Links 7/1/2012: Red Hat HQ in Raleigh, Linux Mint 12 Reviews, New OLPC
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2012-01-07 12:10:36 UTC
- Modified: 2012-01-07 12:10:36 UTC
Contents
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I've written recently about main points on migrating from Windows to GNU/Linux. Those reasons included one which pertains to the software included with the GNU/Linux distributions, and replacing those proprietary products with those on GNU/Linux that you will never need to re-buy or pay upgrades for again in the future. But how is this done? With time and patience, which not everybody has. But if you do, it will pay off dearly over the years you stay on the open source road. One warning though, migrating is not for the timid, it IS a lot of work.
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Desktop
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On The H, in 2011, 25.36% of visitors used Linux, 57.21% used Windows and 7.89% used Mac OS X.
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The Qualcomm dual core processor offers up to 16GB of memory and uses a custom Linux-based operating system.
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There is no doubt that Linux is seeing healthy adoption at the server level, and arriving in many variants and embedded applications, but it's worth noting that it is seeing growth at the desktop level as well. Netmarketshare has published its latest round of statistics on desktop Linux usage, with data updated through December of 2011. While Linux has desktop market share of under two percent, its share did grow at a very healthy clip last year.
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Server
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System administrators who need a Linux system will often opt to purchase a bare-metal system and install Linux on the system their way. After all, Linux folks are a rogue, radical ilk. They think differently. They administer servers differently. And, they purchase systems differently. The CXO, purchasing agent or other money-responsible party, on the other hand, has the corporate trust to buy the best available technology at the best price he can negotiate. That's a tremendous burden.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has signed off on the latest release of the Linux kernel, version 3.2, and it contains several additions aimed at power-management. The new code modules have been submitted over the past year by engineers working at Samsung and Texas Instruments, among others.
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The Butter/Better/B-tree Filesystem, Btrfs, is supposedly destined to become the default Linux filesystem. What makes it special, and what's wrong with good old tried-and-true Ext2/3/4?
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Graphics Stack
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Intel's experimental "Sandy Bridge New Acceleration" (SNA) acceleration architecture is a constant work-in-progress that even in the past two weeks over the holidays has received more than 100 changes. How though is this new 2D acceleration architecture fairing these days rather than the stock UXA configuration? In this article are our first Intel SNA benchmarks of 2012 when enabling this architecture.
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Applications
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The Linux New Media Awards are back! Organized by the publisher of Linux Magazine and Linux Pro Magazine, these awards recognize projects, organisations, people, and companies for their outstanding contributions to the Linux/FLOSS community.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Oxygen font family is already available for testing (currently in alpha!) and comes with regular, bold and monospace variants, however, only the basic character shapes are done for now and the font is currently using the basic 'auto spacing' from FontForge.
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New Releases
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Version 0.10 of Tails, the live distribution of Linux that aims to protect privacy and anonymity, has been released. Tails is essentially a Debian Linux, combined with Tor and other privacy or anonymity respecting applications, which can be booted and used from either a USB stick or CD. All internet traffic is routed through the Tor network, which should make all communications anonymous. Tails, an acronym for "The Amnesic Incognito Live System", was inspired by the now abandoned Incognito LiveCD.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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“I regret to inform you that none of the recapitalization schemes that were proposed at the meeting of shareholders on December 5 was accepted,” wrote Mandriva CEO Dominic Loucougain in a letter to shareholders dated Dec. 23, 2011, and published on the Mandriva Forum on Friday.
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Red Hat Family
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The City of Raleigh announced today during a press conference hosted by Mayor Nancy McFarlane that Red Hat will move its global headquarters from NC State University’s Centennial Campus to the RBC Bank Tower in downtown Raleigh.
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As Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) prepares to move its headquarters to downtown Raleigh and expand its operations, the company is also trying to build an open-source community in the city.
Chief Executive Jim Whitehurst said Friday that he has already persuaded another open-source software development company to open a 12-person office in Raleigh, but he declined to identify the firm.
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Mayor Nancy McFarlane formally welcomed Red Hat to downtown, saying Friday that the software company's presence will help Raleigh become a national hub for open-source technology.
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When Red Hat began a search to expand in fall 2009, reports indicated they were considering sites in other states as well as a site in the Tobacco District of Durham County. For the past several months, three governments have offered incentives to the open source giant Red Hat to retain its presence.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In 2010 I wrote about the challenge Canonical faced in revamping the design of Ubuntu, and later looked at the tough road they had ahead of them with Unity and the Community. In the past few days I’ve revisited the operating system to see how far they had progressed, and while the default look of Unity is beautiful, the system still faces significant challenges.
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Flavours and Variants
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When Ubuntu decided last year to abruptly replace the familiar Gnome UI with its own Unity interface, many users were upset. And according to the latest numbers from DistroWatch, Linux Mint has been the major beneficiary, so we decided to test Linux Mint 12.
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Until the release of Ubuntu 11.04, Gnome 2.x seemed to have become the standard desktop interface for Linux. It was the default for Ubuntu, Fedora and Linux Mint, three of the biggest distributions, and many others relied on it too. Of course, lots of people use KDE, but since they released version 4, things seemed to have swung in Gnome’s favour.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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One Laptop Per Child's XO-3 tablet is ready to ship after years in the making, and working units will be shown next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte said.
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One great advantage of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) being open-source is that it looks like the whole run of the tablet market—from low-end to high-class—will soon be running Google's mobile OS.
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Unattended Resolution in A Nutshell – OS is an open source software that will let you perform Asset Managment, Monitoring, Software Distribution,Unattended tasks. It’s free for both personal and commercial use and released under GPL license.
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The death of tape storage has been loudly proclaimed for what seems like decades now. But a recent breakthrough in tape management could breathe new life into the long-running technology and change archiving and even long-term backup as we know it.
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The tech industry went through a lot of ups and downs last year, and our ever-expanding FOSS world too, wasn’t all that immune from these huge changes. From the introduction of Unity to the sudden rise of Mint, the Linux community went through a game-changing phase last year.
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Events
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Web Browsers
Chrome
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Mozilla
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The year 2012 will likely be a milestone for Mozilla's Firefox web browser, as the open source group aims to further accelerate web innovation. Among the ways that Mozilla plans on improving Firefox in 2012 is by way of a number of efforts that could make the browser more secure for a greater number of users.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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Over the past year the Sunlight Foundation has tried to make state legislative data more accessible through a project called Open State.
The project, based at OpenStates.org, has brought together web developers to scrape data from legislative websites — everything from names of elected officials to bill descriptions and vote counts — to make the process more open and easier to double check.
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Openness/Sharing
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A fascinating trend in recent years has been the gradual move from a presumption of secrecy to one of openness, transparency and sharing. This began with free software/open source, and has progressively spread to include areas such as open content, open access, open data, open science and open government.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Today, the American Petroleum Institute unveiled its 2012 Vote 4 Energy astroturf campaign, centered around a major election-linked CNN advertising package that PolluterWatch helped expose last month with audio recordings from inside the studio. Vote 4 Energy attempts to show 'real Americans' who are 'energy voters,' meaning they are committing to vote for whichever politicians support Big Oil's dirty agenda in this election year. Typical. API also bought the back page of the A section of the Washington Post with a Vote 4 Energy ad, space that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to normal people.
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Privacy
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THE federal government has outsourced law enforcement surveillance of environmental and other protest groups, with a key monitoring service operating from an inconspicuous Melbourne apartment block.
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Civil Rights
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Rolling Stone‘s Michael Hastings — whose 2010 article on Gen. Stanley McChrystal ended the Afghanistan War commander’s career by accurately reporting numerous controversial statements made in a series of interviews — embodies the pure journalistic ethos. Some of the most celebrated establishment military reporters in America attacked Hastings for that article on the ground that it violated a sacred trust between Generals and war reporters (The New York Times‘ John Burns), and even baselessly insinuated that he fabricated the quotes and then went on to impugn his patriotism when compared to The Great General (CBS News’ Lara Logan).
Even worse, The Washington Post, ABC News and others irresponsibly published totally anonymous military sources claiming with no basis that Hastings violated ground-rule agreements for the interviews.
Recent Techrights' Posts
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- "The talk is open to the public and attendance is free. Registration is not required."
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- This impacts a lot more than access to the licences
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- [Teaser] Angel Aledo Lopez the Manipulator (Nepotism, Poll Rigging, and Other EPO Corruption)
- We'll discuss this later today or tomorrow, based on internal EPO material
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- Nothing lasts forever
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- It's an effort to divide and destroy, not build
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- Links for the day
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- Nothing of merit here, just more slop
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- Links for the day
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- Faking "growth" is just about as bad as forgery
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- Something has gone terribly wrong in GNOME
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- Links for the day
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- It's good to see him attracting vast audiences
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- there are good reasons to pay with cash, not limited to privacy
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- If you're going to viciously attack somebody, make sure your arguments are rock-solid
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- How does it feel to depend on Microsoft?
- Yesterday's "Distinguished Lecture" by Richard Stallman Possibly Attended by Close to 1,000 People
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- interest in Software Freedom must have grown
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- Links for the day
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- Photos from yesterday evening [...] It looks like it was a very successful event
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- The EPO started the SLAPPs after we had published a few hundreds of articles; we've since then published close to 6,000 because the attacks on us emboldened insiders to help us
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- "They missed a great opportunity to shut up." -Jacques Chirac
- Brett Wilson LLP has been trying to cheat the legal system many times
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- news from Forbes became very scarce
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- Underpaid, unqualified, inexperienced and incompatible people are already recruited to replace veteran examiners
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- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
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- Go listen to Richard Stahlmann
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- Richard Stallman at TUM on 21.10.2025 18:00, MW2001
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- Links for the day
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- At this stage, Brett Wilson LLP is in my humble opinion acting in contempt of the Court
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- It seems abundantly clear that Google News and Google in general participates in the slop epidemic
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- Over at Tux Machines...
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