As we begin 2012, Linux is 25 years old and showing no signs of slowing down. 2012 should be another solid year for Linux growth and expansion in a number of areas with new development in the kernel, distros and on architectures big and small.
My journey with Linux began in 2009, one week before the release of Ubuntu 9.04. I was a long-time Windows user who knew of nothing else, but what Microsoft had to offer for my computer. Years of frustration culminated with me clicking away on Google to look for an alternative, if there was even one. Boy, did my eyes fill with wonder as I found out about Linux, in general, and more specifically Ubuntu. I read and read about it and came to find out that I could test drive it right from the cd itself. It works! It really works! I was ecstatic. I was free from the shackles of Microsoft Windows.
How do I download Linux? That’s a question that I hear fairly often. It usually leads to follow-up questions, like what is a distribution, which distribution should I download or how do I install Linux on my PC.
Linux has been into the market since the late 1990s and is open to anyone who wants to use it. Linux is free and moreover there is no paying for a cd or a product key. Yet many consumers are very skeptical to switch operating systems or download another. Because of various reasons, windows popularity could be one of them and adding to it is the extra work and time needed to install a new operating system.
Desktop Linux market share had a growth of about 50% last year according to the recent data by NetMarketShare.
Linux usage is on the rise if the latest data from net-statistics firm ‘NetMarketShare’ is to be believed.
Linux is getting popular that’s certain. And if you do not want to peek into stats then you have a simple metric. Virus and the games! Both of which are increasing for Linux, in turn meaning that more people are turning towards Linux OS. Today we are getting number of machines coming pre-loaded with Linux. Lets investigate further how Linux is getting popular, on the basis of stats. The bad part first.
Lenovo wouldn't comment on the Linux kernel it is using, but Engadget reports that it is based on Android, like we originally had heard.
New web servers continued to come online at the end of 2011. According to web server stats vendor Netcraft's January 2012 survey, there are now nearly 583 million sites on the Internet. The January survey figure represents an increase of 27.2 million sites over the December 2011 figures, for a 4.9 percent gain.
BT has revealed how automation has enabled it to reduce the time it takes to deliver a new database from weeks to minutes.
To do this, the telecoms company created a pre-provisioned, six-node rack cluster, which heavily uses automation to create databases for IT projects that require them. This means that new databases can be created on this Database-as-a-Service cluster in just 19 minutes.
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BT has built its entire DaaS on Oracle, except for the hardware. It uses Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Clusterware and Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM).
With financial backing from the likes of Michael Dell and other venture capitalists, open source upstart Nginx has edged out Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) to hold the title of second-most widely used Web server among all active websites. What's more, according to Netcraft's January 2012 Web Server Survey, Nginx over the past month has gained market share among all websites, whereas competitors Apache, Microsoft, and Google each lost share.
Keynote videos from the September 2011 LinuxCon Europe conference are now available for on-demand viewing. Keynote presenters and participants included such Linux luminaries as Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Thomas Gleixner, Dirk Hohndel, Nils Brauckman, Tim Burk, Jon Corbet, and more.
The damage from the September 2011 cracking of several Linux Foundation web sites seems to have been repaired, though one site won't be coming back: the Linux Developer Network.
Improvements to the Ext4 filesystem, network code optimisations and thin provisioning support in the Device Mapper are some of the major improvements in Linux 3.2. Further additions include new and improved drivers – for example, for graphics hardware by Intel and NVIDIA, as well as Wi-Fi components by Atheros and Broadcom.
Minitube is a YouTube desktop client for Linux. I especially like are Minitube's intuitive user interface and its ability to download videos on the fly. Unlike certain other YouTube replacement clients, Minitube does not attempt to clone the website. Instead, it hits its intended mark of giving you a no-hassle TV viewing experience.
Xournal is an application for notetaking, sketching, keeping a journal using a stylus. It is free software (GNU GPL) and runs on Linux (recent distributions) and other GTK+/Gnome platforms. It is similar to Microsoft Windows Journal or to other alternatives such as Jarnal and Gournal.
Whatever be the specification of the Ubuntu OS, in the end it is indeed an OS which has to compete with the likes of premium variants like Windows and Mac OS. SO it has to be strong on all corners. PC Gaming has always been the bread and butter of youngsters far and wide across the globe and no matter what the OS, gaming enthusiasts wanted their computers to run virtually any game that can be found today. But Ubuntu isn’t far behind Windows or Mac in terms of providing a mouth watering gaming experience. There are some exciting and totally cool games that are compatible with the Ubuntu OS. So let us take some time to check out the coolest, meanest and most sought out games in Ubuntu.
Every day we create and consume media in many forms. It would be reassuring to know that the photos we take today, and the videos we record will still be viewable 20 years from now. Unfortunately there aren't always such reassurances.
Bioware's Aurora 3D game engine is currently being reimplemented by a new open source project: eos. Many popular games like Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, Star Wars: KOTOR, Star Wars: KOTOR 2 use Aurora engine or its modified version as the base.
KDE España has started planning Akademy-es 2012—the most important KDE-related event in Spain. The conference is an opportunity for Spanish KDE users and developers to meet, share experiences, catch up on KDE news, and plan for the future. Akademy-es includes a range of presentations, workshops, hacking sessions, informal get-togethers and an assembly of KDE España members. KDE members and supporters will be coming from other countries to enjoy famous Spanish hospitality and meet up with KDE friends. The date for Akademy-es depends on what location is chosen and the availability of suitable facilities.
Cinnamon is another attempt to make the GNOME 3 desktop acceptable to those in the community who have so far refused to have an unpalatable substance rammed down their throats. While MATE is a fork of GNOME 2, Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME 3 Shell. And though better than the other attempts, it does not really represent a sharp break from GNOME 3 + MGSE. Imagine GNOME 3 + MGSE without the Applications view or menu, and you have Cinnamon. The last two updates added some much needed configurations options to the menu, but much still needs to be done.
The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce immediate availability of version 2.3.3 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
Despite the challenging U.S. economy, Red Hat sure sounds optimistic. The open source company plans to hire roughly 1,000 people in 2012. And this isn’t a pure Linux strategy. Red Hat also continues to invest in virtualization, storage, middleware and cloud computing. Here’s where channel partners fit into the strategy.
Two things I have to say to you! One, I've received more emails asking me to test Kororaa than any other distribution. The second one is, I'm angry with the Kororaa development team. They released two versions just a couple of weeks apart, naughty men. As I was collecting screenshots for this review, on top of Kororaa 15.1 Squirt, I learned that a new edition was made available, numbered sweet 16. A dilemma, then. What to do, what to do? Delete and start over? No, I proceeded with the original work.
A few day ago a new distribution forked from aptosid announced their first stable release. On the last day of 2011, Ferdinand Thommes announced the release of siduction 11.1. siduction is based on Debian Unstable and ships in versions featuring KDE, LXDE, or Xfce.
Canonical will have a presence at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, from the 10th – 13th January. The booth, in the Upper Level of South Hall 4, is at location 35379 within the Las Vegas Convention Center.
We have decided that this coming January will be our last keynote presentation and booth at CES. We’ll continue to participate in CES as a great place to connect with partners and customers across the PC, phone and entertainment industries, but we won’t have a keynote or booth after this year because our product news milestones generally don’t align with the show’s January timing.
The start of this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is rapidly approaching, and speculation is running rampant as to what shiny new wares will make their debut there.
Ubuntu shop Canonical has promised to make a splash at the annual gadget jamboree, the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, next week.
I upgraded my primary laptop to Precise yesterday. Very smoooooth! Kudos to the Ubuntu team for the way they are running this cycle; their commitment to keeping the Precise Pangolin usable from opening to release as 12.04 LTS is very evident.
A recent job posting from Canonical appears to hint at Ubuntu’s continued commitment to first-class user experience.
Canonical announced last night, January 3rd, that it will present the latest in Desktop, Cloud and Ubuntu One demonstrations, as well as an exclusive Ubuntu concept design, at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) event, in Las Vegas, US.
There's been a new distribution making small waves lately called Pear OS. It aims to replicate the experience of Apple's Mac OS X, and upon first appearances, it seems to do so pretty well. I'm comparing it to Zorin OS, which similarly tries to replicate the experience of Microsoft Windows, to see which one does its job better.
For someone who has never before tried out a Linux desktop, consider telling them to make Linux Mint 12 their initial exploration.
This version of the Linux distro, which launched late last year, is code-named “Lisa” and runs the relatively new Gnome 3 desktop graphical user interface. It is based on Ubuntu 11.10.
Not content with its Mint GNOME Shell Extensions (MGSE), nor with GNOME 2 replacement MATE, Linux Mint has decided to launch a new GNOME 3-based desktop dubbed Cinnamon.
Intrinsyc announced a hardware/software development platform for Freescale's Cortex-A9-based, dual-core i.MX 6 processor, offering support for Android 4.0 and Windows Mobile 6.5. The Open-6 Design and Production Platform combines a development kit, a wireless telephony stack, and a reference platform with a capacitive multitouch display, cameras, sensors, and wireless radios.
Derald Woods is a 13-year engineering veteran who today works in software development, designing and supporting electronic vehicle controls for heavy equipment and trucks. Lately, his time is being used to work on an ARM9-based embedded Linux solution that involves NTSC/PAL video CSI input, V4L2 overlay, and graphics provided by an SDL implementation.
Roku announced a tiny dongle version of its Linux-based streaming player device, designed to plug directly into a TV's HDMI port. Due to ship in the fall, the "Roku Streaming Stick" will send its signals to -- and accept power from -- Mobile High Definition Link-enabled televisions, including some of Best Buy's Insignia models.
As veteran mobile application developers with experience in most of the popular platforms of the past decade, we feel that the Android platform is one of the most accessible platforms for new developers. With cheap tools, a friendly development community, and a well-known programming language (Java), developing Android apps has never been easier. That said, we still see a number of mistakes that developers who are new to Android make over and over again. Here are the 10 most insidious gaffes.
Google's Android Market now has over 400,000 apps, and the pace of new code additions is accelerating.
Ask punters what they got for Christmas and a rather large number of them say they got a Kindle.
Since the late 1980s, Japanese role-playing games or JRPGs have managed to enthrall a wide range of audiences. From Wizardry to Final Fantasy, this genre has garnered a huge fan following not just among the Japanese, but also among Western gamers. Furthermore, since JRPGs have been made for almost every platform that’s out there, our very own Android, which is also a fledgling gaming platform, has seen some great titles in this genre. So, if you’re hankering for a visit to mystical realms and dragon-infested lands, here’s a list of some of the best JRPGs for Android.
ZiiLabs says it is sampling a quad-core Cortex-A9 SoC (system-on-chip) designed for Android 4.0 tablets. Clocked at 1.5GHz, the ZMS-40 processor is equipped with 96 "StemCell" media processing cores supporting 3840 x 1080 resolution for 1080p 3D stereo video, features 200-megapixel/sec image processing, and supports the new HEVC (H.265) video compression standard, the company says.
I wanted to make an impression with my title. I hope I managed. I am writing this article as Gingerbreak's wheel spins aimlessly runs on my Galaxy S phone. I have little hope that I will actually be root on my phone. Here I am: I intended to write an article about Busybox, in order to turn an Android phone into something that really resembled a GNU/Linux system. I failed, twice: as a user, I failed gaining control of my own phone. As a free software advocate, I failed warning people about what could have happened -- and indeed I let it happen.
Four years back when Asus EEE PC line surfaced with its 7" netbooks, it was told that Linux is reviving on home computing. The first EEE PC models came with a certain modified versions of Xandros, the then popular commercial desktop linux. Popularity of those tiny computers inspired almost every other hardware vendors to come up with comparable models. We saw followers in HP, Lenovo, Sony and Acer, among many others. Keeping pace with the hardware we also saw many customized Linux distributions that gave full support to Asus EEE PCs, Acer Aspire One PCs and HP Mini Notebooks.
It looks like 2012 is going to be a great year for free culture. Possibly my favorite development is that MusOpen has organized its planned symphony recordings for this January. In September, 2010, the free culture organization raised over $68,000 (several times their $11,000 goal) through a Kickstarter campaign, with the intent of commissioning a "internationally renowned orchestra" to perform the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky symphonies.
Musicians tend to make pretty decent label bosses. When I saw Adrian Legg perform several years ago, he extolled his new label, Favored Nations, because it was “run by a guitar player.” Violinist Jeff Gauthier is a triple-threat in this regard; he runs the Cryptogramophone label, produces some pretty happening names such as Jenny Scheinman and Erik Friedlander, and he’s one terrific bandleader. On top of all of that, he plays jazz violin like a bat out of hell, swinging the instrument by its tail and knocking over jars in the jazz, classical, and rock fusion departments in the process. Last time out, Gauthier’s modern jazz combo, The Goatette, was greeted with a year-end approving nod from Slate’s Fred Kaplan. Indeed, House of Return was a highpoint for music on the fringes in 2008, and its follow-up Open Source is just as good.
One Debian/Ubuntu-based distro I’ve always liked — Qimo — seems innocent enough, especially since it is kid-oriented. Of course, when you try to pronounce it phonetically, it comes out “chemo,” as in “chemotherapy.” Actually, that’s not the correct pronunciation for Qimo — it’s really “kim-o,” as in “eskimo,” which is the basis for the name of the this distro. I’m not making this up: The lead developer has a toddler son named Quinn, named in part because the developer Dad is a Bob Dylan fan, and hence the “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” reference is not lost on the Dylanistas among us.
Or so I was told.
Then there’s the ongoing debate about the acronym for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, more commonly known as GIMP. My friend Ken Starks of HeliOS fame — not exactly a paragon in the defense of politically correctness (to his credit) — has a good point when he says that GIMP is insensitive to those with movement disabilities. While I hope a name change is being considered, I would like to think they’re not doing so at the moment because they’re still working on the single-window thing.
Just a few weeks after Google Chrome was reported to have overtaken Mozilla Firefox to become the second most popular Web browser in the world, Google’s glory has been tarnished by a “jaw-dropping,” massive online Chrome advertising campaign that would seem to violate Google’s own guidelines, uncovered by SEO Book blogger Aaron Wall.
The newest Firefox is faster, better, and its parent group is well financed, but is it this version, Firefox 9.01, good enough to win back fickle Web browser users?
Mozilla's upgrade call last month pushed more Firefox 3.6 users to grab a newer edition than any month since June 2011, a Web metrics company said over the weekend.
The Mozilla Public License is one of the most influential software licenses in recent memory. In many respects, it is the basis for alot of modern idea about open source, as opposed to just Free Software and the GPL.
This week, the Mozilla Public License 2.0 was officially released - and to be honest, I was caught a little off guard. I've known that work was in progress since at least 2008. In 2010, Mozilla Chief Mitchell Baker let us know that the new MPL 2.0 would remove references to Netscape in the license.
Mozilla has published a new version of Firefox for Android to its Aurora development channel; the version 11 branch was previously only available as a Nightly build. The open source mobile web browser now uses a native Android UI. Traditionally, Firefox implementations have used XUL, an XML-based language that is interpreted by the Gecko rendering engine. According to its developers, the new native UI should provide improved start-up and page load times, while also using less memory. The new native UI also brings a completely re-designed interface and start page.
The Hadoop project at the Apache Software Foundation is beating its chest for delivering the v1.0 version of the open source MapReduce data analysis tool, its Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), and other related code.
Big Data gets a big release, providing improved security and full support for HBase.
For those who don’t know the back story: In 2010, Oracle acquired Sun, which owned the OpenOffice.org project at the time. Concerned that Oracle might restrict or close the OpenOffice code, or sell the product for money, several groups formed the Document Foundation and forked OO into LibreOffice, an independent endeavor. Since then, most leading desktop Linux distributions have replaced OpenOffice with LibreOffice as their default office productivity suite.
Meanwhile, the fears of open source advocates were allayed in June 2011, when Oracle handed the OO code over to the Apache Foundation, ensuring that it would not, in fact, become proprietary. Now, Apache is in the process of regrouping and reorganizing the project, but for now development is kind of dormant and there has not been a new release in almost a year.
Andrew B. Holbrook, a Stanford University Department of Radiology research associate, developed a WebOS application that operates an MRI scanner and allows radiologists and other medical personnel to view images captured by the MRI machine on a TouchPad tablet.
Holbrook designed an app allowing HP's TouchPad to operate an MRI machine from inside the scanning room, then interface with a PC server located elsewhere. The computers traditionally used to control MRI scanners are cumbersome and costly because they need special modification to reduce metal parts, which react to the MRI machine's magnetic field and pose safety risks.
The Department of Veterans Affairs wants to overhaul its medical-scheduling software, which is integrated into its VistA electronic health record system.
Many consider XBMC as one the finest, if not the best, media center application out there, which is also open source. Starting from the previous XBMC 10 'Dharma' release, XBMC started supporting add-ons officially which made it super easy to install third-party developed skins and apps for XBMC. Aeon Nox 2.0 was one such long awaited theme for XBMC and it is now available with the default XBMC 11 repositories.
The Apache Software Foundation’s formal 1.0 release of Hadoop will give enterprises and SMBs a cost effective, open source cloud computing software framework that is mature, stable and features state-of-the-art technologies
Major Updates:
o Support new tool ipmi-pet, tool to parse/interpret platform event traps. o Support new --sdr-cache-file option specify specific SDR cache file in all SDR related tools (ipmi-sensors, ipmi-sel, ipmi-fru, etc.). o Support Quanta QSSC-S4R/Appro GB812X-CN OEM SDRs, sensors, and SEL events. o Update libfreeipmi for DCMI 1.5 additions. o Add petalert.pl contribution.
Open-source, cross-platform desktop publishing package Scribus 1.4.0 has been given a final, stable release, four years after the first developmental version saw the light of day. Over 2,000 feature requests and bugs have been resolved in this new release, which, despite the relatively minor version number jump from 1.3.3.x, is a major new release.
At the end of last year I reported on the worrying signs of vacillation from the UK government over its support for truly open standards. At least it's relatively straightforward to keep tabs on what's happening in Blighty; Europe is another matter - I find the labyrinthine bureaucracy and its digital shadow pretty hard to navigate. So I was pleased to come across the following page, entitled "Strategy for internal use of OSS at the EC".
The Defense Information Systems Agency has updated the Application Security & Development Security Technical Implementation Guide, clarifying a commonly-misunderstood Defense Department policy that many saw as a hurdle to open source software use at DoD.
My post yesterday on how Google gains financial benefit from vendor GPL violations contained an assertion that some people have questioned - namely, "unscrupulous hardware vendors save money by ignoring their GPL obligations". And, to be fair, as written it's true but not entirely convincing. So instead, let's consider "unscrupulous hardware vendors have economic incentives to ignore their GPL obligations".
He’s used the timetable data released through Open Data Manchester as well as taking information from the Open Street Map project to provide other points of interest including bus stop and rail station locations.
We have come to a crucial point in our series of articles regarding C development. It's also, not coincidentally, that part of C that gives lots of headaches to beginners. This is where we come in, and this article's purpose (one of them, anyway), is to debunk the myths about pointers and about C as a language hard/impossible to learn and read. Nonetheless, we recommend increased attention and a wee bit of patience and you'll see that pointers are not as mind-boggling as the legends say.
Hungary's public administrations will by default use open document standards for their electronic documents, as of April this year, the government ministers agreed on 23 December, and all public organisations are encouraged to move to open source office tools. Hungary's government also in December decided to cancel the funding of proprietary office suite licences for all schools.
Don Reisinger has a list of M$’s mistakes in 2011:
1. Where were the tablets? 2. Let Google cement its lead online 3. Failing to acquire a handset maker 4. Let Android get away 5. An odd Nokia partnership 6. Failing to wrap up the living room 7. Retaining Steve Ballmer as CEO 8. Let Google cement its lead online 9. Overpaid for Skype 10. Tipped its Windows 8 hand too early 11. Failing to make the mobile space about security
This is great fun for me. One of the last barriers to the desktop space for GNU/Linux is the retail shelf space GNU/Linux gets. Now, M$ is actually suing one of its partners, Comet, a retailer of electronics. I don’t have details but according to Ars Technica, Comet sold recovery CDs to customers against M$’s wishes.
I used to have a paperweight sitting on my desk that read something like “Robert H. Lane, appointed President of Commodore Computers....” It was the sort of thing that they gave to executives. A brass plaque of their appointment as it appeared in the Wall Street Journal or the Globe and Mail.
In its first acquisition of 2012, IBM has announced the purchase of cloud-based software testing platform Green Hat. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
(Reuters) - MF Global unloaded hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of securities to Goldman Sachs in the days leading up to its collapse, according to two former MF Global employees with direct knowledge of the transactions. But it did not immediately receive payment from its clearing firm and lender, JPMorgan Chase & Co , one of the sources said.
The sale of securities to Goldman occurred on October 27, just days before MF Global Holdings Ltd filed for bankruptcy on October 31, the ex-employees said. One of the employees said the transaction was cleared with JPMorgan Chase.
Maybe blacking out their Web sites would be over-kill, but the Internet giants could use other joint tactics to kill Stop Online Piracy Act off.