• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Adventures in Brickdom: Installing Windows 8 on a CR48

20 ways to break Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• ScraperWiki

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.1-rc9

• Graphics Stack

  • 3 independent displays are getting really close..

    Continuing my updating on latest intel linux graphics-related activity, some hours ago Jesse Barnes’ patches which add support for 3 display pipes to our Linux i915 driver have landed onto intel-gfx mailing list. This is one feature I am particularly very interested in, and it is great to have those patches available in the open-source world now – months before the IVB-based hardware will arrive at the consumer market.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Introduction to Cgroups, the Linux Control Group

  • Simple LightDM Manager: Change The LightDM Background Or Logo Using A GUI

  • Android Smartphone USB Tethering (Linux Mint 11)

  • Fedora 16 – How to install 64-bit Flash Player 11

  • How to Install New Icons and Cursors (Linux Mint)

  • How to install the Nvidia proprietary driver in CentOS

  • Use Profiling to Improve Snort Performance

• Games

  • SpaceChem Added To The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle

    All you Humble Bundle purchasers know the drill. Check out your Humble Bundle download page for links to Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of SpaceChem, the mind-bending, molecular machine-building puzzle game by Zachtronics Industries!

  • Rage Linux Port Is Not Likely Until 2012

    The much anticipated Rage video game was released yesterday by id Software as the inaugural title on their next-generation id Tech 5 engine. Unfortunately, as expected, this first-person shooter mixed with racing game was released without a native Linux client at launch.

  • Helena the 3rd now available to buy from the Ubuntu Software Centre

  • It’s Not All Roses For The Latest Humble Bundle

    This newest bundle, The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle, is similar to previous HIBs: you pay what you want, the games are cross-platform, and there is no DRM (Digital Rights Management) restricting the user. But this newest bundle isn’t nearly as popular as some of the past bundles, most of which have generated more than one million dollars (USD) in less than two weeks and even two million dollars.

    One week into this Frozen Synapse Bundle, there’s $832k as of this morning from 175k sales. The average contribution price is just $4.75 USD. This is still a very modest amount and it should cross one million dollars as there is still six days left to the sale period, but the pace of sales isn’t as fast as some of the other bundles.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE to Celebrate 15th Birthday

    KDE is having a global birthday party to celebrate 15 years and everyone is invited. Well, since we all can’t actually get together in one spot, they’d like to inspire a bunch of parties happening simultaneously across the globe on October 14.

    It all began much the way Linux began, with a message to a Usenet usergroup. Matthias Ettrich posted, “Programmers wanted!” for a “New Project: Kool Desktop Environment (KDE)”. The rest is history. 15 years ago Ettrich was looking to create an interface for endusers – the regular desktop user and he and his fellow developers succeeded. KDE became the most popular desktop environment for free Unix desktops and remained so until the rise of Ubuntu propelled GNOME into that position. It will be interesting to see where the dueling desktops end up in the coming years.

  • KDE’s October Updates Improve Kontact Performance

    September 7, 2011. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the second in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.7 series. 4.7.2 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.7 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.7.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. The October updates are especially interesting for those using the new Akonadi-based Kontact Suite, as it contains many performance improvements and bugfixes for applications such as KMail, and others retrieving information using Akonadi.

  • Freedom. 15 years. Party!

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3.2: Tactical Brilliance and Strategic Stubbornness

    If you’re still waiting for the GNOME 3 series to tolerate more than one work-flow, then GNOME 3.2 is going to disappoint you.

    Although the new release contains dozens of improvements, both practical and aesthetic, it still supports only a single work flow, just like GNOME 3.0. Despite six months of protests, the GNOME team seems to have decided that, if it just ignores the complaints, eventually they’ll go away.

    That said, some of the improvements might just be enough to reconcile you to the GNOME 3 series. While some improvements are useful but minor refinements, others ranging from task-oriented documentation and accessibility improvements to online integration tools, would be welcome additions to any desktops.

  • Official GNOME Shell Extensions Available In The WebUpd8 GNOME 3 PPA For Ubuntu 11.10

Distributions

• ArchBang Is Lightweight & Always Up To Date [Linux]

  Install a lightweight operating system that’s always up to date. Featuring the speedy Openbox desktop and built on the rolling release Arch Linux, Archbang delivers both minimalism and up-to-date software. Best of all, it’s a lot easier to set up and use than a vanilla Arch installation.

• New Releases

  • Salix OS 13.37 Features Ratpoison Window Manager

    George Vlahavas from the Salix OS development team, proudly announced on October 4th that the a new edition of the Salix OS operating system is now available for download, featuring the Ratpoison window manager.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • PCLinuxOS Build server moved to rpm 4.8.x

    The build server that produces RPMS for the software repository for PCLinuxOS has switched over to RPM 4.8.x as of today. This comes after a month worth of notices and reminders posted.

  • Mageia 1 review – Confusing

    My test box was the old and abused T60 laptop, with 2GB RAM and an ATI graphics card. It never had hardware issues with Mandriva or PCLinuxOS or many other distributions, which indicates there might be some deep problem in the Mageia core. A shame really, as I wanted to see what the distro could do when committed to hard disk and running.

    Based on the live session testing and the installation, there’s a lot to be done still. Mageia needs a lot of bug fixing and polish. There are too many bugs and errors to allow a smooth and seamless desktop experience. The visual aspect also needs improving. My biggest gripes were the slew of errors and warnings that the user just need not see, the archaic layout of the desktop and the selfish installation that simply ignored my Windows.

    I ought to give the Mageia team some slack, given the fact this is their first release. So yes, more work is needed, and the distribution will mostly likely improve over time. I hope some of my finding will make into the future editions. For the time being, based on my testing, Mageia is not mature enough for desktop use. Will keep in touch.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 Beta is out now

    When you’re talking serious server Linux, chances are you’re talking Red Hat’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) , so it’s good news that the beta is now ready for the next edition: RHEL 6.2

    Coming on the heels of the news that Red Hat is acquiring Gluster, a cloud-storage software company, it should come as no surprise that it will offer improved cloud deployment support. Of course, there’s a lot more here than just better cloud support.

  • Red Hat (RHT) Shares Given New $50.00 Price Target by UBS AG (UBS) Analysts

    Equities research analysts at UBS AG (NYSE: UBS) lowered their price target on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) to $50.00 in a research issued note to investors on Wednesday. They currently have a “buy” rating on the company’s shares.

  • Video: Default to Open

    Red Hat produced a video entitled Default to Open: The History of Open Source and Red Hat. Since it is about history, it has a number of older clips… bits and pieces I’ve seen before but quite a bit of new stuff too. Enjoy it embedded in webm format or use the link below to download it for local playback.

  • Gluster is Likely to Be One Among Many Upcoming Red Hat Buys

    It’s no secret that as the last remaining public, U.S company focused on open source (after the acquisitions of Novell and Sun Microsystems), Red Hat is on a tear. The company is on track to become the first $1 billion a year open source firm, and we’ve predicted before that acquisitions are on the horizon for the company as it rakes in the revenues. Sure enough, enhancing its increasing focus on cloud computing and Big Data, Red Hat has announced that it is paying $136 million for Gluster, a privately held storage firm. This is just one of what will likely be several upcoming acquisitions from Red Hat.

    As the Register notes, Gluster’s name comes from the combination of GNU and cluster, and the firm specializes not only in storage solutions but in solutions that help organizations crunch and manage large data sets. Gluster was originally created at California Digital Corp., which makes supercomputers.

  • Beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 released

  • Oracle previews RHEL-ish 2 Linux kernel

    As part of the OpenWorld extravaganza being hosted by Oracle in San Francisco this week, Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at the software giant and the guy who is responsible for the company’s Linux and Xen hypervisor variants, gave a brief preview of the next iteration of Oracle’s homegrown Linux kernel.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 Beta Has GNOME 3.2 and Linux Kernel 3.1

      The Fedora Project proudly announced last evening, October 4th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta version of the upcoming Fedora 16 operating system, due for release in November 2011.

    • F17 Might Be The Beefy Miracle To The Precise Pangolin

      Yesterday there was the announcement by Mark Shuttleworth that Ubuntu 12.04 is codenamed Precise Pangolin. But what will its friendly competition be called? The voting is taking place right now for the Fedora 17 codename. Beefy Miracle is again a contender for the next release of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Community-Canonical Relationships – The honeymoon might be over, but the love is still there.

        When I got home yesterday I had a few messages asking about whether or not I had seen yesterday’s CC (Community Council) Meeting. I was away from my computer for most of the day yesterday so I didn’t get a chance to read the log of the meeting until late last night. This is one CC meeting I wish I had been able to attend.

      • P is for…

        Balancing all of those options, I think we have just the right mix in our designated mascot for 12.04 LTS. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Precise Pangolin.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS named “Precise Pangolin”

        Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Long Term Support) will be named “Precise Pangolin”. Shuttleworth’s inspiration came when he “recently spent a few hours tracking a pangolin through the Kalahari”, and noted their precision and toughness. Many alternative suggestions including “Perky Penguin” and “Porangi Packhorse” were rejected for a variety of carefully considered reasons.

      • Well That’s One Way to Pimp Ubuntu…

      • Interview with Rubi1200

      • Million Cloud Monkeys create MonkeyBeth

        AK: Your story about how “A Few Million Monkeys Randomly Recreated Shakespearean work” Got you featured on many tech-news websites. Can you introduce yourself to cloud.ubuntu.com readers. (Your background, Studies, where you work, your hobbies, your future dreams…etc)

        I work at Intuit in Reno, NV as a Senior Software Engineer. I love watching The Simpsons (which finally paid off). I like to try out new technologies and try to do things that have not been done before. Trying out these technologies usually leads to a personal project – none of which has been as successful as the Million Monkeys project.

      • Computers provide path for humanity to others

        Is it possible to reduce the need for upgrading by reusing a computer? Absolutely! There is a very green solution that can extend the useful life of any PC. It can result in less frequent purchases of new hardware and software, or breathe new life into a computer that can then be reused by someone else who could benefit from it. It’s called Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• How to make a voice-controlled robot arm for $55

  Okay, so we might have made most of that up, but the developer of the robotic arm really is an aerospace engineer, he really does have a broken wrist, and he really did create a voice-controlled arm for under $60 — and better yet, he did it using an open-source operating system (Linux), a bunch of open-source tools, and of course he made all of his work open source so that you too can make your own robotic helping hand.

• Phones

  • Intel and Samsung Mount Android Attack

    The Limo Foundation along with the Linux Foundation are joining forces to create Tizen as an open source alternative to Google’s Android. The game plan will launch with a SDK in early 2012. This means Intel will say bye-bye to MeeGo.

    Adobe folks must be feeling the roller coaster ride of the Kindle Fire supporting Adobe’s Flash, while Tizen will be HTML 5 based.

    Tizen is aimed at tablets, smartphones, netbooks and in-vechicle systems.The Limo Foundation has a number of backers with Motorola, NEC, Panasonic, Orange, Samsung and others. Add Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Qualcomm and others in the LinuxFoundation.

  • Android/Ballnux

    • HTC Sensation XL video demo

    • Latest MyTouch phones feature help wizards

      T-Mobile announced two mid-range Android 2.3 (“Gingerbread”) phones from LG Electronics, featuring set-up wizards and how-to guides for novice users. The 3.8-inch MyTouch and the 3.5-inch, QWERTY slider MyTouch Q are equipped with 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, five-megapixel cameras, and support for T-Mobile’s HSPA+ 4G network.

    • Android widens smartphone market lead over iOS

      According to the company, Android secured 43.7 percent of the U.S. smartphone OS market during the three-month period ended August 2011, jumping 5.6 percentage points from the 38.1 percent market share it had at the end of May. Apple’s iOS platform came in second place with 27.3 percent market share at the end of August, ComScore said. In the three-month period ended May, Apple’s operating system secured 26.6 percent of the U.S. smartphone OS market.

    • Leaked T-Mobile Roadmap Tips Additional Android Devices

    • GTV Director Gives Google TV 3.1 Honeycomb Update Time Frame at MIPCOM

    • Apple or Google: Who makes the best mobile operating system?

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Government of India launches the elusive $35 tablet, retail availability in November

    When Tata Motors unveiled the Tata Nano—the $2500 car, the automative world was taken by storm. The engineering minds behind the cheapest family car pulled off something no other company could. The Government of India had similar plans for computers. The OLPC project showed promise but did not catch up. They (the organization behind OLPC) have however been able to attract some state governments to join them.

  • OLPC XO-1.75 Laptop Preview

    Last month at XDC2011 Chicago, I managed to get my hands on what should be the production hardware model of the XO-1.75 laptop that is expected to be released in the coming months by the OLPC project. The low-cost OLPC laptop targeted for students is now ARM-based and consumes very little power.

  • India’s $35 Tablet ‘Aakash’ Launched, Runs Android 2.2

    India’s much talked about US$35 tablet running Android 2.2 Froyo is finally launched. World’s cheapest tablet will be called ‘Aakash’ and it’s exact price is Rs.2,276. At current rates, final cost will be around US$50, which still makes it the world’s cheapest tablet. If the price point of this Android tablet impressed you already, specifications are going to impress you even more.

  • ‘$35′ Android tablet launches in India, but it’s now $61

    India’s “$35″ tablet has launched at a price of $61, but may be subsidized by the government to as low as $30 for students, according to one report. Developed by U.K.-based Datawind, the “Aakash UbiSlate 7″ tablet runs Android 2.2 on a 366MHz Conexant processor, with 256MB RAM and 2GB flash, and features a seven-inch, 800 x 480 resistive display.

  • Pondering the Prospect of a Completely Open Linux Tablet

    “In the end it won’t be Linux that makes it a niche, it will be simple economics,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “Nobody will pay even close to iPad pricing on anything but an iPad, and ZaReason will have to charge close to iPad money to get decent hardware in the thing.” So, ZaReason will likely “sell enough to stay in business and make a little profit, but it won’t set the world on fire.”

  • ZTE’s V55 Android Honeycomb tablet hits the FCC on its way to Sprint

    ZTE is better known for its OEM feature phones, but the company has recently started to roll out a suite of Android tablets. Today, one of the company’s latest tablets, the V55, won FCC approval and judging from the label pic above the device appears to be headed for Sprint.

  • ASUS Not Scared By Kindle Fire Threats, Will Release Transformer 2 As Planned

    Jerry Shen, the CEO of ASUS, has recently gone on the record about the new tablet arena that Amazon’s Kindle Fire has created. First off, he said that he has no immediate plans to slash the price of the original ASUS Eee Pad Transformer to keep up with the Fire. We have already seen some companies do this in the wake of Amazon’s rumored 100,000 pre-orders of their new tablet, but ASUS says they are still gaining successful results from their tablets.

  • Amazon Kindle Fire pre-orders over 2,000 per hour

    With Apple news everywhere today because of the iPhone 4S release, it’s hard to remember other new products. But it’s hard to ignore a leaked screenshot of Amazon’s order system showing Kindle Fire orders coming in at over 2,000 per hour.

Interview: Alan W. Irwin, developer of Time Ephemerides

F4S: Please, give us a brief introduction about yourself.

I got my Ph.D in astronomy in 1978, and my research work afterwards has been primarily concerned with developing Fortran and C software to support my astronomical research. My development environments over the years have been IBM System/370, VAX minicomputers, Solaris boxes, and then Linux on PC’s from 1996 to the present. That Linux development environment has been an enormous benefit for me so I have been happy to contribute back by participating in such open-source projects as PLplot (plplot.sf.net), FreeEOS (freeeos.sf.net), and now the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net).

Events

• Videos: KVM Forum 2011 Presentations

  The KVM Forum 2011 was held at the Hyatt Regency in Vancouver, Canada on August 15-16. It was co-located with LinuxCon North America 2011.

  LinuxCon and the KVM Forum were both sponsored by The Linux Foundation who recorded a large number of videos from both events. Unfortunately, The Linux Foundation had few security breaches to deal with on their kernel.org and linux.com domains which (I’m guessing) has greatly delayed them doing post-production work on the recordings and posting them publicly.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google shells out $10,000 to fix 10 high-risk Chrome browser flaws

• Mozilla

  • Firefox for Tablets available for download in Aurora Channel

    It’s been quite a while since we did that post on Firefox’s upcoming tablet User Interface, and guess what, it’s finally here! Firefox for Tablets has just landed in Aurora channel, which means, you can now download it, test it, and make the product even better. The tablet version includes all the features we discussed in our earlier post along with some additional features. Here’s more about it :

  • Firefox and SeaMonkey users warned to disable McAfee ScriptScan

    A major incompatibility between Mozilla’s browsers Firefox and SeaMonkey, and McAfee’s ScriptScan plug-in has caused “a high volume of crashes”, according to Mozilla. The problem first came to light in September, when members of the McAfee forum began reporting problems with version 14.4.0 of ScriptScan, a tool which checks web pages, as they are loaded into the browser, for malicious code. This is the first time since July that Mozilla has found it necessary to block a plug-in.

  • Privacy Extension for Firefox, Priv3

SaaS

• EngineYard Brings JRuby to Cloud

  “This is the first commercially supported way to run applications on JRuby in a production environment,” Mike Piech vice president of product management and marketing for Engine Yard told InternetNews.com. “JRuby is really important to both the Ruby and Java world.”

• OpenStack Foundation to Form in 2012: A Spin-Out from Rackspace

  It’s official: After some early posts that reported that the OpenStack cloud computing platform will be spun out from Rackspace, OpenStack officials have confirmed that a new nonprofit foundation will oversee development and evangelism beginning in 2012. OpenStack is presenting significant challenges to proprietary cloud computing platforms and offering a flexible, open source alternative, so this promises to be good news. OpenStack’s oversight will also differ significantly from some of the open source cloud platforms backed solely by commercial entities.

• Rackspace to create an OpenStack Foundation

  Rackspace says that it is planning to create an OpenStack Foundation next year to take over the governance and ownership of the OpenStack trademark. The OpenStack project was launched in July 2010 to manage a new open source cloud platform created by Rackspace and Nasa; since then Citrix, Dell, Intel, AMD, HP, Cisco, Canonical and others have joined the initiative. However, there have been concerns about the governance of the project, specifically that Rackspace has too much control since buying Anso Labs which gave it a majority of seats on the project board. A reformation of voting processes within the project in March this year did little to reduce those concerns.

• Linux Labs Unveils Strategy for Its SaaS Business With Full Launch Targeted for Next Quarter; Software as a Service (SaaS) Market Forecasted to Reach $40.5 Billion by 2014

Databases

• Oracle Goes Big for NoSQL

  There is a lot of buzz around the term “big data.” It’s a topic that Oracle is now jumping into with both feet with a new big data engineered system as well as new Hadoop and NoSQL software offerings.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle Updates Linux, Sticks with Intel and Promises Solaris

  Oracle remains committed to Intel and to Linux even as it continues to promise the delivery of Solaris 11. That’s the message that Oracle executives delivered during a keynote at the OpenWorld conference this week.

  The commitment to Intel is particularly key, since Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s comments during the company’s recent earnings call. Ellison said that he didn’t care if Oracle’s Intel x86 server business dwindled down to zero. Oracle Executive Vice-President John Fowler said during his OpenWorld keynote that he received a few calls about his boss’ comments. He stressed that Oracle remains comitted to Intel.

• Java 8 delayed, but only a little

  During his keynote on Oracle’s Java strategy at the JavaOne conference, the Vice President of Development for the Fusion middleware, Adam Messinger, had to announce that the release date of Java 8 has been postponed. Instead of late 2012, the new version is now only likely to be released six months later, in summer 2013. Around nine million Java developers, as counted by Oracle, had to wait more than four-and-a-half years for Java 7, which was released this summer after repeated delays. To make up for the postponed release date, Oracle’s Java developers plan to use the extra time to extend the feature set.

• New fonts, unique features for LibreOffice DTP

  Based on the excellent SIL Graphite font technology and Philipp H. Poll’s Libertine Open Fonts project, LibreOffice has got extraordinary DTP capabilities with the extended Graphite version of Linux Libertine and Biolinum font families.

• Lively Alphabet – coloring book and DTP example

• Oracle’s Plans for Java Unveiled at JavaOne

  Oracle made a number of announcements about current and future versions of Java at the annual JavaOne conference this week, including the availability of an early access version of JDK 7 for the Mac OS, plans to “bridge the gap” between Java ME and Java SE, an approach to modularizing Java SE 8 that will rely on the Jigsaw platform, a new project that aims to use HTML5 to bring Java to Apple’s iOS platform, the availability of JavaFX 2.0, a pending proposal to open source that technology, gearing up Java EE for the cloud and a delay in the release of Java 8.

• VirtualBox 4.1.4 features automatic extension updates

  The Mac OS X version of VirtualBox has seen comparatively few changes, with an issue that caused the VirtualBox GUI (Graphical User Interface) to lock-up during the start-up of a VM being one of the major fixes. For Linux, a bug that prevented removable storage from being detached after restoring a VM snapshot has been fixed, and hard-links that caused the installation of VirtualBox to fail on file systems such as OpenAFS have been removed. Two hardware acceleration issues, one causing incorrect rendering and potential crashes when switching to/from full screen, the other causing problems when using Compiz under Ubuntu 9.10, have also been fixed.

• As LibreOffice Turns One, a Peek Ahead at What’s to Come

  It was just about a year ago that I was writing about the launch of LibreOffice, and now here we are today, marking the free productivity software suite’s first year.

• LibreOffice – a dive into the unknown

  The Document Foundation (TDF) and LibreOffice turned one year old last month, and it has been a good year. LibreOffice was a dive into the unknown, and an opportunity to prove what the community already knew: that a chance to swim free could only bring positive results.

Healthcare

• IBM Donates Portion of Blue Spruce Code: Enables Smarter Healthcare Solutions

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU PDF project leaves FSF High Priority Projects list; mission complete!

  The goal of the GNU PDF project from its beginning in 2007 was to provide a complete implementation of the emerging ISO standard for PDF, ISO 32000-1. We’ve had free software PDF viewers for a long time, but at the time most of them didn’t support newer PDF features like annotations and forms.

• Accounting Software GNUcash Accounts For Google Summer of Code

  The team of free accounting software GNUcash is providing mentorship to students in the Google Summer of Code program this summer. Two of the three students have successfully completed their projects.

Project Releases

• Gephi 0.8 beta released

  The latest beta version of Gephi has been released, download it for Windows, Mac OS and Linux platforms. This release focus on new features for both users and developers, and the new license unlocks opportunities for business. The Ranking and Preview modules have been completely rewritten in a modular way and can be now extended with plug-ins! Preview can now be extended in many ways, for instance group shapes or edge bundling. Moreover, continuous progress have been made on the dynamic network support and we release today the last big part: statistics over time, available from the Statistics module when the network is dynamic. Thanks to users who reported bugs, it’s the only way to fix them.

Open Hardware

• What is Arduino? Learn About This Open-Source Electronics Platform

  Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. Today we will help you get started by showing you some of the options available and how easy it is to get started.

Programming

• Journey of a C Program to Linux Executable in 4 Stages

• Speeding your embedded application development; not just a case of writing code quicker

Google Docs Still Not Ready For Tablets

Google has updated its Google Docs app for Android tablets, but the cloud-based office suite is far from ready for the prime time on Android tablets.

The app doesn’t come with and WYSIWYG text editor which may enable a user to do any ‘real’ work on Google Docs using the tablet. All you get is a simple text editor where you can type content.

Finance

• Christie Speculation Gives Campaign Top Billing

  Depending on how you count, anywhere from seven to more than a dozen Republican candidates are running for president. But it was a non-candidate who fueled one of the biggest weeks of campaign coverage to date.

  Speculation that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie might enter the fray made the 2012 presidential election the No. 1 story in the news media the week of September 26-October 2, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Coverage of the campaign accounted for 15% of the newshole studied last week. That was the third-biggest week for campaign coverage this year—and the biggest not to involve a candidate debate.

• Coverage Grows for Wall Street Protest

• Goldman Sachs Requests A Correction

  And, the GS sp0kesperson reminded me, since Goldman bought part of Abacus for itself, I w as not permitted to describe the entire event as a “fraud.”

DRM

• The Daily Digital Lock Dissenter, Day 4: Canadian Council of Archives

  The Canadian Council of Archives is Canada’s leading archivist organization, with a mandate “to preserve and provide access to Canadian documentary heritage by improving the administration, effectiveness and efficiency of the archival system.” The CCA’s comments on the C-32 digital lock provisions:

Copyrights

• Astrologers Attack TZ Database

  Just when you think you have seen it all a case of copyright violation has been filed by an astrology publisher against a keeper of a timezone database. This has caused the TZ database to shut down pending further proceedings. TZ is widely used in the GNU/Linux world.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Computer-Aided Engineering in Linux

Engineers are some of the heaviest number-crunchers around. If you are a grad student, post doc or undergrad, you usually get whatever is lying around as your work machine. Also, depending on how inflexible your local IT department is, you may be forced to use one of the commercial operating systems around these days. What are lowly students to do when they need to do heavy computational work? You may be interested in looking at CAELinux (Computer Assisted Engineering). This project provides a live CD that gives you all the open-source tools you might need for your engineering work. And, because it is a live CD, you can use it without touching the local drive of the machine you are using.

Desktop

• The Linux Desktop Advances

  Many different things make the Linux Planet go around, and one of them is the desktop. This past week, two key Linux desktop technologies advanced — the new GNOME 3.2 release and the 1.0 release of PulseAudio.

Server

• Dell building its own Exadata killer

  Way back when, before Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, and even before Hewlett-Packard became hardware buddies with Big Red with the original Exadata Database Machine, Dell was Oracle’s chosen buddy for running parallel Oracle databases using Real Application Cluster on top of Linux. But now Oracle is in the hardware business, and it looks like Dell is fixing to take the parallel Oracle database fight to Oracle.

• Oracle Big Data Appliance stakes big claim

  With its latest appliance, Oracle has officially embraced big data, including Hadoop and NoSQL.

Kernel Space

• Kernel.org partially back online

  The kernel.org web servers are back on line and are once again delivering the Git repositories of some Linux developers – including the main repository of the development branch of Linux maintained by Linus Torvalds. However, the frontpage links to the archives with the sources for the Linux kernel point to files that have yet to be uploaded. Following four weeks of downtime, kernel.org is thus at least partially back in business. The administrators took the servers offline for maintenance work around a month ago, following the discovery in late August that an attacker had obtained access to some servers.

• Changes in Enterprise Computing Bring New Members to Linux Foundation

  Eucalyptus Systems, Nebula and Virtual Bridges look to Linux to enable innovation in the new enterprise

  SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., October 5, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that three new members have joined the organization: Eucalyptus Systems, Nebula and Virtual Bridges.

• There’s A Linux 3.1-rc9 Kernel Release

Applications

• OpenShot Video Editor

  The OpenShot video editor for Linux is easy to use and very powerful. You can work with audio, video, or images to create cool video projects with amazing effects. OpenShot will let you add subtitles to your videos, and you can export your videos to many popular video formats. This is a fantastic video editor with many effective features. You can even use OpenShot to adjust the gamma, hue, and brightness of your videos. Real-time previews are also available when working with your video. If you want to install OpenShot just use the following commands from the Linux command line.
  $ sudo apt-get install openshot

• Proprietary

  • The Flashless Future

    Those two words have driven fear, annoyance and hate into the hearts of many users and developers for some time now. I am here to say today, in case you had not noticed, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I say with certainty that the days Adobe Flash enjoys as a dominant web development tool are numbered.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Serving CGI Scripts With Nginx On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04

  • How to play Blu-ray in Linux

  • A better way to use xclip (clipboard from the command line)

  • How to Hide data (Steganography) into MP3 file – mp3stego

  • Using less

  • Introduction to Cgroups, the Linux Control Group

  • Network booting with Linux – PXE

  • Ripping An MP3 CD On Linux Mint 11

• Games

  • REVIEW: Altitude – Linux flies with multiplayer retro-style plane combat!

    Anyone who is old enough to remember the Atari 2600 will recall the plane warfare game which provided hours of fun for two players and you fought it out. It also spawned numerous clones on the same system, with tanks and a plethora of others my failing memory has chosen to forget. Happier times.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • New Screen Locker

  • Desktop-per-screen (multiple monitors improvements)

  • Make KDE feel like home for the Firefox

    Yes, pretty much anybody using KDE probably agrees that Firefox sticks out inside the K desktop like a drop of milk on black coffee. It is a superb browser and the quick development pace Mozilla has adopted is only making it better in a much faster fashion, but looks are also very important, aren’t they? How about making Firefox look like a native KDE app? Check out the screenshot below!

• GNOME Desktop

  • Top 8 Gnome Shell Extensions

    The power of Gnome Shell lies in its extensionability. It is this power that transforms the barely unusable vanilla Gnome Shell desktop environement into a powerful and extremely usable and productive desktop environment. Gnome shell has a number of useful installations to enhance the user experience. To learn how to install and enable them using the Gnome Tweak tool check out our post on Installing and using Gnome Shell. In this post we will look at some must have Gnome shell extensions

Distributions

• Deep in the heart of TexOS

  The link in question is for TexOS, the Texas Open Source Project. The Texas Open Source Project, according to its site, “is working with local, non-profits in the San Angelo, Texas, area to provide technology to students who don’t have access to it at home.”

• New Releases

  • AgiliaLinux 8.0.0

  • Clonezilla 1.2.10-16

  • Salix Ratpoison 13.37

    Salix Ratpoison 13.37 is released! This is probably the first ever linux distribution release featuring Ratpoison as the main window manager. The aim of the Ratpoison edition is to create a system that is fully usable with the keyboard only, no mouse required! For everyone that is not familiar with Ratpoison, Ratpoison is a window manager for X “with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence”. Ratpoison uses a workflow that is similar to that of GNU screen, which is very popular in the terminal world. All interaction with the window manager is done through keystrokes.

  • 10/2/2011: Parted Magic 6.7

    Major enhancement release with many updates. Most notable updates include, Linux 3.0.4 and GParted 0.9.1. We have dropped the legacy PCManFM for PCMan-Mod, and man is it nice. Lots a little PCManfm bugs that have existed for years are now quashed. Xfburn replaces SimpleBurn for burning CDROM/DVD media. Chntpw was added to the boot menu. Adding Luxi fonts improved international language support. Although it’s not the newest released, Firefox is updated to firefox-6.0.2 and is compiled for i486 (official branding included) with permission from the Mozilla Foundation. OpenSSH is updated to 5.9p1 with the ecdsa key created by default. People have been complaining about Parted Magic being hard on laptop batteries, so CPU frequency scaling on anything with a battery is now set to “on-demand” at boot. See the changelog for all the updates. There are many.

  • Now, pay attention to the latest Calculate Linux 11.9

    typically ‘calculates’ the necessary utilities for configuration, building and installation of systems.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia, Mandriva and IBM: Battle of Giants

    My laptop is very old, so old that many people don’t even remember the model. This is one of the last models designed and actually produced by IBM before it was sold to Lenovo – a good old IBM X31, upgraded to 2Gb RAM at the day of purchase in 2005. There is no single thing it cannot do for me – it works just perfectly for many years, and, perhaps, for a few years to come.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat snatches storage Gluster file system for $136m

    Gluster is a spin-off from California Digital Corp, a supercomputer maker that was tapped by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to build its Itanium-based “Thunder” parallel supercomputer in 2003, which at one point was the second fastest supercomputer in the world. The techies behind it, led by Anand Babu Periasamy, Gluster’s CTO, founded Gluster in 2005 to build a better file system.

  • Red Hat to Buy Gluster for $136 Million, Add Open Source Storage

  • Red Hat Acquires Gluster Cloud-Ready Storage System

  • Red Hat buys Gluster storage company, OpenStack support included

  • Ascending Open Virtualization Alliance aims to bolster KVM usage

    The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) recently announced it has increased its membership by adding 134 new members, bringing the group’s total to more than 200 members since its formation back in May of this year. That’s a 20-fold increase in membership since its launch, signaling a strong growth of interest in KVM’s core technology and a growing number of companies hungry to partner and build an ecosystem of solutions around an open source platform.

  • Piper Jaffray Reiterates Overweight on Red Hat

    In its report, Piper Jaffray writes, “Red Hat is the market-leading provider of Linux and open source software and solutions. We believe the open source movement represents a tectonic shift in the way software is developed, licensed, and consumed. Red Hat’s early-mover advantage, market share leadership, and execution capability should enable it to grow at two to three times the rate of the broader software industry over a multi-year horizon, in our view.”

  • Analysts Reduce These Share Price Targets Today

    Red Hat (NYSE:RHT): UBS reiterated its rating of Buy for this company and changed its price target from $54 to $50. About the company: Red Hat, Inc. develops and provides open source software and services, including the Red Hat Linux operating system. The Company’s Web site offers information and news about open source software and provides an online community of open source software users and developers.

  • Fedora

    • Source view in Fedora Packages

    • Going Back to eth0 & eth1 in Fedora 15

• Debian Family

  • Help release Debian from the French!

    Debian gurus Raphael Hertzog and Roland Mas, are looking to raise money to fund the translation of their seminal Debian book “Cahiers de l’Admin Debian Squeeze” into English. The pair have set up a crowdfunding campaign here to finance the three-month task of translating the book’s 450 pages.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • uBuntu 11.10 aka Oneiric Ocelot: This Is The Countdown!

      • Official Oneiric T-Shirts Appear in Ubuntu Shop

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint – The Trio

          Linux Mint’s claim to fame is usability and the search for the perfect Linux desktop. As a distribution Mint arrived on the scene in 2006 with release 1.0 code named “Ada”. It never formally made it as a stable release, resulting in little fan fare. However with release 2.0 codenamed “Barbara” Linux Mint made its mark on the community. Over the next 2 years Mint released 5 versions and if you haven’t guessed it already they were all codenamed after feminine first names.

Devices/Embedded

• RoweBots Transforms Medical Equipment Design – Unison Ultra Tiny Linux Supports Xilinx FPGA Microblaze Softcore

  RoweBots Inc., the leading supplier of tiny embedded Linux-compatible real-time operating systems (RTOS) products, today announced that the Unison™ Operating System (OS) is a core component in a variety of medical equipment. The Unison OS controls operating room equipment, intelligent eyewear and other advanced medical devices for the home, physician’s offices and hospitals.

• Phones

  • Will the Mer Project Keep MeeGo Alive?

    In a message on the MeeGo email list today, Carsten Munk proposes the Mer project as a sustainable way for MeeGo and other communities to work with Tizen. Munk explains that many MeeGo project contributors originated from the Mer project, which stood for Maemo Reconstructed. “We were big on open governance, open development and open source,” he says.

  • The Power of Asterisk Revealed: What the Open Source Software Can Do for You

    Nokia is rumored to be developing an open-source OS for its low-end handsets, codenamed Meltemi, despite having failed to drive MeeGo to the point where it could save the company’s smartphones. Apparently being led by Nokia EVP of Mobile Phones Mary McDowell, so the WSJ‘s sources tell them, Meltemi named after “the Greek word for dry summer winds that blow across the Aegean Sea from the north.”

  • Linux is just good for Nokia business

    So why would Nokia appear to do a 180 and try a product release based on another form of Linux, codenamed “Meltemi”? Wasn’t MeeGo good enough? And what about Symbian, which Nokia just completed outsourcing development and support to Accenture?

    Like any detective, I started out making a list of possibilities.

  • Nokia working on new Linux OS for low end smartphones

    By going for the Windows Phone platform, Nokia has put itself in a difficult spot as far as low end phone segment is concerned.

  • From Moblin to MeeGo to Tizen, Oh My!

  • Android

    • World of Goo game coming to Android soon

    • 4.5-inch Android phone boasts 1280 x 720-pixel display

      LG announced an Optimus LTE phone that runs Android 2.3 on a dual-core, 1.5GHz processor, sports a 4.5-inch “True HD” IPS display with an unprecedented resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, and an LTE modem. Meanwhile, T-Mobile posted — and then hid — a web page showing two LG-manufactured MyTouch-branded phones said to be “coming soon.”

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • The $35 android tablet, a snip at $50

    The Aakash is designed and built by UK firm Datawind, known for their cheapo web-browsing kit. It features a resistive screen, a 366MHz processor and 2GB of storage, along with a couple of USB ports and space for a micro SD card. Connectivity is Wi-Fi, though cellular is already in production, and the government will be selling it to students for a shade under £20 a pop.

  • OLPC India head disappointed with govt’s $35 tablet

  • India’s $35 tablet computer meant for students to be launched today

    India’s Human Resources minister Kapil Sibal will unveil the country’s $35 tablet computer meant for students, officially on Wednesday.

    The tablet was developed as part of the National Mission on Education as a low cost alternative to high-end tablets which were available at $200. Even the latest tablet made by an Indian company called Pepper was priced $99.

  • Linux Tablet Will Be Fully Open Source

    It’s possible the launch of Tizen will eventually add some more variety to the mix, but in the meantime a California vendor of Linux PCs has set its sights on delivering what it believes will be the first fully open source tablet.

PhoneGap Build in Open Beta

Adobe Acquires Developer Of HTML5 Mobile App Framework PhoneGap Nitobi

Adobe buys PhoneGap, TypeKit for better Web tools

PhoneGap Creator Nitobi Acquired by Adobe

PhoneGap Applies to Apache Software Foundation, Contemplates Name Change

PhoneGap to become an Apache project as Adobe acquires Nitobi

Adobe has entered an agreement to acquire Nitobi, the startup behind PhoneGap. Alongside news of the acquisition, Adobe and Nitobi have jointly announced plans to donate the PhoneGap project to the Apache Software Foundation.

PhoneGap is an open source mobile development framework for building applications with standards-based Web technologies. The project provides a cross-platform Web runtime that allows application developers to reach multiple mobile operating systems with a single code base. It includes a custom API stack that enables platform integration and exposes device capabilities.

Adobe Announces Agreement to Acquire Nitobi, Creator of PhoneGap

IBM open sources Blue Spruce to aid medical research

Big Blue has passed the code to the Dojo Foundation’s Open Cooperative Web Framework (OpenCoweb), where it is already being used in a National Institutes of Health funded study of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPDGeneR). The COPDGeneR team is studying the CT scans and medical records of over 10,000 patents in an attempt to understand causation factors and find cures.

The open source code “provenance” audit concept

Proprietary software vendors like to scaremonger over the use of open source software. They like to highlight the “inherent dynamism” that exists in open source libraries that are exposed to community development at all times.

26 helpful open source network management tools

Gnucash accounts for a successful summer

Events

• The art of the Linux conference

  When Ballarat makes its debut in January 2012 as the first regional centre to host Australia’s national Linux conference, it will also see a number of first-timers involved on the organisational front.

Web Browsers

• For Fast, Light Web Browsing, Dillo’s No Dallier

  First things first: Unless you visit only very simple websites, Dillo will probably not be your one and only Web browser. However, you may find it very useful as a secondary browser because of its speed. It loads in under a second and renders just as quickly. It can be your go-to tool when you want a fast means to enter a site and find key information.

• Chrome

  • Google’s Chrome browser: Coming soon to an Android near you?

• Mozilla

  • The current (and poor) state of Firefox

    Firefox 7 was recently released. That’s right, less than a month after the release of Firefox 6 comes numero 7. But why? Why would one of the most popular browsers out there put out major releases so close together? Could it be the fact that 6 was so bad they wanted to call “do-over!” to try to make things right?

  • Mozilla aims to add silent updating to Firefox 10

    A year after it pulled the plug on silent updates in Firefox 4, Mozilla said it will debut most of the behind-the-scenes feature by early next year.

  • Firefox developer reveals changes and new update service

    In a post on his blog, developer Brian R. Bondy says that, while Mozilla’s rapid release process has allowed the development team to release a new version of the Firefox browser every six weeks, modifying restricted files under Windows has been difficult due to the introduction of User Account Control (UAC). By default, UAC prevents software from making changes to c:\Program Files\ without the user’s permission, in the form of a confirmation dialogue box. Bondy argues that “if a user with administrative access gives permissions to Firefox one time via a UAC prompt, and that user has automatic updates on, then there is no reason we should continue to ask them to elevate the permissions each and every time we want to apply an update.”

  • Firefox 3.6 Update To 7.0

    Firefox users who are still running a 3.6 version of the web browser should prepare themselves for receiving an advertised update on Thursday. Users will receive a prompt with the option to update the browser from their version to the very latest. Mozilla is quick to note that this has “no bearing on support levels”, which means that Firefox 3.6 will continue to receive updates after the update prompt has been launched.

SaaS

• The Community Effect

  Owen O’Malley recently collected and analyzed information in the Apache Hadoop project commit logs and its JIRA repository. That data describes the history of development for Hadoop and the contributions of the individuals who have worked on it.

• OpenNebula 3.0 features ACLs and updated interface

  Version 3.0 of the open source cloud toolkit OpenNebula has been launched; according to its developers this is used by thousands of organisations to build IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) clouds. The release includes “new innovative features” which have been “developed to fulfill the needs of leading IT organizations running production environments”.

• Mirantis Establishes Center of Excellence for OpenStack

Databases

• Firebird 2.5.1 is officially released

  Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 2.5.1 This sub-release introduces several bug fixes and many important improvements – for example, performance improvements during a database restore, the ability to write to global temporary tables in read-only databases, etc. For the full list of changes please refer to the Release Notes, Chapter 2 “New in Firebird 2.5″. Firebird 2.5.1 has 100% compatible on-disk structure with Firebird 2.5.0, so it is recommended to migrate to 2.5.1 as soon as possible.

• Amid NoSQL hubbub, Oracle tweaks fan-fave MySQL

  Oracle’s rumored NoSQL database made its splashy debut, along with Oracle’s Big Data Appliance, on the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 main stage Monday. Less trumpeted was news that MySQL, the venerable open-source database, got an update that vows to speed query and improve cluster capabilities.

• Oracle Defies Self With ‘NoSQL’ Database

  Oracle’s extended diatribe against the NoSQL crowd — including Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, and Redis — sought to expose their limitations and sow some serious doubt over their open-source roots. But the white paper has now vanished from Oracle’s website, surviving only through Google’s search cache, and Oracle has launched a new attack on the NoSQL movement. On Monday, at its massive Oracle OpenWorld conference in downtown San Francisco, Oracle unveiled its own NoSQL database.

• Oracle tweaks MySQL with milestone update

  While the news about NoSQL has garnered much attention, Oracle has quietly published a development milestone release (DMR) for MySQL.

  The MySQL 5.6.3 DMR includes a major revision of the software’s optimizer, which the company claims will make file-sort optimizations up to three times faster by searching more intelligently and dumping unneeded data during the process.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• VirtualBox 4.1.4 for Linux Supports X.Org Server 1.11

  Oracle announced last night, October 3rd, a new maintenance version to its popular and powerful VirtualBox virtualization software, VirtualBox 4.1.4, which brings many improvements and lots of bugfixes.

• ODF 1.2 has been approved as an OASIS standard

  Standard document formats are key for liberating the user from the lock in of proprietary formats. ODF has been developed by OASIS based on OOo document format, and is now supported by most personal productivity software and many other computer programs. TDF is committed to supporting ODF and contribute to its development. ODF will be one of four main topics at the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in Paris.

• Java FX 2.0 tries again

  The first time round, JavaFX was a closed source attempt to dislodge Flash, Silverlight and the other plugin runtimes from being the way that people delivered rich applications on the internet. This time around, Oracle has released version 2.0 of its JavaFX RIA (rich internet application) technology as an open source based platform. The release was announced at JavaOne, which is being held in parallel with the company’s in-house OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

  In contrast to previous attempts, in the opinion of many of the Java experts who have been testing the beta since February, it comes across as a much more rounded product. Whether Oracle will be able to compete with alternatives such as Microsoft’s Silverlight or Adobe’s AIR/Flex is, however, open to question, especially as those platforms are already under pressure from the emerging HTML5 ecosystem.

• Oracle v. Google – Settlement Discussions Continue

• Oracle v. Google – Google Files Case Management Statement

  Oracle filed its case management statement last Friday specifying the claims it would assert. (Oracle v. Google – Oracle Specifies Claims It Will Assert) In its statement Oracle identified 26 claims it would be asserting, although it also suggested that there were only 15 unique sets of claims because of what Oracle described as “claim mirroring.” Monday Google responded with its own case management statement identifying the grounds for invalidity it would assert against each of Oracle’s asserted claims.

• Oracle v. Google – Stay or Not to Stay, That Is the Question – Redux

  Each of the parties has now come forward and filed an additional Case Management Statement (Google Statement – 480 [PDF]; Oracle Statement – 481 [PDF]) on the issues of the patent reexaminations; whether the case should be stayed pending those reexaminations; the amount of time required for direct and cross-examination at trial, and the issue of damages. Not surprisingly, the positions of the parties are diametrically opposed.

Education

• iSchools bats for open-source in Software Freedom Day

  The iSchools Project, a government-funded ICT for education integration initiative, recently made a push for open-source software during the Software Freedom Day (SFD) 2011 held at St. Paul’s University in Tuguegarao, Cagayan Valley last September.

  Working on the theme “Smarter Communities Choose to be Free”, this year’s SFD aimed to educate and convince technology users to choose open-source software instead of using proprietary software or unlicensed software.

Business

• CIO/CTO Ghan Desai Leverages Open Source at Team Capital Bank

  A developer at heart, Team Capital Bank EVP and CIO/CTO Ghan Desai takes a hands-on approach to technology development while taking advantage of free, open source solutions.

• OSS adoption guidelines for SMBs

  For most small and midsize businesses (SMBs), costs and availability of in-house IT resources dictate the type of software they procure. This is why industry insiders are urging these companies to consider open source software (OSS) and leverage the low start-up expenditure and availability of support offered by market players.

• The Power of Asterisk Revealed: What the Open Source Software Can Do for You

  Small businesses, enterprises and even governments use Asterisk-based technologies to enable feature-rich voice communications over a Web connection. But not all current and prospective Asterisk (News – Alert) users know the true power of the open source software.

• The uneasy relationship between open source and profit

  Richard Stallman’s FOSS idea was anti-capitalist. Eric Raymond’s open source attitude is profoundly pro-capitalist.

  Yet the first open source companies to emerge in the early part of the last decade used FOSS licenses, not the “permissive” BSD-type licenses Raymond favors. They wanted community support, and an equal relationship among developers encouraged it.

• Semi-Open Source

  • Opscode Releases New Chef Software to Rapidly Deploy and Automate OpenStack Clouds

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Nominations are open for the 14th annual Free Software Awards

  The Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software is presented annually by FSF president Richard Stallman to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.

  Last year, Rob Savoye was recognized with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his contributions to compiler and testing tools, and his leadership of the GNU Gnash project, a fully-free replacement for Adobe Flash. Savoye joined a prestigious list of previous winners including John Gilmore, Wietse Venema, Harald Welte, Ted Ts’o, Andrew Tridgell, Theo de Raadt, Alan Cox, Larry Lessig, Guido van Rossum, Brian Paul, Miguel de Icaza and Larry Wall.

• Merging In The GNU D Language Compiler To GCC

  Nearly one year ago I wrote about Digital Mars wanting to merge the GNU D Compiler into GCC. Finally it looks like merging the compiler for the D programming language is nearing a point of reality.

Public Services/Government

• The Kerala State Electricity Board Saves a Whopping Rs 8 Crore, Using FOSS

  For the last four years, KSEB has created over 840 databases across the state. Almost all its applications in major functional areas, operating either in a centralised or local architecture, use PostgreSQL. About 700 PostgreSQL databases have been used in the Oruma project, and over 4,000 employees of KSEB access these databases on a daily basis. Saras has about 140 databases, which are used by about 1,000 users for daily transactions. Three projects under implementation (the Human Resource Information System or HRIS, the Supply Chain Management or SCM, and HT/EHT billing software) also use PostgreSQL databases. The HRIS will have a single database, and over 500 users are expected to use it on a daily basis. The SCM system uses PostgreSQL, and about 1,000 users are expected to access this centralised database for daily transactions. And about 30 people will use the HT/EHT billing software, every day.

Openness/Sharing

• OCCUPY WALL STREET (the theory)

  Occupy Wall Street is an open source protest.

• Open Data

  • Synchronously Replicating Databases Across Data Centers – Are you Insane?

    Well actually….no. The second Development Milestone Release of MySQL Cluster 7.2 introduces support for what we call “Multi-Site Clustering”. In this post, I’ll provide an overview of this new capability, and considerations you need to make when considering it as a deployment option to scale geographically dispersed database services.

    You can read more about MySQL Cluster 7.2.1 in the article posted on the MySQL Developer Zone.

    MySQL Cluster has long offered Geographic Replication, distributing clusters to remote data centers to reduce the affects of geographic latency by pushing data closer to the user, as well as providing a capability for disaster recovery.

• Open Access/Content

  • Open-access R&D for drug industry

    LONDON: Drug companies are learning how to share. In a bid to save both time and money, some of the industry’s biggest names are experimenting with new ways to pool early-stage research, effectively taking a leaf out of the “open-source” manual that gave the world Linux software.

Programming

• Put down the Java manual

• Typesafe Updates Scala and Akka

  Typesafe Stack 1.1 includes latest versions of the open source Scala language and Akka middleware

Standards/Consortia

• UK.gov coder defines open standards: ‘A lot like porn’

  As the government works on drawing up yet another definition for open standards, the man in charge of the Cabinet Office’s team of IT coders is keen to talk about a future where all government tech is based on, well, open standards.

Health/Nutrition

• Food Rights Network Interviews Food & Farm Hero John Kinsman

  This month, the Center for Media and Democracy’s new Food Rights Network launches a series of interviews with “food and farm heroes.” It’s easy for an organization dedicated to exposing corporate spin to focus on negative corporate propaganda with its ubiquity, but we would be remiss not to highlight courageous people who fight corporate agendas and spin in other ways, large and small. Some devote their lives to it.

• Los Angeles and Kern County’s Epic Sewage Sludge Battle

  Sewage sludge can contain heavy metals, pesticides, dioxins, flame retardants, pharmaceuticals, perfluorinated compounds, nanoparticles, pathogens, known endocrine disruptors, and more. Of those, only 10 heavy metals out of dozens are regulated in sewage sludge that is applied to land where animal feed is grown as fertilizer. The strictest regulation, which the EPA calls “Class A Biosolids” (“biosolids” is a term the sewage industry made up to make sludge sound more palatable), has the same restrictions on heavy metals, plus two other criteria: it must have no detectable salmonella or fecal coliform, and it must be treated so that it is not attractive to disease-carrying organisms like rats or flies. But this leaves in and unaccounted for numerous other pathogens, as well as an array of heavy metals and other substances like PBDEs concentrated in the resulting sludge.

Finance

• O.co aka Overstock.com vs. Goldman Sachs: A True David & Goliath Story

  For six years Overstock.com has waged a war to expose Wall Street mischief. We did not go looking for a fight, but our company was attacked, and we learned we were not alone: the same manipulation-for-profit tools that Wall Street had deployed against us had also been deployed against many American companies, harming job creation, innovation, and economic growth. We knew that if left unchecked and unexposed, Wall Street’s games could ultimately damage U.S. capital markets.

  So in 2005 and 2007 we filed two lawsuits. The first case was against a hedge fund (Rocker Partners) and hatchet-job-for-hire research team (Gradient Analytics), both with ties to Jim Cramer. The second case was against a group of eleven Wall Street prime brokers, culminating in Goldman Sachs. The hedge fund in question (Rocker Partners) hired famed lawyer David Boies, and the prime brokers showed up with an army of the most prestigious law firms in America. Our lawyers were Dore Griffinger, Ellen Cirangle, Jonathan Sommer and Catherine Jackson of Stein & Lubin, a small but excellent San Francisco law firm.

• Ratigan With Denninger: How To Get Money Out Of Politics

  Three years ago, I left my 15-year career as a financial professional, because I was disgusted and disturbed by the rampant evidence of corruption in the relationship between our banking system and our government.

  At the time the Tea Party was emerging and I was confident that between their exploding wave of anger and our newly minted president’s soaring aspirations for all of us — we would align to confront and resolve the blatantly corrupt relation ship between banking and our government and more broadly BUSINESS and STATE.

• Molly Crabapple’s Occupy Wall Street “Vampire Squid” poster, for your printing/stenciling pleasure

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Koch Industries Exposed for Bribery, Secret Iran Sales and More

  Late Sunday night, after a flurry of PR flack-directed prebuttals that had eyebrows arching and anticipation building, Bloomberg Markets Magazine released an epic exposé about Koch Industries’ misdeeds during the last three decades.

  Fifteen Bloomberg journalists from around the world contributed to the story.

• U.S. House Passes ALEC-Inspired TRAIN Act

  The TRAIN Act, introduced by ALEC alumnus Rep. John Sullivan (R-OK), “would create a special committee to oversee the EPA’s rules and regulations, and require the agency to consider economic impacts on polluters when it sets standards concerning how much air pollution is too much.”

Censorship

• Italian-language Wikipedia hidden, may shut down

  In a message it posted today, Wikipedia said it has hidden the Italian-language portion of the site due to a new law proposed by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s administration.

DRM

• The Daily Digital Lock Dissenter, Day 3: Retail Council of Canada

  The Retail Council of Canada represents more than 43,000 store fronts of all retail formats across Canada, including department, specialty, discount, and independent stores, and online merchants. It board of directors include representation from Canada’s largest retailers. The RCC’s comments on digital locks in Bill C-32:

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 231 – Engage the Noise Gate!

Kernel Space

• Kernel.org is back

  The restored kernel.org is back on line – partially. It holds the mainline tree, the stable tree, and linux-next; as of this writing, all hold their pre-shutdown contents. Expect those trees to be updated soon; other trees will slowly reappear as their developers obtain new credentials on the site. Services other than git and FTP (the wiki, mirrors, etc.) remain offline. (Note that there appears to be some residual weirdness around the site’s SSL certificate, leading to “untrusted connection” warnings if you try to use HTTPS).

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA 285.05.09 Linux Driver Pre-Release

    As was pointed out in the forums, new binary NVIDIA Linux drivers were pushed out today. The new version is the 285.05.09 pre-release.

  • A first post about Intel Linux Graphics and their friends

    As you already know, since August I am working at Intel, within the Intel Linux Graphics group. And, as many of you know as well, the news about Intel Linux graphics out there vary a lot, but usually just between the “it just works” and “nothing works” states, with few intermediate points in between (many of which are usually covered by phoronix news).

Applications

• 4 programs to update your Blog from Linux

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Change Default Browser, Mail, Music/Movie Player in Ubuntu 11.10

  • Generate and/or Encrypt Passwords – makepasswd

  • How to lock down Linux

  • Recording and Replaying Web Interaction Using Perl Modules

  • Python for systems administrators – Repetitive tasks

  • Fix for mount error(12): Cannot allocate memory

  • Linux security tips

  • Tech Tip – Touchscreen Calibration In Linux

  • Add a ‘Force Quit’ Applet to Ubuntu’s Unity Launcher

  • How to analyse Network Protocols using Wireshark in Ubuntu

  • Configuring Your Kubuntu Panels

  • Increased Performance In Linux With zRam (Virtual Swap Compressed in RAM)

  • How to Find Anything Under Linux

  • Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Fedora 15

  • Install Epiphany 3.2.0 With Web Application Mode In Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

  • PyLogsParser: how to write a normalizer

  • Free Online security course (LearnSIA) – A Call for Help

• Games

  • Let’s Play: SuperTuxKart

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 25th September 2011

    In this week’s KDE Commit-Digest:

    * New sorting options in KDEBase
    * Work on screen locking as an effect
    * Optimization of message list update in KMail
    * VPN status overlay icon reworked in Network Management
    * Optimization of QVector usage in Undo manager in KDElibs
    * Optimization of item addition and deletion to a project in K3B
    * Bugfixes in Calligra, including date entering in Kexi forms.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Fedora, OpenSuse betas embrace GNOME 3.2

    The Attachmate/SUSE-backed OpenSUSE and Red Hat-backed Fedora community Linux projects have been released in beta versions that include the GNOME 3.2 desktop environment. The Fedora 16 (“Verne”) beta also adds support for the GRUB2 bootloader, as well as updates to applications including Firefox, Blender, Perl, and Python, while the OpenSUSE 12.1 (“Asparagus”) beta to be more of a developers alpha release masquerading as a beta.

Distributions

• One CD disk, multiple Linux distributions: Netboot CD

• An Arch Tale

  Dave needs a new 64-bit Linux for his primary audio production machine. What shall he do ? Read on to learn how and why he decided upon the Arch Linux distribution.

• New Releases

  • Parted Magic 6.7 Comes with Linux 3.0.4 Kernel, GParted 0.9.1

    Parted Magic 6.7 has been released. The latest update to the partitioning tool and distro comes with some rather big changes. A couple of big components have been updated to their latest version, both the Linux kernel and GParted, the main tool in the suite.

  • Parted Magic 6.7 adds Xfburn CD/DVD burner tool

    Version 6.7 of the Parted Magic open source, multi-platform partitioning tool has been released. According to lead developer Patrick J. Verner, the update is a “major enhancement release” that has a number of notable improvements and updates.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat to pay $136M for data-storage firm

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16: Linux home for lost Ubuntu GNOMEs

      Dubbed “Verne” and sporting desktop artwork that echoes Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Fedora 16 is shaping up to be a worthwhile alternative to Ubuntu 11.10, particularly for those that aren’t happy with Canonical’s home-brewed Unity shell.

      Among the big changes in Fedora 16 is GNOME 3.2, the latest version of the GNOME 3 shell Ubuntu ditched for Unity.

    • Fedora 16 ‘Verne’ beta released

      The Fedora Project has made the first and only beta of Fedora 16 available for download. It should include all of the major changes for the new distribution, code-named “Verne”. Over the next five weeks leading up to the final release, development will focus on fine tuning and bug fixes.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 235

      • The New Wallpapers of Ubuntu 11.10

        Canonical introduced this weekend the new wallpapers that will be part of the final release of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system.

        There are fourteen new wallpapers in total, for the new Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system, due for release on October 13th, 2011.

        In order of appearance, their names are: Buck off!, Darkening Clockwork, Dybbølsbro Station, JardinPolar, Langelinie Allé, Momiji Dream, Mount Snowdon – Wales, Not Alone, Power of Words, PurpleDancers, Small flowers, Stalking Ocelot, The Grass ain’t Greener and WildWheat.

      • Ubuntu Version 11.10: Days Away Now

        As we’ve reported before, the official release of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot, is due on October 13th. In addition, many people are already using the beta releases. In case you missed it, at ThisisTheCountdown.com you can track the minutes and seconds leading up to the next major release of Ubuntu, and get QR codes and URL strips. The previous release of Ubuntu, Natty Narwhal, provoked some controversy among users, especially due to its desktop interface, but version 11.10 has some much desired improvements. Here’s an updated look at what’s under the hood.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Android Smartphone USB Tethering (Linux Mint 11)

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Amazon rumored to be negotiating for WebOS

    Amazon is rumored to be negotiating with HP to buy its Palm division, including its WebOS assets — either to create an update to the Kindle Fire tablet, or just to gain patents. Meanwhile, an IHD iSuppli analysis suggests Amazon is selling each Quanta-manufactured Fire for $10 less than it costs to build.

  • Sony Ericsson camera phone debuts unlocked on NewEgg.com

    NewEgg.com has begun shipping an unlocked, camera-focused Sony Ericsson Android 2.3 smartphone for $380. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray is equipped with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a 3.3-inch display, both 8.1-megapixel and VGA cameras, plus a 3G radio said to be suitable for AT&T’s network.

  • Android

    • Replicant: Making Android truly free

      Since Linux is released under the GNU Public license, Google is forced to release the source code for the Linux kernel that Android runs on.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Solar-powered I-slate tablet heading for Indian schools in 2012

    An Android-based “I-slate” tablet prototype developed in part by Rice University has completed year-long trials in Indian public schools, and a $50 solar-powered version with a new power-sipping processor is set to enter full production for a mid-2012 release. Meanwhile, the much-delayed “$35 Indian Tablet” aimed at Indian students will launch Oct. 5, the Indian government now claims.

  • Will the Kindle Fire Light a Fire Under Android?

    Since releasing its new Kindle Fire tablet last week, which is based on the Android mobile operating system, Amazon hasn’t released official numbers for how many of the units it is selling, but there are some reports that the Kindle Fire could become one of the biggest selling Android hardware devices ever. The Cult of Android blog is running a screenshot that it claims is leaked from Amazon and shows that the units are selling “at an average rate of over 2,000 units per hour, or over 50,000 per day.” If the sales numbers are correct, that would put the Kindle Fire on track to be a bigger seller than the iPad was fresh out of the gate. It goes to show that Amazon’s big bet on open source is paying off.

  • Toshiba Regza AT700 tablet announced

    Toshiba kicked off proceeding’s at this year’s CEATEC with news that it has created the world’s thinnest tablet – the Toshiba Regza AT700.

    TechRadar was in Japan to get a first glimpse of the tablet, which looks mightily similar to the one it announced in IFA in September – the AT200.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Telepathic Flirt With Chromium

• Mozilla

  • Rapid Release Follow-Up

    My recent post on the rapid release cycle generated a lot of response, some very thoughtful and some also very frustrated. Many of the comments focus on a few key issues listed below. We’ve been working on how to address these issues; I’ll outline our progress and plans here.

  • Mozilla releases Rescuefox prototype

    Mozilla’s Gladius game engine is part of the outfit’s Paladin project, which is trying to push 3D gaming in the Firefox web browser. The Rescuefox prototype was used to highlight any problems between the Gladius game engine and Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine, and it also works on Google’s Chrome.

  • RescueFox: The Value of a Prototype

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Is One

  Once in the mists of time, I was the head of open source at Sun Microsystems. One of my chief delights in that role was the OpenOffice.org project. I attended the Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Monterey, California in 2000 where the project was created out of a product Sun had acquired the previous year, StarOffice. I watched as it grew in polish and capability. I also helped as it submitted its ideas to the OASIS standards group for an “Open Office Document Format”, a project that evolved into ODF and changed the world of enterprise document handling.

Education

• On the University migration to Free Software

  Megatotoro described here how the recently announced University migration to free software made a big splash in national newspapers and even on TV news. The idea is to start by replacing MS Office suites by free software equivalents (Open Office.org/Libre Office) and, eventually, dump Windows and implement Linux.

  I visited the online page of one of those newspapers to see the coverage and the comments I read were, for the most part, very encouraging and positive. Of course, the public is congratulating the University for the initiative of saving a LOT OF MONEY (that was used to pay MS licenses) through the use of Free Software and to invest this growing amount on improving the campus and on resources available to students.

Funding

• VC funding for open source – existential question time

  I tweeted last week that VC funding for open source related vendors was up 95% in Q3, driving by significant investment in ‘big data’ related vendors.

Project Releases

• Airtime radio software updated with new DEB packages

  The Sourcefabric development team has released version 1.9.4 of its open source Airtime radio software. Airtime is a server application which allows users, from any modern web browser, to upload audio, create playlists with drag and drop, incorporate track transitions, build complete shows and then schedule them for transmission.

• New Zentyal 2.2-1 installer available!

Openness/Sharing

• Project Mango kick-off
  [Blender project]

Programming

• Sinatra 1.3 adds streaming

  The developers of Sinatra, the light-weight web framework for Ruby programmers, have announced the availability of a new feature release, Sinatra 1.3.0, which allows applications to keep connections open over time while still delivering data over the connection.

Finance

• The Occupation Is On The Move, Find a Big Bank Protest Near You

  U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone used to say “sometimes you have to pick a fight to win one.”

  Now Occupy Wall Street has picked one, right in Jamie Dimon’s backyard.

  But it won’t stay contained in Zuccotti Park. While Brookfield Properties called the park a “public sanctuary” in 2005, they have apparently changed their minds. Mr. Zuccotti wants his park back and the police are preparing to clear it with new rules barring camping, sleeping and breathing.

• World is heading for ‘Great Stagnation’, says Goldman

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Synagro’s Shiny New Patina

  Synagro is in the business of marketing sewage sludge as “compost,” or, as the company’s new, PR-approved website puts it, “Transforming natural waste challenges into sustainable, planet-friendly solutions.” The company is a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group, the largest private equity firm in the world. Carlyle is also a sizeable part of the military-industrial complex with ties to numerous national politicians, including former British Prime Minister John Major, Alice Albright (daughter of former Secretary of State Madelyn Albright), and both George W. and George H.W. Bush.

Privacy

• Open Data Community Demands a Real Debate on Public Data Corporation

  Earlier this week dozens of people from the loose open data movement gathered in London to discuss the current government consultations on this policy area. Open Rights Group had organised these workshops to present the policy proposals and our initial views, but also to gather feedback from the community. The main message we took home is that the Public Data Corporation in is current shape is widely perceived as a missed opportunity and huge step backwards, while the Making Open Data Real paper got a much more nuanced response.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Red Hat

    I am happy to announce that today the party is kicking off its public policy process. To get involved simply take a look at www.pirateparty.org.uk/policy2011 and then go to piratethispolicy.co.uk to let us know what you think.

    As you know, over the last year I have been listening to members, voters and the public as well as going out and speaking to the people who had an opportunity to vote for one of our candidates in Gorton, Oldham and Bury. I watched as our brothers and sisters in Berlin reinvigorated their voters and overturned a legacy of decline and apathy. I saw that it was not just because they had money, not just because the electoral system in Berlin is fairer, but because they had ideas that people could vote for; ideas that came from the same guiding principles as our own, ideas that were well presented, sensible and relevant. They were ideas that won 8.9% of an election and they were good ideas.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

How Linux is advancing astronomy

Head into the professional world of astronomy, though, and Linux machines are ubiquitous. Speaking to science colleagues, fellow developers and reading this very magazine, it becomes clear that there are a wealth of options out there for avid stargazers and the same names and distros crop up again and again.

Flexibility of GNU/Linux

I have often used GNU/Linux to examine systems for many reasons: hardware identification, testing, rescuing data from hard drives, and installation, of course. KNOPPIX is often used but SystemRescueCD is designed for the purpose and has a ton of great features such as chNTpass and memtest. Then there is CloneZilla which does efficient disc imaging to/from a device or a server and, with a server, multicasting. The world is “solution-rich” with GNU/Linux.

Open Source: Niche Markets, Linux and Microsoft

If you are a Linux protagonist who has been around as long as, or longer than, I have, you have seen responses like these over and over as to why Linux distributions will never go mainstream on the PC desktop:

* “Linux will always remain a niche platform because it does not have a native release of Adobe (Photoshop / Creative Suite / etcetera)!”
* “Linux does not have Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office power users require Microsoft Office!”
* “The web portal at (insert portal here) needs Internet Explorer. There is no native release of Internet Explorer for Linux, so no one will want to use Linux!”
* “Program X does not have a Linux version or equivalent!”
* Or other claims along the same lines …

[...]

To me this suggests that the Microsoft platform is the niche platform:

* Do you “need” Adobe (Photoshop / Creative Suite / etcetera) for your job? Then you are a niche user.
* Do you “need” Microsoft Office because you are a “power user”? Then you are a niche user.
* Do you “need” access to an IE only web portal? Then you are a niche user.
* Do you “need” to run Program X on your PC? Then you are a niche user.

Six ways to use Linux Live CDs in your business

It was true for me up until a certain point. Things changed when Knoppix Live CD was released by Klaus Knopper in 2000.

Desktop

• Gummersbach: ‘Open source desktops much easier to manage’

  Easier management is one of the main reasons for the German city of Gummersbach to switch its almost 350 PCs to the open source operating system GNU/Linux, a move that began already four years ago. One of the IT administrators, Dirk Hennrichs: “Our Linux desktops need close to zero maintenance, making them light years easier to manage than their proprietary predecessor.”

  Following the move to GNU/Linux, time spent on desktop maintenance was rationalised by one full time equivalent. Hennrichs: “Had the city stayed with the proprietary alternative, it would force us to increase the number of IT administrators.”

• Flashdrive Linux Saves the Day

  As I have mentioned previously on this blog, I never go anywhere without a bootable Linux flashdrive. The fact that Linux is so portable is one of my favorite things about it. I have at various times kept Fedora, Linux Mint, and Puppy on my flashdrive, but for the last couple months, my mobile distro of choice has been Knoppix.

Server

• Mad Dog 21/21: Bier Or Hospice, That Persistent Thirst For Legacy

  It’s possible–and I think likely–that IBM could not sustain either legacy business, and particularly the mainframe legacy portion, without the highly visible z/Linux offering. Unfortunately for IBM, a key technological capability that distinguished z/Linux from rivals in the form of non-z servers, is losing its advantage.

• Linux on Mainframes – an IBM update

  IBM presented an update on Linux on its mainframe line of computers. It was refreshing to learn about the success Linux has been having outside of the realm of industry standard X86-based systems. Here’s a quick summary of the session.

Kernel Space

• Btrfs File-System For Old Computers?

  Recently I published benchmarks of Btrfs from a Serial ATA 3.0 SSD (the excellent OCZ Vertex 3 SSD) and those results were interesting, but most people aren’t running 6Gb/s solid-state drives, so how does this next-generation file-system perform on the opposite end of the spectrum? In this article are EXT4 and Btrfs benchmarks from an old Core Duo notebook with a 5400RPM mobile hard drive.

Applications

• Infos: The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle

  Sometimes it’s useful to work offline, and once the article it’s finished publish it on your Blog.
  yes you can do it with an html editor, or also with a simple text editor like Vi or Emacs, but there are specialized programs that can ease your work of publishing and management of your online Blog.

• 4 Windows Applications That Originated On Linux

  We all know that, as the most widely used operating system, Windows has the largest collection of software. Whenever a developer wants to create a new program, they’re more than likely going to choose Windows as their first (or only) supported platform. That way the developer can reach the maximum number of people that would use the software.

• Proprietary

  • Native Netflix Client Coming to Linux ‘In The Next 12 Months’

    As a Brit the whole “Netflix” phenomenon has largely passed me by, but I do know that Linux support for the on-demand video-streaming service is a long-held ‘want’ for many readers.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Sync Calendar and Contacts with Google in Evolution

  • Set up Spice-Gtk-0.7.4X (USB redirection support), LibUsbredir 0.3.1, Qemu-kvm-0.15.0 +noroms(spice enabled), Spice Server&Client 0.9.1 on Ubuntu 11.10

  • Intrusion detection systems : Using tripwire on Linux

  • Serving CGI Scripts With Nginx On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04

  • High quality MPEG-4 transcoding with Mencoder

• Games

  • Announcing Ensign 1!

    Ensign 1 is a new game idea from the people who gave us the awesome 2D/3D game Helena the Third! (go buy that one now, it’s good!).

  • Linux Game Preview: AirMech, New Action/RTS Hybrid Game

  • Infos: The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle

  • From Doom to RAGE: 20 years of id development

  • Kot-in-Action Interview!

  • Linux Game Preview: AirMech, New Action/RTS Hybrid Game

    AirMech is an upcoming top down shooter, real time strategy hybrid game by Carbon Games Studio. The first gameplay footage was shown at PAX 2011 and since then it has garnered quite good response from viewers.

  • Announcing Ensign 1!

  • The Top 5 Real Time Strategy Games for Linux | Game on!

    Gaming in Linux is still in its infancy when compared to Windows although that gap is closing as Linux games start to emerge and the popularity of Linux itself gathers momentum. You can choose the middle path of running your favourite Windows games in Linux by using wine or go native. There are a decent collection of RTS games in Linux. Some of the games have been around for a while others like 0 AD have been relative necomers to the area. Have a look at some of the best (IOO) RTS Games that run natively in Linux

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE to Say Buh-Bye to Screensavers

    Developers are addressing a security “constraint” in KDE’s screen-locking routine, which I guess some folks may welcome. But as a result, screensavers will be rendered inoperative. They hope to include a fallback in 4.8, but will remove that in 4.9. Martin Graesslin says they wish to replace the current engine with a “new solution” built using Qt Quick and they hope users will start to contribute new screensavers.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3′s Default Wallpaper – Ubuntu Style

    Whether or not you’re a fan of GNOME 3′s default ‘stripy blue’ wallpaper there’s no denying that it is striking.

    If you plan on using GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.10 (it’s just a click away) – or if you’ve made the ultimate sacrifice and have it installed it in 11.04 – the following Ubuntu-flavoured variant of GNOME’s default wallpaper can add some Ubuntu-flavoured purple warmth back to your desktop.

  • GNOME 3.x Revisted

    The last time I tried both of GNOME 3′s official ISOs, things didn’t go as planned. But the recently released 3.2 version deserved another chance, seeing its apparent slew of new features. I downloaded the 946 MBs of data, burnt it and booted from it. This time around, the live environment loaded up pretty quickly and with, I’m happy to report, 0 errors or hiccups. Yay! The “revolutionized” interface worked as expected and I was able to rapidly get to the “Live Install” button that was sitting boldly on top inside “Activities”. Oh, the base for this GNOME 3 showcase is openSUSE. The installation process is quite easy to go through. As I chose to place the distro on my second HDD, I also wanted the bootloader to be installed on the same HDD, so as not to interfere with the primary drive arrangement. Sadly, and I tried several options, the bootloader wouldn’t be correctly installed. I finally conceded and overwritten the main one.

  • Gnome 3.2 More Evolution than Revolution

Distributions

• One Year of Rolling with Arch/Bang

  It’s just a little over a year now that I first installed ArchBang with 2010.09 that had just been released. In comments to my following review a poster expressed the opinion it would be interesting to see how this would develop and if it would still be working in a year from then. So here we are. I’ve tweaked the install and kept it updated at my leisure, and it is still working fine. Over time the ArchBang base I started out with has turned into Arch Linux, as you would expect it to when pointing at Arch repositories.

• A Review and Endorsement of Sabayon LXDE

  Before moving to Lubuntu, I briefly gave Sabayon Xfce a spin. It was interesting, but there was a little bit more of a learning curve than I was prepared to commit to at the time.

  But once I had my new machine working, I decided to try out Sabayon on the old one, a ThinkPad T43. Since I’ve fallen in love with LXDE as a desktop environment, I wanted to see Sabayon’s take on it. I liked it so much on the T43, I wound up installing it on the T420, my everyday laptop.

• Re: Rethinking the Linux distribution

  Bundles are a great idea, actually, to solve the problem of 3rd party software developers (mostly proprietary) saying “I won’t develop for Linux because packaging for each distro is too much work”. But having a read only file system, and killing existing package management is just not the right solution. Making bundles the only way to install software destroys all advantages of a package management system.

  I assume (mainly because I saw some gnome designers oppose to package management) that this is going to be the way you install software in GNOME OS. Am I right? Well, I hope at least you’ll develop it as a freedesktop spec and not only in GNOME.

• New Releases

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 167

    · Announced Distro: Tiny Core Linux 4.0
    · Announced Distro: DoudouLinux 1.1

  • Calculate Linux 11.9 released

    Calculate Linux 11.9 has been released. All of our distributions are available for download: Calculate Directory Server (CDS), Calculate Linux Desktop with KDE (CLD), GNOME (CLDG) or XFCE (CLDX), Calculate Media Center (CMC), Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS) and Calculate Scratch Server (CSS).

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • They make Mageia: Samuel Verschelde

    I discovered linux during my studies, in 2003. It was exciting to discover a whole new world I didn’t know, having only used computers with Microsoft systems on them for many years. The first distribution I installed was Debian potatoe, and it probably wasn’t the best choice for a beginner not familiar with unix command line
    Then I used Red Hat for some time and finally settled to Mandrake in 2004.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Restores Xen, Adds Juju to Version 11.10

      • New Set of 14 Wallpapers for Ubuntu 11.10 is Perhaps the Best Collection Yet

        Every Ubuntu release cycle churns out fresh new collection of wallpapers. These wallpapers are carefully chosen from a huge cache of user contributed images in Ubuntu Artwork Flickr pool. Oneiric release cycle is no different. 14 gorgeous new wallpapers have arrived in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric already and they are by far the best I have seen in any new Ubuntu release.

      • How Ubuntu is built: the inside story

        Every six months we release a new version of Ubuntu. Each one brings together hundreds of developers, translators, testers and documentation writers to integrate the latest and greatest upstream applications, as well as new and innovative Ubuntu technologies.

      • Excited for Ubuntu Linux 11.10? The Official Countdown Has Begun

        Among the new additions in that second beta version are a new kernel, now based on version 3.0.4; an updated GNOME desktop (currently version 3.1.92 on the way to GNOME 3.2); and improved support for installing 32-bit library and application packages on 64-bit systems.

      • The countdown to Oneiric Ocelot begins, Ubuntu 11.10 arrives October 13th

        A whole new world? A whole new computer? Those are some pretty epic promises coming from the folks at Canonical, especially since we’ve seen the most recent beta and Ubuntu 11.10 and, while its packed with welcome improvements over Natty, it’s not exactly revolutionary. Still, we’re excited that on October 13th the final release of Oneiric Ocelot will be hitting the web with an improved Dash that integrates search Lenses, new default apps, a spiffed-up app switcher and application syncing across multiple devices. There are plenty of other little tweaks and improvements that add polish to the popular Linux distribution — more than we could possibly cover without inspiring a string of TLDR comments. If you’re the adventurous type you can download the second beta now, but we suggest you wait till the timer at the source link reaches zero. If you want to spread the Gospel of Ubuntu you’ll also find a printable flyer at the source with a QR code and tear-off URL strips that lead to ThisIsTheCountdown.com.

      • The Best Indicator Applets for Ubuntu

        Earlier, many folks were unhappy about the dozens of applications that ate up valuable space on their system tray. Often, people would have overly crowded panels that would look ugly in most cases. To address this problem, Canonical came up with Indicator Applets. It was not only a huge step forward in usability; it was also the foundation of a more clean and uniform user interface.

        Unlike Windows, where you’re clumsily right-clicking the tray, indicator applets allow you to interact with multiple applications at once without clicking more than twice. Now, if you take a look at the top panel, it looks much more uniform, with properly spaced icons and easy-to-navigate menus. As Canonical has released the API out in public, many developers have come up with some nifty indicator applets.

      • Interview with John Lenton

        In this continuing Ubuntu One interview series, Amber Graner talks to John Lenton, Senior Engineering Manager for Ubuntu One. Lenton give a little about his history with FOSS and how he found his way to Canonical. He addresses reader comments about the Ubuntu One proxy issue and gives users and developers links and information on how to participate in the Ubuntu One project and more.

      • Is the Ubuntu App Developer Portal a Game Changer?

        Canonical has recently announced the creation of the Ubuntu Developer Portal. The portal’s goal is fairly straight forward: it’s basically been designed to get more mainstream developers creating software for Ubuntu.

        In this article, I’ll look at the motivation, tools and resources that will be made available to those using the Ubuntu Developer Portal. I’ll also look at whether this is an effort that is going to be a “game changer” for Ubuntu or merely a weak publicity stunt that backfires on everyone involved.

      • Seven Minutes in Ubuntu

        For a while now, I’ve been using my home machine with MAMP to develop a research prototype. But last week, I got my hands on a PC to use as a web server (thanks Andrea!). Before I could get started on it though, I needed an operating system to install — ideally one that would get the job done with minimal setup and training on my part. After a bit of reading online, I chose Ubuntu.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Xubuntu Review: It Packs a Punch! (With Screenshots)

          Xubuntu 11.04 is a fast, stable operating system for older systems or systems that could use the performance boost. It is beautifully well put together and easy to use.

        • DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 425: Questions and Answers: A Look Behind The Curtain

          In the end of the day, money is only a metric to measure time and power and it doesn’t measure it all. Sometimes we spend money on things we can get for free, because the time we don’t spend in getting them is more valuable than the money itself. So how do we do? We can tackle any problem and pay for what we need. We can engage in expensive projects (we recently decided to mirror Debian for instance and we’re now confident enough in our new servers to have all LMDE users point to them). We’re almost ready to scale up, to hire, to rent offices, the financial aspect of this isn’t the main issue anymore. Our biggest problem is to buy time. Because unlike everything else in the project that’s been getting better and better since the start, finding the time to achieve what we have in mind has become harder and harder. Do you achieve twice as much when you’ve got twice as many developers? What are big companies and their large IT staff doing wrong to let small projects like ours challenge them? How do we manage to become more productive and to take on bigger projects? We don’t need to worry about the money, the community removes that problem for us and allows us to focus on what really matters, finding the time that we need. This is the real challenge.

        • elementary OS 0.1 ‘Jupiter’ review

          elementary OS (another one that forgoes capital letters in it’s name) is a relatively new kid on the Linux block. It’s based on Ubuntu 10.10, and uses a customised version of the GNOME 2.32 desktop.

          On visiting the elementary OS website, one has to be impressed with the polish. I may admit to temporarily wondering if I’d accidently gone to Apple’s site instead. This being said, if the developers have taking this much care with their operating system as they have with the website, we could be looking at a good thing.

          Testing environment: Acer Aspire 3410 laptop, Intel Celeron ULV 1.2GHz processor, 3GB RAM, integrated Intel graphics.

Devices/Embedded

• Ex-NASA Man Squeezes Cloud Onto USB Stick

  Set for an unveiling at next week’s OpenStack conference in Boston, this “cloud key” also includes Piston’s Linux-based PentOS.

• 100 Greatest Gadgets

  That digital cameras, perfectly printed pages and email are now all as platitudinous, quotidian and meretricious as takeaway coffee is easy to take for granted and I certainly don’t expect credit for being an early adopter or some kind of wise prophet. I was also an early adopter of many disastrous failures. The Newton, the Microwriter AgendA, early, bulky and dreadful Sony electronic books, iRex iLiads weird tone-dialling devices – any number of freakish gadgets that were either before their time and technology or simply deluded and hopelessly hopeful were all grist to my crazy mill.

• Phones

  • Nokia to Impose Price Cuts on Smartphones with Linux-based Mobile OS

    Nokia, the largest cellular phone manufacturer in the world, is developing a Linux-based mobile OS that will power its low-cost smartphones as it bids to sell a billion of such under-$100 device.

    The Nokia OS project called “Meltemi” and led by executive vice president Mary McDowell, was revealed by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

  • Nokia readies Linux mobile OS for cheap smartphones

    Nokia has underlined the importance of low-cost smartphones and now it appears that the company is developing a Linux-based OS for smartphones that will cost less than $100 (£60) without subsidies.

  • Android

    • 6 Commercial Android Video Players

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Kindle Fire: Take three tablets and call me in the morning

    Right now my boys, ages 5, 7 and 9 all have iPod Touches that have served them well despite having been many times lost, spilled on, and in one case very lightly driven over by a car. But the Touches, which also cost $199 as I recall, are getting old, their batteries recharged so many times to where they now barely last an hour. It’s time for something new, which in the eyes of my boys means something better.

  • Nokia readies Linux mobile OS for cheap smartphones

    Let’s start gingerly, with Nokia. You’ll recall the indignation when Nokia threw Symbian under the Windows Phone 7 bus and osborned its existing product line. Nokia dead-ended Symbian handsets, causing sales to plunge while everyone waited for the new MicroNokia smartphones.

    The company didn’t stop there.

    It then presented Meego, the offspring of Intel’s Moblin (as in Mobile Linux) and Nokia’s own Maemo (also Linux-based), as their weapon of the future. This was their killer smartphone OS.

    But Nokia gave up on Meego. The result was a risky but greatly simplified product strategy: One OS, WP7, instead of three or four versions of Symbian, S40, S60, Symbian^3, and Meego.
    Such simplicity couldn’t last.

  • Amazon Sells Kindle Fire at Low Profit Margin to Promote Online Merchandize Sales

    An IHS analysis reveals Amazon’s business model for its new Kindle Fire tablet, with the company willing to settle for a razor-thin margin on sales of devices and digital content in order to achieve the larger goal of promoting merchandize sales at its online store.

    A preliminary virtual estimate conducted by the IHS iSuppli Teardown Analysis Service places Kindle Fire’s bill of materials (BOM) cost at $191.65. With the addition of manufacturing expenses, the total cost to produce the Kindle Fire rises to $209.63.

The Road To Open Source Code Provenance

Data digging company OpenLogic has rolled out a new version of OLEX Enterprise Edition, a code analysis and audit kit designed to “uncover the provenance” of code within open source projects. In light of comments made this week by the German IT security watchdog, open source security issues may be on more corporate radars at the moment if recent warnings by the ombudsman are to be heeded.

Fraunhofer FOKUS axes BerliOS open source portal

On 31 December, the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) is to close BerliOS (Berlin Open Source), its open source software (OSS) repository. According to an announcement made on Friday 30 September, the institute finds itself compelled to take this step as it has been unable to find a successor or to secure further funding.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla releases demo of Gladius game engine

  • Mozilla releases Firefox 7.0.1 to fix add-on issue

    The update, Firefox 7.0.1, is available for both the desktop and mobile versions of the browser and restores any hidden add-ons.

  • Firefox 9 Features, Changes

    With the release of the stable version of Firefox 7, or more precisely Firefox 7.0.1, came also updates to the beta, aurora and nightly channels of the browser. Each channel has been bumped up a version. Firefox Beta to 8, Firefox Aurora to 9 and Firefox Nightly to 10.

  • Mozilla Launches 3D Gaming Effort

  • In the Latest Browser Performance Face-Off, A Surprise Winner Emerges

    Despite these tests where Chrome takes top performance honors, though, Firefox 7 actually emerges as as the winner in Tom’s tests, thanks to strong performances in Java tests and others. You can find the summation of the Tom’s tests here–definitely worth a look, especially if you’re not yet using Firefox 7.

SaaS

• Release of the Third Generation of the OpenNebula Cloud Manager

  With more than 5,000 downloads per month, OpenNebula is being used by thousands of organizations to build large-scale production clouds.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle has a Sun spot

  Oracle’s nothing if tenacious, and they’ve ignored hardware earnings losses to take the recently acquired Sun hardware platform to its next level and renewal with the announcement of the T4 CPU UltraSparc family for its servers. Sun was always a maverick, and its Sparc and UltraSparc processors became the standard bearer for server-based RISC technology. Now it’s dragging Oracle down. Larry Ellison seems to have had a fixation over delivering the Full Meal Deal® to its customers — hardware, software, services, applications, and integration support. The idea has worked well for others, yet others haven’t publicly bruised so many on the way up.

CMS

• Giving a Clunky Old CMS the WordPress Treatment

  When it became clear eMusic’s old, custom-built content management system was becoming a drag on the company, the search was on for a replacement. WordPress offered an open source tool with a passionate developer community. The CMS switch worked out well for eMusic in the end, but it wasn’t always easy. Here are some lessons learned in the process.

Project Releases

• OpenEMR 4.1 is released

Standards/Consortia

• ODF 1.2 includes new spreadsheet standardisation

  An official announcement has yet to be made, but on a mailing list of the OASIS group, Chet Ensign, Director of Standards Development, announced that ODF 1.2 has been approved. ODF 1.2, Open Document Format for Office Applications, was last updated four years ago in Feb 2007 with the approval of ODF 1.1.

Apple is now Public Enemy No 1

With all of the patent suits Apple is currently filing against its tab and smartphone competitors, the title is more than justified. But the following is a personal rant that I believe exemplifies what is wrong with Apple. [Rant warning]

This may be a hypocritical title, considering that I am writing it on a MacBookPro, and I own an iPod touch and an iPad. Yet Apple products continue to produce the sort of anger that I used to reserve for Microsoft software. You know the kind, you love and hate your technology, you cannot live without it, but you know it’s wrong.

The smartphone market is now mature enough that it allows choice beyond the iPhone, with several Android handsets giving Apple a run for its money in both cost and hardware specifications. I am yet to hear a bad word about the Samsung Galaxy S-II, and I’m still very happy with my HTC Desire Z. Android offers a number of features that are quite simply forbidden in Apple-land: multitasking, connectivity, contextual menus, flexibility and configurability (is that a word?). On the other hand, my iPod gives me an indication of the iPhone world, and I do not like what I see.

No One Uses 32-bit Anymore… Right?

Judging by some of the discussions I’ve seen on the subject, some users aren’t convinced there’s a significant advantage. Where ever you land in the discussion, it appears you are not alone. A 44 to 56 split could almost be a statistical tie. Did you know it was still pretty much half and half? I expected lots more 64-bit users.

Windows Cold Call

So nope, there really isn’t anything that my cold-caller from so far away can help with. But good luck to Microsoft, and even though I blow off the calls, good luck to the call-center minions too, and I hope their next job is better.

How ICT helps developing countries – some Kenya case-studies

It’s the first time ever the IGF has been held in sub-Saharan Africa. And this gave me an opportunity to explore something that’s interested me for some time – the role of ICT in the developing world.

Security

• Microsoft falsely labels Chrome as malware

• Chrome updates to repair Microsoft false alarm damage

  A new version of Google Chrome is now available; the latest stable release has the version number 14.0.835.187 and the latest beta version, 15.0.874.58. The update stops Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) virus scanner from incorrectly classifying the browser as part of the banking trojan PWS:Win32/Zbot (Zeus).

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Inside the World’s Largest Embassy

  In 2009, Peter Van Buren, a two-decade veteran of the Foreign Service, volunteered to go to Iraq. Drawn by “the nexus of honor, duty, terrorism, and my oldest daughter’s college tuition,” he signed on as the head of an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team, part of a “civilian surge” to rebuild the country and pave the way for the withdrawal of American combat troops. He’d joined the biggest nation-building exercise in history, a still-unfinished $63-billion effort that Van Buren compares to “past[ing] together feathers year after year, hoping for a duck.” Van Buren’s acerbic new memoir, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, recounts his two years as an official feather-paster in a country that’s become an afterthought to most Americans.

Finance

• Simon Johnson Destroys The Myth Of Jamie Dimon’s Bernanke Complaint (Crocodile Tears Fooled No One)

• The WSJ’s Evan Newmark, A Former Goldman Sachs Executive, Thinks Wall Street Protesters Are Buffoons

  Listen to this nonsense. Newmark, a former Goldman Sachs executive, thinks Wall Street protesters are buffoons. Surprise, surprise. We think someone needs to slap the smug grin from Newmark’s face. In the above video, Marketwatch columnist David Weidner says that bankers, not protesters, are the ones who should have been arrested during Wall Street protests. Newmark chuckles as he disagrees, making no effort to hide his contempt for ‘Occupy Wall Street’, now in its 14th day.

• Roseanne Barr: ‘Guilty’ Wall Street Bankers Should Be Sent to Reeducation Camps or Beheaded

  Controversial comedienne Roseanne Barr has her own solution to the financial crisis: behead any wealthy banker making more than $100 million who won’t be reeducated.

  In an interview with the RT program “Keiser Report,” Barr said if she were the president, she would bring back the guillotine as a form of justice for Wall Street’s “worst of the worst of the guilty.”

Privacy

• Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options

ACTA

• Will ACTA Be Killed in the EU?

  Several of the “like-minded” States that negotiated the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will attend the signing ceremony this Saturday in Tokyo1. The European Parliament, which will have the final word, will now face its key responsibility towards European citizens: will it accept a text that forces new broadly applicable criminal sanctions, deeply impacting fundamental freedoms, innovation and competition? Will it seize the opportunity to reject once and for all a text that was negotiated outside democratic arenas?

• Alert To Activists: Customs Enforcement of IPR

  A very worrying proposal called ”Customs enforcement of intellectual property rights” has arrived from the EU Commission, and will be handled by the European Parliament this autumn. It is an attempt to introduce by the Commission to expand enforcement of intellectual property rights in line with the ACTA agreement, before ACTA has even been signed. Some of the provisions even go beyond ACTA in scope.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Samsung Exynos4 DRM Driver To Be Merged Soon

Applications

• Deja Dup, the backup simple and fast is served

  Today we talk about Deja Dup, the tool I used to make a backup of files before the upgrade of my Lubuntu at release 11.04 (most probably this arrive a little late, but the program is worth a blog post) . It is indeed a great software to create backups (so that it’s part of the standard packages in Fedora 13 and if everything goes in the right way it will also be added to Ubuntu 11.10), but the reason for the post is not just that, a large plus of Deja DUP is its extreme ease of use, it takes a couple of clicks to configure it and save our precious documents, even “in the cloud”.

• Transmission 2.33 Review

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to use Jupiter with Ubuntu 11.10 to control netbook power features

  • The Best Text Expansion App for Linux

• Games

  • ZOD Engine – Game Review

    Today we’ll take a look at a remake of the classic game Z. Z was a real strategy pc game by Bitmap Brothers launched in 1996. It is about two armies of robots (red and blue) battling to conquer different planets.

    The remake it’s Zod Engine is an open source remake written in C++ using the SDL library and available for Linux/ e Windows.

    The Zod Engine is a multiplayer oriented game where as Z is a single player oriented game. Here you will be able to for the first time do things such as play games against multiple bot players, or play the original levels with friends helping you on the same team.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • DoudouLinux Gondwana update 1

    For the peopel that don’t know what’s doudoulinux, this it is not a new distribution, but a Debian tailor-made for children, the designer Jean-Michael says that is usable by children two years old.

    And in fact by starting this live meta-distro you get a rich and colorful menu from which childrens can choose what to play or learn.

• Red Hat Family

  • Analysts’ Weekly Ratings Changes for Red Hat (RHT)

• Debian Family

  • Linux Mint Debian Update Pack 3 Released

    I noticed yesterday evening that one of my systems running Linux Mint 201109 Gnome was offering to install Update Pack 3. This morning I see the release announcement for it. This is going to be particularly good news for some users with very new hardware, because it upgrades to Linux kernel 3.0. On my HP dm1-3105ez, for example, this means that it now includes the driver for the Ralink 5390 WiFi adapter. Of course, there are a lot more changes and improvements in this update. If you have been running the normal distribution with Update Pack 2 installed, it will probably install something like 480 updates.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Oneiric Ocelot (Ubuntu 11.10) Launching October 13th In A Shroud Of Mystery

        Lion and Windows 8 may be stealing their share (and then some) of the spotlight, but that’s not to say that other operating systems are just sitting on their laurels. Ubuntu, perhaps the most popular flavor of Linux for the consumer world, is about to release their newest version. Oneiric Ocelot is on the edge of launch, with Ubuntu 11.10 arriving October 13th.

      • Ice Cream Sandwich, Jaunty Jackalope, and other bizarre code names

      • Award-winning Airtime releases new packages for Ubuntu & Debian

        Airtime 1.9.4 has been released with new DEB packages for Ubuntu and Debian that keep installations automatically updated with the latest version. Airtime is Sourcefabric’s open source radio software for scheduling, automation and remote station management via any web browser. It can be downloaded free from www.airtime.sourcefabric.org

      • Ubuntu eyes speedier releases

        The pace of technology change has always been fast, but now even technology companies are feeling the pinch.

        There was a time when new software updates were released years after one another. Then that changed to releases that were released months apart. Today more and more software companies are putting their foot down and accelerating releases to an almost weekly basis.

        Google releases new Chrome versions faster than most people can keep up. Version 14 of the increasingly popular browser was released this week as a stable release. Already version 15 and 16 are well into development. By the end of the year both of those may have been released formally and version 18 will be in sight.

Devices/Embedded

• Teach your router new tricks with DD-WRT

  With each passing year, hardware devices grow less dependent on proprietary components and more reliant on open source technologies. Network routers are among the main beneficiaries of this trend, especially those that can support a variety of third-party open source firmware projects. One variant, DD-WRT has become a common out-of-the-box option for many routers, but also exists in stand-alone implementations that can be placed on routers that support it. Hundreds of routers can run DD-WRT firmware, including nearly 100 Linksys models alone.

• Phones

  • Nokia creates yet another mobile Linux OS

    Like London buses, mobile Linux operating systems travel in threes. Hard on the heels of plans to open source Samsung bada, and the merger of MeeGo and LiMO to form Tizen, Nokia is reported to be developing its own platform, Meltemi. However, this will not be another challenger to Android, but will be focused on the featurephone market which has recently been Nokia’s main source of growth.

  • Meltemi tipped as Nokia’s new open-source OS ambition

  • Android

    • Samsung to show off Nexus Prime at Oct. 11 event?

    • Android: Ice Cream Sandwich briefly previewed

      A video alleged to show the next major update to Android, code-named “Ice Cream Sandwich”, has surfaced on the internet. The video shows a Nexus S phone running an updated and unreleased build (IRK48) of Android with a newer kernel version (3.0.1). While current Nexus S smartphones show the version number under the “Android version” heading (e.g. 2.3.x) under Settings > About phone, the phone in the video specifically says “IceCreamSandwich” without a number.

    • LG Optimus Slider, HTC Wildfire S join Virgin Mobile’s Android family

      Today, Virgin Mobile announced the upcoming availability of its latest Android smartphones, the LG Optimus Slider and HTC Wildfire S.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • ThinkPad Tablet holds its own against iPad in enterprise, says review

    Lenovo’s 10.1-inch ThinkPad Tablet is a reasonable alternative to the iPad 2 for enterprise users, says this eWEEK Labs review. This capable Android “Honeycomb” tablet offers business-focused extras like built-in enterprise software, full-size ports, and an effective digitizing pen.

  • India Gets a $35 Tablet: Is the U.S. Next?

    The Amazon Kindle Fire promises a lot of great features, including free cloud storage, an innovative Web browser and access to all of Amazon’s multimedia services, but the most eye-catching part of Wednesday’s announcement was the price point: The device will cost just $200, far less than the $500 base price of the iPad 2.

    That’s hardly the cheapest tablets can get, though. The Indian government has announced that a long-awaited $35 tablet intended for students will be coming out next month.

  • Sony Tablet S review

    It has taken two years for Sony to enter the tablet market, and in that time every manufacturer and their budget Taiwanese spin-off have colluded to fill the tablet market with dross.

  • 12 best Android tablets in the world

    Some have ten-inch screens, others seven, and there are big differences in battery life, processing power and on-board RAM. So while we wait for the likes of the Asus Eee Pad Slider, Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 and Amazon Kindle Fire, let’s see what the current best tablets are…

Google open sources JavaScript testing tools

Google is open sourcing one of its key JavaScript testing tools in an effort to get developers to speed up web applications.

Google JS Test is used internally on the V8 JavaScript engine using in Chrome. Google has attributed much of the speed increases it claims for the browser to the performance of the V8 engine, and the company is clearly hoping this will improve matters further.

Google open sources JavaScript unit testing framework

On the Open Source at Google blog, Google has announced the release of JS Test – the JavaScript unit testing framework that it uses in-house – as an open source project. The tests run on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, the same open source JavaScript engine used in Google’s Chrome web browser. In developing JS Test, the creators of the framework were inspired by googletest, an open source framework for writing C++ unit tests.

X2Contacts Emerges From Stealth With Open Source Beta Release

A Few Sparks of Open-Source Virtualization

VMware dominates the virtualization market and is likely to do so for some time. Why, then, does an intrepid band of tech firms continue to put stock in open-source technology?

Twitter Storm: Open Source Real-time Hadoop

The Apache Software Foundation Announces 10th Anniversary of Apache Lucene

Events

• Looking to JavaOne 2011 with Apache expert Rob Davies

  JavaOne 2011 will be a novel experience for some, but Rob Davies is an old hand at the event. Last year was the first time in ten years that Davies, now CTO with FuseSource, missed the conference. He’s often been a speaker or presenter on Apache projects, especially Apache Camel, and other open source development issues. Still this year promises to be a new experience even for him, because last year was also the first year that Oracle had taken the reins of JavaOne.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 8 Beta arrives with Twitter search

    As expected following the arrival of the stable version of Firefox 7, Mozilla has announced the release of version 8.0 of Firefox into the web browser’s Beta Channel. Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Firefox 8 Beta is based on the Gecko 8 engine. According to the Releases wiki, it is scheduled to arrive in a stable production-ready form on 8 November.

  • Firefox Aurora for Android likes big buttons and cannot lie

    While some solid changes to JavaScript rendering and other under-the-hood code have landed in the latest Firefox developer’s build, the bulk of what’s new focuses on the second version of the recently introduced Android version of Aurora. Aurora 9 for Android includes some big interface changes designed to improve its usability on tablets, support for native camera apps, faster start-up times, and broader language support.

SaaS

• Experimentation, Open Source and Big Data

  More than ever, today intelligent businesses are trying to make sense of millions of tweets, blog posts, comments, reviews, and other form for unstructured data. The obvious question becomes, “How?”

• Revolution speeds stats on Hadoop clusters

  Revolution Analytics, the company that is extending R, the open source statistical programming language, with proprietary extensions, is making available a free set of extensions that allow its R engine to run atop Hadoop clusters.

Databases

• Google VP backs open database processing tools

  Basho CEO Don Rippert suggests that Riak’s openness means that developers have been able to, “More easily build and maintain powerful business applications on top of our platform.” He also says that, “Riak has already proven its stability, ability to scale and provide absolute fault-tolerance in a highly distributed deployment.”

Education

• On the University migration to Free Software

  Megatotoro described here how the recently announced migration to free software in the University where we work made a big splash in national newspapers and even on TV news.

Healthcare

• Open Source and EHRs: A proven reality and invaluable opportunity

  The marriage between open source technology and electronic health records is at first blush, greeted by many with skepticism regarding robustness and efficacy. In truth, persistent myths obscure an intriguing reality: Open source EHR systems are not only possible but already in place.

Semi-Open Source

• Jaspersoft claims world first open source mobile BI package

  Business intelligence (BI) software specialist Jaspersoft has made its move on the mobility space with the latest (4.2) version of its BI Suite, released under open source in what the company claims is an industry first

• Implementing Business Intelligence, the Open Source Way

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Looking for Free Software? A New Directory Can Help

  There are free and open source alternatives to just about every proprietary software package available today–the trick is just finding the right ones for your business.

• Free Software Directory gets overhaul

Public Services/Government

• NASA’s open source space applications challenge

  NASA, the US space agency, is organising an international open source application competition next year which it hopes will deliver a new generation of software to address global issues. The agency plans to liaise with other space agencies to create the International Space Apps Challenge that will encourage “scientists and concerned citizens” to create new solutions using open technology, open data and open source.

Openness/Sharing

• WMMNA: Open Source Biological Art

  Hackteria is a collection of Open Source Biological Art Projects started in 2009 by Andy Gracie, Marc Dusseiller and Yashas Shetty. They have since been joined by Anthony Hall, Urs Gaudenz, and a growing community of people keen on making experiments and developing their own projects in the field of biological art and science.

• The New World of Open-Source Mentoring

  Kathleen Lim wanted to move up the learning curve. At 24, she had just been promoted to billing operations manager at Box.net, a $10.7 million cloud-computing company in Palo Alto, California. It would be her first management job at her first postcollege employer. Box.net also wanted her to strengthen its collections department, not previously a focus. “I was looking for guidance, from best practices to how to structure my team,” says Lim. “And there was this curiosity about what else is out there. How do other organizations do it?”

• Open-source R&D advocates prep $150M cancer drug project

  After watching the cost of drug research escalate year after year with only a small annual crop of new drug approvals to point to, a number of the Big Pharma companies have begun to question all the fundamentals of the grossly inefficient game. And one of the biggest assumptions–that you have to keep your drug IP carefully sequestered behind a legal firewall of patents–will be put to the test by a new project being hatched by some of the leaders of the open-source research movement in biopharma.

Programming

• Engine Yard’s PaaS adds support for JRuby

  Engine Yard, a San Francisco-based company that provides a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution for Rails applications, has announced that developers can now use JRuby, the Java implementation of the Ruby scripting language, in the Engine Yard cloud. Other supported Ruby implementations include CRuby (Ruby MRI), which was written by Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto, and Rubinius. It is no surprise that support for JRuby has been added, as three of the four main JRuby developers are employed by Engine Yard.

• A Look at Phabricator: Facebook’s Web-Based Open Source Code Collaboration Tool

Standards/Consortia

• Spreadsheets Come to ODF as Version 1.2 Wins Approval

Finance

• Hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested

  More than 700 people from the Occupy Wall Street protest movement have been arrested on New York’s City’s Brooklyn Bridge, police say.

• Occupy Wall Street protests grow amid Radiohead rumour

  An estimated 2,000 people have gathered in Lower Manhattan, New York, for the largest protest yet under the banner Occupy Wall Street.

  Demonstrators marched on New York’s police headquarters to protest against arrests and police behaviour.

• SEC finds ‘apparent failures’ at credit rating agencies

  The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has discovered “apparent failures” at 10 credit rating agencies.

  It said it was concerned that the agencies – including Standard & Poor’s (S&P) and Moody’s – were not making timely and accurate disclosures or managing conflicts of interest.

• Wall Street’s unwelcome warriors hang on to protest

  All are anti-Wall Street protesters, but with barricades and swarms of police officers in front of the New York Stock Exchange the closest they can get to their target is Liberty Street, a good three streets away.

  An online activist group called Adbusters organised the gathering and the word spread through social media.

• In pictures: New York mass arrests

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

How to Land a Linux Job

Finding a new job can be an overwhelming prospect in just about any industry today, but for those with Linux skills, the challenges are a little bit less daunting.

Autism – Where Linux Falls Silent

What I would like to see is a sparkled, verbal, full screen application that teaches the child how that mouse works. “Hey, YOU DID IT” resounds when the child gets the task right. Or…”Not quite but close, let’s try that again”.

Tuxmath or Tuxtyping comes to mind in style and purpose. I’ve tried to contact the developers about this several times in the past two weeks but as of yet, there has been no response.

I don’t write software and I don’t have time to learn how to…not at this level. I am imploring those who have the skills to contact me and let’s talk this through…at least to see what can be done or if it can be done. Maybe it’s already out there and I missed it. If you need money to do this, I will find you a sponsor or if I can’t do that, I will take on side work to pay you what I can.

What I do know is that Linux can make a difference in the life of an Autistic child and those who care for her.

I’m simply asking for a few people to help make that difference.

Can Penguins Dance on a Dell, Will Reiser File Again, Are Samsung and Intel Going to the Prom?

Professional Use of GNU/Linux

I have written a lot about using GNU/Linux in education where it is just about perfect at helping teachers, students and administrators create, find, modify and present information, the lifeblood of education. Today, I read about an engineer’s use of GNU/Linux for his work. Most of his work can be done with applications available from Debian GNU/Linux’s repository although he uses a few things running under Wine:

Server

• Oracle rises for Unix server push

  Oracle is taking the fight to Unix market leader IBM with its eight-core SPARC T4 processor and systems with rack, blade, and clustered systems – a full data center press.

• Virtualization — Ready for Small Businesses

  Virtualization technology was initially embraced by large enterprises. These large IT shops had the resources to invest in the hardware, software, consulting, and training necessary to take advantage of virtualization technology. These early adopters paid the price in terms of high costs for virtualization software and early blade servers, and also in terms of dealing with the inevitable bugs that accompany any new technology. On the other hand, these early adopters also benefited significantly from the reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) which is made possible by virtualization. They saw their capital expense decrease due to reduced hardware purchases and they saw their operating costs shrink due to reduced costs for power, cooling, and maintenance.

Audiocasts/Shows

• CAOS Theory Podcast 2011.09.30

Kernel Space

• Kernel Log: Coming in 3.1 (Part 4) – Drivers

  Linux 3.1 comes with all the components that are required for using the 3D acceleration features of various current GeForce graphics chips. The Intel graphics driver is still not using an important power saving mechanism by default. The kernel now supports the Creative Titanium HD.

• The word from kernel.org

  Two messages have been sent to the linux-kernel mailing list regarding the imminent return of (parts of) kernel.org.

• Kernel.org updates its status

• Graphics Stack

  • New, Generic X.Org KMS Driver Work

    David Airlie has announced new work on the xf86-video-modesetting driver, which aims to be a generic X.Org (DDX) driver that will take advantage of the generic parts of the Linux KMS (kernel mode-setting) APIs so that any GPU should be supported.

Applications

• Shotwell Photo Manager For Gnome

• Cairo Dock 2.4.0 Released | Install On Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Through Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Using PPA

  Cairo-Dock also known as Glx-Dock is a graphical user interface application launcher to quickly organize applications and files from docks and desklets and easily launch them.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • HOWTO: Fix Alps Touch Pad Side Scrolling in Linux 3.0

  • How to downgrade Firefox to the last sane version (3.6)

  • How to use Apport to Report Bugs in Ubuntu

  • Selectively Disable Overlay Scrollbars

  • Fedora 16 New SELinux Feature part IV – Shrinking policy

  • Encrypt Folders (Ubuntu Linux)

  • Upgrade Nexus S To Android 2.3.6 [Instructions]

  • How to Install Firefox 7 in Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10

  • How to upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10, 11.04 to Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot | Desktop & Server

  • setting up the Ubuntu One free online storage on Linux, Android and Windows

• Games

  • Quake 2 Source Code Review 1/4

    I spent about a month in my spare time reading the source code of Quake II. It was a wonderful learning experience since one major improvement in idTech3 engine was to unify Quake 1, Quake World and QuakeGL into one beautiful code architecture. The way modularity was achieved even though the C programming language doesn’t feature polymorphism was especially interesting.

  • Let’s Play: Pro Evolution Soccer 2011

    It’s time for a new performance comparison… It’s time for (perhaps) the most addictive soccer game in history… Ladies and Gentlemen.. Pro Evolution Soccer 2011!!!!

Desktop Environments

• Face off

  After a few weeks of getting grumpy with my KDE desktop at work, I thought I would investigate what other desktop environments are availbale for the version of Fedora that I am using (15 if anyone is keeping count). This particular install came with Gnome installed as well as KDE and ordinarily I would be ecstatic about this as Gnome had been my desktop of choice for a long time. However, the most recent version of Gnome has clearly been redesigned to accommodate a touch device and has lost all the “normal desktop” feel about it that a computer user would expect. Gnome used to be a complete breeze to use, have lots of good looking and useful tools (which to be fair, you can still use), and always had an air of familiarity about it. Now, you don’t get a proper “Start” style menu and have instead a page of applications under certain categories that looks more like the home screen of an iPod/Phone than a desktop. Coupled with my other general beefs with the change of interface and overall look and feel, Gnome had to go and I needed something to fill the gap. Step forward XFCE!

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Metamorphosis

    When I first got to know Qt, it was a cross platform tool. That was really the reason for me to start using Qt. It was a great cross platform tool. At the time, I was using a Tru64 based system with real X-terminals. You know, the ones where the screen really is a stupid terminal connected to the network. Tru64 meant a real Unix, as in non-Linux, setup alongside Alpha CPUs. Great for what the school wanted us to do, i.e. use Matlab and latex.

  • A year after the agreement between KDE eV and KDE Spain

    Yesterday, September 29th 2011, it was published in the Dot, the article KDE España, an inspiring first year, wich summarizes KDE Spain activity after the agreement between that organization and KDE e.V. was signed.

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 18th September 2011

  • Amarok 2.4.3 Is Here, Install It In Ubuntu

• GNOME Desktop

  • GTK+ 3.2 with support for Wayland and HTML5

    Version 3.2 of the GTK+ GUI library has been released. The new version brings several enhancements and improvements, including better CSS theming support, two new widgets (GtkLockButton and GtkOverlay) a refreshed file chooser and a new family of “GtkFontChooser” widgets. The most important changes, though, are still experimental: the support for HTML5 and the Wayland display server. Programs that use GTK+ 3.2 can run as web applications in HTML5-compliant browsers as this video shows:

  • Gnome 3.2 Review

    The internet is becoming pretty much everything. And This feature integrates Gnome to the web by providing support to access your web accounts like Gmail, hotmail natively right from your desktop. Through this feature you can access the web account’s email, calendar, chat right from your desktop after you login. This feature is made available to all distros which will run Gtk 3.0. You can use this feature in Ubuntu 11.10 from the control panel. This feature was developed by David Zeuthen. Check out the screencast and screenshot for more details.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • AUSTRUMI 2.4.5

  • FreeNAS 8.0.1

  • DoudouLinux Gondwana update 1

    After 3 months of intensive work, we are very pleased to announce that our first update of DoudouLinux Gondwana, the version 1.1, is now out!

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Installing Fedora 16 pre-release.

      I’m a little late this cycle to move my laptop to the Fedora pre-release. (Note the web site doesn’t yet feature the Fedora 16 Beta — that should change next Monday around 10:00 US Eastern time.) I had tried some Live USBs along the way and they were generally looking great, but before now I hadn’t had the spare time to do the installation and test to make sure my various workflow bits were all working normally. Today I finally took the plunge.

      [...]

      But the login dialog itself, part of GNOME 3.2, is also really swank! With smooth animation and fading, it now feels so much more polished from the very beginning of the signon process.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Analysis: Ubuntu’s ‘Open for Business’ Sign To Developers

        Canonical has now sounded the whistle for developers to walk through its doors and begin to more easily write applications for its Ubuntu Software Centre, by officially launching a portal – developer.ubuntu.com.

        The effort is taking up the “app store” model launched by Apple and followed on by the Android community.

        While the Ubuntu desktop distro has always had an uphill battle for market share against Windows and Mac OS X, the developer portal to the Ubuntu app store shows the community’s leadership gets it. Third-party developers are the key to strengthening platform, and both developer.ubuntu.com as well as the app store are “Open for Business” signs.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Report: Nokia working on Linux OS for low-end phones

    Nokia is reportedly working on a Linux-based operating system code-named Meltemi which is aimed at low-end phones. Sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that the project was being led by Mary McDowell, Nokia’s executive vice president for mobile phones. Nokia has declined to comment on the matter.

  • Android

    • Flickr launches Android app, real-time photo sharing

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Apple Cuts iPad Orders By 25%

    According to a report Apple has slashed iPad orders by 25%, according to research report from JPMorgan Chase. There is no indication as to why Apple is cutting the orders of the iPad by such a huge percentage. There can be several possibilities — a) the iPad market has saturated. b) Tablets are not for everyone and Apple fans who wanted the new toy from Apple already got one and don’t see any need to upgrade to the newest one. c) Android has started to make serious dent in the iPad market. The figures of non-Apple tablets may be smaller but more and more users may be going for Android powered tablets instead of the iPad which is controlled by a China like regime.

  • Amazon Announces Android Tablet Kindle Fire

    Amazon has finally set the tablet stage on fire with the launch of $199 Android tablet against Apple excessively expensive iPad tablets. Amazon has made the right move at the right time by offering a tablet with the perfect price. This is one tablet which is going to pull the ground from under the greedy Apple.

PhoneGap applies to the Apache Software Foundation

In a Google Groups post, Nitobi software developer Brian Leroux announced that the developers behind PhoneGap have applied to contribute their open source mobile development framework to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The project has now been proposed to the Foundation for consideration and incubation as a new Apache project; however, at the time of writing, the proposal has yet to be posted.

Hortonworks Demonstrates Steadfast Support of Apache Software Foundation With Gold-Level Sponsorship

Mozilla

• Why Firefox Is My Browser Of Choice

SaaS

• Karmasphere Secures Funding to Accelerate Big Data Analytics on Hadoop

  Karmasphere™, a Big Data Intelligence company, today announced it has secured $6 million in a Series B round of funding, led by new investor Presidio Ventures. Also participating in the round are existing investors Hummer Winblad and US Venture Partners. Total investment in Karmasphere, since it was launched in 2010, is now $11 million.

Databases

• Percona Lifts Decade-Old Limitation from MySQL with New Release of Percona Server

  Percona, Inc., the largest and oldest independent MySQL services vendor, today announced the release of Percona Server version 5.5.15. The new release enables users to save memory and allows them to simultaneously hold more types of data (such as large BLOB and TEXT types) in memory by removing the fixed-length limitation on the MySQL MEMORY storage engine. The new release is based on improvements designed for the world’s largest online auction company.

• 10gen Releases Cloud-Based Monitoring and Alerting Solution for MongoDB

Project Releases

• Twitter open sources Storm

  As expected, Twitter has released its Storm stream processing framework as open source. The distributed real-time computation system was originally developed by BackType, which was acquired by Twitter in July of this year.

Public Services/Government

• IT: Free software and open technologies spur innovation in South Tyrol

  The Innovationpark South Tyrol (TIS) in the autonomous province of Bolzano in Italy, is increasing its efforts to support innovation in local industry in using free and open source technologies. It recently made ‘Free software and open technologies’ one of its seven departments.

• UK public administration’s use of open source growing in importance

  Open source is a topic rising in importance for public administrations in the United Kingdom. Very recent examples of public administrations turning to this type of software include city and county councils, hospitals and government departments, and politicians increasingly recognise its importance.

• NASA to launch open source space applications challenge

Programming

• When Forking is Not an Act of Love

  Distributed version control changed free software development in ways we’re only now beginning to understand. I used SVK for years from the start, and it improved the way I work. (Yes, I committed code on airplanes in 2005. I’ve forked and patched projects I don’t have commit access on. I’ve done that for six years now.)

  These days Git and friends have taken over from SVK, and that’s fine.

• I have joined SourceForge as its Senior Director of Business Development

  I joined Geeknet as the Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge, and I am responsible to grow and extend our ecosystem. I am excited to bring in all my experience in the open source business and my understanding of open source communities to Sourceforge.

• Ruby 1.9.3 approaches with RC1

  The Ruby development team has issued the first release candidate for version 1.9.3 of its open source programming language. According to the developers, compared to the first preview from August, the RC1 for the next stable release doesn’t include a lot of changes as it primarily focuses on fixing bugs. Provided no serious problems are found, the team say that final version of Ruby 1.9.3 should arrive within two weeks.

Alibaba’s Jack Ma at Stanford: “We Are Very Interested” in Buying the “Whole” of Yahoo

In answer to a direct question about whether his company was going to buy Yahoo at a forum at Stanford University in Silicon Valley this afternoon, Alibaba Chairman and CEO Jack Ma said: “We are very interested.”

Berlios to shut down

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Broadband Must Not Block Lawful Content

Copyrights

• Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore’s Missing Copyright Tweets

  Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore was busy on Twitter yesterday, pointing to many groups expressing support for Bill C-11, the new copyright bill. While he omitted pointing to releases from students (“anti-circumvention provisions will seriously undermine students’, teachers’ and the general public’s use of copyrighted works.”) and librarians (“legislation which does not include the right to bypass digital locks for non-infringing purposes is fundamentally flawed”), it is interesting to look at some of the organizations he did cite.

• ACTA

  • Who is Signing ACTA: State of Play Cont’d

    It has been reported in global press this week that ACTA will be signed October 1 in Japan. http://goo.gl/nC0PL But that does not mean that ACTA actually goes into effect. Indeed, there seems a decent chance it will not go into effect anywhere.

    ACTA Article 40 states that the “Agreement shall enter into force thirty days after the date of deposit of the sixth instrument of ratification, acceptance, or approval as between those Signatories that have deposited their respective instruments of ratification, acceptance, or approval.” Although six ratifications is a pretty low threshold for an agreement with 36 parties to the negotiation, it is far from clear that this agreement will get even that.

  • Canada Signs Historic Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

    The Honourable Ed Fast, Minister of International Trade and Minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway, today signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), an international agreement aimed at combatting the spread of trade in counterfeit and pirated goods. In the June 2011 Speech from the Throne, the Government of Canada committed to enforcing and defending intellectual property rights and helping balance the needs of creators and users to foster innovation- and knowledge-based prosperity.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Playing To Our Strengths

I asked myself, “Is this even LEGAL???” I still laugh to myself that such a thought entered my head, but it was justified. My previous experience was that if it was free it had to be a bootleg or that it just wasn’t any good because I never heard of anybody using it. Nevertheless, I tried several LiveCD’s before I made the attempt to install it on my own computer, I tried out Fedora, Debian, Freespire, and ultimately, Ubuntu. Everything I read about Ubuntu told me that that was the distro of choice for Linux newcomers, so I ran with it.

I ran an Ubuntu 8.10 LiveCD and surprisingly it was pretty easy to navigate through and even though it was different than the Windows I was using, a lot of its features functioned in a very familiar way. I was quite impressed and completely intrigued. Ubuntu came with my favorite internet browser, Firefox, installed by default. It had a movie player, a music player, it’s very own office suite, a bittorent client and a universal instant messenger client, right out of the box. I was one week away from the release of 9.04, so I waited and after release I downloaded and installed it to my computer. I never looked back again. I was “sold” on this free Linux.

Desktop

• ZaReason CEO Sounds Off on Linux, Hardware ‘Compatibility’

  Canonical’s “Ubuntu Friendly” hardware-validation program, which officially debuts next month along with Ubuntu 11.10, should make life a little easier for people with computers that don’t get along so well with Linux. But what if your computer is designed from the ground up to run Linux flawlessly? I recently got a chance to speak with ZaReason CEO Cathy Malmrose, whose company has been shipping Linux PCs for years, about precisely that question. Here’s what she had to say.

• Windows 8: one step forward, two steps back

  Windows 8 machines will require what’s known as “secure boot” which is marketed as a security feature but in reality it’s primary purpose is to prevents other operating systems from being booted on the machine.

  On top of taking ownership of your hardware, Microsoft has decided to take Apple’s walled garden approach to apps.

Kernel Space

• Jukka Ehto is the Linux Contributor of the Year 2011 in Finland

  The Finnish Linux User Group FLUG has awarded Jukka Ehto, the IT chief of the city of Kankaanpää with the Linux Contributor of the Year Prize. Lehto managed a large virtualization and desktop project(1) in the city, using Red Hat’s virtualization technology. In the process, he shaved off about 50% of his budget and 10% of the average time to deploy a new workstation. The prize includes a 2000 euro award.

• Intrerview with Linus Torvalds

  In many ways (and for many years) I think that the most exciting new features are in user space.

• Graphics Stack

  • New ATI Video Driver Fixes GNOME 3 Issues

    AMD announced two days ago, September 28th, the immediate availability for download of the ADM Catalyst 11.9 video driver for Linux platforms.

Applications

• Visually See The Contents Of A Folder Or Hard Drive With Baobab [Linux]

  hecking to see the structure and amount of contents on your hard drive is a pretty important capability. In fact, I just recently featured a program that does such a task for Windows. But the same program cannot be used on Linux (or other operating systems for that matter).

• Review: Minus Desktop Application for Linux

  Minus is a free service that lets you share files easily with your friends and family. Its goal is to make file sharing as simple as possible by allowing users to upload and share their files from anywhere, be it mobile, desktop, or web. Applications for this service are available across all platforms including Linux. Furthermore, Minus also works on popular browsers like Firefox and Chrome. Here’s a quick review of the Linux version of the application.

• VortexBox 1.10 review – (mostly) music to our ears

  VortexBox is turning heads with promises of an easy-to-use media server, but does this streamlined Fedora derivative pass muster?

• Mechanical Engineering Useful Software in Linux

  So, as usual, I’ve no wrote in this space for a long time, but today, as my daughter sleeps like a baby (10 months :P), I’ve got the time for some writings..
  So since my last post, I’ve acquired a new 13″ laptop to replace the good old asus eee 701, I needed a small, fast and good pc for some of my engineering work.
  Just in short lines the PC is an Acer Travelmate 8371, and Linux Mint Debian Edition runs very smooth…. only one thing does not work at all, and that is the fingerprint reader, which I don’t care at all.. One of the most important things for me in laptops is battery (6 hours) and suspend (all ACPI events works out of the box. Even the intel wireless card work without problems…So I’m very pleased with this little and robust machine…

• Roll Your Own Cthulhu Flick

  Stopmotion is a Linux program designed for creating stop-motion films. It’s available for most distributions and easily compilable for the rest. Stopmotion is simple in its design, and it allows you either to import a series of pre-taken photos or take live stop-action with a Webcam. I find the latter to be slightly easier, as you can see a ghost image of the last shot you took, making the slight changes you need easy to spot.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • apt-dater – Terminal-based remote package update manager

  • How to Find Anything Under Linux

  • Linux Running Too Slow? Here’s How to Find the Cause

  • Copy and Paste Multiple Entries (Ubuntu Linux)

  • Tutorial: Extreme colors for your photos

  • How to Add Keyboard Input Languages to Ubuntu

  • Two finger gestures in Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3

  • Quicklink Current Files on the Desktop Panel (Ubuntu Linux)

  • Cool Fedora feature: Would you like for me to install that for you?

  • Book Review “Android 3.0 Application Development Cookbook”

  • How To Install Repcached (Memcached Replication) For High-Availability Over 2 Nodes On Ubuntu 11.04

• Games

  • Trauma Added to the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle!

    All past and future Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle customers will have a nice, shiny copy of TRAUMA on their Humble Bundle download page. If you redeemed your bundle on Steam, TRAUMA should automatically be added to your library. (You may have to restart your Steam client for it to appear.)

  • Minecraft 1.9 pre-release 2 is out!

    Well folks it’s that time…again and my addiction is getting ever stronger…

Desktop Environments

• Windows 8 Metro Style Conky Theme

  Kant – O from DeviantART has a designed a cool conky theme inspired by Windows 8 Metro UI.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE on Minecraft?

    If for whatever reason you purposefully don’t play Minecraft, feel free to tune this post out and carry on with life. It is KDE related, promise!

• GNOME Desktop

  • DIY gnome applets

    We all know Gnome, and similar GUIs, are there only as a fancy console multiplexer, but even so it’s useful to have widgets in your menus or dockbars to display useful data, like the release date of DNF (*). Gnome has a limited amount of applets from which you can choose, and most of them are crap or limited in their customization. You can always create your own widgets, but that’s a pain in the ass for lazy people like me. Fortunately we lazy people can now use something an order of magnitude more useful than widgets in Gnome : we can use console commands!

  • GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.10 – First Impressions

    GNOME Shell and Unity are the two new approaches towards creating the ultimate desktop experience by GNOME Foundation and Canonical respectively. Both approaches stirred up fair amount of controversies, with personalities like Linus Torvalds going so far as to call GNOME Shell an unholy mess. But things aren’t that bad, or are they? Let’s find out.

  • Quick Gnome 3.2 Writeup

    I’ve been using KDE 4.7 for the past few months, since Gnome 3 and me really don’t get along.

    I decide to take 3.2 for a spin on my Fedora 16 computer, and found it to be more of the same.

    Network Manager is as incomplete as ever. Just add an advanced button, dammit! I hate having to type “nm-connection-editor” because the Network panel is half-baked for people who actually need to choose their IPs. KDE has no problems with this. The old (Good?) Gnome didn’t have a problem with this.

    [...]

    I’m switching back to KDE 4.7.1, and will might try again in 6 months, but as the Magic 8-ball says… “Outlook not so good”.

  • GNOME 3.2′s New File Manager, Emperor

    It appears that the GNOME developers worked hard to bring a new file manager to the upcoming GNOME 3.2 desktop environment, which will be released later tonight.

Distributions

• Slackware-Current Hidden Activities

  There hasn’t been any public activities in the -Current tree. The last update committed was in September 6 and since then, there has been a lot of changes happening in the open source world. Some people might ask “Why wouldn’t Slackware development tree gets updated lately?”

• Rethinking the Linux distibution

  Recently I’ve been thinking about how Linux desktop distributions work, and how applications are deployed. I have some ideas for how this could work in a completely different way.

• Red Hat Family

  • Apple, Quality Systems, Red Hat Show Acceleration

    Open-source software provider Red Hat (RHT) had a quarterly earnings decline of 5%, followed by growth of 18%, 37%, 33% and 47%. Technically speaking, moving from deceleration to growth is not acceleration, but it is progress.

    The Street expects earnings of 26 cents a share this quarter, which would be a 30% pop. To keep the acceleration going, Red Hat would have to beat by 4 cents. The company delivered those kind of beats in two of the past three quarters.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 New SELinux Feature part III – permissivedomains module

      As has been stated in previous blogs we have three types of unconfined processes on Fedora.

      1. We have unconfined_domain() system processes. initrc_t, init_t, kernel_t, …
      2. We have unconfined_domain() user processes. unconfined_t,
      3. We have permissivedomains

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Monkeys Recreate Shakespeare Using Ubuntu

        Jesse used Ubuntu Linux for the project. The computer he ran the monkeys on is a Core 2 Duo 2.66GHZ with 4 GB RAM running Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit. He used Hadoop, Amazon EC2 along with the world’s most popular Linux OS. He said that he created an Amazonian Map Monkeys.

      • Interview with Daniel Bray (Lupine)

        In this interview Daniel Bray (Lupine) of the Ubuntu Florida LoCo Team explains how he was able to use Ubuntu instead of Microsoft to complete his college degree. In an era when almost all schools in the United States require that its students use either Microsoft or Mac based technical solutions, Bray finds a way to exercise his freedom of choice and use Free and Open Source software to complete his degree.

      • JUPITER APPLET FINALLY AVAILABLE FOR UBUNTU 11.10 ONEIRIC OCELOT

        Jupiter is an applet designed for netbooks and laptops that you can use to switch between maximum and high performance and power saving mode, change the resolution and orientation, enable or disable the bluetooth, touchpad, WiFi and so on.

      • Ubuntu Development Update

        These are the days where the release team is awake for 24 hour per day. Every issue that comes up on their radar has to be evaluated and checked if it warrants re-spinning all the CD images, re-doing all the testing, or if it should go into a stable release update after the release. It’s a challenging time, but things are looking quite good. (If you ignore the problem of developers just not sleeping.)

      • A Handful of Minor Unity Changes Land in Ubuntu 11.10

        A bunch of bug fixes and minor tweaks to Unity in Ubuntu 11.10 slid down the update pipe yesterday – but what exactly has changed?

      • 14 New Community Wallpapers Land in Ubuntu 11.10

      • Ubuntu Tweak 0.6 Enters beta

        There look to be about 100 options which are divided into three main categories which are then divided into further subcategories:

        Startup (Login Settings, Session Control)

        Desktop (Compiz Settings, Desktop Icon Settings, GNOME Settings, Window Manager Settings)

        System (Nautilus Settings, Power Manager Settings, Security Related, Workarounds)

      • Flavours and Variants

        • WattOS: Is It Faster & Can Save Power Over Ubuntu?

          For some months I’ve been meaning to try out WattOS, an Ubuntu derivative that claims to do more than providing simple desktop theme changes and other high-level customizations. It seeks to provide a simple and fast desktop that’s also said to conserve more power and run better on older hardware, but is this actually the case? Here are benchmarks of WattOS R4 compared to the upstream Ubuntu 11.04 release from which it’s derived, and the numbers are quite revealing.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Philips GoGear Connect Now Available for Preorder

      Philips has finally made their GoGear Connect PMP available for presale. It’s an Android-based device that looks like it could still be on Froyo, but we can’t say for sure. If you need something this size (3.2 inches) and just want a cheap device to play your content on, give it a look.

    • Motorola i940 PTT iDEN Android Stops By FCC (Photos)

      While we already have plenty of upcoming Motorola smartphones on our radar, sometimes one still manages to sneak up on us, not spotted early-on via some blurrycam leaks. That’s the case with the Motorola i940, which just put in an unexpected FCC appearance, offering us a nice series of images of the handset.

    • Exclusive: Motorola Spyder (Droid RAZR for Verizon?) features industry-first qHD Super AMOLED display, LTE, dual-core processor

    • Motorola XOOM™ 4G LTE Upgrade Available Tomorrow

    • Ice Cream Sandwich to be Unveiled on October 11?

      Samsung begun sending out press invitations to their next “Unpacked” event, slated for October 11th. Kicking off at the same time as CTIA, this is likely the day and event where we’ll get our first look at the next version of Android – Ice Cream Sandwich.

    • DROID4 Codenamed the “Maserati,” Will Sport a Slideout Keyboard and 4G LTE?

      It’s not often that we get to toss up a picture of a luxury car, but will jump at the chance as it relates to the latest rumored Motorola device. According to members of Howard Forums, the next slideout keyboarded device from Moto will be the DROID4 or 4G and is known internally as the “Maserati.” Sound familiar? I’m going to assume that this is the same device our Panda friend mentioned a few weeks back during his Nexus poem. Many of you caught his comment on it and starting looking for answers immediately.

    • Disney Launches Two New Android Phones in Japan

      If you think Disney is just making cartoons and not interested in mobile technology, then you might be wrong. Believe it or not, Disney actually offers quite a few phones under their Disney Mobile network and today they have added two new Android powered devices. The announced phones are known as DM011SH and DM010SH.

    • Dell’s new Android smartphone, Streak Pro 101DL, is a dual-core qHD beast

      Dell has officially announced its third Android smartphone (after the Mini 3i / Aero and the Dell Venue). The new handset has been unveiled in Japan, where it will be available via Softbank, under the name of Dell Streak Pro 101DL.

    • Virgin Mobile announces the LG Optimus Slider, coming Oct. 17 for $199

    • Softbank Announces Sharp Aquos, First Announced Ice Cream Sandwich Device due Next Year

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Apple is terrified of Samsung

    Fruity cargo cult Apple has admitted that its patent trolling antics are because the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is better than anything it could come up with.

  • Free Software: the reason Amazon Fire is Android 2.1

    Yep, the ebooks have DRM and ‘lending’ these books out is nearly impossible…

  • Motorola Android tablet refresh kicks off November tip sources

    Motorola‘s 7-inch Android tablet is set to arrive in November, while the company’s second attempt at the 10.1-inch segment will follow on in December, according to Chinese reports. Compal is responsible for the design of the smaller slate, the Commercial Times claims, while Motorola has been developing its larger XOOM-replacement in-house; neither is expected to launch running Ice Cream Sandwich, according to the tipsters.

  • Exclusive: First Pictures of the Motorola XOOM 2 (Updated)

  • Toshiba Expands Tablet Family with New 7-Inch Model

    Toshiba’s Digital Products Division (DPD), a division of Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc., today announced the addition of the Thrive™ 7” Tablet to its expanding line-up of consumer tablet devices. Featuring a brilliant hi-resolution seven-inch diagonal touch display1, the Thrive 7” Tablet offers a complete tablet experience with entertainment-optimized features in an incredibly portable design that weighs under a pound2 and fits comfortably in the palm of your hand.

  • Huawei 4G Tablet Destined For T-Mobile Discovered In The Wild

    We do love getting our hands on some “in the wild” shots of unknown products and this time we’re showing you the upcoming Huawei 4G tablet destined for T-Mobile. Our very own ninja guess is that we’re likely to see a formal introduction during next months CTIA event. At that point we’ll learn the

    Huawei tablet has a 7″ IPS WVGA 1280 x 800 screen, 1.2GHz dual-core processor on top of Android 3.2 Honeycomb, Flash 10.3, 16GB of internal memory, dual-cameras and a 4100mAh battery.

  • Kobo Vox Android Tablet Coming on 17 October for $250

    Kobo had a minor booboo today. Their new Android tablet, the 7″ Kobo Vox, has shown up on Futureshop.ca with a spec sheet, ship date, and a retail of $250 CAD.

  • The Kindle Fire is A Big Open Source Bet from Amazon

    All of this, of course was ballyhooed as the next chapter for Android too early. People far and wide predicted that Android tablets would immediately challenge Apple’s iPad for market share, which isn’t the case. But the Kindle isn’t the iPad. It’s its own breed of mobile hardware device, and Amazon is making a big bet on Android with new generation Kindles such as the Fire.

  • Has Amazon just Fire-forked Android?

    Amazon’s Kindle Fire may not be an iPad killer or offer cutting-edge features, but it could prove to be a big headache for Android tablet and e-reader vendors, analysts agree. Meanwhile, others debate whether the Fire’s customized UI represents a true fork of Android, and argue over whether its cloud-oriented Silk browser is a breakthrough in mobile multimedia or an unprecedented invasion of privacy.

Asylum-seekers get some LUV

A prominent figure from Melbourne’s free and open source software community has complained to the Australian Labor Party that attempts to legalise the offshore processing of asylum-seekers are against party rules.

Ten years of the Lucene search engine at Apache

The Apache Foundation is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the full text search engine Lucene at the foundation. In 2001, Lucene entered the ASF as a sub-project of the Apache Jakarta project. Since 1997, it was available to download on Sourceforge, but in 2001 “Apache provided Lucene a home where it could build a solid community”, said Lucene’s creator and ASF Chairman Doug Cutting. Since then, said Cutting, Lucene’s usefulness to a wide range of applications and deep improvements have led to it powering “smart search and indexing for eCommerce, financial services, business intelligence, travel, social networking, libraries, publishing, government, and defense solutions.”

Web Browsers

• Web Browser Grand Prix 7: Firefox 7, Chrome 14, Opera 11.51

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Firefox 7 Aims to Delight Developers

    Mozilla’s new Firefox 7 release presents a new, snappy Web browsing experience for users and brings along a host of new tools for developers.

  • Firefox 7 Review And Benchmark

  • Firefox 8 beta brings Twitter search, tab controls

    As part of its rolling wave of updates, Mozilla today released a new beta version of Firefox that gives some new options for searching, controlling tabs, and managing add-ons.

  • Test the New Mozilla Firefox Beta: Making Browsing More Convenient

  • History of Mozilla – A Starting Point

    At a recent gathering of Mozilla folks I gave an informal talk on the early history of Mozilla. It’s unpolished, it’s low production value (one mike in a big room) and it’s clearly a talk to a live audience that was filmed. Ideally we’d do some editing, add some text for the questions that can’t be heard and maybe try to improve the oddly abrupt ending.

  • Firefox 7: Better Memory Management, Meh Performance (Review)

  • 9000 Good Reasons to Upgrade to Firefox 7.0.1

  • Chrome poised to take No. 2 browser spot from Firefox

CMS

• Giving a Clunky Old CMS the WordPress Treatment

  When it became clear eMusic’s old, custom-built content management system was becoming a drag on the company, the search was on for a replacement. WordPress offered an open source tool with a passionate developer community. The CMS switch worked out well for eMusic in the end, but it wasn’t always easy. Here are some lessons learned in the process.

Education

• Romanian and Moldovan schools and universities eager to use open source

  Schools and universities in Romania and the Republic of Moldova want to increase their use of GNU/Linux based computers and are also turning to Moodle, an open source e-learning environment, following presentations and practical demonstrations in August and September.

  [...]

  The open source summer school is organised by the Computer Science faculty from the Vasile Goldis Western University in Arad. The university hosted such summer school for six or seven years, first titled ‘Linux and virtual learning environment’ and in the past three years known as “Computer science at the castle’.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Free Software Foundation Relaunches Software Directory

  The Free Software Foundation today announced the relaunch of The Free Software Directory. For years The Free Software Directory allowed users to search and browser for software that meets The Free Software Definition, which is basically what most think of as Open Source software, but an update was needed.

Project Releases

• StatusNet 1.0.0: It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

  I’m pleased to announce that StatusNet 1.0.0 has just gone golden. We’ve released the 1.0.0 version for download, and it’s running now on all StatusNet cloud systems.

• PiTiVi Video Editor 0.15 Released

  PiTiVi Video Editor has just reached version 0.15 bringing in new features and fixes. This is last PiTiVi release based on traditional engine. PiTiVi 2.0 will be based on GES (GStreamer Editing Services) and will bring better performance and stability to this popular video editor.

Standards/Consortia

• Winds of Change…

  Last week, my university approved the use of open source software officially and adopted Open Document Format (ODF) as its standard. The TV news even covered the decision!

• Happy Birthday LibreOffice!

  We changed the world.

• ODF 1.2: Approved as an OASIS Standard

  The day has finally arrived. Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 has been approved. It is now an OASIS Standard.

• Make the use of open standards in education mandatory

  Some of you have noticed there is something buzzing among your Dutch friends. It has to do with education, Silverlight, open standards and being obese. I’ve been asked to write about it in English so you all can get on the same page as us, and sign a petition to show your support for our campaign to make the use of open standards in education mandatory.

Health/Nutrition

• Health Care Reform Opponents Winning the PR War

  The Kaiser Family Foundation just released the findings of its annual survey of businesses to determine how much the cost of employer-sponsored health coverage has gone up. There were some unexpected findings.

  One was that the average cost of annual premiums for family coverage is now more than $15,000. The 9 percent increase in the cost of health insurance over last year caught many people by surprise because it represented a bigger hike in premiums than in recent years.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality

  It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs Wins Dismissal of Lawsuit Over CDO Loss

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc. won dismissal of a lawsuit brought by Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg over losses on $37 million in collateralized debt obligations.

• Goldman wins dismissal of NY lawsuit over bonuses

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s board of directors has won the dismissal of a lawsuit seeking to recover billions of dollars of bonus payouts and other compensation awarded for 2009.

• Risky Business

  With Europe on the verge of a financial meltdown and many of Wall Street’s biggest banks trading at or near their 52-week lows and at a fraction of their book value — take for instance, Goldman Sachs, which is trading at about 75 percent of its book value, staring down a rare quarterly loss, cutting compensation, and firing thousands of employees — is it possible that the turmoil in the global financial markets is finally accomplishing what regulators the world over have not been willing or able to do: force these financial beasts to rein in their excessive risk-taking and act more like the dull, boring utilities we need them to be for our own safety?

• Innovation in Higher Education

  A glance at the latest US employment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals sharp differences in unemployment rates by educational attainment: college degree or higher: 4.3%; associate degree or some college: 8.2%; high school graduates, no college: 9.6%; and no high school diploma: 14.3%. Moreover, while the overall unemployment rate remains over 9 percent, a recent McKinsey report found that employers are having trouble filling specific positions because they could not find applicants with the right skills. The report projects that if economic conditions improve, there will be a shortage of 1.5 million workers with college degrees by 2020, but a surplus of almost 6 million of workers with no high school degree. It also projects a continuing shortage of workers with technical and health care skills not necessarily requiring a college degree.

  Just about every such study points to a similar trend: for the foreseeable future, the US economy will need better educated workers with specific skill requirements. Workers without a post-secondary education face a contracting set of job opportunities. Those with higher educational attainments will be in the best position to obtain good jobs with good pay.

• Darrell Issa Goes Postal, Job-Killing Retiree Bill Moves to the States

  Darrell Issa is going postal. In the name of “Saving the Post Office,” the head of the House Government Oversight Committee is ready to knock off 200,000 jobs and put the U.S. Postal Service, founded in 1775, on the path to oblivion. President Obama’s rescue plan is only slightly better — 80,000 people might lose their jobs.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Susan G. Komen, Pinkwashing? “Promise Me” It’s Not True

  October is fast approaching, with its annual deluge of pink ribbons and cause marketing campaigns that leverage emotions surrounding breast cancer to sell products. In past years, PRWatch has reported on questionable “pinkwashed” products like buckets of fried fast food, cringeworthy “I Heart Boobies” bracelets marketed to teenagers, and even a pink “breast cancer awareness” Smith and Wesson handgun.

Privacy

• Amazon Kindle Fire’s Silk browser sounds privacy alarm bells

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Top 10 Reasons ISPs Are Against Net Neutrality

  Thursday again already? We’ve created a monster, now haven’t we? Anyway, here we go with yet another Top 10 list.

  You might’ve read the news that net neutrality rules are set to become law on November 20th. Of course, how “neutral” the net becomes depends on whether you’re connecting the old fashioned way, by a wire running into your house, or through the gee whiz magic of wireless service. The wireless providers get a break because evidently they aren’t charging enough already or something.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Microsoft’s Secure Boot Gambit

Few vendors and few topics on the Linux Planet inspire as much vitriol as Microsoft. This past week, Microsoft managed to inspire new outrage, as details about its secure boot approach for Windows 8 were alleged to be a potential risk for Linux. It was also a week that saw a delay for Linux 3.1 as the kernel.org servers remained offline.

Server

• Amazon’s Linux AMI is All Grown Up

  Amazon has declared its Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI) production ready. With the update, Amazon is introducing a security center to track security and privacy issues, providing 50 new packages for the distribution and adding access to Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL).

  The Linux AMI provides a Linux image for use on Amazon EC2, so that users have a way to get started with EC2 without having to create their own image or use one of the paid images from Red Hat or SUSE.

• Amazon Linux AMI – General Availability and New Features

  A total of 50 new packages are available including the command line tools for AWS, Dash, Dracut, Facter, Pssh, and Varnish. 227 other packages have been updated and 9 have been removed. For a full list of changes, refer to the Amazon Linux AMI Release Notes.

Audiocasts/Shows

• FLOSS Weekly 184: Eucalyptus

  We talk about Eucalyptus, the project that enables on premise private clouds without retooling existing IT structure or introducing new hardware.

• Two FaiF Episodes

  I’ve not been particularly good at keeping up with this blog here, although I have generally kept up with the oggcast that I co-host with Karen Sandler, Free as in Freedom, which is released every two weeks.

• Episode 167: Exporting Grumpy Bears

  This Blog needed a header image – and it still needs a lot of header images to rotate through. So I created one out of an image of a Berlin Subway station. Nothing much new in here – rotating, cropping to the needed aspect ratio, a bit of curves for better contrast and colours, scaling and sharpening. Finally I added a text layer with the image credits.

Kernel Space

• LiMo Foundation and Linux Foundation Announce New Open Source Software Platform, Tizen™

• Welcome Tizen to The Linux Foundation

  But many of you who closely watch this space may be asking: what about Meego? While Meego will remain a project at The Linux Foundation, we see industry leaders lining up behind Tizen. Imad Sousou, Meego’s technical steering group co-leader, had this to say about the future of Meego.

• 2011 SNIA SDC Report: Summary

  The annual Storage Developers Conference is kind of like a five-ring circus. There are way too many tracks to follow, all going on at once and all interesting to varying degrees to varying people. It was a big show again this year, but this year it didn’t matter what else was going on. The center of attention was Microsoft’s center-ring act: SMB2.2.

  I have been going to the SNIA SDC every year since before it was the SDC. I started going in 1997, when it was still “The CIFS Conference”. Even before that, I went to lots of different computer conferences and shows. Remember DECUS and DEXPO? Amiga DevCon? LISA-NT? I do.

• The truth about Linux Power Management “issues”

Applications

• Anki review : A very well-made flashcard program

• The five most bloated Linux applications

  I knew this day was coming… the day when a Linux application could begin to suffer from that horrible disease so many other applications suffer from on other platforms. Bloat. What is bloat? Bloat is the addition of unnecessary features that cause an application to grow to a size that renders it slow and laggy. Those features may be useful to some. But for many, they are just an anchor dragging the application deeper and deeper into murky waters.

• Adaptable Gimp Makes Using The Gimp Easy [Windows & Linux]

  Do you love using the Gimp, but feel lost amongst all the tools and options? Find just the things you need for the job at hand, instantly, with a simple search. With Adaptable Gimp, you’ll even find step-by-step instructions for accomplishing precisely the thing you want to do. This software, powered by user contributions, makes it easy for just about anyone to use The Gimp. It all revolves around “TaskSets”, a concept so amazingly useful you’ll wonder why it wasn’t in The Gimp all along.

• Award-winning Airtime releases new packages for Ubuntu & Debian

  Airtime 1.9.4 has been released with new DEB packages for Ubuntu and Debian that keep installations automatically updated with the latest version. Airtime is Sourcefabric’s open source radio software for scheduling, automation and remote station management via any web browser. It can be downloaded free from airtime.sourcefabric.org

• Performance monitoring with nmon

• Review: Minus Desktop Application for Linux

  Minus is a free service that lets you share files easily with your friends and family. Its goal is to make file sharing as simple as possible by allowing users to upload and share their files from anywhere, be it mobile, desktop, or web. Applications for this service are available across all platforms including Linux. Furthermore, Minus also works on popular browsers like Firefox and Chrome. Here’s a quick review of the Linux version of the application.

• 5 VDI Alternatives You Can Implement Now

• Free Tools for Optimizing Your Wireless Setup

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 3 easy steps to strengthen your ssh server

  • How to Learn Perl

  • Learn To Use Vim Text Editor The Easy Way

  • Getting your hands dirty : installing and using Gentoo Linux

  • Gnome 3 and Shell – A Complete User Guide [ Part 3 ] – Shell Extensions

  • 9 Linux Parted Command Examples – mkpart, mkpartfs, resize partitions

  • Installing GNOME 3 in Debian

  • Graphical grub2 Configuration Manager – Grub Customizer

  • How to change the boot order of a dual-boot Linux PC

  • Disabling Firefox 7 trimmed URLs

  • How to Sync Evolution With Your Cell Phone in Fedora 15

  • How to use Linux from Windows

  • 3 easy steps to strengthen your ssh server

  • Using cron scheduler on Linux systems

  • How to Download an Entire Website with WGET

  • Set up Spice-Gtk 0.7.44-3867 with usb redirection support on Ubuntu 11.10 ( beta 2)

  • The Perfect Server – CentOS 5.7 x86_64 [ISPConfig 3]

  • Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook review

    If you’re into 3D animation, then perhaps the one and only program you will ever want and need is Blender. Well, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but it sure is a mighty program that does a lot. In fact, it does so much that you will feel quite intimidating even browsing the menus. Luckily, there are a plenty of books that can help you around.

• Games

  • The Humble Frozen
    Synapse Bundle

    We don’t use DRM. When you buy these games, they are yours. Feel free to play them without an internet connection, back them up, and install them on all of your Macs and PCs freely. There is no time-limit on your downloads.

  • Announcing the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle!

  • Introducing the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle

    Humble Bundle is back with another pay-what-you-want plus charity deal on sweet indie games — the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle! Thanks to everyone’s past support, Humble Bundles have now raised over $2,000,000 for charity (the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play charity).

  • Gaming In Linux : Company Of Heroes Installation

  • Report article Networking and Docking Woes

  • Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle!

  • Xonotic 0.5 – Free Shooter Based Off Nexuiz

    Xonotic is a free first-person shooter game for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The Xonotic project started as a fork of Nexuiz, a game which was popular for many years on Linux. The fork was created because Nexuiz was licensed to IllFonic game studios, and it is to be used as a platform for developing a commercial game for Steam, Xbox and PlayStation.

Desktop Environments

• The KDE vs. GNOME Schism In Free Software

  For those looking for an interesting read today, Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE’s KWin and known for his insightful blog posts, has written about fighting the schism in free software; in particular, the KDE vs. GNOME battle.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Okular The Document Viewer With Even More Features

    When you are looking for a universal document viewer that will suit all of your needs you might as well go for one with all of the features. Thats where Okular dominates the stage on KDE desktops, being one of the best document viewers available. Some of the excellent features include advanced presentation support, overview mode, and annotation capabilities. Also with Okular it is easy to open files and switch between them. Okular will store your recent documents for easy viewing as well. This is how you can install Okular document viewer on your system from the Linux command line.

  • Instant Messaging With Kopete

    For a fun and friendly instant messaging client try Kopete for the KDE desktop. You can use Kopete to communicate with your friends and family, even using multiple different network interfaces. Kopete also offers some key features that are lacking in other instant messengers. Advanced users can also expand the functionality of Kopete using plug-ins without much hassle. So if your current instant messenger will not suffice maybe you should try Kopete today. To install Kopete on your system open your terminal and type these commands.

  • Qt gets a bit more independence

    Qt, the cross-platform and application UI framework, formerly run by Trolltech until they were taken over by Nokia, has taken a step forward to more independence: the hosting of the project will soon move to qt-project.org, a domain owned by a non-profit foundation “whose only purpose is to host the infrastructure for the Qt project”. Lars Knoll, director of Research and Development at Nokia, announced the change on the Qt Labs Blog noting that this move was solely about the infrastructure and the new foundation would not have anything to do with steering the project.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Top 5 Gnome Shell Themes

    If the mere mention of Gnome shell brings terrible images in our mind. Relax and take a look at our tutorials on installing and using Gnome shell in Ubuntu. After you do that take a look at a few gorgeous gnome shell themes that is bound to leave you asking for more.

  • GNOME 3.2 Released – See What’s New

    GNOME 3.2 was officially released yesterday with all those cool features which I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for. Let’s take a look at what’s new:

  • First Look: GNOME 3.2

    The first major revision of GNOME 3 offers tighter integration of online services into the desktop environment. The development team has also introduced many minor enhancements and resolved a number of irritating idiosyncrasies.

  • Here’s What’s Coming in GNOME 3.2

  • What To Expect From GNOME 3.4

    Now that GNOME 3.2 has been released, the GNOME 3.4 desktop environment will see the light of day in about six months from now, and it will bring many new features and improvements.

  • GTK+ 3.2 Released With HTML5 (Allows Applications To Run In A Web Browser) And Wayland Backends Support

Distributions

• Pardus 2011.2 review

  Pardus is a Linux distribution developed by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), an arm of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). Unlike most distributions, it is not based on another; an original, in the same sense that Debian is an original Linux distribution.

• New Releases

  • Clonezilla Live 1.2.10-14 Stable Released, Download Now

    Steven Shiau proudly announced the final and stable release of its popular Clonezilla Live operating system, used for cloning hard disk drives.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • LMDE Update Pack 3 is out!

    Update Pack 3 was released as the “latest” update pack today. If you’re not using Linux Mint Debian, please ignore this post.

  • Mandriva Directory Server 2.4.2 now available

    Mandriva announces the immediate availability of a new release of the Mandriva Directory Server (MDS), an easy to use, powerful and secure solution for managing identities, directory services and network services within the enterprise.

  • Mandriva 2011 – A magnificent attempt but is it enough…

    I wish I had the time to provide a more comprehensive review of Mandriva 2011, perhaps I will come back later on with a few more articles featuring Mandriva but until then I seriously recommend trying Mandriva 2011.

• Red Hat Family

  • Clean Your YUM Out!

    YUM is a package manager and updater service for Red Hat Linux, and if you’re part of the Red Hat Network, you’re likely already using the offering to keep your applications fresh. YUM makes sure your various server components are as up to date as they can be, bringing you the latest and greatest in Red Hat without much fuss.

  • Red Hat’s Jolly Journey to the Billion-Dollar Club

    Red Hat “won’t be the first company to make a billion dollars a year off of open source — Google and IBM spring to mind — but as a ‘pure play linux distro vendor,’ this is great news,” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “There’s certainly a halo effect for all linux-based endeavors.” Red Hat has been criticized “for focusing on the business and server market and ignoring the desktop, but the move has paid off in continued growth.”

  • Lessfs 1.5 On CentOS 5

    For this HowTo I used a VirtualBox with CentOS 5.7 x86_64. I attached a separate 20GB Data drive mounted to /data. This will hold the lessfs DB and data. The lessfs mountpoint I put at /lessfs.

  • Open Virtualization Alliance Membership Grows Significantly With Cloud Companies and in Emerging Markets

    The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies, including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), today announced that it is experiencing rapid growth in participation from companies focused on cloud computing and emerging markets around the globe.

  • Fedora

    • Where would you like your install today?

      We are making some great progress on Anaconda’s UI revamp mockups after last week’s Anaconda team meetings. Here’s the storage flow diagram, now annotated with the screen #’s from the mockups:

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Trisquel GNU/Linux – Free Software and Gorgeous

      Welcome to Trisquel GNU/Linux! I’ve been wanting to write this for a long time, because trying this distribution really feels inviting. Trisquel GNU/Linux is as you can see by the naming convention one of the few distributions fully endorsed by the Free Software Foundation, and in return they’re doing a lot to promote the FSF and their principles on their website. If you’re yawning already, hold steady and read on, because Trisquel looks sharp and has something to offer.

      Trisquel is available for i686 and x86_64 architectures, and is drawing from both Debian and Ubuntu, a fact which became immediately apparent when booting. To celebrate Software Freedom Day 5.0 was released on 17th September which has become an annual tradition for the project. The main and so far only edition was using GNOME, but since 4.5.1 in May this year there’s also a Trisquel Mini edition using LXDE, and we have been promised that a KDE using image for 5.0 is on the way. For more advanced needs like disk encryption, RAID/LVM or server setups a netinstall image is also available. Since I have a 64-bit capable machine I downloaded the CD sized image trisquel_5.0_amd64.iso (696 MB).

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Boot Performance: It’s Slowing Down

        When Ubuntu 11.04 was released, Phoronix provided Bootchart results for five different systems showing the boot performance from Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS through Ubuntu 11.04. Since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, the boot time has unfortunately increased.

      • How I’ve learnt Canonical isn’t the wrong

      • Ubuntu Broke so Now I Use Windows

        It worries me because Ubuntu was our fresh brand, to try and get out there and if we bugger it up we’ll have to make a whole new brand

      • Interview with Stuart Langridge

        In this interview with Strategic Architect for Ubuntu One, Stuart Langridge, I kick off the first of a series of articles about Ubuntu One.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Seven Things to do after Installing Bodhi Linux

Devices/Embedded

• Tiny Cortex-A8 module gains Linux development support

  Timesys announced embedded Linux development support for two Logic PD embedded modules incorporating Texas Instruments’ 1GHz DM3730 processor. The LinuxLink offering supports Logic PD’s Torpedo System on Module (SOM) — which at under one square inch is billed the industry’s smallest embedded module — as well as the larger, more feature-rich DM3730 SOM-LV module.

• Phones

  • Nokia preps Linux-based Meltemi OS for feature phones, says report

    Nokia is developing a new Linux-based “Meltemi” operating systems to replace Symbian on its feature phones, according to the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, more details have emerged on the Linux Foundation’s MeeGo-derived Tizen project, which also gained a bit of industry support beyond co-sponsors Intel and Samsung.

  • Android

    • New Features on Android’s Ice Cream Sandwich

    • First Tegra 3 ‘Kal-El’ Android tablet coming from ZTE

      ZTE is preparing two Android tablets, including a seven-inch “T98″ model built on Nvidia’s five-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, code-named “Kal-El.” Meanwhile, Asus announced a rugged, Tegra 2-based seven-inch Asus Tough-ETBW11AA model with Android 3.2 and 1280 x 800 resolution on Japanese carrier KDDI, and the Motorola Xoom finally got its LTE 4G upgrade on Verizon.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • 13 schools. 7 provinces. 3 territories, 2295 students, and 282 teachers: OLPC Canada Progress

  • India’s $35 tablet launching next week?

    Think that new $199 Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is cheap? Indian officials plan to launch a tablet for students on October 5th that will be available for just $35.
    We’ve been hearing stories about the cheap Indian tablet since last summer — and it’s not the country’s first foray into cheap computers. Officials promised a $10 laptop way back in 2009, but it turned out to be just an inexpensive computer without a keyboard or monitor.

  • Government To Launch $35 Tablet On Oct 5

    The long awaited $35 (Rs 1735) dream tablet promised by the Indian government will finally see the light of the day as the launch date has been fixed for October 5. The low cost computing device touted to be the cheapest in the world, has been a project drawn on lines similar to the OLPC, with the students being the target beneficiaries.

  • ZaReason Working to Release First True Open Source Tablet

    There’s no denying the open source world lags far behind the proprietary universe when it comes to tablets and touch-enabled devices. But as ZaReason CEO Cathy Malmrose explained recently, that may soon change, as she and her employees are working hard to release a Linux-friendly tablet. Here are the details.

    It’s true that open source developers have been making progress when it comes to touch. Interfaces including Unity and GNOME 3, with their finger-friendly buttons and emphasis on dropping and gesturing, lend themselves to touch in ways that earlier desktop environments do not. And projects like Canonical’s uTouch promise better overall support for touch on Linux.

  • Introducing Amazon Silk

    Today in New York, Amazon introduced Silk, an all-new web browser powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and available exclusively on the just announced Kindle Fire. You might be asking, “A browser? Do we really need another one?” As you’ll see in the video below, Silk isn’t just another browser. We sought from the start to tap into the power and capabilities of the AWS infrastructure to overcome the limitations of typical mobile browsers.

  • Amazon spins color Kindle tablet, plus three more E Ink devices

    Amazon was widely expected to announce a Kindle-branded tablet today, and it did — also revealing three additional Kindles, two breaking the magical $100 price barrier. The $200 Kindle Fire has a seven-inch color IPS (in-plane switching display), “cloud-accelerated” Silk browser, dual-core processor, and 8GB of flash storage, while the $150 Kindle Touch 3G, $99 Kindle Touch, and $79 Kindle all include six-inch E Ink screens and either 2GB or 4GB of flash.

  • How to Turn a Nook Into a Great Android Tablet

    Presto chango! You can have a full-fledged Android tablet today by applying your DIY skills to a few simple ingredients: a Nook Color, a memory card, a PC to carry out a few tasks — and some nerve. Among your rewards, besides self-satisfaction: the Amazon Kindle app. This is a great solution for anyone who already has a Nook or anyone who just can’t wait another month or so for Amazon’s Fire.

  • The Kindle Fire and the Triumph of Open Source

    Today’s big tech news is the release of a new generation of Amazon Kindles. Of particular interest is the Kindle Fire, a $199, 7-inch color touchscreen tablet based on Android. It seems destined to become the most credible competitor to the iPad.

    One point I haven’t seen anyone make about this is the importance of open source software to the evolution of the tablet computing market. Google decided to make Android an open-source operating system, which meant that third parties could take the code, tweak it for their own needs, and sell competing Android-based products. That’s what Barnes and Noble did last year with the Nook Color, and it’s what Amazon did to create the Kindle Fire.

  • Toshiba’s seven-inch tablet ups ante on screen resolution

    Toshiba announced a seven-inch Android 3.2 tablet featuring an Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor and a 1280 x 800-pixel resolution typically found on 10.1-inch models. The Thrive 7″ Tablet offers 16GB or 32GB of storage, microSD and HDMI connections, five- and two-megapixel cameras, and a full complement of wireless features — except for cellular support.

Interview: Andy Spencer, developer of Aweather a meteorological data viewer

Andy: I’m 24 years old, I grew up in the Midwest United States and am currently working as an embedded software engineer in the Los Angeles area. I’ve been interested in Free Software for the past 6 or 7 years since first installing GNU/Linux during high school. I’ve mostly contributed small patches to various open source projects after finding bugs or when I wanted additional features. Of my own projects, they tend to be small, obscure, and arguable crazy, with AWeather being the main exception as the most “Normal” application.

How Open Source Development Is Becoming More Social

Tim Yeaton is the President and CEO of Black Duck Software. He has more 30 years experience working in the software community. Contact him at tyeaton@blackducksoftware.com.

Most people do not think of software developers as being high on the “social” scale. In fact, the (misinformed) stereotype for a typical developer is that of the introverted geek. But in many ways, particularly with open source developers, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Open Source Desktop Publishing 2011

The free software world moves rapidly, but every individual project also moves at its own pace and rhythm. Consequently, it is easy to get behind on the news. Here is a look at the state of the art in the open source desktop publishing (DTP) arena for fall 2011.

Lucid Imagination brings open source search to big data

Lucid Imagination released a new version of LucidWorks this week that provides an easier way for data centers to install and use the open source search products Apache Lucene and Solr.

Lucid Imagination Brings Open Source Search Into the Datacenter, Helping Companies Turn Big Data Deluge into Valuable Business Insights

Learning from The Apache Way

Every month, regular as clockwork, the free software community receives a gift. It takes the unusual form of the Netcraft Web Server Survey, which provides a measure – by no means the only one – of the market share of the main web server software used on the public internet.

For the last 15 years, Apache has been the most popular system there; and for the last 15 years, Microsoft’s IIS has failed to dethrone it, despite at least two concerted attempts to do so (visible as temporary rises and then falls in the latter’s market share). This month, though, the survey has an extra little present: Microsoft’s market share has not only (again) failed to rise, it has actually sunk back to the level it attained in June 1997. That is, in 14 years, IIS has gone precisely nowhere.

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Whirr as a Top-Level Project

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Whirr has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Start of a good thing: Open Source from Web Dev

Hi there! Let me start this post, the first of many, by introducing myself and my team. I’m Ashley Jones, manager of and senior engineer in the Web Development group here at Splunk. My team is responsible for every nook and cranny of the code for a number of sites you know and love. This includes, but is not limited to, splunk.com, docs.splunk.com and blogs.splunk.com. We have wonderful groups inside Splunk that we’re privileged to provide the code which makes their design work well and their content easy to consume.

Events

• Apache Software Foundation announces ApacheCon Keynotes

  The Apache Software Foundation announces ApacheCon Keynotes by noted Open Source authority David A. Wheeler, Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschweiler, and IBM Emerging Internet Technology group CTO David Boloker.

• PuppetConf and the state of devops

  It’s been some time now that we’ve been talking about devops, the pushing together of application development and application deployment via IT operations, in the enterprise. To keep up to speed on the trend, 451 CAOS attended PuppetConf, a conference for the Puppet Labs community of IT administrators, developers and industry leaders around the open source Puppet server configuration and automation software. One thing that seems clear, given the talk about agile development and operations, cloud computing, business and culture, our definition of devops continues to be accurate.

• Puppet Labs Announces Puppet Enterprise 2.0

Web Browsers

• 10 Alternative Web Browsers for Ubuntu Linux

  With the Oneiric Ocelot release of Ubuntu just around the corner, we decided to take a fresh look at some alternative browsers for Linux. While Firefox is arguably still the champion of Linux web browsers, it has a history of being slow and getting bogged down by sites like Facebook. As a result, the Linux browser market has never been more full of competition. If you’re looking for a break from Firefox, there’s probably an alternative browser out there for you.

• Mozilla

  • What can you expect from new Firefox versions?

    Mozilla has started the Firefox development merry-go-round again, updating its Beta, Aurora and Nightly builds to versions 8, 9 and 10, respectively.

  • Firefox 7 Updates for Security, not SSL

    Mozilla is patching it’s Firefox Web browser for at least 10 vulnerabilities, seven of which are rated as being “critical.” Firefox 7 was released on Tuesday offering users the promised of improved perfomance and better memory usage.

    On the security front, the Firefox 7 release provides a critical fix for what Mozilla describes as, “Miscellaneous memory safety hazards.”

  • I’m a 7 user now!

    Only it’s not Windows 7, but Firefox 7.

    I downloaded it as a .tar.bz2 file and used alien to convert it into an RPM. You do that by typing SU in Konsole, then your root password. You have to use this this command:

Big Data/SaaS

• OpenStack ‘Diablo’ Release Expands Networking, Will Power Global Clouds

  SAN ANTONIO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–OpenStack™, the open source cloud operating system, will today release “Diablo,” the fourth version of its community-driven software, with nearly 70 new features and enhancements making it possible for a broader community of users to deploy OpenStack clouds in production on a global scale. OpenStack Diablo allows users to automate and control pools of compute, storage and networking resources across a global footprint and multiple datacenters with increased scale, performance and networking capabilities. There have been nearly 50,000 downloads from the central code repository, and production cloud environments are coming online across the globe.

• Virtual Bridges Announces Support for OpenStack

• New Karmasphere Analyst Offers Data Professionals Optimized Analytics Workflow on Hadoop

• EMC Announces 1000 Node Analytic Platform To Accelerate Industry’s Hadoop Testing and Development

• Ingres Becomes Actian to Take Action on Big Data

• Basho Technologies Announces Anticipated Release of Riak 1.0

• What It Means When Everybody Has A Cloud

  Every technology goes through this evolution. It’s created, it’s put in a box and finally it becomes just software.

• Terracotta’s Latest BigMemory™ Release with ARC Maxes Out the Biggest Servers on the Market

• Revolution Analytics Partners With Cloudera To Deliver Comprehensive New Big Analytics Solution

Databases

• On the Nature of MySQL Closed Extensions

  Matt Raykowski pointed out a couple of notes about the recent announcement by Oracle that it would begin supplying closed source extensions to MySQL, which it acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems (such as this one from Simon Phipps and this one from Monty Widenius)

• Welcome, MySQL commercial extensions

  This new foundation, combined with the injection of experienced QA personnel from the ranks of Sun and Oracle, made the project ready to offer reserved features to customers, while continuing the development of a lot more features for the community edition.
  From a community standpoint, I welcome the commercial extensions.

• New Commercial Extensions for MySQL Enterprise Edition

• VoltDB Announces Version 2.0

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Celebrates First Anniversary

  It was just a year ago today that LibreOffice was officially announced and the first beta of the OpenOffice.org fork was released. The Document Foundation marked the occasion by sending out a announcement with lots of juicy statistics. For example, LibreOffice represents the results of the collaborative power of 330 contributors.

• Firefox devs mull dumping Java to stop BEAST attacks

  Firefox developers searching for a way to protect users against a new attack that decrypts sensitive web traffic are seriously considering an update that stops the open-source browser from working with Oracle’s Java software framework.

• Happy Birthday LibreOffice

• LibreOffice reaches it first birthday

CMS

• Does Acquia suck up all the Drupal talent?

  A number of concerns have been voiced from the community about the substantial growth Acquia has achieved since its inception, the number of key contributors who are now employed by Acquia, and the subsequent influence that this allows Acquia to have on the project.

  While some of these concerns have validity, I also think there is also a fair share of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) being spread. So, let’s clear up a few points.

• Why Acquia acquired Cyrve and GVS

  As followers of this blog, you might have read that Acquia acquired two Drupal companies; security specialist Growing Venture Solutions and migration expert Cyrve. We wanted to do these acquisitions because they create a win-win-win situation; it is beneficial for the Drupal community, our partners and our customers. I personally championed and led those acquisitions so I want to take a moment to explain why…

Healthcare

• PHYAURA Releases Open Source Electronic Health Record (EHR) Download and Provides an Online Community for Healthcare Providers

Semi-Open Source

• Alfresco, SugarCRM launch mobile app for iPad, iPhone

• Gluster Grows Global Reach Through Partnership With CSS Corp

• Jaspersoft 4.2 Delivers Industry’s Most Flexible Mobile BI Offering

Funding

• Should You Donate To Open Source Projects?

  A project in which I’m involved, in the middle of a time of change, recently received an enquiry from a member of its user community. The enquirer was pleased with the software, concerned about the changes and wanted to provide support to the project to ensure it continued and as an expression of gratitude. “Where should I make a donation to support the software?”

• Tools for Attracting Interest in a Startup Open Source Idea

  Seek advice first. In some really great comments that Linus Torvalds supplied on the Input/Output blog, he said this: “The first thing is thinking that you can throw things out there and ask people to help…”That’s not how it works. You make it public, and then you assume that you’ll have to do all the work, and ask people to come up with suggestions of what you should do, not what they should do. Maybe they’ll start helping eventually, but you should start off with the assumption that you’re going to be the one maintaining it and ready to do all the work.” There it is: You can’t take the Tom Sawyer approach right out of the fence and ask everyone to whitewash your fence.

  Know what open source means. The Open Source Definition is where every project leader should start when it comes to how open source projects should be distributed, and what actually qualifies as open source. It’s also good to review Open Standards requirements.

• DataStax Secures $11 Million in Funding; Driving Apache Cassandra™ Momentum in Real-Time Big Data and Analytics

• 10gen, Sponsor of MongoDB, Announces $20M in Funding

• MongoDB Selected as the Core Content Management Component of SAP’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Offering

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Happy Birthday to GNU

  On this day in 1983, Richard Stallman wrote the groundbreaking announcement that he intended to write a comparable version of Unix. After experiencing frustration in getting critical changes made in the source code of proprietary software, he set out to champion the idea of returning to the spirit of sharing that existed in the early days of computer programming. He cites as one reason for the project:

• Free Software Foundation re-launches its Free Software Directory, with over 6500 programs listed

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the re-launch of its Free Software Directory at directory.fsf.org. The Directory lists over 6,500 programs that are free for any computer user to download, run, and share. It was first launched nearly a decade ago, but the new version brings a host of new features designed to make it a more useful and current resource for users, developers, advocates, and researchers.

• Behind the scenes of the new Free Software Directory

Project Releases

• NeonView Image Viewer 0.2.0 Released!

  This is the first release of NeonView, a minimalist, lightweight image viewer written in C and using the GTK toolkit.

  This first release, codenamed ‘Betta splendens’, includes just a handful of features for now, however it is the base on which development of more advanced features will take place. Still, the goal of NeonView is to remain clean and lightweight, while also trying to implement only the needed functions that a simple image viewer should have.

Programming

• Measuring vocabulary richness with python

• One Million

Another Windows Version. Another Hardware Upgrade.

Windows 8 currently boasts the same hardware requirements as Windows 7. Don’t believe it. Microsoft has never been accurate with its hardware specifications yet.

Will Windows 8 ‘Secure Boot’ Lessen Linux Adoption?

Another issue is that most casual PC users aren’t going to be too enthused about having to do anything extraordinary just to get their computers ready to install Linux. Even with an off switch in computer BIOS, Secure Boot could still be a significant stumbling block for some.

And even if disabling Secure Boot in the BIOS is simple to do, the fact is that Linux newbies who aren’t aware that Secure Boot even exists will only find themselves frustrated when their distribution won’t install as expected.

Linux fans file ACCC complaint over Win8 boot

A number of Australian Linux users have filed a formal complaint with the national competition regulator over what many perceive to be restrictive practices introduced in upcoming Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system which may stop many mass-market computers from being able to boot alternatives such as Linux.

Microsoft recently revealed it would support a PC booting protocol named the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) in Windows 8. The move was broadly seen as positive, as it will increase the security of PCs as well as doing away with the legacy limited BIOS platform which underlies operating systems like Windows and Linux on computers today.

Finance

• “Lifting the Veil”

  Mark Ames referred me to the documentary “Lifting the Veil.” I’m only about 40 minutes into it and am confident it will appeal to NC readers, provided you can keep gagging in the sections that contain truly offensive archival footage (in particular, numerous clips of Obama campaign promises).

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Rogers Astroturf Lobby Campaign on Spectrum Foreshadows Battle over Wireless Broadband Competition

  The Rogers astroturf lobby campaign against a spectrum set-aside, which sneakily uses people interested in a notification on when LTE may be available in their market, foreshadows a major battle over the rules on the 2012 spectrum auction. Much like the 2007 battle over the AWS auction, the incumbents will argue that the market is already sufficiently competitive and that any set-aside will unfairly advantage new entrants. The 2007 battle included submissions from Rogers and Bell that insisted that Canada was already “extremely competitive” and that consumer prices for wireless services very low. For example, Rogers argued:

• Wireless carriers and the fine art of astroturfing

  Rogers, Canada’s biggest cellphone carrier, made waves on Friday by taking its lobbying efforts for the next auction of wireless airwaves to the public. The company launched a website that urges Canadians to write to their MPs in support of a wide-open auction, rather than one that will set aside licenses for new cellphone companies.

• Mobilicity calls Big 3 lobbying ploy insulting to consumers who will ultimately pay for the return of high wireless rates

  Responding to what it says is a thinly veiled attempt at manipulating government regulators and public perception, Mobilicity today said Canadians should not be fooled by a new Big 3 carrier stunt to get people to protest more wireless spectrum set-asides for Mobilicity and other new carriers.

  “The future of affordable wireless rates is at risk, not the future of long-term evolution (LTE) networks,” said Chief Operating Officer Stewart Lyons. “Mobilicity has helped bring down the cost of wireless in Canada significantly and we need to augment our limited amount of spectrum to ensure affordable pricing continues.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Net neutrality supporters file lawsuit against net neutrality rules

  When the Federal Communications Commission last week issued its final network neutrality rules and said they would go into effect at the end of November, lawsuits against the policy could finally begin. Verizon and Metro PCS, both wireless carriers, had already made clear their intention to sue and were widely expected to be the first to do so. Instead, they were beaten to court by the activist group Free Press—one of the strongest supporters of network neutrality.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Re: Hurt Locker P2P Lawsuit Comes to Canada

    What is curious is that this company that is taking people’s IP’s must be using some sort of commercial app to target the specific city of the person. For example when I try to geo-locate the 70.53.229.233 IP using standard available web apps or demo’s of commercial apps, it shows it to be in Terrebone, or Ottawa or Toronto. The filing shows it as Asbestos, Quebec. How did they get that? And with which app? Or did Bell give them that location?

  • Copyright Board Refuses to Require Transactional Licenses from Access Copyright or its Rights Holders

    The Copyright Board today released a decision denying AUCC’s request to amend the interim Access Copyright post-secondary tariff to force Access Copyright to issue transactional licenses.

  • Canada tries again to update copyright legislation

    The legislation, first introduced ahead of the federal election in May, is designed to cope with things like movie piracy, which the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association put at more than C$1.8 billion ($1.7 billion) in 2009-10, or the equivalent of 12,600 full-time jobs.

  • Government to again debate changes to copyright law

    The Conservative government is taking another stab at revamping Canada’s copyright law after minority parliaments scuttled past attempts.

    Industry Minister Christian Paradis will reintroduce the government’s copyright reform bill Thursday, setting out what consumers and educators can — and can’t — do with copyrighted songs, movies, video games and e-books in the age of MP3 players.

  • Copyright Is Back: Why Canada is Keeping the Flawed Digital Lock Rules

    Later today, the government will table Bill C-11, the latest iteration of the Canadian copyright reform bill that mirrors the previous Bill C-32. It was widely reported this fall that the government would reintroduce the previous bill unchanged, re-start committee hearings where they left off in March (with prior witnesses not asked to return), and move to quickly get the bill passed by the end of the calendar year. That seems to be what is happening with today’s tabling and a new legislative committee to follow.

  • Statement by the Liberal Party of Canada on the Copyright Modernization Act

  • ACTA

    • Minister Fast Visits Japan and Indonesia to Drive Canada’s Success in Priority Markets

    • ACTA to Be Signed – But Can it Enter into Force?

      It has been reported in the global press this week that ACTA will be signed October 1 in Japan. But that does not mean that ACTA actually goes into effect.

      ACTA Article 40 states that the “Agreement shall enter into force thirty days after the date of deposit of the sixth instrument of ratification, acceptance, or approval as between those Signatories that have deposited their respective instruments of ratification, acceptance, or approval.” Although six ratifications is a pretty low threshold for an agreement with 36 parties to the negotiation, it is far from clear that this agreement will get even that.

    • Holding of the Signing Ceremony for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

      On Saturday, October 1, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan will hold the signing ceremony for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) at Iikura Guest House, Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

    • ACTA will be signed Saturday

      On Saturday, October 1, 2011, parties that have completed relevant domestic processes will sign ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).

      FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure) statement:

      The world faces major challenges: access to medicine, diffusion of green technology needed to fight climate change, and a balanced Internet governance. While flexibility is essential to solve these major issues, ACTA codifies heightened measures.

      To stimulate startup companies, the EU legal situation should minimize market entrance risks for innovators. In digital markets, innovators are often confronted with patent minefields. Even a mere allegation of infringement may easily lead to market exclusion. ACTA’s damages beyond the actual prejudice have a disproportional negative effect on startup companies, which do not have deep pockets.

    • EU will not join countries in signing ACTA this weekend

      Japan has announced that negotiators of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will congregate at the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Saturday and those countries that have “completed the relevant domestic processes” will sign the agreement.

      ACTA is a voluntary international treaty that seeks to provide standardised international enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights. The agreement was negotiated in secret by the Governments of a collection of countries over the past three years.