. The good news is that, when you do research for open source, you can easily try it out and get very good information about the product from the community behind it. All the feedback from the users is out in the community for all to see, so you never have to rely on a sales person who is just going to tell you what you want to hear. You can actually interact with other users in the community, and validate what is really there.
Openbravo has announced the release of a new integrated business management solution, built on top of Ubuntu Server Edition, which is fully supported by Openbravo and its partner network. Openbravo is the leading developer of web-based open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Point of Sale (POS) solutions for businesses, while Canonical is the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, which is rapidly becoming a very popular server platform choice for businesses across the globe.
One of the most interesting developments in the world of openness has been the growing move to open up government. In the UK, the scandal over MPs' expenses has helped to expose the perils of lack of transparency at the national level, but far less attention is being paid to local government. That's a pity, because it's precisely local data that impacts most of us more directly.
The new US administration could implement such a system through simple FRPAA-like legislation requiring funding agencies to commit to this open-access compact in a cost-neutral manner. Perhaps reimbursement would be limited to authors at universities and research institutions that themselves commit to a similar compact. As funding agencies and universities take on this commitment, we might transition to an efficient, sustainable journal publishing system in which publishers choose freely among business models on an equal footing, to the benefit of all.
The campaign is part of Fiat’s push to embrace the digital age head-on. By creating an open forum, it acknowledges that all ideas generated might be used by other individuals, or by its rivals. A bold step that might spell the beginning of the end for closed-shop car design.
Like I promised few days ago, here is the demo that shows tile-based OpenStreetMap rendering on Qt/S60. If you never heard of OpenStreetMap before, it is “a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world” (from its Wikipedia entry). You can try it at www.openstreetmap.org. It might not be as complete as other maps solutions, but surprisingly, OpenStreetMap coverage for many world big cities are detailed enough for most users.
The code in the example is released under the GPL, so you can take it, play with it and incorporate it in your own open source application. Everybody wins — developers get a simple way to add maps to their applications, Qt shows how cool its framework is, and Nokia gets more developers writing for its phones. Try doing that without an open source licence.
Nationwide unemployment may be heading toward double-digits in the U.S., but among the skills that are in highest demand are those of a Linux sysadmin. That's partly due to the effects of the recession -- more companies are willing to experiment with lower-cost open source alternatives to proprietary software. Still, the good news is qualified: Many of those jobs can be done anywhere on the planet.
The enterprise Linux vendor celebrates the tenth year of its certification program as it tries to recruit more training partners.
I am not sure why we do not see more support for Java in many of the distributions of Linux. It is available. It is open source. And it provides a means for software developers to make programs that can run on many different platforms with few alterations. This is the opportunity that could greatly increase software support for Linux. Still I often find that Java is a bit of a pill to install in most Linux Distributions. Many have Java related stuff in the default install but they do not work properly and when you try to install a Java based program like for example limewire then you have problems.
Just one week shy of Christmas 2008, the Python world saw the release of version 3 of Python. Big deal, eh? Well ... it turns out it was and is, as Python 3 is the first major release of Python designed from the get-go to be incompatible with prior versions of the language.
The company acquired these statistics during the natural course of its regular crawling activities, said Chris DiBona, Google’s open source programs manager. Among other things, Google’s Code Search Crawl revealed that nearly half of the projects licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) have moved to version 3 of that license, including new projects.
The library is an add-on for existing C++ compilers, which permits computer programmers to utilize the new multithreading facilities from C++0x without the upheaval of compiler upgrades.
One of the more notable new features is the inclusion of support for the lamda capabilities in the new C++ draft standard (C++0x). The new release now uses the LD_PRELOAD function on Linux and a dynamic instrumentation method on Windows to provide automatic memory allocator replacement throughout an application, greatly improving the memory allocators performance. Intel has also reworked the task scheduler, allowing it to scale better, and made improvements to parallel algorithms and concurrent containers.
Due to the fast growth of open frameworks, it's no surprise that the developer is faced with a new dilemma. It's not "which OS should I write to?" anymore. It's now "which Web-centric tool will help me develop the best application?" From the perspective of the developer, this is a much friendlier environment.
The European Commission has sneaked out its position on the Telecoms Package second reading. Decoded, it calls for the Package to seal in the right of governments and broadband providers to restrict the Internet.
A single Canadian company sells traffic shaping gear in use on 20 percent of all broadband lines in the world—and nearly all of its clients throttle traffic by application.
There are some users who are going to fall for DRM schemes, and lose access to their content when the scheme changes, no matter what. Just like there are some users who will leave thermal-printed concert tickets in a hot car, or let their dogs chew on their CDs. And there are some users who will avoid anything that smells even slightly of top-down media control. But the users in the middle are the people who matter. If Joe User is on the fence about buying a Kindle, what would scare him away?
An injunction banning a book is a big deal. It's usually called a prior restraint, and it's usually highly suspect; the U.S. Supreme Court held publication of the Pentagon Papers could not be restrained despite the government's claim that national security would be jeopardized.
Last month, we wrote about a new study that basically showed that independent bloggers and the mainstream press had a rather nice symbiotic relationship, with different stories flowing back and forth across the two. Oddly, the NY Times misinterpreted the study to claim that it showed that bloggers were "behind" the mainstream press on stories, but the details showed a very different story. It's no surprise that a mainstream publication would portray the study this way, but it makes it even more amusing when that same publication is then caught using a story from a blog as well, without doing any additional reporting.
Recently there has been a rising crescendo of finger-pointing, shrieking, braying and teeth-gnashing about the future of the news. In the last couple of weeks there have been many comments on the AP’s proposals, Attributor’s proposals, Ian Shapira’s story and fair use.
After some of the AP commentary, I posted a tweet directed at Jeff Jarvis that prompted some members in the community to ask me to be more outspoken, asking me to be blatant about it, to post a public statement. For those who know me, I usually don’t need to be asked.
The Associated Press has issued a statement explaining the “license” they gave me to quote Thomas Jefferson. A few brief comments:It is an automated form, thus explaining how one blogger got it to charge him for the words of a former president.The problem is not just that they use an automated form to issue their “licenses” (although the automated form does make it easy to mock them). No, the problem is that they also make bizarre, sweeping copyright claims about “their” content.
Copyright, as Wolfram seems not to understand, is a bargain between creators and their public. As an *incentive* to create, the former are given a time-limited monopoly by governments. Note that it is *not* a reward for having created: it is an incentive to create again.