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Links 21/3/2012: Fedora 18 Talked About, Many New Android/Linux Devices





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • Exploring DIY Linux Router Distros
    Router lockups have been a problem for me ever since I got my first 802.11G Router in 2004. Since then, we've seen companies roll out supposed "power user" routers or routers meant for "gamers," but for some reason not a single one has alleviated the problem of having to reset the router after running for a few days. After my new "gaming" router locked up while refreshing a server list for a multiplayer game, it was the last straw and I began searching for something a little more robust.


  • New Universal USB Installer for Linux
    The Universal USB Installer converts live CDs of various Linux distributions to run on USB keys.


  • Desktop

    • Past Year of GNU/Linux in Germany
      According to Statcounter, it’s more like 40%, but still quite good. Perhaps more of those units are going into homes rather than businesses. Doubling time at 40% per annum is about two years.






  • Kernel Space

    • Linus Torvalds: The King of Geeks (And Dad of 3)
      The license plate on Linus Torvalds’ Mercedes SLK convertible says it all. The frame running around the outside of the plate reads “Mr. Linux. King of Geeks.” But the plate itself says “Dad of 3.”

      If you meet Linus Torvalds, he comes off as a mild-mannered, down-to-earth Finnish-American. He lives with his wife Tove, three kids, a cat, a dog, a snake, a goldfish, a bunny and a pet rat in a comfortable 6,000 square foot home just north of Portland’s tony Lake Oswego neighborhood. The house is yellow — his favorite color — and so’s the Mercedes.


    • Linux guru: re-merging of Android into kernel eases sysdev a bit
      Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman said the reintroduction of 7,000 lines of Android code into the Linux 3.3 kernel will make it somewhat easier for OEMs creating Android systems. App developers? Not so much


    • Graphics Stack





  • Applications



  • Desktop Environments



    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Direct Rendering For Qt Compositor & More


      • Kdenlive: Superior Video Editor ... not just for pros
        Video editing has evolved from a niche market in the computer world to something that computers are simply expected to do. It's a tall order to be everything to everyone. But if any video editing software comes close to that mark, it's Kdenlive—a KDE Applications star. With a strong commitment and a plan for making major improvements, the Kdenlive team is raising money. Please help out if you can.


      • KDevelop 4.3 released with basic C++11
        After about nine months of extensive development, the KDevelop team is happy to announce the immediate availability of KDevelop 4.3. As usual, this feature release comes packed with new features, bug fixes and improved performance.






  • Distributions

    • Linpus Lite Desktop 1.7 review


    • JoldzicOS 3.31 Screenshots


    • Red Hat Family



      • Fedora

        • Naming Fedora 18, The Beefy Miracle Successor
          There's two months until Fedora 17, which is codenamed the Beefy Miracle, is officially released. However, already getting underway is the codename proposal period for Fedora 18. What will succeed the Beefy Miracle?


        • Fedora 18 Picks Up New Features, Rejects Systemd-Journal
          There's still two months prior to the official Fedora 17 release -- Fedora 17 Beta isn't even out yet -- but besides coming up with a new codename, we have our first technical glimpse at new features to Fedora 18, which will be released by Red Hat and the community in Q4'2012.

          At yesterday's Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee (FESCo), they approved the first batch of Fedora 18 features now that Fedora 17 is well into its feature freeze. The items approved for the yet-to-be-codenamed Fedora 18 include:






    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News - March 19th, 2012


      • Derivatives



        • Canonical/Ubuntu



          • Flavours and Variants

            • Zorin OS 6 Lite Is Based on Lubuntu 11.10
              The Zorin OS development team proudly announced yesterday, March 19th, the immediate availability for download of the Zorin OS 6 Lite and Zorin OS 6 Educational Lite operating systems.

              This major release of the Zorin OS 6 Lite series is now based on the Lubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating sytem and takes advantage of the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, in order to provide an extremely fast and feature-packed desktop experience, especially for low-end machines.












  • Devices/Embedded



    • Phones



      • Android

        • Google is the least open part of Android
          I have been an Android user since the release of the G1. I was a Linux server admin at the time, and the idea of an open source environment on my phone was something I had been thinking about for awhile. Before the release of the G1, I was even considering diving into the OpenMOKO project, which nobody remembers (as a result of the G1 launch). For me, open source meant that, like my computer, I could adjust things at will that I wasn’t happy with. I followed the Android Open Source Project with eager anticipation, and watched as this community of developers modify and build and bolt on features to the Android that we know today.


        • ZTE N910 clears the FCC with LTE support for AWS and PCS bands


        • Sony Xperia Neo L MT25i announced as the company’s first Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone


          Sony has officially unveiled its first smartphone to come with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich from day one: the Xperia Neo L MT25i, announced earlier today in China.

          As its name suggests, the Xperia Neo L is the successor to the Neo and Neo V (which were introduced last year running Android 2.3 Gingerbread), although it doesn’t bring major hardware enhancements.


        • Huawei myTouch Smartphone Discovered Hanging In The Wild
          If you have been eagerly awaiting a first look at the upcoming Huawei myTouch line heading to T-Mobile, then we have good news for you. Thanks to a TmoNews ninja we’ve got a quick look at the upcoming non-QWERTY myTouch device, expected to arrive on store shelves in the coming months. At this point we don’t know much about the device, though we suspect a WVGA 800×480 resolution display and some other mid-range specs. The myTouch line isn’t billed as a high-end line for T-Mobile anymore — more as a “family” phone that has something for everyone. Huawei marks the third such manufacturer to release a device under the myTouch branding for T-Mobile, after HTC and LG.


        • Getac releases PS326: Android-powered, Milspec-carrying beast of a handset


        • Sony Releases Open Source Archive For The Xperia S, Includes Handy Build Instructions
          Sony released the Xperia S open source archive today, providing all the tools necessary to build a kernel and start cooking up ROMs for the Xperia S from Sony's source code. In a post to Sony Mobile's developer blog today, the company also noted that the opening of the Xperia S archive marks the first time Sony has published source code for a product built around Qualcomm's Snapdragon S3.






    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets







Free Software/Open Source



  • Big Switch Unveils 'Open' SDN Architecture


  • Killed email device Peek resurrected with open source app framework
    Amol Sarva, the man behind Peek, recently made waves by giving away his remaining stock of discontinued Peek devices to hackers interested in reusing them for something interesting (the company is still around, but it's focusing on cloud-based software services now — the hardware, and the cellular service that underpins it, is dead). This all happened less than two months ago, but we've already got an open source application framework from a coder by the name of Ryan Krumins available for Peek hackers to take advantage of.


  • Big data enters open-source hype cycle
    Possibly. Open source was all the rage in the tech press for years as it promised to lower costs while improving enterprise IT freedom. Ultimately, a few start-ups cashed out big time (MySQL, JBoss), but for the most part the real value in open source came as both IT vendors and in-house IT organisations turned to open source to provide raw material for their software projects. Open source became less about sales and more about code, which was exactly what it was designed to do.


  • CARS Unveils Free Open-Source IBEAM Portal
    Consolidated Asset Recovery Systems launched a new open-source, freeware version of its IBEAM Web portal to the agent and lender community.

    The company highlighted this new version of IBEAM — available after April 15 — will be specific to repossession and invoice management, providing all the capabilities of asset tracking, real-time monitoring of updates, online condition reports and complete transparency throughout the recovery process.


  • 8 Free Open Source Alternatives To Microsoft Exchange


  • NTIDA advocates open source software
    The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) says Nigerians need open source software if the country must be a full participant in the software industry.


  • SaaS

    • EMC Intros Chorus Open-Source Big Data App


    • EMC wants to be the Linux of big data
      To broaden its reach in the big-data arena, disk-array maker EMC's Greenplum division, which peddles data warehousing and Hadoop appliances and software, announced that it will open source its Chorus management and collaboration tools. EMC also has acquired Pivotal Labs, experts in agile programming, to help it build better big-data software and, equally importantly, help others do so.

      EMC has always been serious about data, but in case you haven't noticed it, the company is now very serious about big data and the software that is used to chew it up and regurgitate useful bits of information.




  • CMS

    • DrupalCon 2012 Kicks Off in Denver
      The Drupal Association, hosts of the biannual DrupalCon conference, announced the opening of its North American DrupalCon in Denver, with more than 3,000 Website designers, developers, site architects and IT managers in attendance.

      The first day of full conference events at DrupalCon is March 20. Drupal is an open-source content management platform that powers millions of Websites and applications. Drupal is built, used and supported by a very active community of people from around the world, and that community comes together for DrupalCon.




  • Healthcare



  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 5.0 set for a modular future?
      Version 4.7 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is due out in April 2012 – a second release candidate was released last week. Discussions on the future direction of the utilities collection are currently underway. Musings over making GCC 5.0 more modular have attracted considerable attention. These have been inspired by the increasingly popular Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), a compiler infrastructure part-sponsored by Apple.


    • Interview: Richard Stallman
      RMS: The term "investment" is not applicable here, because that implies spending money on a business to obtain a larger subsequent profit. I set out to do a large job, but it wasn't a business and the purpose was something more important than profit.

      I quit my job at MIT when I started writing code for the GNU operating system because I wanted to make sure MIT would not be able to claim copyright on the code I wrote for GNU.

      Evidently, financial support was not crucial at the beginning, because I made progress on my own, which drew others to help.




  • Project Releases



  • Public Services/Government



  • Programming





Leftovers



Recent Techrights' Posts

The General Public License (GPL) Inspired the Web's Original Openness/Freedom, According to Tim Berners-Lee
"During the preceding year I had been trying to get CERN to release the intellectual property rights to the Web code under the General Public License (GPL) so that others could use it."
The Real Problem With Rust is Not "Wokeness" (It Never Was)
Don't feed the trolls who attack "Rust People" on political grounds
 
IBM: We Can't Make 'AI' (Voice Recognition) Do the Work of a McDonald's Teenager, So Let's Try the Same on Saudi Planes
IBM is lost. It's truly lost.
Microsoft is Becoming Irrelevant: The Case of Georgia
Not Georgia Tech
Sirius Open Source is Now Imminently Dead (Struck Off)
compulsory strike-off
Dr. Richard Stallman, Invited by LibreTech Collective, is Giving a Public Talk in Georgia Tech Next Month (Scheller College of Business)
They can probably squeeze about 400 people into this room
25 Years of Activism for GNU/Linux
My passion for GNU/Linux brought a lot of contentment
Africa, Where Microsoft Used De Facto Slaves to Pretend to be "AI", Chatbots Usage is 0.2% of Measured Online Traffic
Judging by recent trends in Africa, many "Windows PCs" are being converted into GNU/Linux computers
New Drone Footage Shows IBM is Dead (Parts of It)
The people who participated in IBM when IBM actually mattered probably have boasting rights, unlike people who work for IBM today
Michael Larabel Adds Slop Category to Phoronix, Quickly Realises That It's Worthless
Phoronix nowadays gets carried away; it made a new category to talk about slop and it decided to call it "intelligence" with some caricature of a brain (that's misleading)Phoronix nowadays gets carried away; it made a new category to talk about slop and it decided to call it "intelligence" with some caricature of a brain (that's misleading)
After 35 Years the World Wide Web, HTML, and HTTP Are Proprietary
HTTP/2 added a lot of complexity (it's just a Google protocol, based on SPDY originally), many image formats are proprietary and patented, HTML got 'replaced' by Java-Scripts [sic], and many URLs (the URL system was created in the early 90s) are just long strings for proprietary 'webapps'
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 20, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, December 20, 2025
The Register MS Has Lowered Its Standards Considerably
Incidentally, we've only just noticed that "US editor for The Register since July 2025" has not been active for 4 weeks already
Scamfarms, Spamfarms, and Slopfarms in "Linux" Clothing
Today, Linux searches in Google News produced no slop at all. That's an improvement.
Did Bill Gates Lobby to Blur the Face of the Young Woman He Openly Braces (and Who Isn't His Wife)?
"This photo of of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates with a woman whose face is blurred out is just one of 68 more photos and documents released today."
Links 20/12/2025: Microsoft Ruins Televisions, 'Epstein Files' Deeply Sanitised (to Protect Particular Culprits)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 20/12/2025: Merry Christmas 2025 and Running a Factorio Headless Server on FreeBSD with the Linuxulato
Links for the day
With 10 Days Left, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Already Raised Close to $300,000 This Winter
they're besieged by despicable corporations and very despicable people
2025 in Numbers
What was very good about this year is that we truly got "into the rhythm" of publishing
More Microsoft Layoffs Coming Soon
When I spoke about Microsoft layoffs (routinely) I got very viciously attacked by Microsoft boosters
My Humble Assessment of the Future of Red Hat, A Company That IBM is Flushing Down the Loo
GNU/Linux will be OK without Red Hat, but shaping the future of it matters because we don't want companies like Valve (DRM) to set the agenda
Probably the Least Useful Gadgets, Ever
as if a "smart" thing worn on the wrist is the "new Rolex"
Former Manager at IBM Research (Yorktown) Says Why IBM is Doomed and the Anonymous Tipline (Speak Up) is a Trap
IBM isn't willing to change or to address internal issues
Links 20/12/2025: Fentanylware Becomes CheeTok and "Why Roomba Died"
Links for the day
Linux Foundation: Richard Stallman Developed Only a Software Licence
We already criticised this report several times last night
Impulsive Writing, Quotas, and Keeping Things as Concise as Feasible
A 10-word sentence being read by a million people can have the same impact or magnitude (exposure-wise) as a million-word book being read by just 10 people
Gemini Links 20/12/2025: Christmas Songs, Storms, and Old Web
Links for the day
Coming to Grips With a Lack of Future at IBM
Red Hat's future doesn't look bright under the auspices as they seem right now
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 19, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, December 19, 2025
Links 20/12/2025: Media Layoffs, a Third of Online Traffic is Bots
Links for the day
Barbados: Significant Gains for GNU/Linux
over 5% if one counts ChromeOS as well
Very Shallow LLM Slop for IBM Disguised as Journalism About a "Plan to Train 5 Million Learners in India by 2030" (Unverified Figures With Very Distant Future Date/Year)
The Web has become somewhat of a laughing stock
'Linux' Foundation: The Foundation Has Almost Nothing to Do With Linux, It Just Misuses the Name "Linux"
Only a tiny portion of the Foundation's budget actually goes to Linux
Austria vs GAFAM
another win against GAFAM
Microsoft Has Purchased Another Linux Foundation Seat
From the latest (new) report
No Electronics, No Clocks, No Phones
We're meant to think that more gadgets will make life easier
Gemini Links 19/12/2025: Great Website Rebuild of 2025 and Running OpenBSD in a Hostile Environment
Links for the day
Google News Helps Slopfarms (What's Left of Them)
Lately we've noticed that nothing in the RSS feeds we follow is burping out slop
Links 19/12/2025: Privacy International's Reports and Russian Assets in EU
Links for the day
Today, The Register MS is Parroting Marketing Spam for Ponzi Scheme ("AI") in Exchange for Money
The Register MS should be held accountable when the bubble pops
Red Hat Senior Engineering Manager Leaves (or Gets Pushed Out by IBM) After Nearly 20 Years at the Company
The recent massive wave of IBM layoffs impacted Red Hat and so will the next (impending, Q1) wave
Why We Got Told by Insiders That Almost Everyone at EPO Reads Techrights and Many at IBM Track IBM RAs Via Techrights
In a nutshell, we cover topics almost no other site dares touch
IBM Research Shutting Down Labs, Lots of Workers Laid Off (Even Days Before Christmas in Devout Catholic Country)
Heartless, soulless company
Links 19/12/2025: Windows TCO in NHS, "Locked Out of Apple Account Due to Gift Card"
Links for the day
Nearly Three Months Have Passed Since EPO Cocainegate and the EPO's Management Still Refuses to Talk About It
But it's clearly aware of it
Richard Stallman Explains Why Software Patents Are Really Bad and Very Much Unnecessary
"The relationship between patents and products varies between the fields"
The Copycats of the FSF Have Serious Problems
If you care about Software Freedom, then support the real thing
Once Again, Just in Time for Christmas, UEFI and Its Boot System Turn Out to be a Giant Bug Door (Also a Microsoft Remote Kill Switch)
This industry - even academia - has been deeply compromised
In Activism and Journalism, If You're Ineffective They Ignore You, When You Become Effective They Stalk and Harass You, Failing That They Threaten You
"the Wikileaks effect"
Google Has Begun Linking to commandlinux.com in Google News, But It Seems to be a Slopfarm
This is not innovation, it's sloppiness, laziness, and a modern form of plagiarism
Microsoft Reportedly Tries to Cause Top-Level Managers to Resign If they Don't Participate in the Ponzi Scheme
Apparently even executives who don't play along are given marching orders
Microsoft, Over 120 Billion Dollars in Debt, Prepares Next Round of Mass Layoffs (After Christmas)
Microsoft is not managing to pay back its debt
Links 19/12/2025: Scam Altman Humiliates Self in Public, Climate Alarm Sounded, Egyptian Economist Convicted Over "Social Control Media Posts Critical of the Government"
Links for the day
You Can Get Work Done With Lean Software
obviously!
"The War on Privacy" is Real
"He Built a Privacy Tool. Now He’s Going to Prison."
The Cost of Being Influential
The "tech world" and its monopoly enforcer (patent system) are sleepwalking into autocracy
More Shutdowns and Layoffs at IBM
if someone covers correct but suppressed information, then people will make an effort to find it
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 18, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, December 18, 2025
EPO Violates Laws to Profit More From Invalid Patents, Then Cuts the Budget Allocated to Staff
taking away what was already promised to staff
Only a Few Examples of LLM Slop Found, Mostly via Google News
Is it fair to say that sites learned LLM slop does not offer any real value?