Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 23/2/2012: Ubuntu Uses Qt, Many New Android Devices



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • Why the World Is Desperately Seeking Linux Talent
    A recent study from The Linux Foundation has found that Linux talent is a hot commodity among many hiring companies. The conclusions made sense to many on the Linux blogosphere. "Linux and open source are becoming strategic investments in many companies and have been for years," said Chris Travers of the LedgerSMB project. Others, however, took issue with the study's methodology.


  • Transparency Launches as Linux of Drug Development
    When Tomasz Sablinski was working in pharmaceutical R&D, he was often frustrated by the demand for secrecy in the clinical trials process—a misdirected effort, he says, to keep competitors in the dark about what drug companies were up to. “The price you pay when you hide what you’re doing is you only get feedback from a precious few people,” he says. “There is very little new blood in the ideation process.”


  • Desktop





  • Kernel Space

    • With Many Eyeballs, All Bugs Are Shallow
      In his seminal work The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond put forward the claim that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” He dubbed this Linus’ Law, in honor of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. It sounds like a fairly self-evident statement, but as the Wikipedia page points out the notion has its detractors. Michael Howard and David LeBlanc claim in their 2003 book Writing Secure Code “most people just don’t know what to look for.”


    • Linux 3.4 Kernel Set To Speed-Up Intel's GPU Driver
      While the Linux 3.3 kernel is still weeks away from release, there's more building up to look forward to with its successor: the Linux 3.4 kernel. A few months down the road when Linux 3.4 makes it out, there will be some additional Intel performance improvements.


    • Graphics Stack

      • DRM Base PRIME Support Part Of VGEM Work
        Remember the proof of concept PRIME multi-GPU rendering / GPU offloading work that was being hacked on two years ago? Work on it has been resurrected and could make it into the kernel when the VGEM driver is ready.


      • Intel 12.02 Package Proclaims Stable Ivy Bridge
        The 12.02 graphics driver is basically what was Intel's quarterly package release under a new numbering scheme. Instead of being the "2012Q1" Linux driver package, it's now 12.02 to reflect its release in February of 2012. Back in October I wrote about Intel working on a new release cycle and this is part of their new development process.






  • Applications



  • Distributions

    • Pardus Kurumsal 2 for a Second Time
      A few days ago, I experienced a motherboard failure. This gave me ample opportunity to do a fresh Linux installation. The first disk on hand was Pardus Kurumsal 2 for AMD64. I thought it would be interesting to give the distribution another spin.

      Upon a first boot attempt of the Pardus Kurumsal 2 installation disc, I was met with a black screen and a blinking cursor. Using ALT+Left, I determined that this was merely a failure of Xorg to start. The disc was automatically set to attempt usage of the best drivers possible, but at the time of the Pardus release, the NVIDIA GT520 was no where near the market. Running X -configure and then setting the driver manually to vesa allowed me to run the installer without further complication. Although, this problem did reassert itself after installation and upon the first boot of the newly installed system. This time, I wanted to have higher resolutions and improved performance, which prompted me to fire up Lynx. After navigating to nvidia.com, I downloaded the driver I needed. The next thing is the installation of the Pardus equivalent to Slackware's D package set as well as the required kernel headers for module building.



    • Red Hat Family



    • Debian Family



      • Derivatives



        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • 10 New Features Added to Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin


          • Canonical: No plans for public cloud
            "Canonical doesn't intend to offer a public cloud as part of our business strategy," Jane Silber, the company's chief executive, said on Wednesday. "We have no plans to do that right now."

            Because of Canonical's close ties with the OpenStack cloud project, it doesn't want to go down the Red Hat route, Silber said.


          • Interview with Gema Gomez-Solano


          • Ubuntu One Switches To Qt
            Ubuntu 12.04 development hits the User Interface freeze tonight. This is also evident from all the user interface updates trying to meet the deadline. One such update brought a significant update to the Ubuntu One control panel.

            We all know about Ubuntu One, sync service developed in house by Canonical. In this update, the Ubuntu One developers have released a new interface based on the toolkit QT. This new interface is going to be the standard interface on all platforms like Windows, Ubuntu and MAC OS. A step in trying to bring about some integrity and commonality in the Ubuntu One usage on all platforms. It also helps with the Ubuntu One branding.










  • Devices/Embedded





Free Software/Open Source



Leftovers

  • Economist Notices That The US Is Getting Buried Under Costly, Useless Over-Regulation




  • Finance

    • Oakland's Toxic Deal with Wall Street
      Although last week's $26 billion settlement between the Obama administration, attorneys general from 49 states, and five large banks over unscrupulous lending practices appears to have been deeply flawed, it may provide a modicum of relief for two million homeowners nationwide, including a half-million Californians. The agreement, however, does nothing for cities like Oakland that are trapped in expensive and toxic financial deals with some of Wall Street's biggest players. Oakland's bad lending deal is with Goldman Sachs, and it's already cost the city $26 million. By 2021, the total pricetag for local taxpayers could reach $46 million.




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Wisconsin GOP Goes After Equal Pay for Equal Work
      Late in the evening, on February 22, the Wisconsin Legislature turned back the clock gutting key provisions of Wisconsin's Equal Pay Enforcement Act (Act 20).

      Rep. Chris Taylor (D-Madison), a long time women's rights advocate lamented: "It's like we're going back to 1912. We are fighting the same fight our mothers fought, just to be treated equally."




  • Censorship

    • ICE Considered One Of The Worst Places To Work In The Federal Government
      Last month, we noted the odd propaganda film from ICE director John Morton, in which he seemed to be trying to pat himself on the back and pump up the morale of ICE agents for their hard work in illegally censoring the internet. Perhaps it's because he knew that ICE agents apparently hate working there. An anonymous person pointed us to the news that in a recent ranking of government agencies, ICE ranked very near the bottom -- 222 out of 240 agencies. It seems that morale isn't particularly high there.




  • Privacy



  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Time runs out for timezone lawsuit
      The Electronic Frontier Foundation is touting a victory in a copyright lawsuit that had the potential to shut down the database that all Linux and UNIX-based platforms and many time-based applications use to keep track of the ever-changing global timezones.


    • Copyrights







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