In the end my question to the open source community is why is this acceptable for ARM hardware? Why do you continue to rejoice about every new Android device that gets released riddled with closed source modules that are next to impossible to make work under actual Linux.
Just as many of you would be upset if you where told that desktop (or laptop) you bought had to keep it's default operating system I am more than a little annoyed that a good deal of the ARM hardware out there comes with this stipulation attached.
Technology people are often pictured as being quiet, shy or antisocial, but any suggestion that they are backward in coming forward should be dispelled by the peculiar traditions of the developer event. As the whoops and bellows ring out, it becomes clear that they have just been saving it up.
The Linux Foundation's Executive Director Jim Zemlin sat down with The H's Editor-in-Chief at LinuxCon Europe to talk about the embedded initiative, the purpose of the Foundation, Linux desktop leadership and what applications he'd like to see on Linux.
Most of you know this already, but: hybrid graphics, the technology concept of having dual GPUs (generally a low-power IGP and a high-performance discrete GPU) and being able to seamlessly switch between them depending upon load and battery life, is a mess under Linux. It will continue to be a mess for the near-term.
The matter of Linux hybrid graphics support was brought up today during one of the morning sessions at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando. Simply put, there isn't much Canonical will be doing in the near-term to better support this technology (then again they aren't a company known for their upstream engineering work), but they do hold out hope for the longer-term that there will be improvements.
Transmageddon, a popular open-source video transcoder for Linux that's built atop GStreamer, has seen its first major update in more than one year.
Transmageddon 0.20 is this new release tagged by Christian Schaller. This release took a while in part due to having to work out bugs in GStreamer and waiting for a new python-gstreamer release, which has now occurred with version 0.10.22.
A selection of game titles from software publisher MumboJumbo have been made available for purchase through the Ubuntu Software Center.
Two months back, John Carmack, Founder and Technical Director, id Software announced that soon Doom 3 code will be open sourced. Now he confirmed through a recent tweet that everything has been tested and packaged and source code release of Doom 3 can happen anytime now, its just awaiting final clearance from lawyers.
As the end of this semester comes close, I've found myself progressively busier. I've even neglected my blog about the experiences I have with Linux...
Then, I noticed something: Why is it that I'm so busy and why I haven't written anything here?
GNOME Shell is GNOME foundation's official shell for GNOME 3.0 and as we have seen in so many posts before, GNOME Shell is an incredibly good alternative for Canonical's Unity UI which became the default Ubuntu interface starting from Natty Narwhal release. The least you can say is, now you have two unique interfaces to choose from instead of plain vanilla GNOME. Top things to do after installing GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.10.
Jack Wallen responds to a question from a long-time Linux fan about small distributions and hardware support. Here is Jack’s advice on lightweight distributions.
LFS needs an existing Linux environment. Don’t try and use unetbootin on the LFS liveCD (I used lfslivecd-x86_64-6.3-r2145-min.iso to get started, but there is a newer revision 2160 available on one of the mirrors.) unetbootin in this configuration is just a bag of hurt and you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get your root volume to work, so just burn a CD.
If I was building LFS again I’d have started from a stable Debian base or other Linux distribution where I’m comfortable and have network access – there are a number of reasons below I suggest this, but you really want your host system kernel to be 2.6.25 or higher.
Make sure to have all the patches from linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter03/patches.html are downloaded and in a location you can access from your host distribution. USB sticks are OK for this if you don’t have network access (mount the stick, and then copy the patches and packages to the sources directory). Use DownThemAll or a similar mass downloading application/extension on the patches page to save time and grief.
Once upon a time, Linux enthusiasts were forced to compile the software they needed. It was the only option available. While the act of compiling software was itself not so bad, the need to chase down dependencies was a deal breaker for many Linux newcomers.
These days however, package management for most Linux distributions has made any sort of software compiling something most people can safely avoid.
As I was pondering these changes to the Linux world, this got me wondering: do most Linux users really prefer one kind of package management over the other? In this article, I hope to shed some light on this once and for all.
ALT Linux 6.0.0, an independently-developed Russian Linux distribution, has been released. The new version comes in two editions - "Simply Linux", which is an installable live medium featuring the Xfce 4.8 desktop environment, and KDesktop, which is a live and installation DVD image centred around the KDE 4.6.5 desktop. Both editions are built on top of the Linux kernel 3.0.3 and include X.Org Server 1.10.3 and LibreOffice 3.4.2. Other features of this release include hybrid ISO image that can be used either as a DVD image or transferred to a bootable USB drive, GRUB 2 as the default bootloader, simplified installation of third-party applications, and seamless integration with the Dropbox cloud storage system.
For this version of the experiment I have chosen to try my hand at installing Gentoo. Gentoo, for those who don’t know, or who weren’t following Jake’s posts during the original experiment, is a fully customizable distribution where you have to compile and install all of your applications from source code downloads. Thankfully they do offer some excellent package management tools, Portage in particular, that help automate this process.
I happen to prefer Fedora as my Linux distro. While I usually install the "alpha" and "beta" releases on a USB flash drive, and test-drive it there, I haven't been able to do that with Fedora 16 yet. The installer for the test releases had a bug that prevented me from making the flash drive bootable. This has been fixed with an updated installer (which has been tweaked at least twice since) but too late for me to test it out here.
Fedora Project developers are proposing to move all executable files and libraries used by them to the /usr/ directory from Fedora 17 onwards and essentially dispensing with /bin/, /lib/, /lib64/ and /sbin/. Fedora 17 is due for release in May 2012. The change would mean that virtually all operating system components would be stored on one volume/partition, optionally mounted as read-only, which could be used by multiple computers simultaneously. It would also simplify the creation of snapshots. Snapshots allow the restoration of a previous file system state following installation of an update which proves problematic.
Fedora Linux is always pushing the bleeding edge, and has evolved into a versatile, flexible distro with something for everyone, for little old ladies with netbooks to students to powerhouse enterprises. Fedora 16, Verne, is due to be released November 8, 2011, so let's take a sneak peek at what's inside.
People familiar with Linux Mint's other editions may miss the extras which come from the Ubuntu base. For instance, the Debian edition doesn't appear to support PPAs or the Ubuntu One services. Though it's not likely to make a big difference one way or the other, the Ubuntu-based editions of Linux Mint coming out later this year will have a few thousand extra packages in their software repositories compared to Linux Mint "Debian". So there is a slight downgrade in features in exchange for the rolling Debian base. Having said that, my week with Mint's Debian edition was a pretty rewarding experience. I ran into a package conflict right away, but aside from that and the keyboard issue it was smooth sailing. Also, the Mint desktop in this edition is just as polished and as easy-to-use as the Ubuntu-based editions. On my hardware everything was detected and worked straight out of the gate and it's nice to have the low-resource usage of Debian combined with the useful collection of drivers, firmware and codecs that come with Mint. My feeling is that people who already use Mint probably won't find any benefit in switching to the Debian base, unless they're quite taken with the rolling-release model. However, users of other rolling release distributions and other Debian-based operating systems will probably enjoy the convenience and friendliness that comes with the Mint experience.
Still a lot of work needs to be done but it is coming along.
Ever since Ubuntu 11.04, the lack of the ability to configure many aspects of the new Unity interface has been pointed out and questioned widely.
Today, at the “Meet Ubuntu Desktop Designers” session in the Ubuntu Developer Summit being held in Orlando, Florida, members of the Canonical design team clarified that they never intended Unity to not be configurable; instead, it is very much on their radar.
Canonical certainly delivered some exciting news this week when it announced that its Ubuntu Linux distribution is on the way to tablets, smartphones, and TVs.
News surfaced yesterday that Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, will bring its Linux-based platform to mobile devices sometime within the next several years. The popular desktop browser alternative has long been thought to be a good candidate for tablet devices but ZDNet reports that the company would like to take it to smartphones and smart TVs as well.
Canonical is entering a complex ecosystem. Creating a new platform for mobile devices is more than just rallying developers to the cause (that certainly does not hurt). Commercial uptake has a lot to do with what the original equipment manufacturers and mobile carriers want and how they can implement a platform. As we have seen with Android, that is a tangled web to weave.
I’ve used both Unity and GNOME Shell plenty in the past, and I like them both. In fact, I prefer Unity on my netbook, since it makes more efficient use of the tiny screen. But on my desktop, where I’m not so worried about the economy of pixels, I always felt more at home with the sleek plainness of GNOME 2.
But on Ubuntu 11.10, GNOME 2 is nowhere to be found. Unlike in earlier Ubuntu releases, Unity is the only desktop environment installed by default. The Internet is peppered with instructions for “reverting” to GNOME 2 on Ubuntu 11.10; however, they merely explain how to install a package called gnome-session-fallback, which is not actually GNOME 2 but a half-baked build of GNOME Shell dressed up in its predecessor’s clothing. It doesn’t work well at all.
I am not a big fan of Unity, not because it is poorly designed, but because it doesn’t make it easy for users to configure it to their liking. In fact, the dock itself is immovable, attached permanently to the left side of the screen, even though many people would prefer it at the bottom, and right-handed users might find it more natural on the right side. This rigidity is a dramatic departure from the Gnome 2.x desktop, which let users put their desktop elements—launchers, folders and widgets—almost anywhere they pleased.
Besides talking about how hybrid graphics on Linux are a mess, there were many other topics talked about on this first day of the Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida.
Below is some of what happened (and my thoughts) on a few of the interesting events.
In the absence of anything shiny, the hoi polloi and the media focused on Siri as the The Big Idea at the iPhone 4S launch. Android has supported basic voice commands for ages, but there are now a number of Siri-wannabes in the Market. But are they of any use other than as a bit of mild amusement?
That depends on the use you put them to. Asking your phone “how many inches in a kilometre” or “what’s the capital of Paraguay” verbally is a darned sight easier than searching for the information in the conventional manner.
Sky Go for Android devices will launch "in the coming months" a spokesperson has confirmed to TechRadar.
Sky Go has been a huge hit for Sky – amalgamating its on demand services and proving popular not only on computers but also on iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad.
Almost half of the UK population now owns a smartphone, and Google's OS, Android, is leading the race.
The carriers will keep pushing smartphones to their customers, and most of the time that smartphone will be an Android smartphone, especially for people who want inexpensive contract plans. The carriers push of smartphones plus the ever lower low-end smartphone prices should help Android completely and undeniably dominate the market in 2012.
Samsung blew past Apple and Nokia in the third quarter to become the No. 1 smartphone vendor in the world, but another emerging smartphone vendor stole the top spot in the U.S. according to a new report. Market research firm Canalys on Monday released country-level smartphone shipment estimates and according to its figures, HTC shipped 5.7 million own-brand smartphones and another 700,000 T-Mobile-branded handsets in the U.S.
AT&T will launch its first two smartphones supporting its 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) service on Nov. 6. The Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket is a larger (4.5 inches) and faster (1.5GHz) version of AT&T's earlier Galaxy S II offering, and the HTC Vivid features a 1.2GHz processor, 4.5-inch screen, and dual cameras, one of which is an eight-megapixel model.
Hewlett Packard's webOS-based TouchPad tablet is back from the dead again and hitting Best Buy store shelves this week. Starting Tuesday on BestBuy.com you can pick up the 32GB version of the TouchPad for $150 with the purchase of a new HP or Compaq PC. Alternatively, you can pick up the webOS tablet alone for $600. The tablet will be available at Best Buy retail locations starting Friday. You can find complete details on Best Buy's TouchPad deal page.
NYSE Technologies is the IT division of NYSE Euronext, the company that operates the New York Stock Exchange and various other exchanges across the globe. In essence, it provides tech services to the financial outfits that use these exchanges — investment banks and hedge funds and other trading firms.
For years, it has charged these companies to stream market data through an online interface it calls MAMA (Middleware Agnostic Messaging API). MAMA has been in use since the middle of the last decade, letting banks and funds tap into an NYSE software platform that streams data from more than 200 global markets.
Digium, Inc., the Asterisk Company, and the Asterisk open source community, recently released Asterisk 10. Asterisk is a communications platform that allows developers to create powerful business phone systems and unified communications solutions. Since its introduction 12 years ago, Asterisk has been used, free of charge, in nearly every country of the world to power telephone and other communications systems. It has been downloaded millions of times, including two million last year alone, establishing Asterisk as the most popular open source telephony engine.
In various geek circles, most of the smart money has turned away from Firefox and toward the Chrome browser. I must admit that I'm getting a little tired of Firefox since it now handles files on my main Vista writing machine poorly—or at least version 3.6.23 handles them poorly. The details are boring but let's just say there are idiosyncrasies that force me to use Chrome in too many instances.
Firefox’s single largest consumer of RAM, its JavaScript engine SpiderMonkey, is going on the mother of all diets. At any one time, SpiderMonkey’s memory footprint can be over 50% of Firefox’s total usage — the JavaScript on the ExtremeTech homepage, for example, uses no less than 115MB of memory — and slipstreaming SpiderMonkey is by far the best change that Mozilla can make to keep Firefox on the desktop svelte and competitive with Chrome and IE, and Firefox on Android less sluggish.
Hortonworks officials have predicted that half of the world’s data will be processed by Apache Hadoop within five years, and the company claims to be focused on accelerating the development and usage of Hadoop.
You can add MarkLogic to the growing list of database vendors rushing to embrace the open-source Hadoop programming framework for large-scale data processing.
It has been a while since I have blogged about the Foundation status, but the Steering Committee have been very active on this topic in the meantime. Now that we are handing over to the new Board of Directors, it is good to document where we have reached.
The members of the Steering Committee are among those who have been elected to serve on the new Board of Directors.
Pentaho has released version 4.1 of its open source Business Intelligence (BI) suite and analytics software. Available both as a Community Edition and a commercial Enterprise Edition, the update includes "major" data analysis performance, scalability and reliability improvements, as well as support for distributed in-memory caching systems.
Open source app development platform Appcelerator announced Tuesday that it has raised $15 million in a round of funding led by Mayfield Fund, Translink Capital, and Red Hat, with participation from existing investors eBay, Sierra Ventures, and Storm Ventures. The new round brings Appcelerator’s total raised to $31.5 million.
With over 30,000 apps and 30 million devices in its portfolio, Appcelerator has laid claim to the title of the largest mobile app development platform for the Apple and Android marketplaces.
Modo Labs(TM), a leading provider of open source content delivery solutions for mobile platforms and devices, today announced the company has closed a $4M investment from Storm Ventures and New Magellan Ventures. Modo Labs will use the new funds to accelerate market adoption for its mobile solutions, which are based on its open source Kurogo(TM) mobile platform.
The OpenBSD Foundation has released version 5.0 of the popular operating system and has made it available for download – or for purchase via CD if you want the bonus party pack.
OpenBSD 5.0 includes the GNOME 2.32.2, KDE 3.5.10 and Xfce 4.8.0 desktop environments. It also contains a number of new and updated packages including versions 3.5.19, 3.6.18 and 5.0 of the Firefox web browser, PHP 5.2.17 and 5.3.6, LibreOffice 3.4.1, and Chromium 12. The release includes September's release of OpenSSH 5.9.
The Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science (MEC) has told school boards across the country that it will not be shelling out huge amounts of dosh for Microsoft software this year.
It wants schools to keep their old computers and install free Linux software instead as part of an austerity measure.
A startup called Upgrade Industries has developed a modular motherboard kit with an open source design that aims to improve upon the Arduino concept. The BoardX kit lacks a processor or any required operating system, but provides a breadboard system for stacking circuit boards, including an available, Arduino-compatible Atmel Atmega AVR module.
Sierra Wireless and the Eclipse Foundation announced an Eclipse working group to define an open development standard for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Together with founding members IBM and Eurotech, the M2M Industry Working Group will establish an integrated development environment for M2M networks, as well as a Linux-based, lightweight communications protocol, based in part on Sierra Wireless' Koneki project and the Lua scripting language.
The first question that comes to mind for a person with a completely nontechnical background is ‘what is 4G?’ There have been several levels of up-gradation you have seen in the mobile phones available in the market since it was launched. The variations have been available not only in the designs and looks of the phones but also in the engineering and technology with which they are made. This has initiated various changes in their features and functionalities.
Post-Jobs, Apple must exist in a world of constantly improving commodity technology being created by its competitors and enterprises seeking next generation, integrated mobile and desktop solutions that the company is not currently offering: Products which are arguably more open and can more easily attract the partners needed to create solutions.
And it should go without saying that Apple cannot compete by continuing to use the intimidation tactics of its departed founder, no matter how many tens of billions it has in its expansive larders.
The Who guitarist Pete Townshend has launched a bitter attack on Apple, claiming that the iTunes Music Store is a 'digital vampire.'
The ageing mod-rocker likened Apple's download platform to the failed Northern Rock building society and says the store is 'bleeding dry' and failing to support up-and-coming musicians.
In early April, Jon Corzine was in a tough spot. MF Global, the company he had run for the previous year, was about to post a fourth-quarter loss, marking its fourth successive fiscal year of red ink.
For the former Goldman Sachs chief, it was a setback to his efforts to turn MF Global around. He had just announced a plan for the bank to boost trading risk by holding more assets on its books, both to help customers and to bet on markets.
Last December, the government celebrated passing eight bills into law, including the long-delayed anti-spam bill. Years after a national task force recommended enacting anti-spam legislation, the Canadian bill finally established strict rules for electronic marketing and safeguards against the installation of unwanted software programs on personal computers, all backed by tough multi-million dollar penalties.
The European Parliament’s register released the International Trade (INTA) committee’s coordinators’ minutes on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). Prior to the release, the Parliament’s services denied the existence of these minutes four times. Only after the FFII provided proof that the documents do exist, the Parliament released them. The minutes document illegal decisions.
On 21 June 2011, the coordinators of the INTA committee decided to ask the Parliament’s legal service an opinion on ACTA. (pdf) This decision was illegal for two reasons. First, the ACTA text had already been published, the discussion should have taken place in public. Second, coordinators can prepare decisions, not take them.