If you have ever worked as a technical writer, you probably have an image of what writing documentation for free software would be like. You might imagine the writer as a lone figure in a corporate department, using proprietary software, and chasing down developers to plead for information, much like most technical writers anywhere. But while you might find a few positions like that, the chances are that every one of these pre-conceptions would be wrong in practice.
As we noted last week, the Linux Foundation‘s list of major Linux-related accomplishments over the last year centered on advances in embedded and mobile platforms more than on traditional hardware. The Linux Foundation’s summary aside, however, there were plenty of openvsource achievements in other areas that are worth noting before the outgoing years passes us by.
Without a doubt, the progress Linux vendors made integrating open source solutions into platforms such as automotive computers, Android-based mobile devices and Chromebooks, all of which the Linux Foundation highlighted, were very notable. They represent key areas in which Linux is likely to enjoy continued momentum going into 2012.
It’s still a FLOSS world on the client and lots of FLOSS is used on the servers but it’s not happening in Google’s data-centres. What’s the point of opening the code when none of us can compete on price/performance with Google? It comes down to trust. If you trust Google, you get cheaper/faster IT. If you don’t, you can still build your own infrastructure with lower performance and higher cost. In the past many trusted M$ and agreed to slavery. At least Google seems a benevolent monopolist in comparison. If that changes, the world can still make its own software and share but what about data-centres? Will society create shared data-centres, cutting out the likes of Google? I don’t see it in the short term.
One such leak appeared this week, courtesy of Chinese-language site ChipHell. If it's legitimate (and it does appear to line up with information we already knew), it points to Wayne being a powerful SoC best suited for high-end tablets, but also a good fit for small, inexpensive ARM-based laptops or desktops. What we know so far paints a remarkably complete picture of what Wayne looks like, what it will be good at, and just how much better it will be than Tegra 3.
Here is a story about how Ubuntu could replace Windows as the main operating system on a non-tech-savvy user’s laptop. I think Linux, though perhaps lacking some essential software for business use is ready for every home.
As we narrow in on the final weeks of our 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks series, we talk to Linux kernel developer and Btrfs maintainer Chris Mason. Chris details his desktop and productivity tools, his favorite all-time flame war and shares his advice for getting involved in kernel development.
Just in time for Christmas, the 3.7 Linux kernel was released on December 10, 2012, and brings with it 64-bit ARM support plus a multitude of improvements and changes. The main changes are:
* ARM Multi-platform and 64-bit support * TCP Fast Open Server Side support * SMB2 protocol support * NFS V4.1 support * BtrFS updates * VXLAN support * perf trace * Cryptographically-signed kernel modules * Intel "Supervisor mode access prevention" (SMAP) support
I'm announcing the release of the 3.6.11 kernel.
As we say happy birthday to Linus Torvalds today, he should be a happy chap because Linux is now the dominating OS on consumer computing devices. According to IDC and Goldman Sachs, as reported by the Seattle Times, Android (which is based on Linux) runs on 42% of all consumer computing devices.
The PulseAudio developers have released version 3.0 of the open source audio framework. PulseAudio 3.0 includes support for Bluetooth sources out of the box, ALSA Use Case Manager (UCM) support, configurable device latency offset and several optimisations and infrastructure improvements. PulseAudio is used by the majority of Linux distributions to handle audio input and output and interface desktop software with the underlying stack that directly manages the hardware drivers.
I am a recent Arch convert and am still playing with the bubble wrap on my test machine. The community is quite helpful on Google+ and helping me out with the minor issues I am facing. I won't comment on my Arch experience unless I spend significant among on it.
With the initial roll-out of the Steam Linux client being a success while primarily focusing upon supporting the Ubuntu distribution, Valve is now looking at improving the Steam support on non-Ubuntu Linux distributions.
Photon Productions, the developers of the upcoming Forsaken Fortress game, announced a few days ago that the upcoming RPG title would be available for Linux-based operating systems.
Forsaken Fortress is a 3D survival role-playing game (RPG) in which the player needs to assemble a team, build and manage a base, collect resources, and survive in a post-apocalyptic world.
Popular free and open source roguelike/RPG Tales of Maj'Eyal (ToME4) is almost ready for its first stable release after having as much as 43 beta releases.
This is awesome, Legend of Grimrock is now available via the Ubuntu Software Centre! The game is really awesome and plays much like the old Dungeon Master game (if anyone besides me remembers that!).
It's a first person dungeon crawler where you control 4 prisoners trying to escape to get their freedom. It can be purchased for $14.99.
Krita Sketch, a version of Krita for touch interfaces, has been released. Krita is a cross-platform sketching and painting application for the K Desktop Environment (KDE). It is a component of Calligra, KDE’s native Office and productivity suite. Krita has support for concept art, comics, and textures for rendering.
The GNOME Foundation announced that they were planning to hold the 14th GUADEC Conference in Brno, Czech Republic. The announcement also mentions some details about the 15th GUADEC Conference, which will be held in Strasbourg, France, in 2014.
I get on any other computer, any other OS (even Windows and Mac OS), or any other desktop environment, and I find myself mousing into the top-left (or “hot”) corner to get my application panel and search/launching dialog.
Gauchito returns after 35 years! LinuxBBQ “Argentina78ââ¬Â³ is featuring the brand-new MATE 1.4.2 desktop environment and kernel 3.7
Earlier on in the year I wrote a review about Slacko Puppy . A new version of Slacko Puppy is now available (version 5.4).
You can download the latest version of Slacko Puppy from http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%20Latest%20Release.htm.
ROSA company is pleased to announce a new operating system for desktops - ROSA Desktop.Fresh 2012. The product is targeted at enthusiasts who are likely to appreciate the wide choice of fresh software components. ROSA Fresh edition is a non-commercial product distributed free of charge.
As we prepare to enter a new year, the big names that have dominated the Linux world for the past decade–Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), Canonical/Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE–are unchanged. But they may be joined in 2013 by a newcomer to the open source channel, Mageia Linux, which has been enjoying staggering popularity since its creation barely two years ago. Where might it head next?
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has shared his plans for 2013. It was clear from the Nexus 7 initiative that Ubuntu is eventually looking into the mobile space more seriously. Google created the cheap device Ubuntu was looking for wider testing and development.
Canonical announced a few days ago that they have updated the online ‘Photos’ feature of their Ubuntu One cloud storage service.
The update brings a dedicated tab for the Photos function, which is located on the Ubuntu One dashboard, giving users a proper album view that includes all their saved photos via Ubuntu One or Instagram.
Linux Mint 14 was recently released. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, and offers the Cinnamon or MATE desktop environments. This review covers the Cinnamon version, I will try to get a separate review up for the MATE version soon.
In this day and age, all major platforms must have an app store. And thus today, the Raspberry Pi Foundation unveiled the Pi Store to act as the one-stop shop for users of the tiny computer.
Earlier this month, Linus Torvalds was reminded that Linux 3.8 will not run on i386 computers, such the one he used to create Linux back in 1991. "I'm not sentimental," Torvalds responded. "Good riddance."
In that same future-looking spirit, we anticipate the progression of embedded Linux in 2013, a year in which forecasters expect PCs will continue to shed market share to mobile devices. In 2013, the Linux-based Android should continue to dominate smartphones, while drawing closer to matching Apple's iPad on tablets. Meanwhile, three new mobile operating systems based on open source Linux are expected to launch on new smartphones.
That’s 80% of the population, folks. No longer is China a follower in IT. They are a trend-setter. The desktop/notebook/server universes are changing too. China is the single largest potential market for all of these and the whole world is seeking to supply the need for IT in China. With so many having experienced the joy of FLOSS on mobile devices, there is a huge potential for FLOSS on desktops and notebooks to grow in China. That’s where the new OEMs will go when the smartphone and tablet markets flatten out. Expect 2013 to be the year of the GNU/Linux desktop in China.
We recently had the chance to spend time with David Greaves and Vesa-Matti Hartikainen of Jolla and take Sailfish OS for a spin. As you might recall, this open source mobile OS builds upon Mer (a fork of MeeGo that includes Qt) and uses the Nemo framework with a custom UI. Like any decent Linux-based OS, it supports both ARM and x86 devices. The company is also behind the Sailfish SDK which is in the process of being finalized but is still open to developer feedback (the source code is available). After seeing Jolla's various demo videos and noting some UI similarities with MeeGo (swipes) and, strangely, with BB10 (peek gestures), we were eager to experience Sailfish OS for ourselves
Officials in the Lone Star state have given Samsung the green light to expand chip production lines at an investment cost of $3.9 billion.
The CyanogenMod team is making more images for the latest version of their open source custom ROM for Android devices available. CyanogenMod 10.1 is based on Android 4.2 "Jelly Bean" and has been in development since Google open sourced that version of the operating system last month. New nightly builds of CyanogenMod 10.1 are now available for the Samsung Galaxy S, S II, S III and tablets such as the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity and both versions of the Galaxy Tab 2.
Remember the Android PC (APC) mini mother board from VIA Technologies Inc., a manufacturer of integrated circuits based in Taiwan? At the time it was released, it’s form-factor, known as Neo-ITX, did not fit any available computer case.
There’s a lot of interest out there with Nexus 7 owners turning their super sweet Android Jelly Bean tablet into an Ubuntu Linux tablet. The geek in me understands this a little bit. But ultimately, at least at this point in the Ubuntu / Nexus 7 game, you may be better off keeping Android running on your Nexus 7 and save yourself a ton of stress, headaches, and wasted time. The Nexus 7 is already an amazing tablet built for high end performance with the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad core processor and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
The best way to fight an enemy is to start by learning everything you can about it, which is exactly what the team at Integreen are looking to do in the Italian city of Bolzano. By using the latest technology and banking on open source software, Integreen hopes to provide the city management with enough traffic and environmental data to help them more effectively implement environmentally conscience programs such as mass transit.
When it comes to their Internet browsers, users can get quite picky about how much automatic updating they want to take place. For example, in an OStatic post at the end of last year on how the Mozilla Firefox browser would begin silently updating itself (in keeping with Google Chrome) our readers disagreed widely on whether they wanted Firefox to do so.
We've written before many times about Hadoop, an open source software framework for highly scalable queries and data-intensive distributed applications. The ecosystem of companies and organizations using Hadoop has grown dramatically in recent years, and as the Big Data trend grows, Hadoop training and support solutions are proliferating.
The developers of Oracle's VirtualBox have announced a maintenance update to the lead version of their virtualisation platform. Version 4.2.6 is released along with maintenance releases of older branches of the software: 3.2.16., 4.0.18 and 4.1.24. The changes in 4.2.6 are focused on stability and on correcting a number of regressions – there are no new features. Fixes include ensuring that stale virtual machine events are not sent to resetting VMs, fixing the appearance of text in the GUI, corrections to the 3D support, fixing hangs with some storage and adding network rate and disk usage to the metrics.
Being "fed up with the existing open source CRM applications", the team at Zurmo have released their own open source customer relationship management (CRM) software – Zurmo 1.0. The CRM software, which has been in development for two years, includes deal tracking features, contact and activity management, and has scores and badges that can be managed through a built-in gamification system.
Zurmo 1.0 has been translated into ten languages and features a RESTful API to further integration with other applications. Location data is provided by Google Maps and Geocode. The application's permission system supports roles for individual users and groups, and allows administrators to create ad-hoc teams. The application is designed to be modern and easy to use and integrates social-network-like functionality at its centre, which functions to distribute tasks, solicit advice, and publish accomplishments.
Piwik is a Free Software Web analytics application. If you run a website, it is what you use when you do not want to use Google Analytics or any other third party solution.
A few days after the intended release date, the LLVM developers have announced the availability of version 3.2 of the LLVM compiler infrastructure. The LLVM project encompasses a set of compiler tools such as the C/C++/Objective C compiler Clang, the runtime compiler library compiler-rt, the low-level debugger LLDB, a C++ standard library libc++ and the VMKit JVM which uses LLVM for static and JIT compilation.
After initial stages of fundraising campaign, the developers have published a new release of MediaGoblin, the only full “free as in freedom” media sharing software. This software is a part of the GNU project and aims to give users full freedom to share, upload and use all kind of media on their servers without using some expensive services out there or losing their privacy, freedom or control over their data.
In the latest update to the Java servlet container Tomcat, the TomEE development team has done a lot more than just fix a few bugs. TomEE 1.5.1 includes an option to improve classloader customisation and the ability to inject remote initial context into TomEE clients.
Some iPhone users are complaining of a faster battery drain after applying the latest update, although others aren't seeing any problems.
The New York Post is reporting that relatively soon, possibly as early as next week, the FTC is scheduled to announce a settlement of its antitrust investigation and potential claims against Google.
Let’s unpack that misconception, shall we?
Over the last twelve years, there have been more than 320 drone strikes. Over 300 of those strikes were conducted under the auspices of the Obama Administration (the most recent 2 strikes in Yemen over Christmas not included). They have killed between 2600-3300 people, of which over 800 were civilians (these numbers require us to believe that 2600 people were terrorists). Around 176 were children.*
These are hardly “unintended” consequences. If 1 or 3—ok, 5–drone strikes are launched, and others besides the “intended” targets are killed, it is more plausible to believe that the consequences are “unintended.” It is easier to believe the position of former US Air Force drone pilot, Brandon Bryant, that by droning, he and his colleagues “were saving lives.” In fact, Bryant and his fellow drone pilots knew what they were trained to do: they were trained to kill—to “target” human beings, who were supposedly “terrorists.”
In rural Yemen, a botched attack on a terror suspect kills 12 civilians and destroys a community.
Decades after a risky Cold War experiment, a scientist lives with secrets.
Making political predictions is an inherently risky task, but 2013 provides one pretty safe bet: barring armed revolution or similar catastrophe we will have a federal election in Australia.
And if the concluding events of 2012 are any guide, it will be a pretty ugly affair, a nude mud wrestle between an unloved Prime Minister leading a widely disliked government and a positively loathed opposition leader who has nonetheless put his party on track for a win which very few really look forward to.
This article reviews a) Sweden’s traditional culture among its rulers of spying on their own citizens – also a political culture of “Neutral” Sweden consisting of dealing in secrecy with (and on behalf of) NATO powers in matters of Intelligence; b) the allegations about a systematic cooperation between the Social Democratic Party and the country’s Security Police, c) the juridical context of this illegal violation of the citizens’ civil liberties and integrity – a context that has been characterised as “The Bodström Society”, and the veritable threat to those abusing powers represented by WikiLeaks and its founder and forerunner Julian Assange.
The Federal Action alleged that Goldman Sachs' 2008 Proxy Statement violated the federal securities laws and Delaware law by undervaluing certain stock option awards and alleged that senior management received excessive compensation for 2007. The State Action alleged violations of Delaware statutory and common law based on substantively similar allegations regarding stock option awards from December 13, 2005 to December 17, 2008.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bain Capital Partners LLC are set to defend what they call legitimate private-equity practices against investor claims that buyout firms and their bankers colluded to rig bids on takeovers.
The greedy, corrupting and wealth-accumulating culture of Goldman Sachs does not exist in a vacuum. The IMF and the World Bank (WB) knew exactly what they were doing (and surely support the role of Goldman in their scenario) and why they were doing it beginning before the 1970s. The IMF and the World Bank are creatures of the US government (which has been thoroughly corrupted by the financial sector, i.e., the banks) and both are helping to fulfill the US economic policies world-wide.
A federal judge on Monday agreed the city of Reno could take Goldman Sachs into private arbitration, bypassing the federal court system, to continue fighting for a settlement from the bank potentially worth millions of dollars.
Last week, UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced a new porn filtering system that will go online sometime during the coming year. However, the blockades, which are intended to deal with porn, may end up developing into a backdoor ban on BitTorrent and other file-sharing related sites.
Over the past year I and other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg have pressed a lawsuit in the federal courts to nullify Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This egregious section, which permits the government to use the military to detain U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers, could have been easily fixed by Congress. The Senate and House had the opportunity this month to include in the 2013 version of the NDAA an unequivocal statement that all U.S. citizens would be exempt from 1021(b)(2), leaving the section to apply only to foreigners. But restoring due process for citizens was something the Republicans and the Democrats, along with the White House, refused to do. The fate of some of our most basic and important rights—ones enshrined in the Bill of Rights as well as the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution—will be decided in the next few months in the courts. If the courts fail us, a gulag state will be cemented into place.
Last Tuesday, the Senate quietly altered a key privacy law, making it much easier for video streaming services like Netflix to share your viewing habits. How quietly? The Senate didn't even hold a recorded vote: The bill was approved by unanimous consent. (Joe Mullin of Ars Technica was among the first to note the vote.)
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein has been presided over four days of committee debate over reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act with an iron fist and incredible subordination to the Obama Administration. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was set to expire, but President Obama has been pushing for its un-amended reauthorization.
There's nothing like a debate over warrantless wiretapping to clarify how the two parties really feel about government. On Friday, the Senate voted to reauthorize the government's warrantless surveillance program, with hawkish Democrats joining with Republicans to block every effort to curtail the government's sweeping spying powers.
As the Senate debated the renewal of the government's warrantless wiretapping powers on Thursday, Republicans who have accused President Barack Obama of covering up his involvement in the death of an American ambassador urged that his administration be given sweeping spying powers. Democrats who accused George W. Bush of shredding the Constitution with warrantless wiretapping four years ago sung a different tune this week, with the administration itself quietly urging passage of the surveillance bill with no changes, and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) accusing her Democratic colleagues of not understanding the threat of terrorism.
This week, as Congressional incompetence threatens to plunge the US into another recession, it's comforting to know that Democrats and Republicans can still agree on at least one thing: that the US government should have the unquestionable authority to spy on its own citizens — in secret, without a warrant, and absent of any semblance of transparency.
This tremendous expansion of whistleblower rights will help to safeguard approximately $1.9 trillion worth of government contracts, grants and reimbursements annually, and protect some 12 million federal contractor whistleblowers when they expose corruption, wrongdoing, waste, fraud, abuse, or threats to the public. By comparison, there are only (approximately) two million federal employees, many of which (national security and intelligence workers) do not enjoy rights under the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA), signed into law by President Obama late last month.
President Obama ought to veto the bill but probably won’t. I’ve flagged in red the provisions that are actually a problem.
To add insult to injury, another part of the provision appears to allow the military to take adverse personnel actions based solely on the beliefs held by service members, even when the individual’s beliefs have never been expressed, or never acted on. This sort of discrimination would amount to pure thought policing. If this is the case, the measure could impact personnel from across the political spectrum. Consider a company commander who learns that someone in his unit has moral objections to the mission, or harbors views critical of the government. The provision could permit disciplinary action by the commander or the denial of a promotion, among other adverse actions, based solely on those constitutionally protected beliefs of the individual unit member.
The Senate passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act that was stripped of a prohibition of the indefinite military detention of US citizens on American soil by an 81-14 vote on Friday, but only after a furious dissent on the chamber's floor by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who called it an "abomination."
It now goes to President Barack Obama for his signature.