Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 29/6/2011: Munich’s GNU/Linux Migration in Track “on Track”; Linux 3.0 Now in RC 5



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



  • Android and Red Hat Prove Linux's Merit on Phones and Servers
    Debate over Linux's viability on the desktop may rage unabated in light of the recent changes made to Canonical's Ubuntu, in particular, but there's no questioning the operating system's strength in the server and mobile arenas.


  • Sony CEO blurs line between Linux and piracy at shareholders’ meeting
    Sony CEO Howard Stringer told shareholders that his company was the target of hacker attacks in April “because we tried to protect our IP (intellectual property), our content, in this case videogames.”

    In April Sony was forced to take its PlayStation Network (PSN) offline for several weeks after hackers broke in and stole information from more than 70 million user accounts, finally relaunching it in May. A similar attack also affected Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) servers, which control Sony’s online role-playing games. Combined, more than 100 million user accounts were affected.


  • Desktop

    • Farewell to Microsoft
      To me this seems to be the perfect combination, you can use all free software out there in your Linux computer (or partition) and also run that special software you really need on the Mac computer (or partition), and at the same time you can forget about the blue screen, you can forget about the poorly done operating system that Windows is.


    • DE: Munich's move to a vendor independent desktop "on track"
      The German city of Munich's migration to a vendor independent IT infrastructure is "in time, in budget and on track", says one of the external consultants involved in the project. The city aims to migrate about 80 percent of all the city's fifteen thousand desktop PCs to Ubuntu Linux.

      That 20 percent of the city administration's PCs will remain locked-in to a proprietary operating system has been foreseen from the start, says Andreas Heinrich, a consultant at IBM closely involved in the project, dispelling rumours that the project is missing its target.

      "The project scope is to migrate 80 percent of PCs in the administration. From the onset, it was foreseen that there will be financial or technical constraints where a move to open source is not beneficial."


    • Munich To Migrate 15,000 PCs To Ubuntu
      The German city of Munich's migration to a vendor independent IT infrastructure is "in time, in budget and on track", says one of the external consultants involved in the project. The city aims to migrate about 80 percent of all the city's fifteen thousand desktop PCs to Ubuntu Linux.

      That 20 percent of the city administration's PCs will remain locked-in to a proprietary operating system has been foreseen from the start, says Andreas Heinrich, a consultant at IBM closely involved in the project, dispelling rumours that the project is missing its target.






  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.0-rc5
      The most noteworthy thing may be that only about a quarter of the changes are in drivers, filesystem changes actually account for more (40%): btrfs, cifs, ext4, jbd2, nfs are all present and accounted for.

      On the driver side, there's some gpu updates, infiniband, mmc, sound and some SCSI target fixes.

      And the normal random smattering of changes all around. Like some long-standing compile failure (admittedly you need to enable some esoteric resource counting options and disable NUMA to trigger it, but still). I think there's a few more lurking in staging, with fixes yet to be merged.


    • Linux Turns 3
      In case you missed it, Linux is turning 3. Well, really, it's turning 20. 20 years of Linux have come and gone, and yet, until recently, we've been stuck in 2.6.x kernel hell. The kernel has been in the 2.6 phase for almost half of that 20 years, in fact. This has caused endless annoyances for developers and distribution managers, sadly.

      You see, because my laptop runs kernel 2.6.32, it is relatively up to date. It includes the Completely Fair Scheduler, and a host of other major improvements over, say, a machine running 2.6.20. One might even suggest that two machines running kernels that far apart are essentially running completely different Linuxes. It's like the difference between Windows XP and Windows 7.




  • Applications



  • Desktop Environments



    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Putting things together
        Putting things together Half a year ago there was a thread on the kde-core-devel mailing list with the topic "why kdelibs?". I gave a potential answer and this resulted in a series of great discussions. While these discussions were very constructive, it was pretty clear, that we would need an in-person meeting to finally answer the question about the future of the KDE platform.






  • Distributions



    • New Releases



    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva 2011 RC 1 Released, Almost
        Eugeni Dodonov announced the release of Mandriva 2011 RC1 earlier, but I'm still waiting for it to hit mirrors. He did actually said it was "coming," so his announcement could be considered a big ole tease. In fact, I hate it when a release is announced and we have to keep checking the mirrors for it to actually become available. But they do this every time.

        Anyway, he said, "The images are built and are undergoing an internal testing right now, and unless any critical issues are discovered, they will be pushed to the mirrors in the coming hours! Those additional testings for RC1 images before their release to the mirrors was intended in order to certify that the final changes for the RC-stage of Mandriva 2011 release, containing the (almost) final UI and Desktop experience, do not result in any unexpected issues."




    • Red Hat Family



    • Debian Family

      • News from Debian


      • Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.2 released
        The Debian project is pleased to announce the second 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.






  • Devices/Embedded





Free Software/Open Source



Leftovers



  • Security



    • John The Ripper Expedites Password Auditing


    • Protecting Linux Against DoS/DDoS Attacks
      When I first heard ridiculous-sounding terms like smurf attack, fraggle attack, Tribal Flood Network (TFN), Trinoo, TFN2K, and stacheldraht, I didn't take them too seriously for a couple of reasons — I worked mainly on non-Internet facing systems and I was never a victim. I thought it was primarily a network or application administrator's problem.

      I am not too proud to admit that I was completely wrong. The truth is that I only had a grasp of the impact of such attacks but I didn't know anything about the methods and the things that can and should be done at the operating system level.




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying



  • Privacy

    • Facebook spent $230,000 lobbying in 1Q
      Facebook spent $230,000 lobbying the federal government in the first quarter on issues such as online privacy, rules that aim for equitable Internet access and other issues, according to a disclosure report.

      That's up from $130,000 Facebook spent in the fourth quarter and nearly six times the $41,390 that it spent in the first quarter of last year.




  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Forget "Skinny Basic", It's Time For the CRTC To Mandate Full Consumer Broadcast Choice
      The CRTC vertical integration hearing continues today, following several full days last week in which the Commissioners repeatedly asked whether companies such as Rogers, Bell, and Shaw should be required to offer a "skinny basic" service - a cheaper television package with limited programming. The introduction of skinny basic appears to be one of the CRTC's preferred responses to the issue, since it is concerned that vertically integrated companies will use their broadcast distribution services to require subscribers to subscribe to their broadcast properties. The major integrated providers have opposed the idea, arguing consumers aren't interested.


    • Ottawa to contract out spying, but who cares? It's only the Internet
      Imagine that, because you're pressed for time, you take a cab to the library. The cab driver is obliged by law to install a device that will monitor where he takes you. While in the cab, you call your friend to talk about your day. The phone company is obliged to track whom you talk to and for how long.


    • Civil Society Groups Reject OECD Internet Policy Principles
      The OECD is meeting this week in Paris for a meeting on the Internet economy. The meeting features many government leaders and is expected to conclude with a Communiqué on Principles for Internet Policy-Making. This builds on the June 2008 OECD meeting in Seoul, Korea that not only placed the spotlight on Internet economy issues, but opened the door to participation of civil society groups in OECD policy making. That was a big step forward, but today there was a major step back as the civil society groups - now representing over 80 organizations from around the world under the name CSISAC - announced that it was withdrawing its name from support of the draft OECD communique.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights

      • Canadian ‘Lawful Access’ laws come at too high a price, critics argue
        Hidden deep within the federal government’s comprehensive bundle of crime legislation lies a bill that opponents claim will rob Canadians their right to online privacy as well as their cash.

        During the last federal election campaign, Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed to combine 11 separate crime bills into one omnibus piece of legislation and pass it within 100 days of taking power should his Conservative Party win a majority.


      • Drake Tells Universal Music To Stop Taking Down The Music He's Leaking
        It's been an interesting week for Universal Music. The company was outed for their secret war on various hiphop blogs, including some of the sites of their own artists, such as 50 Cent, whose personal site was declared a "pirate" site on a list that Universal helped put together. Now, super popular Universal artist Drake is lashing out at Universal for issuing takedowns over his own music. Apparently, like many artists who value the promotion, he's been leaking his own tracks to the various hiphop sites and blogs that Universal has declared evil. And Universal has been taking them down, leading Drake to tell them to stop...


      • The AUCC Diagnoses the Problem but Prescribes the Wrong Remedy
        Unfortunately, while the AUCC correctly diagnosed some of the problems, it asks to Board to prescribe the wrong remedy. I am not persuaded that amending the Interim Tariff to require Access Copyright to grant transactional licenses on a per copy basis—as the AUCC requests—is the optimal remedy for these issues. In fact, I am concerned that ordering Access Copyright to grant transactional licenses might actually—under some circumstances—aggravate the problem. While I am confident that this was not the AUCC’s intention, I believe that the remedy that it proposes could inadvertently backfire and serve the interests of Access Copyright to the detriment of Canadian academic institutions.











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CyanogenMod 7 Gingerbread Detailed Review



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