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Links 18/1/2012: Btrfs In Linux 3.3, Oxygen-gtk3 1.0, Woz Says Android Better Than hypePhone





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • Linux should copy Apple on user rapport
    The Linux operating system and other open software projects are under threat because they've failed to develop the sympathy for users manifested by companies such as Apple, according to luminary Bruce Perens.

    Perens created the Open Source Definition and was founder or co-founder of projects including the Open Source Initiative and the Linux Standard Base, to name just two.

    In his keynote address to the Linux.conf.au (LCA) 2012 conference in Ballarat yesterday he delivered a blunt warning.


  • Desktop





  • Kernel Space

    • Linux for the 'Longterm
      The Linux 3.0.y kernel has been deemed to be the new longterm kernel support release. Kernel Developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has pledged to maintain the 3.0.y branch for at least the next two years. The first Linux 3.0 kernel was released in July 2011. Since then, it has been updated 17 times, with the most recent release being the 3.0.17 kernel that Kroah-Hartman released on January 12.


    • Are Your Linux Skills Right for HPC Jobs?
      Do you have what it takes for that Linux job with an HPC vendor you've got your eye on? Brent Welch, the director of software architecture at Panasas, talks about the role Linux plays in HPC at Panasas and the in-demand technical skills supercomputing suppliers need from job applicants.

      Last year, Panasas, a provider of high performance parallel storage solutions for technical applications and big data workloads, moved into new corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and expanded its team by more than 50 percent in areas such as engineering and sales. Panasas hasn't been the only supercomputing-focused company growing and hiring recently. In fact, high performance computing (HPC) vendors across the industry are hiring, but they are running up against a shortage of skilled talent.


    • Btrfs In Linux 3.3 Brings Reworked Balance Code
      On the same day as talking about Microsoft's new Resilient File System, the pull request for Btrfs in the Linux 3.3 kernel was sent in and subsequently pulled. This file-system update does bring a few notable changes.

      Btrfs with Google Snappy compression support didn't make it for Linux 3.3 (it was a last-minute request and there's at least LZO and Gzip file-system compression already available), but there are some notable changes. However, the 3.3 changes also aren't as noticeable as the beefy Btrfs changes found in Linux 3.2.




  • Applications



  • Desktop Environments

    • Oxygen-gtk3 1.0 is out
      The first release of KDE's Oxygen widget theme, ported to GTK 3.X applications, has been uploaded to kde ftp servers on Tuesday January 17 2012 and is available for download here. It is called oxygen-gtk3.

      This release is still experimental, notably due to the small amount of GTK 3 applications it has been tested on. Still, since snapshots of the running git repository were already being circulated around for some time, we deemed it appropriate to release the current code, if only because it would make book-keeping and bug tracking easier. Also, we expect rapid progress as bug reports are being filled by users.




  • Distributions



    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva Delays Bankruptcy Decision
        In a short post today Jean-Manuel Croset said that recent events have lead the failing company to postpone any final decisions for a week. Earlier this month a letter to shareholders stated that Mandriva would have to close its doors by January 16 without an influx of capital.

        January 16 came and went without word while anxious users paced the floors over at the Mandriva Forums. Then earlier today Croset published his post. Unfortunately, it's a little short on detail.




    • Debian Family



      • Derivatives



        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 248


          • Improving Battery Life in Ubuntu Precise 12.04 LTS
            art of my focus this cycle is to see where we can make power saving improvements for Ubuntu Precise 12.04 LTS. There has been a lot of anecdotal evidence of specific machines or power saving features behaving poorly over the past few cycles. So, armed with a 6.5 digit precision multimeter from Fluke I've been measuring the power consumption on various laptops in different test scenarios to try and answer some outstanding questions:

            * Is it safe to enable Matthew Garrett's PCIe ASPM fix? * Are the power savings suggested by PowerTop useful and can we reliably enabled any of these in pm-utils? * How accurate are the ACPI battery readings to estimate power consumption? * Do the existing pm-utils power.d scripts still make sense? * Which is better for power saving: i386, i386-pae or amd64? * How much power does the laptop backlight really use? * Does halving the mouse input rate really save that much more power? * Should we re-enable Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM)? * Are there any misbehaving applications that are consuming too much power? * What are the root causes of HDD wake-ups * Which applications and daemons are creating unnecessary wake events? * How much does the MSR_IA32_ENERGY_PERF_BIAS save us?


          • Flavours and Variants

            • ZevenOS - Does it recapture the flavor of BeOS?
              BeOS was a much loved and highly advanced desktop operating system that ceased active development in 2001. ZevenOS is a Ubuntu 11.10 based system (with a bit of help from Xubuntu) that attempts to recapture some of the BeOS look and feel.












  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux-ready multitouch PC has huge 65-inch screen, quad-core CPU
      Ideum announced a "multitouch wall" that responds to as many as 32 simultaneous touches and will support Linux in March. The MT65 Presenter has a 65-inch screen with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution, a 2.2GHz Core i7-2720QM processor, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD (solid state disk), and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 graphics card, according to the company.


    • Pushing the Limits of Price on Small Cheap Computers
      A system suitable for embedded, educational and R&D applications has been developed based on ARM and minimal hardware (no PSU) for $15, about the price of a box of copy-paper. The idea is to have a complete stack from circuit-board layout, CPU and OS completely open and produced by cooperation with Free Software proponents and Chinese hardware design and production.


    • Phones



      • Android

        • Woz admits Android does things better than iPhone
          Although he still carries the iPhone 4S as his main handset, Steve concedes that Android is making serious headway over Apple.


        • Motorola DROID 3 Now $99
          With the announcement of the Motorola Droid 4 Verizon’s looking to push its predecessor off of store shelves and quickly. They’re now offering the 3G-only Motorola DROID 3 for just $99. It’s a decent deal for a great phone if you don’t care for 4G.










Free Software/Open Source



  • Who can afford Open Source?
    The reason why I asked Francesco permission to publish his outburst is to stimulate the whole FOSS community to share thoughts and experiences on this topic, to find out how general the problem he signals is in 2012. Personally, I still remember hearing, during a Linux Day in Rome almost ten years ago, somebody commenting a talk about the FOSS used in, and developed by, the Bank of Italy asking to himself: “so, in order to develop FOSS you must belong to a big organization?”

    What do you think? Do you agree with Francesco? What is your experience in similar cases? How general is Francesco’s conclusion? Besides, do you too, think that current FOSS products for schol management lack usability?


  • LCA2012: Bruce Perens Says Open Source Needs To Do More
    Wearing a suit when the rest of the 500-strong lecture theatre were dressed in shorts, jandals, and old conference T Shirts, Bruce Perens introduced himself by announcing his clothes as a lesson: Linux needs to be more outward facing.


  • Open source needed to save democracy
    Open-source software developers face greater risks today than they ever have, to the point where the constraints inherent in proprietary software now represent a risk to democracy, according to one of the movement's leading figures.


  • Tilde-D Detection Focuses on Coding Anomalies
    An open-source tool from the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security hunts for Duqu using telltale signs left behind by the Tilde-D creation toolkit.


  • Digital Delights – THe French, Open Source And Five Strips
    SourceDelight: The Droid Comic Viewer for Android systems that reads CBR & CBZ files has gone “open source” after its millionth download, to improve the software.


  • Web Browsers

    • Pushing the 3D Boundaries in WebKit with CSS 3D and Three.js
      Sometimes, you need to see what a technology can do before you can fully appreciate it. Take, for instance, CSS 3D and Three.js. It's one thing to hear about doing 3D elements for Web sites, and another to see them integrated into a well-designed site. Take, for example, Steven Wittens' Acko.net redesign.


    • Mozilla





  • Databases

    • Making the transition from RDBMS to Hadoop
      If your organization seems to be a good fit for Hadoop, you can download the open source software that comprises the data framework and try it out with relative ease.




  • BSD

    • Linux lovers should try FreeBSD for stable systems


      Say the words "free and open source operating system", and Linux is probably what springs to most people's minds.

      What many don't even realise, however, is that there's another free and open source operating system out there that's also based on Unix and that's also widely used on servers around the world. It's called FreeBSD, and a brand new version of the software was just released on Thursday.




  • Public Services/Government

    • With Code.Nasa.Gov, Agency Steps Up Hunt for Its Open-Source Software Projects
      The Kepler space observatory slowly trails further and further behind the Earth as it orbits the Sun, scanning a sliver of the galaxy in search of Earth-like planets. A specially designed telescope, 0.95 meters in diameter, the Kepler instrument, per NASA, "stares at the same star field for the entire mission and continuously and simultaneously monitors the brightnesses of more than 100,000 stars for the life of the mission—3.5 or more years."




  • Openness/Sharing



  • Programming





Leftovers

  • Google to Murdoch- This is just nonsense
    Well, Google has fired back and called the accusations "nonsense."

    "This is just nonsense," wrote a Google spokeswoman. "Last year we took down 5 million infringing Web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads...We fight pirates and counterfeiters every day."


  • Myths and Realities of IT


  • Security



    • Apache Tomcat developers advise updates to avoid DoS
      The Apache Tomcat developers are advising users of the 7.0.x, 6.0.x and 5.5.x branches of the Java servlet and JSP container to update to the latest released versions 7.0.23, 6.0.35 and 5.5.35. Recent investigations revealed inefficiencies in how large numbers of parameters and parameter values were handled by Tomcat.




  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Commission seizes power to adopt certain measures blink-blink
      I have no idea what that is about, but it seems important. And in fact it is, the amendments concern “delegated acts”, where the Commission could take regulatory action without prior consultation of the legislator. We really should really look up Article 270 of the Lisbon Treaty regime…




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights

      • Lamar Smith & Bosses Call Wikipedia Blackout As Stunt


      • Wikipedia blackout tries to show SOPA is "unconstitutional' and 'dangerous'


      • Tell the EU regulator about your Internet restrictions!


      • This Site Has Been Shut Down Due To Possible Copyright Infringement


      • Who, besides Wikipedia, is going dark and why
        There is nothing wrong with your Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. The reason you won’t be able to use Wikipedia, Reddit, or numerous other Web sites on January 18th is that these Web sites have decided to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA).


      • Wikipedia, Other Sites to Protest Anti-Piracy Bills with Blackouts
        Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is warning students to do their online research before midnight Wednesday when the world's largest online encyclopedia will block access to its English language site for 24 hours. Wikipedia's worldwide blackout to its English-language site is part of a larger online protest against the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts being considered by Congress.


      • Google to join Wednesday's anti-SOPA protest
        Google will join Wednesday's anti-SOPA and anti–PROTECT IP Act (aka PIPA) protest by noting its opposition to the bills on its home page.

        "Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the internet," a Google spokeswoman told The Reg in an email. "So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our US home page."


      • January 18 captured: A SOPA blackout gallery
        I'll be updating this post throughout the day with more images of sites that have joined the SOPA blackout. Leave a comment with any site you'd like to be added to the gallery, which will remain here after the blackout is over.


      • Google Goes Big With Its SOPA/PIPA Protests; Blacks Out Logo


      • Why Canadians Should Participate in the SOPA/PIPA Protest
        Some of the Internet's leading websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and BoingBoing, will go dark tomorrow to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The U.S. bills have generated massive public protest over proposed provisions that could cause enormous harm to the Internet and freedom of speech. My blog will join the protest by going dark tomorrow. While there is little that Canadians can do to influence U.S. legislation, there are many reasons why I think it is important for Canadians to participate.


      • Black Wednesday: In Protest of SOPA, Darken the Web


      • SOPA protest swells as Google, Scribd, and Wordpress join
        "Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet," a Google spokesman told Ars. "So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our US home page."


      • U.S. movie piracy claims mostly fiction
        In recent weeks, Canadians have been subjected to a steady stream of reports asserting that Canada has become the world's leading source of movie piracy. Pointing to the prevalence of illegal camcording – a practice that involves videotaping a movie directly off the screen in a theatre and transferring the copy on to DVDs for commercial sale – the major Hollywood studios are threatening to delay the Canadian distribution of their top movies.


      • The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
        Tomorrow, a number of very high profile websites will go dark in protest of the proposed U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act. Though the White House has since made it clear that the President will not support the bill, the fact that it was proposed at all is an indicator of the threat the Internet faces. And, according to this post from Michele Neylon, SOPA may not be quite dead yet.


      • ACTA

        • FFII note on the Legal Service’s Opinion on ACTA
          We welcome the decision to release the European Parliament legal service’s opinion on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). We have compared the legal service’s opinion with multiple academic opinions on ACTA and some civil society analyses.










Recent Techrights' Posts

They Say That People Are Afraid of or Worried About "Hey Hi", But the Worriers Should be the Fools Who Invested in It
At the end of the day nobody should worry more than those who invested their money in this bubble
Throwing Away "Old" Computers (Mozilla and Other Climate Deniers)
Mozilla is not leftist
 
Xubuntu Site Compromised
Let's hope it is not a security breach
Links 10/09/2025: Retaliation at Facebook and Microsoft Reveals Almost 100 Security Holes
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Gemini Links 10/09/2025: Annihilation of Self, The Future Eaters, and Leaving Academia
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Harassment evidence: franceinfo's Clara Lainé report on Ubisoft prosecution
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 10/09/2025: Microsoft Layoffs in "RTO" Clothing and Windows TCO, GitHub TCO
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Blaming Everything on China
TikTok works for China. GAFAM works for fascists.
People Get Tired of "Hey Hi" (AI), Unlike the Subservient Money-Obsessed Media That Gets Paid to Pretend This Bubble Still Matters
"crash will be way bigger than dot.com burst in 90s. and that was Internet, actually transformative technology, not this expensive AI toy with direct dependency on the energy input which is not scalable"
Brett Wilson LLP Accepts That the Serial Strangler From Microsoft Filed a Case That Also Implicates My Wife (Everything is Connected)
They used to pretend that there were two separate cases
10 Reasons to Disable (or Enable) UEFI Secure Boot
Tomorrow the "trusted corporation" Microsoft will see a certificate expire
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Over at Tux Machines...
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Jim AllowHurst (Whitehurst) is meanwhile promoting Microsoft's agenda from within other companies
statCounter Sees GNU/Linux Exceeding 10% in Bulgaria This Month
What can Microsoft still do to stop GNU/Linux?
Dark Patterns
Microsoft saying "security" is like a Convicted Felon in the White House saying "law and order".
It's Almost Fall (Autumn)
To "Facebook prison" you are bound
Bruce Schneier About "Secure Boot"
Bruce Schneier isn't a fan of "Secure Boot"
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RMS Told Microsoft to Stop 'Secure Boot' (He Even Went There to Say That), But They Didn't Listen
Dr. Stallman (RMS) assumed that speaking to sociopaths would work
What Richard Stallman Told Me About 'Secure' Boot in 2012
"if the user doesn't control the keys, then it's a kind of shackle"
Those Who Helped Microsoft Weaponise "Secure Boot" Against GNU/Linux and BSDs Are Fleeing
Microsofters doing what they do best: they evade accountability
Simple is Better, Simplicity is Power
That is "the advantage of having commodity GNU/Linux systems," an associate notes
Much Ado About Nonsense
Microsoft Lunduke is still all dramatisation and sensationalism
Current Events in France
It needs to dump Microsoft and other GAFAM (US) giants, move to Free software
Further Media Cut-downs
media reporting about the media being cut
Links 09/09/2025: US-Korea Tensions and Meta Whistleblowers
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Gemini Links 09/09/2025: Moon Eclipse and ROOPHLOCH Reports
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Links 09/09/2025: “Torrents of Hate” and Political Crisis in France
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Gemini Links 09/09/2025: "Dedigitizing" and Forgejo on FreeBSD
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Google News (Not Just Google Search) Lets Itself by Gamed by One Slopfarm - to the Point Almost Half of "Linux" News is Bot-Produced Plagiarism (LLM Slop With Slop Images)
That says a lot about what Google thinks of quality, even in Google News
Bill Gates-Funded Media Inadvertently Refutes the Microsoft Lie That in 2025 Microsoft Had Just Two Waves of Layoffs
There were about 12 rounds of layoffs so far in 2025
Official SUSE Blog Still Uses LLM Slop (Bots) to Make Fake Articles (Marketing)
The company is all about sound bites
Companies Realise That Slop Doesn't Work as Advertised, Accordingly Dump It
"Hype dims as a country-wide survey of US corporations shows a sudden drop-off in AI use among firms with more than 250 employees."
Microsoft-Funded Lawsuits Against Critics of UEFI 'Secure Boot'
Remember that no company (or law firm) ever survives collaborations with Microsoft
From theregister.co.uk to theregister.com (US) to The Register MS (Run by Microsoft Operatives) and theregister.ai
The best way to break this racket (or cycle of hype and harm) is to break the chains of funding
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Culture of Censorship Necessitates More Speech
The OSI bans dissent or people who merely point out that the OSI is abusive
How to Reach Us Discreetly (Other Than Encrypted E-mail)
We're still managing to maintain a 100% source protection record. We soon turn 19.
LLMs Are Vastly Worse Than a Waste of Energy and the Externalities Are Huge
Worse than just higher power bills for everybody
LLMs Versus Search (Not Replacing Search But Engaging in DDoS Attacks Against Web Sites That Permit Searching)
The state of the Web isn't just bad; it's utterly terrible
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IRC logs for Monday, September 08, 2025
It's Only the Second Week of September and Already Two Waves of Layoffs at Microsoft, Slopfarms and Microsoft-Funded Sites Spin It as "AI Investments" Rather Than Commercial Failure
A very large third one expected next week
The UEFI 9/11 - Part IX - Shunning Old Computers (in 2023 the Certificate Was Updated/Overridden, Underlying Aim May Be Herding/Forcing People to Get TPM and Other 'Novel' Restrictions)
the "upgrade treadmill"
Rumour: Second Wave of Microsoft Mass Layoffs in September to Commence Third Week of September
That basically answers questions like, "Any specific date or time of the month?"
If Your Machine Still Has "Secure Boot" Enabled, Then Microsoft Has a de Facto Kill Switch (Even If Your Machine Doesn't Have Windows and Never Had Windows)
It is not incorrect to call UEFI 'secure boot' a "kill switch"
Gemini Links 08/09/2025: Reality, ROOPHLOCH 2025, and Writing Another Gemini Client
Links for the day
Updating Firmware is Not the Solution But Only Additional Risk, Disable "Secure Boot" Today
firmware blobs are buggy, secret, impossible to audit, and barely tested
Microsoft Tim's DevClass (Part of The Register MS/Situation Publishing) is Full of Slop
Looking at many sites that are full of slop images is becoming an eye sore and hallmark of text too likely generated by LLMs or 'assisted' (tainted) by them
Microsoft Trying to Fake Demand for Slop. At What Cost?
That's a giant demotion and broken promises
Reddit is Corporate Propaganda
To make matters worse, Reddit ousted many original moderators
Jeff Geerling Shocked to Discover Many Metrics in YouTube Are Fake (His Audience Turns Out to be Much Smaller)
Maybe self-host all videos, don't rely on Google's "FOMO" cheating (addiction based on false assumptions)
Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant and Kryptonite/Garlic to Vampires
Transparency (sometimes described by words like "Sunlight" or "Truth") is paramount
The Register MS Uses Slop in Articles About Slop
we are fairly certain it's slop or CG based on other people's work
Visiting a Web Page or a Public URL Should be Safe, Predictable, and Benign
It's probably too late to "fix" the Web
The Register MS (Situation Publishing) is Paid to Spread Mindless Hype for the "Hey Hi" Ponzi Scheme and That's a Serious Problem
"Sponsored by Zoom."
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EPO Workers Point Out that the EPO is Destroying the Planet Under the Guise of "Hey Hi" (It Also Grants Many Invalid Patents Illegally
On 12 March and 16 June 2025, staff representation met with the administration in the Local Occupational Health, Safety and Ergonomics Committee (LOHSEC) in Munich
Turn Off Microsoft's Restricted Boot ("Secure Boot")
We're still running a series on this issue
Social Control Media Sites Have Become Bot Farms (Not Limited to LLMs and Automation)
linkedin.com was nothing but trouble and losses for Microsoft
Deep in Debt With the Magnitude of Losses Quickly Growing, Microsoft "Open" "Hey Hi" Now Uses Broadcom for Vapourware, Pretending It'll Do OK Next Year
At some stage it'll collapse
You Can Tell Microsoft is in Trouble When Its Own Fans and Staff Blast it
"Microsoft sinks billions into chasing artificial intelligence fads to hype up its share price."
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Microsoft customers experience problems
Lawyers Who Think They Are Online Assassins Don't Deserve a Licence to Operate
they've become a laughing stock in their "sector"
Microsoft Windows Fell to 3.9% "Market Share" in Bahamas
Based on statCounter
How the European Union (EU) Fell Out of Love With Free/Libre Software
Lots of bribery
Over at Tux Machines...
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