04.03.12
Posted in News Roundup at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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At the same time that GNU/Linux was holding share of Wikipedia, traffic was increasing and the mobile share of traffic was increasing. Despite all that, GNU/Linux held share. Examining only non-mobile traffic, GNU/Linux share rose 18% while that other OS declined several percent.
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Hundreds of Linux distributions have been created trying to make that ideal mashup of Linux into a single user like OS.
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EVERY year, some bozo comes up with a prediction that Linux on the desktop is dead.
These people really ought to know better, but it’s fun to get a rise out of Linux users, and a provocative headline does wonders for page views.
I’ve decided not to play their game, so I’m not even going to name the fathead columnist who raised this issue again, and focus instead on why he’s wrong. That way, the truth gets out without benefiting the cynical purveyor of the lie.
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Server
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Warren Luebkemen of Resara, LLC recently joined the Greater Dover Chamber of Commerce and celebrated with a Ribbon Cutting Ceremony.
Resara, LLC is an innovative, passionate software company that was founded in 2005 to develop Linux based server products. Resara has extensive experience and expertise in thin client computing, which was the first product developed by the company.
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If you saw my article on DIY Linux Routers, then you might have already taken the plunge and gotten yourself up and running with one. One of the primary reasons I made the switch to a dedicated machine running a Linux router distro was to have a router that would not lock up on me regularly, but what I found was that the additional features that these distros come with became a large part of why I love my Linux router.
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Kernel Space
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According to the report more than 7,800 developers from almost 800 different companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since tracking began in 2005. Just since the last report, more than 1,000 developers representing nearly 200 companies have contributed to the kernel.
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Two weeks after Linux 3.3 was released, Linus Torvalds has announced the availability of the first release candidate for Linux 3.4. As usual, this step signals the end of the merge window at the beginning of the development cycle; during the merge window, Torvalds integrates the major changes for a new Linux version and about seven-eighths of all changes. Apart from a few stragglers, mainly minor and low-risk changes will be made in the stabilising phase that has now begun.
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With the help of its embedded farm, set up in November 2010, the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) has tested and analysed Linux’s experimental real-time (RT) capabilities. The OSADL analysed a total of 73 billion automated test cycles recorded over the last 12 months on more than 50 computers running mainline RT kernels on a range of CPUs.
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Patches for an x86 disassembler for the Linux kernel have been proposed. An in-kernel disassembler could prove useful for developers in cases of kernel panics and other happenings.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Today I decided to look at the current versions of three well-known games on Linux: Supertuxkart, Supertux, and Secret Maryo Chronicles. All of them detected and let me use my Logitech wireless controller, which made playing them a lot easier than if I’d needed to use the keyboard. Each of these games let you set the window resolution or else play the game in fullscreen mode. All three of these have versions for Windows, and will provide many hours of fun. Check your repositories for them, and if you are running Linux Mint or Ubuntu, you will probably need to enable the “getdeb games” additional repository in order to have the most recent version.
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- $5.69 Average Windows Price
- $7.07 Average Mac OS X Price
- $9.97 Average Linux Price
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Last week at the Chicago Flourish conference, well known Linux game porter/developer Ryan “Icculus” Gordon shared some of his recommended open-source tools and libraries for Linux game development.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Jonathan Thomas has announced the release of Muon Suite 1.3. The Muon Suite is a set of package management utilities for Debian-based Linux distributions built on KDE technologies.
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In early February news came out that Canonical would be dropping support for Kubuntu following the 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin release. This Ubuntu derivative that employs the KDE desktop no longer has the business interest of Canonical and so it’s set to become another community-based spin, similar to Xubuntu or Lubuntu. Jonathan Riddell, the lead Kubuntu developer at Canonical, is set to be tasked with non-Kubuntu work following the Precise Pangolin release.
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Today we released the Alpha of Qt 5, the first major release since the Qt Project went live. A lot of people have worked hard to make this release happen. A large amount of work and features that went into this alpha have been coming from people not working for Nokia. It’s great to see that the project has become a place where many people meet and together push Qt forward.
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GNOME Desktop
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New Releases
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The Fuduntu team has announced the release and availability of Fuduntu 2012.2. With this release Fuduntu is shifting from SourceForge as a package host to a new mirrorable infrastructure. Several open source mirror providers have begun replicating the repositories. This change improves speed and availability of software available for installation, as well as package updates.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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A post by one of the developers on March 8 said, again in keeping with the best cryptic traditions, “Yes, quick very fresh news: Mandriva still have to solve some complicated problems, but the situation is far more better since yesterday, the main problem is cleared 
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Red Hat Family
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The donation will be split between four projects which do not benefit, normally, from Red hat’s work: Creative Commons (CC), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and UNICEF Innovation Labs. The $100,000 award is 0.7 per cent of the company’s annual net profit of $146.6 million. Much of Red Hat’s development work is available as open source anyway though, a contribution potentially worth millions of dollars to the community.
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Stock-picking wunderkind Jim Cramer spoke with Red Hat’s (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whithurst on Monday’s Mad Money.
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Red Hat’s strong earnings report won the company some upbeat reviews from analysts who see the maker of the Linux OS gaining in the industry-wide push toward cloud computing. Red Hat’s momentum has accelerated as companies try to save money and gain more flexibility by keeping their technology in far-flung data centers instead of PCs.
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Fedora
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Fedora 18 is expected to use tmpfs for mounting the /tmp directory, which sees that the temporary directory is stored in RAM/SWAP volatile memory. Tmpfs tends to generate less disk reads/writes, potentially saves power while inreasing performance, sees that the temporary directory data isn’t stored across reboots, and other advantages. System administrators installing new Fedora installations are still expected to be able to opt-out of using tmpfs.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It’s all too common to hear Linux portrayed by detractors as an operating system suitable only for longtime hackers and “hobbyists,” as it was put in one recent example.
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Flavours and Variants
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For the last few years, there has been something of a popularity contest between two well-known Linux distros: Linux Mint and Ubuntu. Both of these distributions share the same code base, as Ubuntu is based on Debian and Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu.
In both instances, the distributions took the foundation that Debian built, then added their own flavor to make it more user friendly. The similarities between the two distributions go even further, in that Ubuntu packages work flawlessly on Linux Mint, just as Ubuntu PPAs work well on Linux Mint.
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The Kubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Precise Pangolin Beta 2 release of Kubuntu 12.04 gives a preview of the next LTS version of Ubuntu.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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We had expected to be able to pull the lever on orders for Vivaldi by a couple of days ago. Last month there were some developments that have consequently pushed back the project by about a month. I’ll be sending out emails tomorrow to individuals catching them up with this, but thought I’d let people know via my blog as well.
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Tweet
After a temporary hitch with trademark issues, KDE Active Plasma tablet has hit another road-block. There will be delays in the orders.
Aaron Seigo has blogged about this delay, “We had expected to be able to pull the lever on orders for Vivaldi by a couple of days ago. Last month there were some developments that have consequently pushed back the project by about a month.”
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Dubbed OpenGamma Platform 1.0, the open-source software gives users the ability to customize and integrate the platform into existing legacy systems. It features a real-time calculation engine, a built-in library of analytics, market data support and trade data management capabilities.
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Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) has offered its Mojito application framework to the open source community under the BSD license.
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OpenGamma has announced version 1.0 of its open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. OpenGamma is the first company in this area to open source its software. The OpenGamma platform is designed to be a completely open and transparent architecture to help deliver high quality, real-time available trading and risk analytics used by front-office traders, quantitative analysts (“quants”) and risk managers. According to the OpenGamma site, the platform, which has been downloaded over 4000 times, has 750,000 lines of code, 9,000 developer days of work and 10,694 test cases. It also apparently involved the consumption of over 37,000 cans of Dr Pepper Zero.
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US-based Ruby on Rails Platform-as-a-Service specialist Engine Yard has introduced a new Ruby web server called Puma. According to its developers, Puma, created as an alternative to WEBrick and Mongrel, is “built for speed and concurrency”.
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Events
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SaaS
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If you want to live at the Rainbow Mansion, says one former resident, you have to want to change the world. That’s an easy thing to say. But the Mansionites have already changed the world, bringing their communal ethos to the most important open source project of the decade: OpenStack, the Linux of cloud computing.
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Open source business intelligence software developer Jaspersoft has added new tools for accessing “big data” sets through Jaspersoft ETL, the extract, transform, and load (ETL) software that it OEMs from Talend. The latest release of the company’s tools includes better support for the Apache Hadoop big data framework.
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The open source project unveils its first commercial product, claiming to give the flexibility with extra security measures.
ownCloud today moved into the commercial market with the launch of its file sync and share project for businesses.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle announced yesterday, April 2nd, the immediate availability for download of the popular VirtualBox 4.1.12 virtualization software.
Even if it is not mentioned in the official changelog, VirtualBox 4.1.12 is now distributed as 32-bit and 64-bit .deb packages for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system from Canonical.
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Education
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Business
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Explaining open source software can be tricky. Those on the proprietary and business side of the fence find it hard to understand why anyone would want to make software for free. On the other side, open source developers visibly pale at the talk of money and profit, says Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems.
It’s an awkward relationship but one that can and does work, thanks to the professional open source provider.
Perhaps the best explanation of this complex relationship between developers not motivated by profit and businesses focused almost exclusively on profit is James Dixon’s beekeeper model.
Professional Open Source Software (POSS) companies exist, says Dixon, as exchange systems between two distinct groups: the open source community, which is motivated by mutual contribution and community, and the business marketplace, which is motivated by economic reward.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of Wikimedia, has announced the launch of a new project called Wikidata. According to the non-profit organisation, Wikidata – the first new Wikimedia project since 2006 – will “provide a collaboratively edited database of the world’s knowledge” and, once completed, will be used by its other projects including the free Wikipedia online encyclopaedia.
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“The democratic nature of wikis online really spoke to me,” said Schmabb. “Student Life’s primary goal is to serve the needs of the Washington University student body, and we hope that our new website will allow us to better accomplish that goal.”
Schmabb predicts that the quality of all stories will be increased now that eyewitnesses will be able to add their accounts of important news stories directly to the online story.
Senior Online Editor David Seigle says that other elements of Wikipedia might be incorporated into the website in the coming months. Such features include talk pages and administrative powers to undo inaccurate edits.
“[Schmabb] and I trust that members of the Wash. U. community will not abuse these new online capabilities until everything is fully implemented,” said Seigle, a senior.
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Open Data
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The open database of the corporate world, OpenCorporates, has announced that it has passed the milestone of having 40 million companies in its database. It also noted that the fifty-second jurisdiction, Mauritius, has been added, and that it is moving from alpha to beta, though it admits it should have done that “some time ago”.
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This is what the wind over the United States looked like on March 27th, 5:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time. It’s beautiful. And it’s even better if you go to the project page, where you can watch real-time wind currents move around the map.
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Open Hardware
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I have been quite absent from Unixmen for almost 2 weeks now. I do apologize, but have been very busy with other work tasks and projects.
I actually started this article during my absence, but there was a reason it has taken me so long to finish. Read on and see why.
There’s an ugly side to Linux. Or to be more specific, Ubuntu Linux. It has suffered from the evil grips of what I describe as ‘Commercialism’.
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A very short time after both my brother and I migrated to Linux, we began experiencing the frustration of seeing the reality of the computer world: lazy technicians that charge to destroy your data, incompetent tech support staff who think that Linux is an anti-virus, unscrupulous companies that avoid their responsibilities and blame their helpless users by chanting their eternal mantra: “Your computer must be infected”…
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Desktop
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The article which I am referring to is titled: “Difference engine: free is too expensive.” The blog in which the entry is made is titled Babbage. That, of course, gives it respectability – Charles Babbage is a man whom every computer science student knows about. But the entry itself is mostly specious.
The author first tries to get the Linux crowd on-side – he/she/it has used Linux, and the software (oh, how condescending can you be?) has several good points. Why it can even run on an old Pentium!
But then we get to the meat of the confused reasoning – the large number of distributions and the fact that one distribution may have a different file layout to another is a big minus, and unless Linux conforms to the same pattern that Mac OSX and Windows do, it will not succeed in business. We all need to march to the same tune; monoculture will save the earth.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Ryan “Icculus” Gordon, the famed Linux game developer, in the past has sharply criticized open-source Linux graphics drivers as not being mature and putting the Linux desktop into a dangerous position. In speaking to Ryan this weekend, his views on the open-source graphics drivers have changed.
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Applications
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Monitorix is an free and open source system monitoring tool that allows users to monitor via web browser. Monitorix also monitoring services including CPU temp and load, Active processes, Allocated memory, Hard disk temp, Kernel usage, Network activity,Graphic Card temp and usage, and More.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Quake2World, a standalone game built atop the id Tech 2 engine but with sharply better graphics and other improvements, has finally reached a beta state. There’s a number of features to this latest open-source first person shooter.
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Reaction 1.0, a game derived from Quake III, has been released in beta form after being in development for the past decade.
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There’s some more Linux gaming news this weekend: the Linux client of Trine 2 has finally been released.
Trine 2 is the side-scrolling game of action, puzzles and platforming and the successor to the original Trine game that also had a native Linux client.
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Dear Linux gamers, the wait is over, as Frozenbyte unleashed a few days ago the Linux version for its award winning Trine 2 cross-platform game.
Trine 2 is a side-scrolling puzzle adventure/action game developed by the Finnish studio Frozenbyte, will be ported to Linux and officially launched sometime during 2012.
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Desktop Environments
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I just wanted to take a moment to clarify the state of compositing with the Enlightenment desktop. In two recent reviews of Bodhi Linux the authors mucked up a few of the details concerning compositing and E17. I can’t really fault them for their misinformation (as a whole both are really good write ups) because the details about compositing and E17 aren’t very well documented. Today I would like to clarify a few things about using compositing with Enlightenment DR17.
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For those unsatisfied with the state of GNOME 3.x Shell, Ubuntu’s Unity interface, and other Linux desktop options, Xfce 4.10 is approaching with an official release planned for later this month.
As the first major Xfce update in more than one year, Xfce 4.10 Preview 1 is now available. “The Xfce development team is proud to announce the first preview release for Xfce 4.10. Together with this preview release, the Xfce project announces the feature freeze for the final 4.10 release which is set to be pushed out to the world on April 28th, 2012.”
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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The developers behind the GNOME project have announced GNOME 3.4, a new version of the desktop environment. The update brings several significant new features and a number of design and usability improvements.
GNOME is an open source software stack that provides a desktop shell, applications, and development frameworks that are commonly used on the Linux platform. It is the default desktop environment in Fedora and several other Linux distributions. It’s released every six months on a time-based development cycle.
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I want to revisit this article for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I think enough has changed in the last 6 months to invite some commentary. Journalism is sometimes just the ability to speculate widly and then put those crazy, wide-eyed presumptions onto paper. That said, not everything in this piece came true, and at the same time some of this things are still developing.
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It is my hypothesis that there is a very real lack of knowledge of Linux basics even by many long time Linux users and especially by many members of the Linux press. This knowledge gap is exhibited by the fact that a large number of Linux users actually believe there are huge differences between Linux distributions. The media especially is rife with comparisons of different distributions (distros), reviews of distros and stories about each distro.
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First and foremost, RapidDisk 2.1b is now released and available. Second, the RapidDisk LX project is now listed as part of the Open Invention Network. Third, I just uploaded an initial RapidDisk LX 1.0 alpha release image to the project website.
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New Releases
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The second Fuduntu quarterly ISO, Fuduntu 2012.2 is now available for immediate download. As with all Fuduntu releases, this release continues our tradition of small incremental improvements. It is important to note that existing Fuduntu users have already rolled up to this version through the normal update process, and do not need to download or reinstall from this media to benefit from this release.
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Gentoo Family
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Coming out of the Gentoo camp is the Gentoo Linux 12.1 LiveDVD release with several new features.
Packages at the heart of this updated Gentoo LiveDVD include the Linux 3.3 kernel, X.Org Server 1.12, KDE SC 4.8.1, GNOME 3.2.1, Xfce 4.8, Fluxbox 1.3.2, Mozilla Firefox 11, LibreOffice 3.5.1, Blender 2.60, Amarok 2.5, VLC 2.0.1, and others.
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Gentoo released 12.1 on April Fool’s Day. I included it in my jokes roundup. But the Gentoo announcement has added a message to users and jokesters today: The installer is real.
I said in that post that the best jokes are the ones you almost believe. But perhaps that wasn’t quite accurate. Maybe the most crafty of all are those that are real but seem like a joke. That’s the sum of the Gentoo installer. A Gentoo installer is a difficult beast to construct, I understand that. At one time the very nature of Gentoo conflicted with the traditional binary installer. However, the Gentoo team has been promoting Stage 3 installs for quite some time. What is a Stage 3 install? It’s the nearly complete install of a binary system from a tarball that needs to be rebuilt before adding all your goodies. So, why not have an install wizard like Sabayon?
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We can exclusively share with you the official disc artwork for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS CD and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server releases.
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Having recently converted to Android from my iPhone 4, I have been very happy with the range of apps to replace what I had on iOS. In many cases, I’m finding the apps better. The Android ethos seems to be more about function, rather than design and aesthetics. However, one area where I’ve found the Android to be lacking is in respect of the “todo” category.
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Phones
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Android
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Sony says its customers should avoid upgrading their Android devices to Ice Cream Sandwich, adding that many of them won’t get the option anyway.
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London’s claim to being the hub for tech startups in Europe got a boost last week, when Google opened the doors of its latest effort, Google Campus, a seven-story centre for startups, which it has launched in partnership with several existing organizations, and big ambitions to galvanize some of the tech activity that has already marked out London to take it to the next level.
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Events
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At the end of last year, Computerworld’s Eric Knoor had this to say about the state of cloud computing: “If I had to sum up in one word the most exciting thing that happened to cloud computing in 2011, I’d have to say it’s OpenStack. This open source project, launched by Rackspace and NASA in late 2010, is assembling a private cloud ‘operating system’ for the data center that promises vast increases in operational efficiency.”
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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With the evolution of HTML5 standards gathering pace, and developers increasingly looking to produce apps for multiple platforms, Mozilla’s plans to deliver an HTML5-based operating system for smartphones could have a major impact.
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SaaS
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Wondering what comes after the cloud? Literally, usually sunshine — haha. But metaphorically speaking, the next great frontier may well be big-data. And Hadoop, an open-source project enjoying ever-increasing buzz as of late, will likely be at the fore as that niche evolves. If you don’t know much about Hadoop, it’s time to learn. Here are the basics.
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Semi-Open Source
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Just got back to Buenos Aires after a 10 days in the United States and El Salvador, and finally got some time to write about the award, what it means to GNU Solidario and to the community at large.
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(You can check the original post at http://www.meanmicio.org/2012/04/gnu-health-wins-fsf-project-of-social.html )
Just got back to Buenos Aires after a 10 days in the United States and El Salvador, and finally got some time to write about the award, what it means to GNU Solidario and to the community at large.
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OpenMRS began as a research project spanning Indiana University and Eldoret, Kenya’s Moi University.
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Public Services/Government
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The Indian government launched an ‘Open Government Platform (OGPL)’—an open source software platform which aims to provide enhanced public access to government data and documents.
The OGPL, a joint effort from India and the United States, will make government data, documents, applications, tools and services publicly available. “By making data available through OGPL developers, analysts, media, and academia can develop new applications and insights that will help give citizens more knowledge for better decisions,” the government officials said in the press release.
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Open Hardware
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Standards/Consortia
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This magic comes about by the use of “virtualisation” – which simply refers to the creation of a virtual (rather than an actual) version of something. With the right software and a reasonably powerful PC, you can build virtual “compartments” inside your computer that look and act like a whole separate machine. That allows you, for example, to run Linux and Mac on Windows, try out a new web server or run an old operating system such as DOS or OS/2, all without disturbing your current system – or having to reboot. “Guest” systems can communicate with the underlying (or “host” operating system) via shared folders, networking or the clipboard, and you can install and run as many VMs (virtual machines) as you like, with disk space and memory the only real limitation. More amazingly, the extremely clever software is open source. And that means it’s free.
VirtualBox, from virtualbox.org, is available for Linux, Mac and Windows and requires 40-90MB of disk space depending on your operating system. There’s also an Extension Pack containing some extra goodies and an extremely detailed manual on the site.
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Finance
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Prof. William K. Black, you are the pre-eminent Hero of We the People in our time. You are the Man of Light, Truth, and Justice for the century. May your name ring forever in the pages of history, on a par with that of your namesake, William the Conquerer (“Johnny the Concaloo” in early R&B, you may recall), but with a higher purpose. William K. Black, you are our pre-eminent *Leader of Light*.
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04.01.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Last night I shared a preview of the best and worst case examples of power consumption on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. In a good case, for newer PC hardware, an Intel notebook was going through nearly 40% less power while idling on Ubuntu 12.04 compared to Ubuntu 11.10 and earlier releases. However, for older PC hardware, Precise Pangolin’s power consumption was up sharply — 30% higher than when the Intel “Dothan” was in its prime.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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As I reported earlier this week, Cairo 1.12 was released earlier this week after being in development for the past year and a half. Besides other new features, the performance of Cairo 1.12 should be better than previous releases.
As mentioned in the earlier Cairo 1.12 article, “For bringing the Cairo performance improvements, the library’s rasterization pipeline was overhauled and now allows for the different Cairo back-ends the ability to implement their own specific pipeline while being able to leverage a library of common routines. Clipping was also overhauled, stroking was made faster, and there’s also four new anti-aliasing hints.”
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME 3.4 is the second release aiming at countering some of the complaints that greeted the release of the version last year.
Users were unhappy with the mobile phone-like interface, which seemed to mimic the Unity interface used by Canonical for its Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.
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From some time that I’ve been working on ‘Moniz’ after Martim Moniz. Moniz is meant to be a Linux remix which defaults to European Portuguese, and will be based on GNOME 3 with Cinnamon by default (GNOME Shell is also available). There’s also some intention to make this more ‘Iberian’ compatible, which means that the languages spoken in Spain should be supported in the Future.
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I decided to try something else, which I had been hearing about a lot, Mint. I decided to try with the LXDE interface, because I like my desktop to take little memory and be responsive.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the OpenBox Special Edition of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. It is available only as a PDF since all the articles have already appeared in the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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CentOS 6 is arguably one of the least expected best distributions for your desktop. While it is intended for servers, it does a splendid job at home, too. It’s fast, light, stable, robust, and supported unto eternity. And with some medium-hard work, you can significantly improve the overall look & feel and productivity. I have elaborate on these so-called pimping efforts in a series of three articles, all of which introduce a new range of programs and tools that are not included by default. To name a few, Java, Flash, LibreOffice, Chrome, newer versions of Firefox.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Over the past few years, competitive debate has moved toward a digital, paperless workflow, but that creates problems for school debate programs that don’t have the extra dough to shell out for laptops and software licenses. Chris McCool, a debate coach at Ballard High School in Seattle, Washington, decided to create a free, open source solution that would work on older, used laptops. On the project’s Kickstarter page, McCool explained:
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xpected to be unleashed in autumn of 2012, Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest gamble in the desktop market is making millions of eyes turn even before its release. Loaded with a brand new yet somewhat contentious Metro interface, the touch-friendly desktop will not only be seen on laptops and PCs, but will also find its place in the swanky upcoming tablet computers.
That said, the main target group for Redmond would be the desktop, a field that they’ve been dominating for decades. Windows 8 will aim to obliterate all the competition by giving users an interface that will look and behave the same way across all devices. Sadly for them, and quite obviously too, Metro isn’t the first to try out this unified concept. Our very own Ubuntu has been busy for a couple of years trying to polish Unity, its unified interface for computers, tablets, smartphones (see: Ubuntu For Android: Do We Really Need it?), and even TVs (see: Ubuntu TV vs. Google TV: Battle of the Linux-based Smart TV). Some even go as far as to say that Microsoft might have actually ‘borrowed’ that idea from its old penguinian buddy.
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Flavours and Variants
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After months of developing and testing, on March 23 David T has finally released Comice OS 4, the last version of Pear OS, a Linux distro that is based on Ubuntu and has the look and feel of Mac OS. Although I’ve tried the former versions of Pear OS and found them not very usable then, Comice OS 4 is totally different and it really impresses me this time. I downloaded Comice OS yesterday and tried it on my laptop, and here is my review for Comice OS 4.
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Phones
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Android
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Android 4.0 code named Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) was released more than three months ago. Google’s own Galaxy Nexus is perhaps the only device that ships with it at the moment. And because of that, there are only a handful of Android apps available whose design has been updated for Android 4.0+. That will change as time goes by. But which all are the Android apps whose design has been updated for Android 4.0 ICS at the moment? Let’s find out.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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2011 was great for tablets, Apple’s tablets. 2012 will be different. Google, realizing Android/Linux tablets have respectable but not great share of the market, is gearing up to actively promote Android/Linux tablets. All the pieces needed for great competition will soon be in place:
* great products,
* great and numerous combatants, and
* great prices.
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This Q&A is part of a biweekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 80+ Q&A sites.
Lord Torgamus asks: I want to join an open source project for the same reasons as anyone else: I want to help create something useful and become a better coder.
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Revolutionary movements require revolutionary progress. However, at the start of a Movement, such progress may not be immediately evident to those whose views of progress have been tainted by commercial software, where progress is measured by feature enhancements, quality improvements and user satisfaction. These are false idols and the shallow view of progress they support are irrelevant for true free software.
Rejecting the repressive capitalist view of progress-as-production and production-as-consumption, and the doctrinaire emphasis on results-oriented metrics, we instead adopt the dialectic of progress-as-being and being-as-becoming, with metrics illustrating not what is produced, but what is willed. Rather than galley slaves, prodded by whip lashes to “row harder!”, our motto shall be: “row louder!”
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AUSTIN, TX, March 28 — The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin has released a new open-source software package called DisplayCluster that is used to drive large-scale tiled displays and allows scientists to interact and view high-resolution imagery and video up to gigapixels in size.
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It’s been an open secret all month, but two new members have joined the Affiliate scheme at OSI – Spain’s CENATIC (the national open source competency centre that’s been so important to the government adoption of open source in Spain’s regions) and the venerable Debian Project. Both bring a much-needed international flavour to OSI, along with a wealth of hard-won experience.
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Web Browsers
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Education
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Blackboard has just announced its acquisition of Moodlerooms and Netspot, two companies that help provide support and deployment services for schools that use the open-source LMS Moodle.
“Wait. What?” is an acceptable, albeit mild response.
This is, after all, the LMS giant — one that once claimed the patent on e-learning technology and sued other companies who provided competing software. Blackboard now says it is embracing open source — “Ours is no mere dalliance with open source, but a very committed plunge into the pool,” says the company’s Ray Henderson. To that end, Blackboard has also announced it’s creating an Open Source Services Group that will help institutions manage their open source LMSes, including Moodle and Sakai.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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With cross platform development comes some important questions of software freedom. There would be no true software freedom if we said we would permit our software to compile and run only on specific platforms, that is after all what proprietary software vendors often do. However in GNU Telephony we do principally develop and test our software on GNU systems specifically and do not have expertise in or interest in supporting proprietary ones.
If people wish to work on or support other platforms also, they are certainly free to do so. As one of our goals in GNU Telephony is ubiquity, this is essential. However, unlike some groups who choose such goals, or distributions who choose “popularity” as their essential goal, we will never do so if it means also compromising the freedom of our contributors and users. Given this, if people want to submit patches for building and running on other platforms, we are happy to take such patches in, so long as they do not break features or functionality on free software platforms, and do not impose any additional restrictions on how we convey software to others.
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GNUtrition is a diet and nutrition analysis program for the GNU Operating System. The US Department of Agriculture Nutrient Database of Standard Reference is used as the source of food nutrient information.
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The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is celebrating open standards today in an annual event called Document Freedom Day. The event, which was first held in 2008, is observed on the last Wednesday of March. The purpose of the celebration is to raise awareness of the critical role unencumbered interoperability and open standards play in protecting data from vendor lock-in.
According to the FSFE, 34 organizations are hosting 48 events in 17 countries to honor the occasion. The FSFE’s list of Document Freedom Day partners includes The Document Foundation, the KDE eV, the Pirate Party of Baden-Württemberg, and many regional Linux user groups.
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Public Services/Government
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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Thanks to our friends the Millers, I learn that yesterday was World Backup Day. I don’t know why it was especially important to be backed up on March 31st, unless because of worries that Anonymous was going to carry out their threat to bring down the Internet. If that had happened, and you use the “cloud,” you’d want a local copy.
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Hardware
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Evidently tired of smooth running graphics, lightning fast processing and bags and bags of available memory, programmer Dmitry Grinberg decided to go back to computing basics. And then some. As Linux was developed on a 32-bit machine with 1MB of RAM, this has always been considered the minimum system requirements to run the open source OS.
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Finance
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A U.S. appeals court was asked on Friday to decide whether Goldman Sachs Group Inc and TCW Asset Management Co should have foreseen the housing market implosion that caused a $37 million loss for German state-owned Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg.
A three-judge panel on Friday did not make an immediate ruling on a trial judge’s decision last September to dismiss the German bank’s lawsuit claiming fraud against Goldman and TCW, an investment advisor.
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Privacy
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So now we start getting some of the actual facts and not the bold headlines or the wishy-washy text from the BBC. So it appears, no, your actual data activity will not be monitored in real time, just your affiliations whilst in cyberspace. So the requirement of a warrant still is in place for anything more and I’d suggest that if an intelligence agency has a level of interest in you which would have your affiliates logged, then there would be a warrant on the cards anyway. A lot of fuss from the average user about nothing and a good way for the UK to look as if its not completely lost on its tech vision. Remember “digital Britain”? And how about your digital contract with your ISP? If I interpret mine correctly, I’ve already agreed for them to give my particulars away to any law enforcement agency if so requested – without warrant. In respect of my ISP, no new law or even warrant is required to get this information. More likely this is a good chance for the UK Government to pretend they are doing something.
In the UK we’ve seen the expertise the courts and the criminal/civil justice system operate under – dealing with a chap who recorded a movie on his phone in a cinema in order to post it on the net for nothing but having an “image”, blundering through a circus like the ACS:Law case, where in the end, it was the law firm itself (not the alleged File-sharers) that ended up with big problems.
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03.31.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Qualcomm has clarified their views today regarding the presentation of two of their Atheros developers proposing that all proprietary drivers be killed for good across all platforms and replaced with open-source drivers.
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As the latest work queued up for merging in the Linux 3.4 kernel is the Btrfs file-system pull, which Chris Mason describes as “pretty big, picking up patches that have been under development for some time.”
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This board is certainly capable of single digit power draw, at least with certain specific setups. With Linux, running the latest kernel (at least 3.3.0) is recommended to achieve lower power consumption. MeeGo with it’s included proprietary xorg driver for CedarView Atoms shows that Linux can achieve similarly low power draw as Windows 7 with an optimized graphics driver. What remains to be seen is if the Linux kernel developers will have access to enough information about the PowerVR SGX 545 GPU core to enable them to incorporate all power saving features of this GPU into the Linux kernel DRM driver.
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Applications
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Want to learn the art of writing a screenplay? Check out Trelby, open source screenwriting software you can try right now if you’re a Linux or Windows user.
Whether you’re an aspiring writer or a planning on becoming a YouTube star, knowing how to write a script is an essential skill. It’s possible, of course, to write a screenplay using Microsoft Word, but using software built for screenplays saves a lot of time. Formatting for screenplays is very specific, so why waste time imitating it? It will just frustrate you, distracting you from your writing.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Do you want to play a game with extreme violence in a background populated with characters that are American Caricatures ?
Welcome to Postal 2.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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A few months ago I took a look at KDE-Telepathy from within Fedora Rawhide. I said I would check it out after upgrading to Fedora 16 and then I got busy getting ready for the arrival of my daughter. (my first kid) So I just kept using Kopete for my multi-protocol IM needs. It’s the only way I keep up with anyone on Gchat or Facebook chat because I refuse to have to keep any specific tab open on my web browser for chatting. Also, it tends to be more annoying to chat – instead of chatting in a small window that I can put off to the corner of whatever virtual desktop or activity I’m in, I’d need my entire web browser.
But recently I came across this blog post in planet KDE that talks about what’s coming in KDE-Telepathy 0.4. I really like logging for my chats because it can be very useful to go back and look for a reference or a URL that someone mentions. So, even though there isn’t an easy way to view the logs right now, the fact that the logs are being saved was enough to allow me to over to KDE-Telepathy. I’m also really excited for the Gchat-like interface coming in 0.4. It’s mentioned in that previous link as well as here.
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GNOME Desktop
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There’s a new simulation game in town and this one is aimed straight for the Linux user. With Linux Tycoon, you can design, build, and manage your very own Linux distribution and compete with other distros for users. “Basically take all the fun parts of building your own Linux Distro… and take out all the work. Bam! Instant entertainment!”
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. (RHT) jumped 15 percent after the software maker forecast earnings that beat analysts’ estimates.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project is pleased to announce that it is joining the Open Source Initiative (“OSI”) as an affiliate. The OSI was founded in 1998 by Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens, with the aim of explaining, advocating, and protecting the term “open source”. Debian shares the OSI’s desire to encourage Free Software. Debian’s Social Contract commits it to producing a system which is 100% free.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A quick update: we’ve uploaded digital versions of the latest issue and our previous issue to Ubuntu’s Software Centre, and we’ll try to do the same for future issues as well.
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Depending upon your hardware, the power consumption when running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can either be at its best or worst. Here’s a look at the two power consumption extremes of the Precise Pangolin.
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I’ve been an Xfce user since 2004, this post from last year documents my UI adventures. It’s been my Desktop Environment of choice for my whole professional career as a systems administrator and I’m very set in my ways configuration-wise at work. These days I help out with the Xubuntu team on marketing, website, release notes and testing. I really love Xfce and I’ll continue to use it and contribute to Xubuntu (we had our beta2 today too, and formal release of our new branding!).
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Almost there! Day by day we are getting closer to the final stable release of Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin the long term support release. Today the second beta release is available to download for the testing purposes. So, let’s check the recent changes to Ubuntu Precise Pangolin highlights.
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The Ninja Block not only runs on open software, but it itself is open hardware, with designs available under Creative Commons. It also includes a 3D printed case. Prices start at $155 AUD ($160 USD, £100 GBP) for the basic device, with external sensors costing more. You can pre-order from the Ninja Blocks website.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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According to a report in The Wall Street Journal citing “people familiar with the matter,” Google intends to go head-to-head with Apple’s iPad by selling co-branded Android tablets. Google, of course, has its hands tied with regard to its lofty goals to become a big player on the hardware scene, as it waits for its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility to be approved. Is Google biting off more than it can chew with its smartphone and tablet plans?
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced that Apache Rave, the organization’s open-source mashup platform, has graduated from the incubator to become a top-level project.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced that Apache Rave, the organization’s open-source mashup engine, has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top-level project (TLP).
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Ever wonder where the phrase “jump the shark” came from? It’s dates back to the once wildly popular TV show Happy Days. It’s widely accepted that the show lost its way, and its audience, in an episode where the lovable hero “Fonzie” jumps a shark on water skis in a pathetic attempt to keep the audience’s attention. I wonder how if Firefox jumped the shark when its parent company Mozilla decided to put Firefox on a hyper-accelerated release schedule last summer. Today, five releases later, Firefox keeps falling farther behind Google’s Chrome in popularity, it’s not very stable, and it can’t keep up with Chrome in speed.
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Public Services/Government
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The United States and India jointly launched a new Web portal to distribute an open source software applications to help governments manage and release their data to the public, according to an announcement on March 30.
The “Open Government Platform” website will make available code, tools and processes to government agencies and to developers, analysts, media, academia and the public to make government data more transparent and useful, officials said in the news releases.
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Openness/Sharing
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03.30.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The current impact on the budget for the LiMux project amounts to a total of €11.7 million,” (US$15.6 million) Ude wrote in a reply to questions asked by Marian Offman of the Christian Socialist Union on March 19. The questions were asked because the party was concerned about a failed migration from Windows to Linux in Vienna.
The city of Munich started the LiMux project in 2004 and began migrating from Windows NT to a fully open source desktop infrastructure in 2006.
The CSU does not have to be worried that the Vienna scenario is going to happen in Munich, Ude assured the city council. If the city had maintained the Windows infrastructure as it was in 2005, the associated costs would have amounted to €11.8 million. However, since then the number of computers increased significantly, and Munich would have spent an additional €1.65 million on new software alone, Ude said.
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Kernel Space
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It seems to be a bad time to be a Linux website. After a September 2011 breach on kernel.org and several other Linux Foundation web sites, it appears that community site Linux.org has been down for quite a while as well.
The reason for Linux.org’s removal is not completely known, though it does not seem to be the result of an attack, but rather a planned renovation of the popular site. The renovation plans are not outlined publicly, nor is any timeline, but signs of life are indicating that Linux.org is about to come back to life eventually.
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Graphics Stack
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Here are some updated benchmarks of the AMD Radeon HD 7950 “Southern Islands” graphics card under Linux with the proprietary Catalyst driver.
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The DRM render-nodes work has been revived. This DRM branch originally started out when working on support for enabling two X.Org Servers to run off of a single graphics card.
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Applications
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The long-awaited and much anticipated 2.8 release of GIMP is right around the corner! Wait, I know, you’ve heard this before. You were expecting it at the end of 2010, and then in 2011, and so on… Well, fear not because it’s really coming in less than 45 days! Want proof? Nothing could be more clear than this infographic.
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Proprietary
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Update: I’ve now been able to attain independent confirmation with Valve (here). This isn’t an April Fools’ Joke or anything else. They’re in need of more Linux folks; will try to get more information to share after the first of the month, since many Phoronix Forums users remain unconvinced about any Valve Linux interests.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)/Qt
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From the mailing list message describing these iOS-porting problems, “As this is a bit of a show-stopper as far as I’m concerned (as a widget-only version of Qt5 doesn’t add any value over a widget and QML version of Qt4.8), I’m not seeing any point in doing a Qt5 port to iOS if V8 is a hard requirement (unless the above issues can be resolved somehow)…There’s no platform plugin yet either, so no way to even test V8 on iOS AFAIK. If anyone knows a way to test V8 without GUI, Declarative or OpenGL, then that may be a starting point at least, because IMHO there’s no point in starting a platform plugin until this issue is resolved.”
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Red Hat Family
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Open source software company Red Hat Inc., believes that companies like VMware Inc., and Microsoft Corp., are skewing the definition of open cloud by claiming that their virtualization products are open when in fact they are closed.
Speaking at a round table conference in London this week, Scott Crenshaw, head of Red Hat’s Cloud Business Unit, said that several virtualization vendors have started to claim they are open as a marketing gimmick.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Time for a personal confession: I hate using Windows. I think Android and Linux go together like peas and carrots, or whatever that famous movie said. Because Android is so Linux-based, with similar file structures and terminal commands, it is worth any Android enthusiast’s time to learn some basic Linux tools. One of the most commonly used Linux distributions is Ubuntu; it’s extremely user-friendly, and you might actually be surprised how easy doing work involving ADB on your phone can become once you invest a brief amount of time in Ubuntu. The biggest complaint I usually hear regarding ADB is that it’s an enormous pain to get it installed and set up properly, and then there are those dreaded driver issues. One RootzWiki developer and script writer, Tahl, has written a script for use in Ubuntu that can make your life a lot easier.
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The ambitious Raspberry Pi is in troubled waters again. After recovering from the manufacturing hiccup when the factory soldered in non-magnetic jacks. Now, it is facing a new challenge. The distributors of Raspberry Pi, both RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell have refused to distribute the Raspberry Pi until it has received the CE mark.
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So far, everyone scrambling to get their hands on the much sought after Raspberry Pi seem to be hoping to use it as a media player. The cheap Linux computer is capable of decoding 1080p video, and its low profile makes it ideal for the living room. Clearly, everyone needs to think a little bigger. One enterprising user has managed to port a ZX Spectrum emulator to the computer for some retrotastic gaming.
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Phones
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Android
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A report from the Guardian that Google only generated $543 million in revenue from Android is based on bad information, says a source close to Google.
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Android/Linux is a global product made from the Linux kernel globally and Android developed by Google. It mostly runs on ARM (UK) but is invading the x86 space as well. Retail shelves around the world usually display Android/Linux devices prominently and in many regions, consumers and businesses can buy GNU/Linux PCs sometimes locally produced but also supplied by global OEMs.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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OSI is very pleased to welcome two important new members to the Affiliate scheme for community groups. They are CENATIC and Debian.
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The Kubatana initiated open source project, Freedom Fone, won an award for Innovation in Media technology at a ceremony organized by the Index on Censorship. The award category recognized Kubatana for innovation and original use of new technology to circumvent censorship and foster debate, argument or dissent. The category is supported by popular web giant, Google.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has launched an online game that runs completely inside a web browser. Which means, the game doesn’t use any plugins to run in your web browser as it is fully developed using HTML 5 and JavaScript.
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SaaS
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Today, the Obama Administration is announcing the “Big Data Research and Development Initiative.” By improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promises to help accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and transform teaching and learning.
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Education
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Sakai CLE, a learning management system, is open source software. This makes Sakai different from its competitors because it is engineered by a community of developers, rather than being developed solely by The Sakai Foundation.
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FSF Events
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Public Services/Government
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“Data belongs to all of us. Sooner we realise as government… better it is for all of us because then government and citizen will collaborate with each other. This project tells us what data can be shared and can be put in public domain,” Telecom and IT Minister Kapil Sibal said while launching the Open Government Platform (OGPL).
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Openness/Sharing
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The team behind the device began taking advance orders this week, and the first Ninja Blocks and sensor packs started shipping from home nation Australia this morning to folk who backed the endeavour on Kickstarter.
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Open Data
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Azavea’s OpenDataPhilly.org open source code has popped up in an open data catalog at Open San Diego, which launched in beta last week.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Karlsruhe, 28 March 2012 – 1&1, GMX and WEB.DE receive the German Document Freedom Award for the use of Open Standards. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII). 1&1 is awarded for automatically adding XMPP for all customers of their mail services. The Document Freedom Award is awarded annually on the occasion of Document Freedom Day – the international day for Open Standards. Last years winners include tagesschau.de, Deutschland Radio, and the German Foreign Office.
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The other day when I was trying out Haiku, I had a sudden brain wave. How many operating systems – old or otherwise can I really name? And how many of these have I actually used? To tell you honestly, I could name only a few including the ones I have used. Of course, I lumped all Linux distributions as one entity.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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EIA Washington recently published data revisions to global oil production, going back at least twenty years. Here, I update annual average oil production for Non-OPEC, which used to account for 60% of total global supply but has had trouble sustaining increases–even in a high-priced oil environment. As of 2011, Non-OPEC supply fell to 57% of total global share, the difference being made up of course by OPEC.
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Finance
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The unemployment rate in the United States fell from 9.1 percent in the summer of 2011 to 8.3 percent in February. This decline, the largest six-month drop in the unemployment rate since 1984, has surprised many economic forecasters. The decline is even more surprising because recent real GDP growth appears to have been around trend at best, whereas in early 1984, growth was more than 7 percent. Our next six posts in Liberty Street Economics will discuss prospects for the U.S. labor market given this surprisingly quick decline in the unemployment rate. In this opening post, we outline some of the themes examined in this series and provide a brief summary of our conclusions. But first we develop a simple framework to place the unemployment rate in context with the rest of the labor market.
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In an earlier article, EU’s selective Lessons from Greece, we saw that EU Parliament’s investigation of the financial crisis (CRIS), and the hearing Lessons from Greece (ECON/7/02578), lacked the resolve to address the Greece/Goldman secret loan that was allegedly improper and exacerbated Greece’s ills.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Federal authorities are investigating two Wisconsin nonprofits associated with Wisconsin political veteran Mark Block, former campaign manager for presidential candidate Herman Cain and former director of the state chapter of the Koch-founded-and-funded Americans for Prosperity. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a letter with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requesting such an investigation last November.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The poster child for the government adoption of Linux, the City of Munich, is reporting that it has saved more than a third of its IT budget in making the move.
According to Golem magazine, which we get for the advanced pottery projects, the city experienced the minimum disruption in shifting to things more open saucy.
The city said that it saved 4 million euro in licensing costs.
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For the past five years, Peter Jansen, a Canadian scientist whose PhD is in neural computation and cognitive modelling, has been developing a series of open source hardware “tricorders” — handheld sensor packages running GNU/Linux that can be used by everyday people to make and record observations about the world around them. There are several versions of the tricorder, some with sensors attached (atmospheric, electromagnetic, spatial), others that are “blank,” with places to mount your own sensors. The latest version, the Mark IV, is still in development, and is intended to be mass-produced at low cost.
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Desktop
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The Raspberry Pi folks have been getting a lot of attention for their $35 PC with an ARM-based processor and support for some open source software. But as the cost of computer components continues to drop, the Raspberry Pi is hardly the only inexpensive PC capable of running Linux.
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Kernel Space
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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” can boot faster… sometimes. If you are not lucky, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can boot more than twice as slow as Ubuntu 10.04, the previous LTS release. Here are boot performance results of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS running on six distinct notebooks and comparing the Bootchart results upon clean installations of Ubuntu Linux going back as far as six years from the days of the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS “Dapper Drake” release.
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Graphics Stack
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Shinpei Kato, the developer that last year at XDC2011 Chicago presented TimeGraph as an open-source GPU Linux command scheduler and PathScale’s GPGPU run-time, has something new to share. Shinpei’s latest project is Gdev, which comes down to being an open-source CUDA implementation that’s competitive to NVIDIA’s proprietary stack.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Looking for a tablet that can serve as an eReader and possibly more while not wanting to support the corporate giants in the business such as Apple, Samsung or Nokia? Then MakePlayLive might have the solution for you.
The company has started to take orders for its 7-inch form factor Vivaldi tablet, one of the first tablets that is available using an open source operating system rather than iOS, Android or any of the other operating systems currently on the market.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) soared up 16.19% to $59.69.
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Red Hat Inc. RHT-N is red hot. The software maker’s shares were up 19 per cent Thursday, hitting a 12-year high, after an earnings report that highlighted how much Red Hat is benefiting from a shift in the way big companies meet their technological needs.
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It’s not that it’s sour grapes or anything… for me, the sense that Red Hat would make this milestone was a bit inevitable, and I never really saw any real chance that they would fail to make this goal. Seriously, it would have taken a disaster to stop Red Hat’s strong growth.
While I can see the value of celebrating milestones like these, I really wonder if this whole notion of basking in the reflected glory of Red hat as proof that an open source based company can Make It Big is a good idea.
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Red Hat has been a public company since 1999, but according to its CEO the company still has a lot of opportunities left to capture. Red Hat reported its fiscal 2012 earnings late Wednesday, passing the $1 billion mark in revenues for the first time.
Red Hat is the first pure play open source and Linux vendor to achieve the $1 billion milestone. For the year, Red Hat’s revenues were reported at $1.13 billion for a 25 percent year-over-year gain. GAAP Net Income for the full year was reported at $146.6 million or $0.75 per diluted share, which is a dramatic gain over the $107.3 million or $0.55 per diluted share reported for fiscal 2011.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Everyone always talks about making their computer faster and faster, but what about if you wanted to make it slower? It’s not as easy as you might think. Using the standard assortment of compatible components means that there is a point where your computer can’t really get any slower, because the old parts just won’t work with the software. For example, you can’t load Windows 8 CP on that 486 you keep in the deepest, darkest corner of the basement. While that might be true, there are ways to work around it if you are really intent on building yourself the worst computer ever.
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Flavours and Variants
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I wrote a few weeks ago about the approaching Update Pack 4 for Linux Mint Debian Edition. According to a new Mint Blog post, the release is getting near, and there is lots of good news about it:
- Lots of updates, of course. Pretty much along the lines of what I wrote previously about this. Linux kernel 3.0.2, Firefox and Thunderbird 11.x, Opera 11.62, MATE 1.2, Cinnamon 1.4, X.org server 1.11.4, and much more.
- It sounds like they realized the same thing that I suspected and wrote about last time, that LMDE has become a sort of haven for Gnome 2 users. So there are a number of options for those users, including of course the latest MATE and Cinnamon releases. But on top of that, they are creating a special repository which will remain with Gnome 2. This is important – when Update Pack 4 is released, it will automatically install Gnome 3 (and remove Gnome 2). So if you want to stay with Gnome 2, make sure that you update your repository list as described in the blog post referenced above before installing Update Pack 4.
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Operating system vendor Enea AB (Stockholm, Sweden) announced at the DESIGN West exhibition that it is now supplying Enea Linux together with some complementary technologies.
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Phones
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Nokia CEO Stephen Elop had several tough decisions to make when he came on board and replaced former chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. Of course the biggest shift for Elop’s Nokia came in mid-February last year when the company confirmed that the burning platform had scorched MeeGo, and Nokia planned to dump its Linux-based mobile operating system for Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. Nokia still went on to launch the N9, and it was widely believed that the handset would be the only MeeGo device from Nokia to ever see the light of day. According to a recent report, however, the Finnish vendor may have new MeeGo devices works.
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Android
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With the news that the Linux kernel is going to see Android compatibility, there has been a growing sense that Android apps will be finding themselves at home on the Linux desktop.
In this article, I will dive into how Android compatibility might affect the desktop Linux and what we might see happening in the near future as well. While the news of Android compatibility might seem unimportant to the casual Linux user, it could potentially mean big opportunities for Android developers.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Internet Solutions is to expand its unified cloud messaging offering to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with fewer than 1 000 users and to the public sector – using Zimbra, VMware’s next-generation, open source, Linux-based e-mail and calendar groupware platform.
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There is a false assumption that open source is less secure. Pingdom, which claims to be big fans of the Apache HTTP web server, recently published an interview with William A. Rowe Jr., who until just recently, was the Vice President of the HTTP Server Project.
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Adobe has announced the launch of version 2.0 of its Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), an open software framework for building media players and applications, based on the company’s closed source Flash platform. Kelash Kumar, Adobe Video Solutions Group Product Manager, says that the new version of OSMF includes a number of improvements aimed at helping developers “create even more engaging experiences” and notes that the developers have “reworked the inner workings of OSMF”.
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Equalis, the leading provider of open source numerical analysis, visualization and simulation solutions for engineers and scientists, today announced that it has appointed THiRA Solution and Consulting as its partner for Korea. THiRA is a specialist Korean manufacturing operations and optimization software and services provider. It is headed by industry veterans and with extensive experience working with major Korean manufacturing companies and education institutions. The Equalis solution is based on the world’s leading open source numerical computation platform, Scilab. Through this partnership, THiRA and Equalis will drive the adoption of the Scilab application by providing customers direct access to a local, dedicated team of application specialists to quickly solve challenges.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Amazon Web Services has upgraded the Linux image that runs in its cloud to include newer versions of Tomcat, MySQL and Python, while at the same time allowing enterprises to stay on older versions, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Business
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Openness/Sharing
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It’s true that, in practice, a pure democracy seems untenable. What the US, or America, political system is to give citizens the ability to vote for a local representative who will then represent their interests — indirect democracy.
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All around the world, open source robotics efforts are maturing, to the point where an open source robot surgeon might even save your life, and commercial companies are taking shape around open source robot platforms. In the past week, there have been some high-profile debates about whether open source robotics software platforms are necessarily better to pursue than proprietary ones. There is a high level of disagreement on the issue.
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Open Data
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Later this year, Raleigh residents could have access to city information and data in an accessible and usable format.
As part of its plan to become an “open-source” city, staff presented information Tuesday to the Council’s Technology Committee about plans to publish more data on the city’s website.
The first step will be to create a website where the information can live. The site will link from the city’s website and provide a “one-stop shop for how the public can engage in conversation,” according to Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Minter. He said that step will be complete in April.
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Open Hardware
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IP lawyer Andrew Katz has announced a new open source hardware licence. The Solderpad Hardware License is based on and compatible with the Apache 2.0 License and has the same goals, but is aimed specifically at hardware.
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Programming
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Downloadable at the Go website, the open source Go has been positioned as a general-purpose language suitable for uses ranging from application development to systems programming and offering such features as garbage collection and concurrency. It also is intended to be easy to program.
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Google Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) member Carol Smith has announced that the student application period for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event is now open. Students have until 19:00 UTC on Friday 6 April to submit their proposals to one of the 180 accepted 2012 mentoring organisations.
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Finance
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A review of 15 investment banks released on Thursday by Britain’s financial regulator showed that a majority lacked adequate anticorruption and bribery checks.
The Financial Services Authority said its review of the banks, including eight major global investment banks, had found that about half had an inadequate bribery risk assessment. The review, conducted during the second half of 2011, also found that managers were not sufficiently knowledgeable about anticorruption and bribery laws.
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A divided House approved a $3.6 trillion Republican budget on Thursday recasting Medicare and imposing sweeping cuts in domestic programs, capping a battle that gave both political parties a campaign-season stage to spotlight their warring deficit-cutting priorities.
But the partisan divisions over the measure, which is dead on arrival in the Democratic-led Senate, also underscores how tough it will be for lawmakers to achieve the cooperation needed to contend with a tsunami of tax and spending decisions that will engulf Congress right after this fall’s elections.
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An annual report from a regional Federal Reserve bank is typically a collection of banalities and clichés with some pictures of local worthies who serve on the board.
And so it is with this year’s annual report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, whose pages are graced by the smiling, stolid portraits of board members who run local companies like Whataburger Restaurants.
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When it comes to Wall Street, liberals and conservatives can agree on at least one thing: The government should avoid bailing out big banks on the taxpayers’ dime. Dodd-Frank was supposed to make that less likely to happen. But it’s uncertain whether that will actually happen, as the new regulation has no explicit prohibition on bailouts.
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With oil prices still in the stratosphere, the rumblings are getting louder that the world’s nations may release some of the crude they have saved up in their strategic reserves. On Thursday, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said there was a “good chance” that the United States and Europe will tap those reserves.
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Spanish workers enraged by austerity-driven labor reforms to prevent the nation from becoming Europe’s next bailout victim slowed down the country’s economy in a general strike Thursday, closing factories and clashing with police as the new-center right government tried to convince investors the nation isn’t headed for a financial meltdown.
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After a four-month lobbying blitz led by firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN), U.S. regulators and lawmakers are signaling they’re receptive to delaying and revising their plan to stop banks from making speculative trades on their own accounts.
Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and co-author of the 2010 law mandating the ban, urged regulators last week to simplify their first draft, while a bipartisan group of senators proposed pushing back its effective date.
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03.29.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux is generally considered the go-to OS for under powered computers. Wanting to challenge the preconceived notion that Linux requires ‘a computer made in the last 20 years,’ [Dmitry] built the worst Linux PC ever around a simple 8-bit microcontroller.
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So much for the sycophants of M$ claiming costs had ballooned with GNU/Linux. Frankly, I am surprised they found so few problems with that other OS. Perhaps users “just rebooted” and made problems go away with that other OS. 46 per month with GNU/Linux is rather trivial for thousands of desktops. The help-desk people must nap a lot. I’ve had that many requests to reset passwords with ~100 PCs. I’ve had a few users who forgot passwords every weekend…
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The Star Trek tricorder has become a reality, thanks to the hobby project of a cognitive science researcher. Dr. Peter Jansen has developed a handheld mobile computing device that has a number of sophisticated embedded sensors. The device is modeled after the distinctive design of the 24th-century tricorder.
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Desktop
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So let’s recap, new interface that many people won’t like. Old operating that needs to be replaced.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The cut command, as the man page states, “removes sections from each line of a file.” The cut command can also be used on a stream and it can do more than just remove section. If a file is not specified or “-” is used the cut command takes input from standard in. The cut command can be used to extract sections from a file or stream based upon a specific criteria. An example of this would be cutting specific fields from a csv (comma separated values) file. For instance, cut can be used to extract the name and email address from a csv file with the following content:
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Kernel Space
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While I was out chasing computer history last week, the Linux 3.3 kernel was released. And a very interesting release it is, though not for its vaunted re-inclusion of certain Android kernel hacks. I think that modest move is being overblown in the press. No, Linux 3.3 appears to be the first OS to really take a shot at reducing the problem of bufferbloat. It’s not the answer to this scourge, but it will help some, especially since Linux is so popular for high volume servers.
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Graphics Stack
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Announced yesterday was the release of kmscon, a terminal emulator for Linux that’s similar to what’s offered inside the kernel, but instead it’s in user-space and relies upon the kernel’s DRM interfaces as well as Mesa.
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Applications
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Multimedia/Graphics
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The Yorba Foundation has announced the release of the newest version of its Shotwell photo organiser. Shotwell 0.12.0 adds the ability to straighten photos, support for GTK+ 3, the ability to recognise more Android devices for photo import, and more.
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The GIMP photo editor is a popular favorite among FOSS fans. However, some users think the app’s interface could benefit by looking more like the one found on Adobe Photoshop. That’s where GimpShop is supposed to come in. However, it seems development on GimpShop for Linux has fallen woefully behind.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Linux Games are going main stream now. Wasteland 2 follows the greatly successful 1988 version of the role playing game, by the same name. Wasteland follows the success of Double Fine Adventure developed by game producer of Brian Fargo of InXile Entertainment.
Termed a post-apocalyptic role-playing video game, it is expected to be a computer-only genre and will not be developed for consoles or other handheld platforms. The dream with Wasteland 2 is to create the magic of theFallout game series, which had earlier proved to be a complete new gaming experience in this genre.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE Cascadia will be held in partnership with LinuxFest Northwest (LFNW) in Bellingham, Washington on April 28 and 29, 2012. This is a pilot of regional KDE gatherings in conjunction with established grassroots FOSS conferences. The goals are to reduce the effort and expense associated with a single annual stand-alone meeting, and to increase user and developer involvement in KDE. The LFNW Organizers warmly welcome the KDE Community.
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME 3.4 will be a big release, as it’s the one that will ‘refine’ the GNOME 3.x experience. This is not an initial attempt, or even just a bug fix stability effort. GNOME 3.4 is about making GNOME 3.x great.
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I have never being a big advocate of the GNOME desktop environment, most especially the standard (default) GNOME 3 desktop. That is why I am looking for distributions that ship with a modified GNOME 3 desktop. Three that I have so far identified are: KahelOS, Deepin Linux, and Comice OS 4.
So, what exactly are the new features of GNOME 3? Will they reveal that the developers listened to critics or are still forging ahead in the direction that started this whole mess? I am not in a position to answer those questions because no distribution has been released with GNOME 3.4 yet (it was just released today).
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Depending on how you look at these things, Red Hat has long been a billion dollar company. With a market cap of almost $10-billion dollars, Red Hat, the biggest of Linux companies, has long been open-source’s shiniest success story. The gold standard of business success, though, is making a billion dollars in revenue in a single fiscal year and Red Hat has just this feat off.
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Open source cloud offerings have specific characteristics that provide benefits above and beyond proprietary offerings, two top officials at Red Hat said during a webinar this week.
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Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation, has congratulated Red Hat for registering more than $1 billion in revenues. He writes, “I would also like to use this occasion to show that there is significantly more at play here. It isn’t just the billion dollars Red Hat is making with open source; there are many more reasons why Linux and open source are fundamental building blocks of the future.”
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When Red Hat (RHT) announced strong quarterly results yesterday, the figures essentially ended a recent debate about Red Hat Enterprise Linux vs. Ubuntu Server. Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth recently suggested Ubuntu is more popular than RHEL for some server applications. But when it comes down to dollars and cents, business-centric applications, and partner engagement, most evidence still points to Red Hat as the overwhelming Linux market leader.
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Sixteen years ago, few imagined that a handful of people at a Linux start-up in North Carolina were laying the groundwork for an open source business with more than a billion dollars in annual revenue. Yet as we stand at that milestone, and as we take the opportunity to reflect, we believe our success speaks volumes about the power of community.
This billion dollar milestone is not only a win for Red Hat—it is a victory for open source advocates everywhere. Our fight has always been about something greater than just access to software code. The open source movement is rooted in shared values about knowledge; it is founded on ideas that are both ordinary and revolutionary. As members of this community, we elevate transparency over secrecy. We prize freedom rather than control. This is the open source way: sharing ideas and information, contributing to an intellectual commons that leads to greater innovation and benefits us all.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The new Ubuntu LTS release looming in the horizon tempted me to try it out as a candidate for a my next Linux OS. Here’s what I think.
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is pretty stable for its current status as beta. The linux kernel at version 3.2.0-20 feels good and seems to support wider range of hardware. The AMD Turion CPU seemed to be reasonably cool while idle. But still Linux has a long way to go in terms of prolonging battery usage. All applications are up to date at least to the latest stable versions which is the best thing in Ubuntu.
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Canonical launched Landscape system management tool without much fanfare sometime ago. Now, in a most recent update, they have integrated Landscape with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, again without much hoopla. In line with a recent move by Canonical integrating handy Privacy Management tool into Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, this is yet another bold initiative by them.
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Unity 5.8 landed in Ubuntu 12.04 this weekend – but what’s new and what’s improved? Let’s take a quick gander…
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With the official release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” being less than one month away, the feature freeze having long passed, and the kernel freeze being imminent, it’s time for the usual biannual Ubuntu Linux benchmarking festivities at Phoronix. In the coming days and weeks there will be numerous articles looking at the performance of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when it comes to its desktop/workstation performance, boot performance, power consumption, and all sorts of other figures to judge the performance of Ubuntu’s Precise Pangolin release. One area from the testing thus far that has stood out has been the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS performance on older PC hardware, but unfortunately it’s not standing out for a good reason.
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In the open source community, we celebrate having pieces that “do one thing well”, with lots of orthogonal tools compounding to give great flexibility. But that same philosophy leads to shortcomings on the GUI / UX front, where we want all the pieces to be aware of each other in a deeper way.
For example, we consciously place the notifications in the top right of the screen, avoiding space that is particularly precious (like new tab titles, and search boxes). But the indicators are also in the top right, and they make menus, which drop down into the same space a notification might occupy.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Raspberry Pi foundation issued a statement today with a status update on their much-anticipated $35 Linux computer. The first 2,000 completed units have arrived in the UK, but the devices aren’t ready to be shipped out yet because the foundation’s retail partners won’t distribute them to purchasers until they have been stamped with the CE marking.
The CE marking, which you can find on many consumer electronics products, certifies that a product conforms with the regulatory standards of the European Economic Area. In order to apply the CE marking to a product, it has to undergo a conformity assessment and the manufacturer has to produce certain documents.
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Raspberry Pi’s Linux-based Fedora operating system, which was developed primarily to encourage kids to code, looks potent enough to compete with Microsoft’s Windows 8 when it arrives. It is even powerful enough to handle everyday jobs which are done with word processing and spreadsheets.
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Phones
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Android
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The Note, which bridges a divide thanks to its large screen and smartphone connectivity, has a role and is selling well, apparently.
It’s an odd one, the Note, with its 5.3in screen. It looks like a small tablet in a giant hand or an oversized phone in small one. We quite liked it when we reviewed one.
Overall, five million have been sold, Samsung says, which is pretty high. Just in the UK, for example, the Note is not cheap and the white version is exclusively sold through John Lewis, which limits its opportunities a bit.
The Note has been on sale for five months thou
Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/18mXC)
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Android is a market leader in consumer segment, however it needs to catch-up with iOS in the enterprise segment. Android partners are building solutions to boost enterprise adoption of their devices. Lenovo has launched its Android app store targeted at enterprise customers.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Curious about the low-cost Amazon Kindle Fire Android tablet? If you’re quick, you might be able to snag a refurbished unit for $139 at Amazon today. The company introduced the Fire at the end of 2011 at the loss-leader price point of $199, though it’s rumored to cost over $190 to build. So at $139, you’d be getting the Android-powered tablet well below cost.
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A fresh new community has recently come together in the form of OpenTablets.org. The brain-child of Matthias Lee, the community’s primary effort centers around MakePlayLive’s premier tablet, Vivaldi. There is a lot of productive discussion there concerning Plasma Active, and making it run proper on this device, but the community also welcomes discussion about any other open tablet platform or open-source software running on various other hardware.
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Recently I read an article from Wired Magazine about the creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds. The article portrays him as a family man, yet when it’s time to get to work he does just that. And we already know this, as he is the chief of the Linux kernel which as we know is a lot of work. But, as with the nature of open source software, he takes a lot of pride with his work, which is clearly evident as he turned down an invite to Apple directly from Steve Jobs. This says a lot. Many of those that use proprietary software and purchase it over and over, have a hard time absorbing the fact that open source software is free and that developers write the software not to make a profit, but because they enjoy doing it and saw a need for the software they write. As I’ve mentioned before, the end result is quality software that any developer can open, look at, and tweak if they wish. Or, they can inquire with the main team in charge of the particular software title and offer their help. It’s a huge system of collaboration, and a very effective and powerful one.
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This is an interview with Jeffrey D. Long, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa (USA) and author of the book “Longitudinal Data Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences Using R“. Dr. Long answers questions about his book and how he uses R in his work in behavioral sciences.
F4S: Hello Jeffrey. Please, give us a brief introduction about yourself.
I am a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa (USA). My expertise is applied statistics in the behavioral and medical sciences. I am the head statistician for Neurobiological Predictors of Huntington’s Disease (PREDICT-HD), funded by the National Institutes of Health and the CHDI Foundation, Inc. PREDICT-HD is a longitudinal observational study of individuals at-risk for Huntington’s Disease (HD), which is an inherited neurodegenerative disease. PREDICT-HD has several scientific sections that concentrate on different aspects of HD, including brain imaging, cognitive functioning, motor impairment, and psychiatric problems. My biostatistics team analyzes data from the scientific sections to answer substantive research questions.
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Events
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Among the items on the 2012 LF Collaboration Summit schedule worth pointing out (and the ones where likely I’ll be at) include:
- The Importance of Linux at Intel
- OpenMAMA
- The Linux Kernel: What’s Next [Panel]
- Intro to Tizen and Community and Architecture Overview
- Kernel in the Way: Bypass and Offload Technologies
- Introduction to Tizen SDK
- The Decline of the GPL and What To Do About It
- Architecture of a Next-Generation Parallel File System
- Upcoming Technologies: Wayland & oFono
- Dtrace
- LLVM Toolchain – Update and State of Building Linux with LLVM
- UEFI as the Converged Firmware Infrastructure
- Btrfs Filesystem: Status and New Features
- GCC, C++ and Transactional Memory
- The Future of the GNU C Library
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that runs the Firefox project, has more than 450 million users worldwide and is known for its open source projects.
It’s just as open in real life. Mozilla treats volunteer developers as nicely as they treat their staff. They even give them office space.
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SaaS
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ownCloud Inc., which develops open-source software for building cloud infrastructure, has existed as a commercial entity for only a few short months. But it has already begun racking up partnerships throughout the channel, highlighting the plentiful opportunities available at the juncture of the cloud and open-source. Read on for the scoop, and what it means for the open-source ecosystem more broadly.
ownCloud has been around as an open-source project for a while, but its launch as a commercial venture dates only to late last year. Since that time, ownCloud has pushed out an important point release of its platform that brought novel functionality not only to the ownCloud package, but to the open-source channel as a whole, where ownCloud currently has no real contenders — which is probably for the best, since competition from proprietary platforms like Dropbox and iCloud should keep the team busy enough.
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CMS
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF’s annual free software awards at a ceremony on Sunday, March 25th, held during the LibrePlanet 2012 conference at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
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At the Free Software Foundation’s Libre Planet conference in Boston, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the inventor of the Ruby language, was honoured with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Luis Falcon received the FSF’s Award for Projects of Social Benefit on behalf of GNU Solidario for its GNU Health project.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Today is Document Freedom Day. It’s not the easiest subject to explain. It’s easy to explain why being free to video a police encounter in the USA is important, or why it’s wrong for your eBook to be remotely controlled by a vendor, but many people fail to understand the subtlety of why a document format is important.
Having your work in a format that will still be readable in 20 years makes sense, and being able to be sure when you share a document with others that they will be able to read it and work on it is good, but people glaze over when you try to explain that an ISO standard is not enough. Having a document format standard that is beyond the control of any individual vendor and is fully implemented in multiple products is crucial, but seems esoteric.
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Security
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Finance
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Long standing readers may recall the 2009 row over the pay level of Andrew Hall, the head of a Citigroup oil trading unit. He had made $100 million in 2008 on a long-standing pay arrangement that gave him a pay deal for his team that was just below 30% of profits, a level unheard of since Mike Milken at Drexel (and we all know how well that turned out). Kenneth Feinberg, Obama’s pay czar, refused to back down, leading to the predictable hue and cry as to how terrible it would be to break Hall’s contract (we pointed out that there were likely ways to do just that, that big producers like Hall were often guilty of expense abuses that would allow for termination for cause).
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Sharon Higgins, the independent researcher and blogger who helped found Parents Across America, reported in the Washington Post this week that the largest charter school network in the United States is a Turkish religious sect that few Americans know about.
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The Florida “Stand your Ground” law that may protect George Zimmerman, the man who recently shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, became the template for an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “model bill” that has been introduced in dozens of other states. As the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has reported, the bill was brought to ALEC by the National Rifle Association (NRA). (The law at issue is also known as the “Shoot First” bill or the “Castle Doctrine” law in various states.)
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Privacy
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It’s “offensive that several courts have ordered accused people to decrypt, possibly incriminating themselves,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “Police have all kinds of other options for their investigations, including access to computers powerful enough to decrypt, surveillance and search. An accused person should not have to convict himself.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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“Great news: this new deal puts an end to roaming rip-offs. This is really great news for anyone who’s been stung by high charges when using a mobile abroad.
For the first time ever, there will be new consumer rules for mobile data – so you can browse the web abroad with confidence.
And most importantly, for the first time ever, we will open the market to competition. Because competition is the best guarantee of long-term, low prices.
Users will see dramatic price cuts in time for the summer holidays: and prices will continue to tumble until 2014.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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The European Parliament’s INTA Committee yesterday soundly rejected a proposal to refer the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to the European Court of Justice for review. ACTA critics viewed the proposal as a delay tactic designed with the hope that public opposition to the agreement would subside in the year or two it would take for a court review. The 21-5 vote against the motion means that the INTA committee will conclude its ACTA review later this spring with a full European Parliament vote expected in June or July. The lack of support for ACTA within the European Parliament is now out in the open with multiple parties indicating they will not support the agreement. For example, MEP Bernd Lange stated:
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03.28.12
Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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First and foremost, what does it even mean to say desktop Linux is “dead” if it’s being embraced and used by growing numbers of individuals and corporations around the world?
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So, the mystery is solved. From this data we can clearly understand how NetApplications gives such a huge share to that other OS and very little to GNU/Linux (0.62%) compared to Wikipedia (1.54%), for instance. We don’t know what the numbers would be without the bias but Wikipedia has no motivation for bias except to English language. We can assume the global usage is much higher because GNU/Linux is much more popular in non-English countries like BRIC (India is English speaking but also has many other languages) where governments promote GNU/Linux.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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A mailing list message this morning raises the possibility that Intel’s open-source graphics developers could soon be working on GPGPU/OpenCL support.
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Kristian Høgsberg has pushed updated patches this morning for XWayland in the X.Org Server that re-base this work to the X.Org Server 1.12 series. He’s also updated the XWayland support for the xf86-video-intel graphics driver. XWayland is the effort for allowing an X.Org Server to run as a Wayland client.
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Tom Stellard of AMD has called upon the LLVM developers to include the R600 GPU back-end into the LLVM project, which is the code for generating compute and graphics shaders inside the LLVM compiler infrastructure for targeting Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics processors.
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Applications
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The central piece to this project is a server-based music player. I am using the Music Player Dæmon (MPD), a wonderful server-based system released under the GNU General Public License and available from the repositories of most Linux distributions. Install the software with your favorite package management system. In addition to this player, you need to set up a streaming system. Icecast fulfills this requirement and also is widely available. Install it as well.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Overgrowth is the game developed by Wolfire that was announced nearly four years ago as a third-person action game that is still considered to be in an alpha/preview state. Overgrowth was announced for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms. The Linux port of this game began last year by a Wolfire contractor (Edward Rudd), but finally there’s some good news to report on the Linux progress.
According to a Phoronix reader, Seon-Wook Park, those that have pre-ordered Overgrowth were informed through their private forums yesterday that the Overgrowth Linux port is nearly ready. Besides the native port, Overgrowth is now working under Wine too, per this WineHQ.org AppDB entry. Pre-ordering comes at a cost of $29.95 USD but includes DRM-free alpha access to the game.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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We were astonished by the response we received on our Google + page. The overwhelming response in favour of Gnome 3 Shell was incredible. You can read it yourself, here are some comments that we liked.
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Tweet
We are running a poll on Muktware to see which desktop environments are popular among Muktware readers. To everyone’s surprise KDE is leading the poll with a huge margin, whereas Unity and Gnome Shell are neck-to-neck with each other.
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After delving into where in the world people seem most keen on Linux, I couldn’t resist taking the research into Google Insights a bit further and seeing what trends were visible on the questions of which Linux distribution seemed to be most popular over time.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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These days there are hundreds of Linux-based operating systems that you can boot from a CD, DVD, or USB flash drive without installing anything to your hard drive. This lets you try out an operating system without replacing your current one — and it may also help you repair a broken operating system by booting from removable storage to run a disk scan, repartition a drive, or make other changes.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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After performing a fresh Linux installation, most users are concerned with customizing their desktop or application set for their needs, but an increasing number of enthusiasts tend to be looking at their kernel. The Zen kernel was once very popular, but of increasing popularity amongst die-hard Linux enthusiasts is the Zen-related Liquorix kernel. While it claims to offer superior performance for common workloads, is this really the case? Here are some benchmarks of the stock Ubuntu 12.04 kernel versus the 3.2 kernel offered by Liquorix.
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Lest you wonder whether this was an intentional naming decision, it does seem to be that Canonical is deliberately avoiding using the L word. The release notes were imported by Canonical’s Kate Stewart (release manager) with the “Ubuntu kernel” language. From skimming the rest of the release notes brings up only one mention of “Linux.” This is to mention that on PowerPC if Ubuntu is installed “along side linux, the system does not automatically boot into the newly installed system.” So Canonical clearly seems to be trying to distance itself from Linux, here.
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Canonical announced a few minutes ago (March 27th), in a security notice, that a new kernel upgrade for its Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system is available.
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The development team behind the hugely popular open source media player and entertainment hub, XBMC, has announced immediate availability of the newest XBMC 11.0 “Eden” release as well as XBMCbuntu, a new Ubuntu-based live CD.
There have been a number of changes since the previous version was announced over a year ago. The default skin, Confluence, has been vastly improved and received some performance increases thanks to features like Dirty-region rendering and a new JPEG decoder, among others.
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Flavours and Variants
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Raspberry Pi will be on sale to consumers from Wednesday morning according to Premier Farnell and element14, who also released an update to the pricing
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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After a several month hiatus, the individual(s) working to reverse-engineer Skype’s binary client have successfully “deobfuscated” the Skype 5.5 release.
“We got deobfuscated skype v5.5!!! I can’t belive in this. But its fucking true. Great thanks and congratulations going to Vilko,” begins a new post on the skype-open-source blog.
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Free and open source software has touched all our lives whether we know it or not. Often misunderstood and treated with suspicion, many businesses take advantage of the benefits of it without acknowledging the community that powers it.
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The time has come for small and medium businesses to get the recognition they deserve, according to Andrew Savory, newly-appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at open source systems integrator Sirius, with a new generation of smart British technology companies proving that they can deliver services just as well, sometimes cheaper, and sometimes better than their large entrenched counterparts.
Savory, an active member of The Apache Software Foundation, joins Sirius from the LiMo Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium dedicated to creating the first Linux-based mobile operating system for smartphone devices. Coming from an open source, small business background himself, Savory is excited to see a step-change in the way that SMEs are being viewed, thanks to initiatives like the government’s G-Cloud.
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f at first you don’t succeed, open source the sucker. Peek has released an open source version of their Peek Mobile operating system, allowing hackers to use the all-but-obsolete little email device as a hacker platform. The Linux release is available the PeekLinux wiki and hackers are already adding new apps and functionality to the tiny device.
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Over the last few years open source technology has enabled mobile phone networks to be set up on a shoestring budget at hacker conferences, on a tiny Pacific island and at a festival in the Nevada desert. Andrew Back takes a look at how this has been made possible and at what’s involved in building a GSM network using OpenBTS and OpenBSC.
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Events
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Gardiner is a long-time member of the Sydney Linux User Group, an office-bearer of Linux Australia, and a regular member of the technical panel that chooses talks for the annual Australian national Linux conference.
Last year Gardiner, along with Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora, set up The Ada Initiative, a project to help increase the participation of women in technology. The project was born after several incidents of sexist behaviour towards women at FOSS events.
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Next week’s Palmetto Open Source Software Conference — or POSSCON — is starting to bring some serious high-tech street cred to Columbia.
The conference – which grew substantially in each of its past four years — focuses on the communal development of software like Open Office and Firefox that developers share with the world, often for free.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google’s upcoming “Daisy” Chromebook will reportedly use Samsung’s ARM-based Exynos 5250 SoC.
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Mozilla
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You can opt out of being tracked online by using a Web browser with support for Do Not Track, a privacy feature that lets you tell supporting websites that you don’t want to be tracked by third parties (advertisers, marketing firms, and the like). It’s like putting yourself on an online version of the Do Not Call list.
Now Mozilla is developing an open-source operating system for smartphones and tablets that supports Do Not Track from the ground up. Code-named Boot to Gecko (B2G), this Linux-based mobile OS is designed to bring the (comparatively) rigorous privacy standards of the World Wide Web to smartphones and tablets.
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Mozilla has teamed up with Web design studio Little Workshop to develop a Web-based multiplayer adventure game called BrowserQuest. The game is built with standards-based Web technologies and is designed to be played within a Web browser.
With the technical capabilities offered by the latest standards, Web developers no longer have to rely on plugins to create interactive multimedia experiences and application-like user interfaces. As we reported earlier this month, modern standards are making the Web an increasingly viable platform for game development.
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If you are a Firefox 3.6 user you know by now that support for that branch of the web browser will end on April 24, 2012. As it stands now, Firefox 3.6.28, released on March 14, is likely the last version of Firefox 3.6. Mozilla will not update the version of the browser again unless a major security or stability issue forces them to.
With Firefox 3.6 out of the picture, Firefox users still using the branch are asked by Mozilla to either update to the current stable version of the browser, which is Firefox 11 at the time of writing, or the Firefox Extended Support Release. The latter has been specifically designed for organizations as a way to lessen the impact of Mozilla’s new rapid release process on the company’s IT department.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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A group of LibreOffice developers have added experimental collaborative editing capabilities to the open source office suite. The feature allows multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously over the Internet. The collaborative editing functionality was implemented by grafting Telepathy to LibreOffice.
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CMS
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Business
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Opscode, the maker of the open source Chef tool that the company says can help system administrators “rule the cloud”, has lured more big backers as momentum builds for that tool’s open source, hosted, and licensed versions.
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Funding
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If you’re a post-secondary student, 18 years or older, you have a golden opportunity this Summer. Contribute to an open source project that you care about, and get paid to do it. Once again, it’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) time, and open source organizations are beating the bushes to find the best ideas and applicants.
The GSoC has been an annual tradition since 2005. Google partners with mentoring organizations and offers students stipends for successful completion of open source projects. Students get a stipend of $5,000 USD and the mentoring organization receives $500. Students get a $500 stipend after coding begins on May 1st, a $2,250 payment after a successful mid-term evaluation, and $2,250 after the final program evaluation. Oh, and don’t forget the t-shirt.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Roland McGrath has announced that the GNU C Library (glibc) Steering Committee is dissolving. The direction of the project will now be governed more informally by a team led by the current maintainers.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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Last month, we posted a survey asking, “If you could open one of the following data sets tomorrow, which one would you open and why?” We got a great response–279 people voted and there were several comments.
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Programming
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The Eclipse Foundation for open source development tools is eyeing July as the release date for the 1.0 version of its Orion browser-based IDE for building Web applications, which will be discussed at this week’s EclipseCon 2012 conference in Reston, Va.
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Standards/Consortia
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No one has seen the Tizen mobile platform in action yet, but whatever browser the in-development platform is using has blown away the competition for HTML5 performance.
Listed only as “Tizen 1″ on The HTML5 Test (THT) site, the development version of the Tizen browser scored 387 points out of a possible total of 475 points within the mobile phone browser category.
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1&1, GMX and WEB.DE receive the German Document Freedom Award for the use of Open Standards. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII). 1&1 is awarded for automatically adding XMPP for all customers of their mail services. The Document Freedom Award is awarded annually on the occasion of Document Freedom Day – the international day for Open Standards. Last years winners include tagesschau.de, Deutschland Radio, and the German Foreign Office.
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Security
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Finance
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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In an uncharacteristic move for a Fox News anchor, Wallace asks some tough questions of the Chair of the House Budget Committee. Since the Ryan plan would lose 10 trillion dollars of revenue over ten years, Wallace asked exactly which tax loopholes would be closed to raise the revenue that would be lost from reducing the tax rate. But Ryan could not name specific loopholes that he would close as part of his plan because “that’s not the job of the budget committee.”
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The gun lobby has come under the spotlight for its role in the so-called “Stand Your Ground” or “Shoot First” law that may protect the man who shot and killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida –- but many other special interests, including household names like Kraft Foods and Wal-Mart, also helped facilitate the spread of these and other laws by funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
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ACTA
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LQDN demonstrates that their voting expectations do not depend upon the ECJ rerferral but their procedural input is quite a bit confusing. I had some strange artefacts in my DSL connection and then found out the ethernet cable between the router and the splitter was broken. You could argue that LQDN add some fog of war and inserted confusion in the process. I just wonder if MEPs would switch to a different cable. If you dismiss the current proposed procedures of the rapporteur David Martin as “delay” tactics what’s the actual alternative for Parliament?
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The EU Parliament has refused to freeze the ACTA debate, and will not refer the agreement to the EU Court of Justice. In a 21 to 5 vote, the Parliament decided to stick to its calendar and will vote on ACTA in June, as originally planned. The Commission’s technocratic manoeuvres have not stopped the Parliament, and the door remains open to a swift rejection of ACTA.
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