06.08.12
Posted in News Roundup at 12:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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The EFI system has slowly been making headway in recent years, and right now EFI firmware is compatible with Windows supporting the GUID Partition Table (GPT), OS X/Intel, and Linux 2.6 and beyond machines. EFI is seen as a better hardware/software interface than BIOS, since it is platform-agnostic, runs in 32- or 64-bit mode, and GPT machines can handle boot partitions of up to 9.4 zettabytes. (That’s 9.5 billion terabytes to you and me.)
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I wanted to write about the Linux boot and UEFI from a while now, but I figured out is better to learn first more about the issue and take a deep breath before taking a position. In the meantime, many faces of the debate were talked in various places, so I think I have a better grasp.
From the beginning, when people started talking about Secure Boot some warned about the treat to Free Software, but they were pretty much dismissed by many as a bunch of hippies following the smelly RMS, we’ll surely find a way around when will get to it. Now, after mjg wrote a long technical pieces about the struggles of making Fedora boot on UEFI with Secure Boot enabled, we can the alarmists were right and Microsoft managed to give a fatal blow to Free Software on the desktop with the help of many hardware manufacturers.
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Allowing M$ to pick and choose which OEMs can install that other OS is leading to a new monopoly designed to replace Wintel, at least on ARM. No longer will consumers be able to install an OS from M$ on a PC if M$ gets its way. M$ will have loyal OEMs only blessed with the privilege and revenue streams.
[...]
Are you paying attention, US Department of Justice?
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Kernel Space
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The ACPI feature pull request for the Linux 3.5 kernel merge window was submitted on Saturday.
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Graphics Stack
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While patches have been around for more than one year to support Hierarchical Z on the ATI/AMD R600 open-source driver, the Gallium3D support still hasn’t been merged.
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The X.Org Foundation and the global community of X.Org developers
announce the release of X11R7.7 – Release 7.7 of the X Window System,
Version 11. This release is the eighth modular release of the X Window
System. The next full release will be X11R7.8 and may happen in 2013.
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While the university crew designed an open-source graphics processor using an FPGA, they haven’t written a proper Linux graphics driver, at least not yet. From part of the email I received, “While this is not anywhere close to OGP, it’s a step in the right direction. The big difference is that the only requirement for our implementation is a FPGA and a RAM. This can easily be integrated with a softcore processor like Microblaze or NIOS or the one we have worked with: the OpenRISC. Yea, thats right we are running a open source graphics accelerator connected to a open source cpu architecture. When we get a linux driver up and running it will be a true open source computer with USB, Ethernet etc all open source.”
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Last month I wrote about Linux Gamers Are Going Crazy For This New Game that was possibly coming to Linux, but today it’s been officially confirmed by the developers that it will indeed be ported.
The game in question is Carmageddon: Reincarnation, which has been a very popular Kickstarter project. Funding ends today and with a “stretch goal” of $600,000 USD they were going to provide a Linux and Mac OS X client. They’re only at $578k right now, but the developers have said regardless they will be providing a native Linux version of this unique racing game (via this update).
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Some of the developers behind the ioquake3 game engine that is derived from the id Tech 3 engine are working on a truly open — all game assets / content are Creative Commons licensed — game called baseio.
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Desktop Environments
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The VAR Guy is trading in his Ubuntu PC for a new Samsung Chromebox running Google Chrome OS. What motivated the move to a cloud-centric thin client? Here’s the explanation.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop
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Not the whole GNOME stack has reached version 3.5.2 so we can’t review it just yet. But we can share what Matthias Mclasen post in his blog -and enrich it a bit 
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People kept voting, despite the announcement of the results. Today I publish second round of the poll results, with number of participants more than doubled since last time: 169.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Today, I was alarmed to see that I could not boot into my Linux Mint system; the OS would give a “no init found” error after the boot splash. First, I had to boot into Microsoft Windows 7; thankfully, that worked as Linux Mint was the OS I was [of course] using when I accidentally unplugged my computer. I looked up the error, and it turns out it’s a common one that can be solved by a file system check (“fsck”) from a live CD. All the guides I saw recommended using a live CD of the same OS whose hard drive partition is affected, but I had left my live CDs and USB sticks in my dormitory room. Whoops again. What I figured would just be a minor inconvenience turned into a semi-major problem.
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Gentoo Family
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Linux x32 is the effort for a native 32-bit ABI for Intel/AMD x86_64 systems but where 32-bit pointers are used to reduce the memory footprint while still allowing for x32 programs to take advantage of the rest of the 64-bit benefits. There’s x32 support within the Linux kernel, GCC, glibc, binutils, and even LLVM/Clang.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat CloudForms, an open hybrid cloud management platform. CloudForms enables enterprises to create and manage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hybrid clouds with the ability to make self-service computing resources available to users in a managed, governed and secure way.
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While many enterprises have been experimenting with private clouds over the last year, moving real workloads to the platform means dealing with public clouds and others’ cloud platforms, a problem dubbed hybrid cloud.
CloudForms, originally created as a Red Hat Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS offering, has now joined the OpenStack development group founded by competitor Rackspace (RAX) and is pushing CloudForms as a method for interoperating among different cloud infrastructures.
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Fedora
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Fedora 17 came out just last week. This is the first time I’ve installed it as a desktop in more than a year — last time was Fedora 14 (or was it 13?).
Fedora for me has always been something I install to check out what’s new, and to get a feel of what all I shall get in other distros in the coming months/years. Here, I’m specifically talking about system-level utilities — for example, systemd and stuff like that. Although, I gotta admit, I still use the service and chkconfig commands as most distros, including Fedora, have managed to keep these tools systemd-aware — and hopefully not retiring either any time soon.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager at Canonical recently replied to user questions while doing ‘Ask Me Anything’ session at Reddit.
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With Ubuntu 12.04 for ARM there were performance improvements thanks to switching to ARM hardfp binaries by default rather than the soft floating-point version. The switch to the hardware floating-point build made a noticeable difference and for some hardware there were performance improvements due to upstream kernel improvements. With the Linux kernel found in 12.04 (Linux 3.2), there is proper support for the OMAP4460 as found in the PandaBoard ES. With that, the dual-core Cortex-A9 can now properly clock up to its rated 1.2GHz speed. Those reasons represent a bulk of the improvements for the ARM architecture in Ubuntu 12.04.
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Ubuntu 12.10 has started churning releases. Kate Stewart of Ubuntu has announced the release of 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Alpha 1. As you are aware alphas are not meant for ‘regular’ consumption. However, if you are an Ubuntu user and want to help find and fix the bugs you can install it on your secondary machine.
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It feels like it was just April when Ubuntu 12.04 was released… oh right, because it was. But the folks at Canonical are already working on the next version of one of the world’s most popular Linux-based operating systems. Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal is scheduled to launch in October, but you can download the first Alpha builds today.
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This month, GM is shipping a 2013 Cadillac XTS sedan that is “technologically gee-whizzed to the gills,” according to USA Today. Novelties include adaptive headlights, ten airbags, and a driver’s seat that vibrates in different locations depending on the direction in which sensors detect a possible collision. Yet the highlight is a Debian Linux-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system called Cadillac User Experience (CUE).
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Phones
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Android
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Add widgets and shortcuts if your install is a keeper. You’ll be able to change desktop layout and preferences, like autofit, that can fix anomalies with look; change user preferences like gesture behavior; configure the status bar and its content; tweak the colors and tints; customize text preferences; change battery indicator preferences; and reboot the launcher.
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Most Popular Android ROM: CyanogenMod If your Android device is feeling a little stale, or maybe the manufacturer has abandoned it and you’d love to breathe a little life into it, your best bet is to root it and install a new ROM. It’s like installing a brand new operating system on your phone or tablet, and an in many cases can give you features the manufacturer never thought to offer. Last week, we asked you which Android ROMs you thought were the best. Then we took a look at the five best Android ROMs based on your nominations, and put them to a vote. Now we’re back to highlight the winner.
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Holo Launcher Brings the Ice Cream Sandwich Launcher to Any Android Phone Android: If you’re stuck on a device running 2.3 Gingerbread (or even worse, 2.2 Froyo) and your manufacturer has no plans on upgrading your phone anytime soon, Holo Launcher gives you all of the features available in the stock Ice Cream Sandwich launcher, right now, completely free.
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Intel claims it is making significant improvements to the multicore performance of Android – but isn’t sure if it’s willing to share them with the open-source community.
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Parrot, an upstart French technology company, is betting that drivers want their cars to be fitted with an all-in-one “infotainment” device based on Google’s popular Android operating software to give hands-free control of its smartphone, radio, music and satellite navigation functions.
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Android’s had a quiet showing here at Computex Taipei, but Acer just snuck out a new product that could well represent a breakthrough for the platform at large. The Iconia Tab A110 is at the company’s booth without much fanfare, and on the face of it isn’t particularly interesting — a 7-inch tablet with Android 4.0 that’s powered by an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. However, we spoke to an Acer representative who said that the A110 would be positioned as the company’s main low-end device when it’s released in the third quarter of the year, and that it will cost less than $200. If true, the aggressive pricing means it could well be the first beneficiary of Nvidia’s $199 Kai program, though the representative wasn’t able to comment on this.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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One of the bigger challenges of spreading LTE has been size; going 4G has tended to put on a little weight. A new Sierra Wireless embedded modem, the AirPrime EM7700, could be just the ticket to shedding those pounds. It’s reputedly the thinnest module ever made, at a tenth of an inch deep, and should slot into an Ultrabook or tablet without anyone making snide comments about the extra bulk.
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Gathering information about how quickly services are running, or not, can get very complex when dealing with dozens of disparate services over many systems. To solve this problem, Twitter created its own distributed tracing system called “Zipkin” and has now made it available as open source. According to its developers, Zipkin is “closely modelled” after a Google research paper from 2010 about Dapper, a large-scale distributed systems tracing infrastructure.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Several years ago, Mozilla was a real up-and-comer — its Firefox browser was the first serious challenger to Internet Explorer in a long time, and the company’s identity with open source enhanced its public perception as a worthy upstart.
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SaaS
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I’m standing in the lobby of the downtown San Francisco Hyatt Regency, where the 2012 OpenStack Conference has just commenced. As with most open source events, I feel like I’m surrounded by ComicCon refugees.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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If functionality and stability are the criteria, LibreOffice’s Writer is a more powerful tool than Microsoft Word.
But how do the other main productivity tools in LibreOffice and Microsoft Office (MSO) compare? In other words, how do Impress and PowerPoint, the slide show applications in the two office suites, compare? Or Calc and Excel, the spreadsheet apps?
The answers are far more complicated than with the word processors. Writer and Word are applications with distinctly different approaches and assumptions about how users work. By contrast, LibreOffice’s Impress and Calc, which were developed after Writer, are designed for compatibility with their MSO counter-parts, and are more similar to them in design.
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BSD
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Project Releases
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The last official release of MPlayer was version 1.0-rc4 and it came in January of 2011. Since then there’s been no official releases so after more than a decade, MPlayer 1.0 has yet to be released, but being quietly available now is… MPlayer 1.1.
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Public Services/Government
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What started with a unanimous vote to adopt an open source resolution eventually became a long-term commitment to the open source way. How many of you have had an elected official attend a citizen-lead event? Probably some of you. But how many of you have had your entire city or town council attend an unconference?
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Openness/Sharing
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We’ll never forget last year’s LinuxCon Japan conference, which took place shortly after the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March. As the country still reeled from the disaster, LinuxCon presenters discussed how open source software could contribute to disaster relief.
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Security
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Germany has set up a cyber-warfare unit designed to carry out offensive operations, the country’s Defence Ministry has admitted for the first time in a parliamentary report to legislators.
According to German reports, the Bonn-based Computer Network Operations (CNO) unit had existed since 2006 but was only now being readied for deployment under the control of the country’s military.
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Finance
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Politics is brutal. Just how brutal became apparent Wednesday when Wall Street teamed up with Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives to emasculate the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) by slashing its budget while imposing new requirements for cost-benefit analysis and rule-writing.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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In an unanimous decision, EU Member States have decided to promote website censorship at the global scale under the pretext of tackling child pornography. This dangerous initiative must be denounced by lawmakers and citizens: Europe cannot give up on its commitment to the rule of law by legitimizing Net censorship internationally.
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Civil Rights
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A developer for encrypted chat application “Cryptocat” has recently claimed that he was detained and interrogated at the US border. Apparently, border guards took his passport and interrogated him about the application, demanding to know “which algorithms Cryptocat used and about its censorship resistance.”
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The FBI has been accused of “illegally” copying evidence used in a case against file-sharing site Megaupload.
The site was shut down in January and its operators arrested in New Zealand because, alleged the FBI, it was being used to pirate content.
Lawyers acting for Megaupload said the FBI had illegally removed hard drives containing evidence.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Check out an exclusive first look at the book trailer for Rob Reid’s Year Zero, a “Swiftian Satire” about aliens who love our music a little too much. This is the zaniest book trailer we’ve seen in quite some time, and it showcases what an unusual, offbeat premise this book actually has.
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06.06.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It turns out that students are removing that other OS [...] They have done many roll-outs of GNU/Linux and should have been aware there was no need for that other OS in Indian IT.
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When I patch one of my Linux systems or add new software, 99 times out of 100 I use a modern program like the Ubuntu’s Software Center or Linux Mint’s Software Manager. But there are times, especially when I’m working with a system that needs automated updates using cron or with a remote system via ssh or telnet, that I need to use a good, old-fashioned command line tool—and you will too. So, for times like those, it helps to keep the shell commands in mind.
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Desktop
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In case you haven’t noticed, after lukewarm reception for its Chrome OS in the market, Google is doubling down on its efforts to gain acceptance for the operating system. And maybe the effort can still be successful. After all, hasn’t Google steered the Android mobile OS to remarkable success in a short period of time? Here are some of the latest assessments of Google’s chances to build a strong user base for Chrome OS despite lackluster user enthusiasm so far.
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Server
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While worldwide expenditures on server hardware declined in the first quarter, server unit shipments actually increased, led by double-digit growth in Linux-based systems. HP, IBM, and Dell were the dominant players, according to two reports released in the last week.
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Last month’s news that IBM would be pushing out Linux-on-Power based servers may very well have given you a sense of been-there-done-that, but the new focus on IBM’s Power architecture is giving Big Blue another shot at taking on the Linux on x86 sector.
The question is, will the shot hit its big data target? Or are the new PowerLinux systems too expensive for their intended markets?
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds published the first Linux 3.5 release candidate on Saturday night, although the official release email wasn’t sent until Sunday afternoon. As usual, the first RC of the new kernel version signals the end of the merge window phase at the beginning of the development cycle, during which nearly all of the major changes are made. Aside from a few stragglers, the function set Linux 3.5-rc1 offers should be almost identical to the one in the 3.5 kernel, which is expected to be released in late July or early August.
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Linus Torvalds kicked off the latest kernel release cycle late Saturday night with the first release candidate for the Linux 3.5 kernel. The release comes just two short weeks after Linux 3.4 was officially released.
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Graphics Stack
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Users of Linux distributions with the latest versions of the Linux kernel and X.org’s X Server will in future only be able to use the 2000, 3000 and 4000 series of Radeon HD graphics hardware with open source drivers. This is because version 12.4 of AMD’s proprietary Linux graphics driver Catalyst (fglrx) doesn’t work with X Server 1.12, which was released in March. Although the recently published beta of Catalyst 12.6 is supposed to fix this, while also supporting Linux kernel 3.3 officially, it was announced in April that this version only works with the Radeon HD models from the 5000, 6000 and 7000 series, which are compatible with DirectX 11. This is the case for both Linux and Windows.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Here’s the latest in the steaming excitement concerning Valve’s Source Engine and Steam client coming to Linux.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Screenshots are not only useful for tech bloggers to showcase cool apps, they’re also an integral component of most of the web-based tutorials. Following the ‘show don’t tell’ technique that many writers swear by, tech bloggers lean on the demonstrative power of screenshots to review the latest applications. Tutorial writers too use these screenshots, and sometimes, they edit them so as to point out particular details about the application. Whatever be the case, taking screenshots takes time, and in many cases, it also demands a certain amount of effort from the user as you need to capture aspects of the app in action.
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Games
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Previously I’ve mooted an obstacle preventing Linux adoption is the need for more big game titles, rather than productivity apps. This week, in the wake of its Humble Indie Bundle debut, Tim Schafer explains what porting Psychonauts to Linux was like.
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Love your Linux games, but hate painful installs? Ubuntu maker Canonical understands, and has kicked the usual, less snappy, procedure to the curb creating a new approach for the Humble Indie Bundle. The company already expanded Linux gaming, recently adding EA titles to its Ubuntu Software Center, and now you can download the Humble quintet from there as a single file, and install it in one go. In true open source style, you can pick the price you’d like to pay at Humble’s site and even juggle how that sum is distributed to the games’ developers and charities. So with the install obstacle gone, trundle on past the break and see if the promo video seals the deal.
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A very small indie gaming company called “Volumes of Fun” are now porting their first game “Voxeliens” to GNU/Linux !
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…bundle organiser Richard Esguerra explained the reasoning behind the move
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One of the thing that some find lacking on the Linux desktop today is the availability of good games.
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Lunduke claims the only way he could release his software under the GPL is if he was making at least $4,000 per month in subscriptions, a sum which (according to him) is below what he’s currently making by selling the applications individually. The idea that Lunduke is making north of $4,000 per month via one time purchases of games like a Linux distro simulator is already difficult to believe, but if true, shows the most glaring omission of logic in this entire project.
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It was at the end of January that Michael Simms, the founder and original CEO of Linux Game Publishing had stepped down after suffering burn out and not much coming out of the company in recent years. Taking over Linux Game Publishing was Clive Crous. Four months ago from yesterday, Clive blogged about the new work and his “great plans for Linux Game Publishing.”
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KDE team has announced the release of KDE 4.9 Beta1. This release brings renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.
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KDE e.V. has responded to the United Kingdom Open Standards Consultation on behalf of KDE, one of the largest and most influential Free Software communities world-wide with thousands of volunteer contributors and countless users. Open Standards align with the goals of the KDE Community, especially with regards to digital freedom and contributions to the common good, while patent mania and malicious licensing terms threaten KDE and other Free Software projects.
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The KDE Project announced last evening, June 5th, the first Beta release for the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.9 environment.
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The first beta of what will become KDE 4.9 was released yesterday, just four day past due date. After the usual round of testing and more pre-stable releases, the final, stable version of KDE 4.9 should hit the proverbial shelves early August 2012. The complete release schedule is available here.
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The schedule for Akademy Workshops and Birds of a Feather sessions (BoFs) is available for registration. Organized in the Unconference style, people attending Akademy can select the preferred times and locations for topics they will lead.
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GNOME Desktop
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There is good news for Debian Sid users. “The final bits of GNOME 3.4 have landed and if all looks as good as it does now, they should migrate to wheezy in about a week,” posts Jordi Mallach on his blog.
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When Linus Torvalds sneezes, the Linux world catches the cold. We often find Linus complaining about Gnome, no surprises you will complain about the flaws in the technology you use and not about the one you never touch. But when he says something it carries a lot of weight as he shares his experience as a user and not the father of Linux. His rants are also important as it gives voice to thousands of users who share the same plight but no one listens to their problem. So, what irked Linus this time?
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Red Hat employee and member of the GNOME foundation Cosimo Cecchi, explained yesterday through his blog, the various improvements that the GTK 3.4 release brought for the GNOME users, and the work that is being done on the next 3.6 release.
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Pinguy OS an out-of-the-box working operating system for everyone, not just geeks
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The days that Linux were thought of as complicated are over. If you don’t believe that, realize that Ubuntu for instance, has reached 20 million active users. There are even Linux distributions aimed for children, which is great news since that means your child might be on his or her way to gaining exposure to Linux as a simplified operating system as well as exposure to healthier games and applications.
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New Releases
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The Neptune team is proud to announce the release of Neptune 2.5.
This release comes with Kernel 3.3.4 with lots of patches and drivers. As usual and for the last time we ship two official variants: 1. Full Edition with KDE 4.8.3 and 2. our Minimal Edition with LXDE and E17.
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Robert Shingledecker announced last evening, June 4th, the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core 4.5.4 Linux operating system, including the Tiny Core Plus edition.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia began its life not so long ago by being a community fork of the Mandriva Linux distribution. The future of Mandriva, as a company, has been in question for years prompting several developers and users to push for an independent, community-oriented distro. The first release of Mageia, version 1, got off to a fairly good start. It didn’t vary much technologically from Mandriva and felt a bit like a test run, as though the developers were making sure all the proper infrastructure was in place.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fedora is always loaded with new technologies, and the new Fedora 17 release has the most ever. Get a head start on what’s going to appear in Red Hat Enterprise Linux by grabbing a copy of the new Beefy Miracle.
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Those of us using GNU/Linux have probably heard about the UEFI Secure Boot scheme and how it demonstrates Microsoft’s strong grasp on PC hardware vendors. If you are not quite sure what UEFI Secure Boot is yet, I highly advise reading up on it as new PCs will begin to have this feature enabled by default in the near future to comply with Microsoft’s requirements for Windows 8. Yes, a software company is controlling hardware companies. Luckily though, the feature can be disabled so that we will still be able to install GNU/Linux on the same x86 hardware. Matthew Garrett from Red Hat summarizes the UEFI Secure Boot issue on his blog.
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Debian Family
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Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the Debian Edu and Skolelinux mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the Debian Edu Squeeze version.
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The Debian Project is pleased to announce the availability of its diversity statement [1], approved by a large majority of the project members [2].
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I got burned by Ubuntu again this morning – as if I needed to be reminded why I dislike it so much. I have a number of computers around here, and they all have a moderately complicated multi-boot configuration. Each of them has multiple Linux distributions installed, and most of them have some sort of Windows as well. I always use the openSuSE Legacy GRUB bootloader. The overall result is that it does what I want, and it’s reliable. At least, it was reliable until I installed some Ubuntu updates this morning.
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Computex will take place between June 5th and 9th, and Canonical will have a booth there, located at M0106 in the Nangang exhibition hall.
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Rhythmbox 2.97 has been released a couple of days ago, bringing a new, more compact header layout which includes album art by default, along with a new podcast subscription interface and other minor new features and bug fixes.
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GNU/Linux is the go-to operating system for advanced software developers world wide, and yet may not be seen as a good fit for creative writers.
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As if there wasn’t reason enough to be a fan of Canonical and its Ubuntu flavor of Linux (Unity aside), the company announced that it has joined forces with the Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) to both raise awareness of the ability to play high quality games on the free platform as well as raise money for some awesome causes. Starting with this latest bundle of independent DRM-free games, Ubuntu users have a streamlined installation process that utilizes the Ubuntu Software Center in conjunction with the HIB purchasing engine to make it easier than ever before to download and install the games being offered. For those of you who are avid fans of supporting both the open-source movement and independent development houses this is a win-win scenario!
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The fine folks over at Canonical have been hard at work on a mobile version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distro, and have announced that the final build will be making its way to smartphones later this year or early next year. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth would not provide a specific date to PC World, instead indicating that announcements would likely be coming later this year.
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Flavours and Variants
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Microsoft has shortly released the consumer preview of its flag ship operating system, Windows 8, that is evidently re-skinned to better suit touch-screen devices. Unfortunately, in attempting to revamp the OS, Microsoft has done some serious damages to it’s self and more importantly to the end-users. The post compares Windows8 to Linux Mint 13.
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Dubbed Cream, Snowlinux 2 Cinnamon is based on the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system and it is powered by Linux kernel 3.2.0 and Cinnamon, a fork of the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
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Mint is a relative of Ubuntu, but don’t let that make you think it’s a recycled Ubuntu distro. Think of Linux Mint 13 as a better OS with all the good stuff that made Ubuntu so popular so fast and none of the stuff that dragged it down in recent releases. Longtime Linux users and newcomers alike will not be disappointed with Mint’s latest version.
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Last year, I sent spies to China who took days off to go shopping and snapping pictures but forgot/neglected to gather intelligence on GNU/Linux in Chinese retail spaces.
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Back in February of this year, Raspberry Pi began taking orders for $35 desktop PCs. The Ultra Low-cost PC (ULPC) is just a circuit board and requires you to supply your own storage media, micro USB charger (for power), display, keyboard, and mouse. Though many people have expressed interest in this little product, there’s still no easy was to house it.
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The Raspberry Pi received an extraordinary amount of pre-launch coverage. It truly went viral with major news corporations such as the BBC giving extensive coverage. Not without reason, it is groundbreaking to have a small capable computer retailing at less than the price of a new console game. There have been a number of ventures that have tried to produce a cheap computer such as a laptop and a tablet but which never materialised at these price points. Nothing comes close to the Raspberry Pi in terms of affordability, which is even more important in the current economic climate. Producing a PC capable of running Linux, Quake III-quality games, and 1080p video is worthy of praise.
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Phones
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Android
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Another Android phone maker is set to unveil a UI overlay sitting atop Google’s mobile operating system. This time it’s Huawei. Its Sense/TouchWiz competitor will be called Emotion UI and is going to arrive in July.
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Humble Indie Bundle 5 was launched recently with five popular and award winning indie games. All these games are supported natively on Linux except one, LIMBO.
LIMBO doesn’t run natively on Linux and instead uses a Wine/CodeWeavers wrapper. It has been a hot topic for debate in last couple of days and Humble Bundle organizers have commented on this.
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In its latest statistics on the market penetration of the various iterations of the Android mobile operating system, Google has revealed that Ice Cream Sandwich could now be found in up to 7.1% of all Android devices. In comparison, data released last month showed that Ice Cream Sandwich only ran 4.9% of the entire population of Android devices.
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Kotlin, one of the newer alternatives to Java that runs on the Java Virtual Machine, has reached its second milestone and can now run on Android. The open source language is being developed by JetBrains, developers of the IntelliJ IDEA IDE. Kotlin offers the ability not only to compile to Java byte code but also to JavaScript. Announced in July 2011 and open sourced in February, Kotlin is working past a set of milestone targets to become a production ready language.
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Last month I reported that Motorola Droid Razr and Razr Maxx users might get to taste the sweetness of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as soon as May 21, while Xoom 3G and 4G owners seemed stuck in Honeycomb thanks to an upgrade holding pattern for the foreseeable future.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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In addition to Intel, Shuttle has also been aggressively entering the education market with its e-backpack solution. Shuttle’s 8-inch V-series V08CN01 tablet PC features Nvidia’s Tegra 2 and Android, while weighing only 570g.
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Tablets are taking over the portable-computing market, but that doesn’t mean the netbooks that they’ve replaced are useless. It’s possible to jam the processing power and battery life of most netbook models into a smaller, touchscreen-equipped package. The project is very straightforward: Remove a few parts, add a touchscreen overlay (about $80; MyDigitalDiscount), reseal the device in its new tablet form, install a driver, and calibrate the screen. And if you use an old netbook you have lying around (or buy a used one), it costs a fraction of the price of a new tablet.
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If you like the look of the Asus Transformer AiO but don’t care about the portability factor, ViewSonic’s Android Smart Display VCD22 may be of interest — it’s a 22-inch 1080p Android 4.0 machine with an all-in-one form factor that you’re unlikely to want to use on your lap. There’s a 1GHz dual-core processor inside, along with 1GB RAM, and it seemed to back up the software smoothly enough with impressively speedy touch response.
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Even as Facebook continues making headlines in the wake of its IPO and a precipitous drop in its share price, the company has made a big contribution to open source. Not everyone realizes that Facebook is built on open source technology, and it has released many components to the open source community before. Now, as Jordan DeLong explains in an extensive post, the company has released a reusable C++ library of components called Folly.
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Revolution Analytics debuted today a major upgrade of its R Enterprise platform for handling big data. R Enterprise 6.0, which like its predecessor is based on the open source R statistics language, is designed to give enterprises better ways of handling big data and discover “hidden correlations” in data to transform businesses, the company said in a [...]
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Yes, a VM install of Mageia 1 with Evolution 2.32.2 will still send e-mail via our hosted mail SMTP server. Yes, Thunderbird will send e-mail via our hosted mail SMTP server. Yes, every other e-mail application I have tried will send e-mail via our hosted mail SMTP server. But not Evolution 3.4.x in Mageia 2, which is what I want to use since I settled on Evolution after abandoning Kontact + Kmail many moons ago. Again, I am considering yet another e-mail application switch due to a broken e-mail application following an upgrade. (Broken for me! I don’t care if it “works” for you!) I do not care to go back to KDE’s Kmail since my experience with that breaking following upgrades was just as problematic. My requirements are still the same as last time:
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Events
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I’ve been an open source and free culture advocate for more than half a decade. I’ve used open source operating systems and applications on my computers and mobile devices for nearly as long. I’ve contributed to open source documentation efforts. I’ve organized a university event to promote the principles of open source in college. And I’ve been writing for opensource.com.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Exactly as the company promised it would early last year, Mozilla is proceeding full steam ahead with its rapid release cycle for the Firefox browser. Version 13 of Firefox first arrived in a beta version in April, adding a number of notable features. Now, version 13 is available (although it officially launches tomorrow). Here is what’s under the hood.
Complete release notes for Firefox 13 are available here, and you can download the new version here.
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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As enterprises consider alternatives to Microsoft Office in the cloud era, Google is zipping along with Enterprise Apps and now QuickOffice and IBM has IBM Docs in beta but all is fairly quiet on the OpenOffice mobile/cloud front. Xform Computing is one developer trying to take OpenOffice to the mobile masses.
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While Microsoft is planning to bring its Office suite to Android and iOS (after repeatedly failed attempts in mobile OS market and sinking Nokia’s boat), Google has acquired QuickOffice, the best mobile office suite for Android and iOS devices. With this acquisition, Google now has an off-line office suite for Android and iOS to compete with Microsoft’s Office.
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Project Releases
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Obnam, “a snapshotting, de-duplicating, encrypting backup program” has been released by its developer, Lars Wirzenius. The application has been in development since 2006 when Wirzenius decided that he could not find a backup application which met all his demands, despite finding various applications with one or two of his requirements.
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Licensing
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An announcement was made on May 16th, 2012, regarding an agreement between the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and 3M to create a public use version of the HDD, called HDD Access, which will be available for download from the HDD Access website later this year. Digg this article
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Standards/Consortia
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However, PCs based on Windows 8 are not expected to adopt entry-level pricing so the initial target markets will be developed economies where purchasing power is strong and users appreciate product innovation. Wang pointed to North America as being the key market, stating that Windows 8 needs to be as successful as Apple in the higher-end of the PC market.
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Finance
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Armageddon was threatening the financial system on Wednesday, September 17, 2008. The largest bankruptcy in American history, that of investment bank Lehman Brothers on Monday, September 15, had roiled global markets, accelerating the stupendous decline in values of every possible investment vehicle– common stocks, corporate bonds, real estate, commodities like oil, copper and gold, private equity and hedge funds alike. In the midst of the chaos Merrill Lynch, the firm that had brought Wall Street to Main Street, was absorbed in a shotgun marriage by Bank of America.
[...]
And later another $100 billion, still not paid back to Uncle Sam.
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Wall Street has good reason to be rattled by the news that Goldman Sachs laid off senior personnel, including managing directors, last week. It is likely the beginning of a new kind of deleveraging that will occur at every major Wall Street firm.
It’s well known that Wall Street has been forced by markets and regulators to delever in the wake of the financial crisis. For the most part, this has been a matter of financial deleveraging: reducing debt to capital ratios, reducing dependence on short-term debt, reducing compensation (especially bonuses) to revenue ratios.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A paid canvasser supporting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker before the recall election has been implicated in a “voter fraud” allegation. But despite claims by Walker and his allies, there is still no evidence of a systemic effort to fraudulently change election outcomes.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Its now a few days since Sky blocked its customers from Pirate Bay after the High Court ruling encompassing UK ISP’s.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.03.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux is distributed using the Free Software Foundation’s copy left stipulations that mean any modified version that is redistributed must in turn be freely available. The below mentioned features gives Linux a winning edge once compared to most Operating Systems.
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Desktop
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When it comes to laptops that solely ship Ubuntu as an operating system one of the most well known names is System76.
During the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, CA a few weeks back I had an opportunity to chat over lunch with System76 CEO, Carl Richell about the exciting products they are working on at their Headquarters in Colorado.
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Lightweight Linux distributions have grown in popularity in recent years, but few have been as buoyant as Google’s Chrome OS. When it debuted a year ago on Samsung and Acer Chromebooks, the web-centric operating system was basically a Chrome browser and a media player linked to cloud services. The open source platform has evolved over the last year, however, and on May 29 Google unveiled a more robust version 19 on Samsung’s new Chromebook Series 5 550 laptop and Chromebox Series 3 net-top.
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Google (GOOG) will try to win more converts to a computer operating system revolving around its popular Chrome Web browser with a new wave of lightweight laptops built by Samsung Electronics.
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Userful Corp. says as Web-based applications grow, open-source virtualization will provide big cost benefits. But a Gartner analyst says the “history and legacy” of Windows is still too powerful for widespread Linux adoption
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We looked at the Laptop 15″ — which is, in fact, a 15.6in. Toshiba Satellite C660D-14C running a customised Debian-based Linux distribution and including a simplified keyboard overlay that provides one-button access to applications and a range of common functions. The idea is to appeal to people — particularly the over-50s — who have so far resisted computers and the internet. The Laptop 15″ costs £599 (inc. VAT), while its 17in. sibling costs £899 (inc. VAT).
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Server
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Dell intends to create a complete ARM server ecosystem running on Ubuntu or Fedora Linux, and has already shipped its first “Copper” servers to select customers and partners; the servers are, however, not yet generally available. Dell is running its own cluster that developers and customers can access remotely. Dell is also planning to offer products such as Crowbar for ARM and Crowbar for Hadoop on ARM, to help customers set up cloud environments – Crowbar is Dell’s open source management infrastructure software.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Supreet Pal Singh has provided an in-depth overview of his X.Org EVoC project for providing a Fermi scripting engine for the Nouveau driver that will allow for safe and dynamic GPU core / video memory re-clocking on modern NVIDIA GPUs.
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Applications
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A file manager is software that provides a user interface to undertake file management activities with file systems. Common operations performed on files or groups of files include create, open, rename, move, copy, delete, search/find, edit, view print, play, as well as modify file attributes, properties and file permissions. The file manager is one of those essential applications for many users which is almost impossible to function without. Linux is blessed with a good range of file managers that help to make file management a breeze.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The average paid is US$7.63 with Linux users being the most generous…
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Desktop Environments
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Method – This is a very casual test (sorry no “benchmarks”), I merely booted the appropriate Live CD, opened a terminal, and reviewed the RAM use. YMMV.
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Linux Mint, the fastest-growing Linux distribution (outpacing Ubuntu in DistroWatch.com page hit rating) is launching its own hardware! The free operating system known for its stability, security, and ease of use, is teaming up with Compulab maker of fanless mini PC for the mintBox.
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David Chisnall of the FreeBSD project is working on updating their advocacy material regarding this leading *BSD operating system. As such, he asked on the mailing list Why Are You Using FreeBSD?
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GNOME Desktop
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I mean, we all know GNOME 3 and its Shell have some rough edges. Given that computers users since the stone-age have been adverse to change, it’s not surprising that people complained about GNOME 3.x being different than GNOME 2.x (actually, more to the point, being different than Windows 95. How dare they?). Even though we believe in what we’re doing, we’re up against it for having shipped a desktop that imposes workflow and user experience changes on the aforementioned change-adverse hypothetical user.
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As we’ve stated two months ago, in article about the upcoming features of GNOME 3.6, the GNOME developers will implement support for Microsoft’s cloud service, SkyDrive, in the Documents application.
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New Releases
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Michael Prokop proudly announced last evening, May 29th, the immediate availability for download of the final and stable release of the grml 2012.05 Debian-based operating system.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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My name is Charles-H. Schulz, you may know me from other Free & Open Source Software projects, and I will be assisting Mandriva and its community in defining our future and how best we will serve the interests of the community, of software freedom, and of Mandriva SA. I am humbled by this task and the trust that has been bestowed upon me. After all, my first job was at MandrakeSoft years ago, before the company became Mandriva. I look forward working with all of you and I’m open to constructive suggestions and ideas. You can contact me at cschulz AT mandriva DOT com and follow my other (personal) blog here.
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Red Hat Family
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If you are tired of waiting for Red Hat to do an official port of its Enterprise Linux commercial distribution to the ARM architecture, well then Red Sleeve Linux has just what you are looking for.
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The Fedora Project, which develops one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions, serves essentially as a sandbox for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). But that hasn’t stopped the Fedora team from pushing out a variety of new features in the latest release, Fedora 17, that should appeal more broadly than to Red Hat’s customer base alone. Here’s a look at the most important.
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Enterprise Linux leader Red Hat is changing its support pricing model in a way that opens the door to rival operating systems — at least in the cloud service provider market — and perhaps more broadly. One large cloud provider said the move will more than double his costs, making the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) option as pricey as Windows.
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Fedora
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The Fedora Project, Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, released a new edition of its free, open-source operating system Tuesday, offering a range of new virtualization capabilities, performance enhancements and new development tools.
The new release, Fedora 17, also provides new desktop features via a new release of the Gnome desktop environment and graphical user interface.
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It’s possible to optimize the Fedora 17 boot process to boot the system in less than three seconds. One developer went from a boot time of 15 seconds down to just 2.5 seconds.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A launcher thats a fusion of the Ubuntu dash, the Gnome-shell overview and the classic Gnome 2 menu which replaces the overview.
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Flavours and Variants
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Introduced by Softpedia at the beginning of the year, the Ubuntu Secure Remix operating system has just reached version 12.04 and it is available for download on mirrors worldwide.
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The Bodhi development team has published the first pre-release build of Bodhi Linux 2.0, the project’s next major update. According to project lead developer Jeff Hoogland, the goal of the new version “is not to introduce ground breaking new features”, but rather to “allow our distro to transition to the next major Ubuntu LTS as a distro base”. As such, Bodhi Linux 2.0 is built upon Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, incorporating changes and new features from that release; the 1.x branch of Bodhi is derived from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
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MontaVista has announced the arrival of a new release of its Automotive Technology Platform (ATP). Version 2.0 of ATP is compliant with the new GENIVI Specification 2.0 from the GENIVI Alliance, a non-profit industry alliance founded in 2009. The GENIVI compliance standards are designed to provide an open reference platform for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems.
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Last time I wrote about the BeagleBone, a simple and inexpensive ARM Cortex-A8 development board that can run (among other things) Linux. Being Linux based, you don’t have to worry about a lot of things you would when you are programming close to the “bare metal.” For example, Ethernet, serial ports, USB, and the like just work, which is really very productive.
On the other hand, some devices aren’t part of a normal desktop Linux OS. Luckily, the Angstrom distribution I mentioned last time even has drivers for these special devices (actually, the standard gpio-sysfs drivers). For example, consider general-purpose I/O ports. The BeagleBone can support up to 66 3.3V input/output pins. The board has 4 pins (GPIO1_21 to GPIO1_24) connected to LEDs. Well, connected to transistors that turn on LEDs. If you output a high, the LED turns on.
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The incredibly inexpensive credit-card-size Raspberry Pi harks back to a simpler time, when programmers intimately built gadgets from the ground up.
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Phones
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Chinese web tat flogger Alibaba finally has some good news to report after sales of smartphones based on its Aliyun OS hit the million sales milestone in the People’s Republic less than a year after its launch.
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Android
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A rumored 7-inch tablet branded by Google has been outed by a RightWare benchmark test and it appears the device includes a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and runs Android 4.1, according to some deep reporting by Android Police.
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Cortex-A15 chip (a source of ours said it will be multi-core) and up to 64GB of internal storage, as well as a “Miflavor UI” — something that we’ve already previewed on the Era at MWC — to go on top of Android 4.0. Lu also hinted that there will be several color options, but we’re more than happy to nab that black kevlar edition in the above shot (and someone should tell Motorola to take a look at this). Two more pictures after the break to keep you busy for the time being.
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It appears that the smartphone race is really heating up. Different operating system (OS) such as Windows Phone 7, Linux, Blackberry OS, Symbian, iOS and Android platforms are all competing to get the consumers loyalty and to get the top spot in the mobile OS race overall. But like any competition, there could only be one winner.
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This media device that fits right into one’s palm looks like a plastic box with an antenna protruding from its body to receive wireless signals. It has measurements of 2.8″ x 2.4″ x 0.5″ and a weight of merely 1.8 oz.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Content and data is everything right? But device usage at the enterprise level necessitates real-time integration, or that data becomes less valuable and potentially even worthless if it exists in some standalone silo.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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There’s been a relatively large announcement made by Hillcrest Labs tonight in that they’ve turned their own “Kylo Web Browser for TV” over to the Open Source community. This announcement sets the Mozilla-based TV browser up for open-sourced management for its many features, features such as its ability to work with Mac OS and Windows machines and its ability to work with Freespace-enabled in-air pointing controls.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla uploaded earlier today, June 2nd, the final packages containing the Mozilla Firefox 13.0 web browser for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.
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SaaS
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Open-source source platforms for big data have exploded in popularity. And in the past few months, it seems like nearly everyone is feeling the fallout.
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You might think the hard work for Hewlett-Packard is done, after it came from behind to build its own Amazon-style cloud so quickly. But the difficult part – taking on Amazon and winning with open source – lies ahead.
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CMS
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François Hollande won the presidential election in France last week, with the help of an impressive campaign and kiwi content management system SilverStripe.
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Education
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NetSpot is pleased to announce that they will be partnering with the University of Wollongong to provide enterprise-level hosting and services of open source e-Learning systems: Moodle and Mahara.
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Business
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BSD
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After a few days ago sharing a list of why you should use FreeBSD as said by FreeBSD developers and community members who use the BSD operating system, here’s a list of reasons for why not to use FreeBSD or missing functionality.
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Project Releases
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Piwik is a free software/open source Web analytics software developed in much the same manner as most open source applications – global collaboration of talented coders doing what they love.
It is an alternative to Google Analytics and from my experience, better in many respects. If you manage websites and want to have complete control over traffic monitoring, Piwik is what you want to use. The latest version, released just today June 1 2012, is Piwik 1.8, and it comes with its share of new and improved features and bug fixes.
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The Gluster open source distributed filesystem is out with version 3.3 after a long development cycle. Gluster 3.3 unifies file and object storage and provide a Hadoop HDFS compatible API for Big Data Storage.
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Public Services/Government
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The European Parliament’s Directorate General for Innovation and Technological Support is to produce report on the EP’s free and open source software programmes. MEP Bart Staes (Group of the Green and European Free Alliance) on 10 May added this as a requirement for the discharge of the EP’s 2010 budget committee.
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The government of the Navarra region in Spain is making available its ‘Justice Management’, a document management system (DMS) tailored to judicial documents. The system is already used in courts in Navarra and Cantabria. Galicia and La Rioja, two more autonomous regions in Spain, are considering to use the DMS.
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The national council of Switzerland on 3 May adopted a resolution signalling that electronic governmental services must work on all kinds of computing platforms and should not depend on a single IT vendor. The parliament voted in favour of a motion for improving a software application ‘Agate’, which must be used by the country’s cattle farmers for filing livestock data.
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Patient List, a software application making it easier for doctors to hand over patients, has won the NHS Hack Day 2012 which took place in London last weekend. The application is made available as open source.
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Public administrations in Italy’s Lazio region are encouraged to replace proprietary software with open source alternatives, according to one of the articles of a law on open data adopted on 23 May. The law also says that software developed for and by the regions public organisations should be made available as open source.
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Portugal’s Agency for the Public Services Reform (AMA) is revamping the country’s main eGovernment portals for citizens and businesses. It will use the open source portal software Liferay.
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The UK government appears to be taking positive (possibly even ‘assertive’) steps towards more implementation of open source technologies at this time. The Open Government Summit today will be held on 30th May in Central Hall Westminster and speakers have just been announced.
While the UK public sector is arguably far better at organising “congressional summits” than it is at decisive implementation and action, there will reportedly be examination and analysis into how the open source model allows public sector organisations to be more efficient, save money, meet mission-critical IT demands and improve their services.
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Licensing
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The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) — a nonprofit project hosting the Samba and BusyBox projects — has announced a new initiative to engage in enforcement of the Gnu General Public License and related free software licenses. The move arises following a controversy earlier in the year when it seemed that a former developer of BusyBox — a command-line interface used in embedded devices — was working on ToyBox, a non-GPL-licensed clone of the project. This concerned GPL enforcement activists because BusyBox is a popular entry point to wider GPL enforcement by the SFC on embedded devices.
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Openness/Sharing
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With UDL Book Builder, children can freely create, share, publish, and read digital books. They can express their thoughts, ideas, and feelings in words, pictures, and sound. They can create their own interactive digital stories. This gives children the chance to become an author, to have a voice, to make learning relevant to their experience and their personal lives. They can control the content and the message. Printed materials may still exist and be used in classrooms today, but we’re in a transitional world where print is in flux and digital learning is paramount for young children.
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The Polish Ambassador, a “beat machine from the future,” raised a number of interesting questions on Facebook about “what it would mean to be an ‘open source’ musician.” Discussion ensued. Mike Masnick pointed to this discussion on TechDirt. More discussion ensued.
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Open Data
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Using open source software to build open data application is pragmatic and logical, says Pieter Colpaert, board member of the newly founded Belgian chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The OKF is assisting the government of the Belgian region of Flanders in organising a open data hackaton, in Brussels on the 15 of June.
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Open Hardware
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Standards/Consortia
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During a round-table meeting in Brussels, the Coordination Group of the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) Programme has endorsed four open specifications for e-Government interoperability.
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Finance
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The folks on Wall Street are busily dry-washing the hands in glee at the thought of a massive wave of European bank collapses.
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Privacy
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The reason? Siri ships everything you say to her to a big data center in Maiden, North Carolina. And the story of what really happens to all of your Siri-launched searches, e-mail messages and inappropriate jokes is a bit of a black box.
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Copyrights
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The coalition of authors suing to stop Google Book Search scored a key victory on Thursday as the judge overseeing the case ruled that three individual authors and the Author’s Guild could represent the class of all authors whose works had been scanned by Google. Google had sought the opposite result, arguing that including all authors in a single lawsuit would make the case too complex, and that most authors actually supported the scanning project.
Judge Denny Chin, who rejected a controversial settlement of the case last year, ruled on two distinct legal issues. The first was over whether the Author’s Guild was entitled to serve as a representative of its members. Google had argued that only individual authors could be plaintiffs because the case will require the participation of those individual plaintiffs to consider issues such as fair use.
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Mr. Dotcom, founder of the online storage site Megaupload.com, was arrested in New Zealand in January on charges including criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit racketeering. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down Mr. Dotcom’s website, which it claims was used to pirate half a billion dollars worth of entertainment content.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
06.02.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Everyone is always so fixated on desktop Linux and why it can’t get decent numbers in the desktop market.
The answer is obvious. You can’t come late into the game when someone has a huge installed base and expect to win based on free over easy.
Because that what the desktop battle is (not really a battle, by the way). It’s low cost versus “here, let me do that for you” that MS provides it’s already huge pre-installed base.
You will never win that battle and to prove it, Linux can’t even get a firm foot in the door.
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There are far too many small to mid-sized businesses still relying exclusively on proprietary software and costly hardware solutions to drive antiquated technology.
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Desktop
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Server
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According to IDC, Linux servers generated $2.4 billion in revenue for vendors in the first quarter of 2012. That’s a 16.0 percent growth rate, which is better than the 1.3 percent revenue growth rate for Windows servers.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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AMD’s considerable effort in releasing its Llano and Trinity accelerated processor units (APUs) has been offset by stumbling support from applications for its GPGPU architecture. Now AMD has admitted that it needs to beef up support for Linux.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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In the last two years, I have introduced you to a number of so-called super-duper system administration tools. We learned how to properly analyze a range of problems by carefully studying symptoms and then isolating and fixing the root cause. We learned about strace and lsof, both immensely powerful tools. We focused on system profiling and auditing. We also worshiped the omnipotent GNU Debugger (gdb). Now it is time to combine the powers of all these into one mega tutorial.
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Games
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Lilly Looking Through is a new adventure game for Linux by Geeta Games. The game has absolutely beautiful art, pleasant animations and a totally great soundtrack.
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Black Pants Studio’s action platformer game Tiny & Big in : Grandpa’s Leftovers can be now pre-ordered for $12.99 (Windows, Mac, Linux).
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This year we have Blue Systems as a Platinum sponsor of Akademy 2012 Tallinn. Recently, they made news by offering continous support for Jonathan Riddell, lead developer of Kubuntu, the KDE distribution that they would like to become one of the best on DistroWatch.
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GNOME Desktop
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New Releases
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The final release of VectorLinux 7.0 SOHO is now available. This release is built on the 7.0 GOLD release featuring the recently released KDE4.8.3 desktop experience. VectorLinux is the fastest Linux desktop in it’s class bar none. We have spared no expense to bring the KDE4 desktop to the Linux community in a unique fashion that is best tried to see KDE4 at its most awesome potential. With the custom artwork, visual tweaks and a little Vector magic, behold SOHO as you have never seen it before.
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The SolusOS team is pleased to announce the release of SolusOS 1.1. This release brings greater hardware support and newer application versions, as well as support for hybrid GPU’s, such as the NVIDIA Optimus. A new 3.3.6 kernel is at its core with the BFS patch, alongide the Gnome 2.30 Desktop Environment. Many new application versions are present.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fedora Utils is a tool to tweak Fedora and easily install packages which are not available in the main Fedora repositories.
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Fedora Linux is a high-quality community-supported distribution, and a showcase for new technologies. SELinux, Systemd, PulseAudio, new kernels, new Gnome and KDE releases – if it’s bleeding-edge chances are you will find it in Fedora. Some call Fedora a testbed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a characterization that the nice RH folks don’t always agree with. Regardless of what you call it, new features appear first in Fedora, get pummeled by users, and then work their way into RHEL. It’s a great way to get an early look and start testing new goodies.
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I must admit that Fedora was the first GNU/Linux distribution that introduced me to this world. We used it as the default OS in Linux For You magazine where I worked as a writer and editor. Fedora was also the first GNU/Linux OS that I installed on my PC. I moved to PCLinuxOS, then Mandriva, then Debian and then to Ubuntu. These days I multiboot between Ubuntu, openSUSE and some random OS. I stayed away from Fedora due to RPM Hell. I still remember being burnt by it in Fedora 14. But things have changed dramatically. Fedora is now extremely useful for novice users. I build confidence in Fedora with version 16 and planned to revisit it as 17 hits the Internet. I confess, I never used Fedora as my primary OS, outside my work at LFY.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Developers who would like to learn more about adding their games to the Ubuntu Software Center can also get information through Canonical.
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Like it or not, these sort of fresh ideas are the only thing pushing the Linux desktop forward these days. Gnome wants to take a step backward and try to ‘bling’ its way into your heart. KDE, no matter how excellent it is, lives on tried-and-true desktop idioms and only pushes forward in aesthetics. Unity, as much as you force yourself to believe that it’s uncool, is really innovating and with each release becomes more and more compelling to the nay’ sayers.
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Flavours and Variants
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Reminder: OEM images are for computer vendors and manufacturers. They allow Linux Mint to be “pre-installed” on a machine which is then used by another person than the one who performed the installation. After an OEM installation, the computer is set in such a way that the next reboot features a small setup screen where the new user/customer has the ability to choose his/her username, password, keyboard layout and locale.
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After a very successful launch of Linux Mint 12, we’re taking a look at the newest edition of Linux Mint to see what’s new with this edition.
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Linux Mint is getting difficult to keep up with these days. They officially have 38 different variants of their popular operating system (well, maybe not quite 38) and now they are getting their distro factory installed on another some of those little tiny PCs. Apparently, that little nugget was tucked away in a regular progress report. Today, the Mint guys released their OEM version.
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The Bodhi team and I are happy to announce the first pre-release (Read: Not suitable for daily usage machines) of our next major release Bodhi Linux 2.0.0! This release is considered alpha quality and is intended to allow our community to help test this release before it becomes our “stable” version.
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Electronic Frontier Foundation just posted an article discussing “Apple’s Crystal Prison and The Future of Open Platforms” in which they characterize Apple’s and Microsoft’s restrictive policies as affronts on users freedom, and call on Apple to lead the way by aligning with Steve Wozniak’s call for Apple to open up.
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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This week, Susan covered The Document Foundation’s release of the latest version of the LibreOffice open source office productivity suite. The release announcement claims that the suite offers as much as 100 percent better performance than previous versions, and some early reports from users are confirming that. Meanwhile, there are strong signs that the Linux community is embracing LibreOffice, and that Windows users make up the majority of new downloads for Apache OpenOffice.
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CMS
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Licensing
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants scored a significant victory on Tuesday when a New Zealand judge ordered the United States government to hand over evidence the defense will need to prepare for an upcoming extradition hearing. He rejected the government’s argument that the defendants should make do with the information about its case the government itself chose to introduce in court.
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06.01.12
Posted in News Roundup at 4:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It seems that the folks behind the hugely popular Linux Mint operating system have come up with an announcement that you will soon be able to pick up a Mint-branded computer that is aptly known as the mintBox, where it is more or less a Compulab fit-PC3 that has the Mint brand name on it. Not only that, Compulab intends to share a part of the proceeds with the Mint team in order to further assist their efforts in developing the operating system in order to bring it to greater heights. Right now, Compulab offers its fair share of small form factor PCs under the fit-PC range, with the latest models being hugely line diminutive at a mere 6.3″ x 6.3″ x 1″, and will rely on low power AMD processors as well as Radeon HD graphics to get the job done.
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As we head toward the mid-point of 2012, it’s clear that one of the biggest open source stories of all is the proliferation of diminutive, inexpensive Linux-based computers at some of the smallest form factors ever seen. The tiny $25 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi (shown here) has grabbed many headlines on this front, and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently pledged to give some of the units to U.K. schools along with training for teachers who can pass on Linux knowledge to kids. But the Raspberry Pi is only one of many tiny LInux computers being heralded as part of a new “Linux punk ethic.”
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Desktop
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In my opinion Chromebox and Chromebook are a major threat to Microsoft’s core market — businesses. The desktop as we know it is almost dead and with Microsoft’s switch to Metro will further put a nail in the traditional desktop market. Desktop is being used only by those who either create content and use it for editing audio, video and images. Applications which need massive processing power to handle the workload. The desktop is also used for gaming (though the consoles are picking up).
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If you’re in the market for a Linux-ready PC, May 2012 has been a good month. First eRacks launched a new line of high-end desktops. Then System76 introduced high-power laptop. Now ZaReason, one of the few other big open source OEMs, has both released new hardware and upgraded a popular existing model. Read on for details.
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Google and Samsung have launched fresh hardware aimed at reviving interest in its ChromeOS platform, with a laptop for end users and a desktop box system.
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Kernel Space
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Following the Linux 3.4 kernel benchmarks from last week, available now are the results from a three-way file-system comparison using the Linux 3.4 kernel as well as the Linux 3.2 and 3.3 kernels for reference. The three file-systems being pitted against each other are Btrfs, EXT4, and XFS.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the availability of The Linux Foundation FOSS Bar Code Tracker.
Released as an open source project under the MIT license, the new software tool aims to simplify the way open source components are tracked and reported by using an auto-generated, custom QR code for each product. The QR code contains important information on the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) stack contained in a product, such as component names, version numbers, license information and links to download the source code, among other details.
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Applications
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Whether you want to overclock your PC or flaunt its computing prowess to your tech-crazy buddies, benchmarking is something that has interested tinkerers and newbies alike. The simple process lets users understand the limits of their system, thus making it easier for them to overclock it to the maximum. Furthermore, tech bloggers and reviewers often use benchmarking tools to compare various hardware and gadgets.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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One of the first people I recruited for Valve when they were looking for good Linux referrals was Forest Hale, or better known within Internet communities (including the Phoronix Forums and Phoronix IRC) as LordHavoc. He was the lead developer on the DarkPlaces engine, which is the Quake-derived engine that was used by the open-source Nexuiz game and is now used by Xonotic as well. As can be seen when firing up the old Nexuiz or when running Xonotic, DarkPlaces is both technologically and visually impressive, especially for being a non-commercial GPL-based engine. Under contract he additionally was the lead on the Mac OS X and Linux ports of Quake Live. He’s also done other Linux contract work, but for the work on the open-source DarkPlaces engine is where he’s arguably most known.
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For two weeks, you can pay whatever you want to get these DRM-free games on Windows, Mac, and Linux: Psychonauts, LIMBO, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. If you choose to pay more than the average price, you will also receive Bastion! Each game comes with its soundtrack in both lossless (FLAC) and MP3 formats.
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We are delighted to announce that the Humble Indie Bundle, that was just announced will have all the games available in the Ubuntu Software Center running natively on Ubuntu.
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Desktop Environments
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Xfce’s first release in sixteen months comes at a critical time. After years of being a distant third among Linux desktops, in the last year Xfce has found a new popularity among those looking for alternatives to GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity.
In fact, according to one survey, Xfce is now the second most popular desktop, and starting to crowd KDE — at least among experienced users.
Under these circumstances, Xfce 4.10 might have been an ambitious release, full of new features and extras designed to attract new users. Instead, like earlier releases, the latest version of Xfce consists of a modest set of visible changes — specifically, a few miscellaneous new features, some improvements to the panel, and some new configuration options — that improve the desktop without visibly altering it to any great extent.
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A full desktop environment is the lazy man’s approach to Linux. Most popular Linux distributions today employ a full desktop environment, while hand selecting each component for specific purposes.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia began as a fork of Mandriva Linux in September 2010 by the former employees and contributors of Mandriva because they were not happy with the governance of the project.
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Mageia has been pretty popular ever since its original release last year. While all Linux distributions give you more choice than any other operating system, Mageia was one of the few distros that has a lot of these choices upfront. This is partly due to it being an offshoot of Mandriva, however the team at Mageia have taken it noticeably further.
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Today Charles-H. Schulz posted a short message on Mandriva’s official blog stating that he will be joining the Mandriva team to help them come back to life. Charles-H. Schulz is a very active member of the Open Source community and is probably best known for his invaluable contributions to OpenOffice.org, The Document Foundation, and LibreOffice.
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The Mageia developers are replacing the background image in Mageia 2 after discovering that they did not have permission to include it. Mageia 2 was released just over a week ago. The current background image, which won the Mageia 2 artwork contest, was submitted by a user who had derived it from an original work by pr09studio. The Mageia community were made aware of the use of the Domination wallpaper early on the morning on 31 May and, after confirming that it was derivative, set about remedying the problem.
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I usually avoid to talk much about my day job and what my company is working on, but I will make an exception for this one. Starting today, I will be assisting Mandriva in its Open Source strategy and its relations with the community.
Mandriva has had rough times lately, but things have improved recently and a few important decisions have been made concerning the overall corporate strategy of Mandriva and its role with respect to the Mandriva Linux distribution and its standing within the broader community. Specifically, the conversation on the future of Mandriva Linux as a distribution, the goals and expectations of its community needs to start. In many ways, it is a discussion that has been delayed, but a conversation that is worth having.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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When people generally think of open-source platforms in Korea, Google’s Android immediately comes to mind due to the wide use of smartphones and tablet PCs in the business-to-consumer space.
But in the business-to-business world, U.S.-headquartered Red Hat provides the world’s leading open-source operating systems for enterprises’ data-processing servers.
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Fedora
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Fedora 17, code-named Beefy Miracle, was released yesterday for all to download and use. Aside for the main edition, which uses the GNOME 3 desktop environments, installation images for three main Spins were also released. These are for KDE, LXDE and Xfce.
Specialized Spins for Security, Scientific-KDE, Design-suite, SoaS, Games, Electronic-lab and Robotics were also released. It is very unlikely that I will review these, but there will be reviews of the main edition and KDE Spin. While the reviews are still being baked, here are a few screen shots from test installations of the main edition and KDE Spin for your viewing pleasure.
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That’s a bold claim for a package with such a ridiculous name. While this is a solid update with significant enhancements under the hood and the latest version of the GNOME desktop, there’s nothing particularly miraculous about it – just as we concluded in the review of the beta build.
A miraculous Fedora 17 would have included full support for Btrfs – the kernel at least supports the filing system – but that’s going to require a major rewrite of the Anaconda installer interface and has been postponed until at least Fedora 18.
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Last October, I received a message via Twitter from a hot dog. This hot dog, calling itself The Beefy Miracle, informed me that the latest version of the Fedora operating system, Fedora 17, was going to be named after it. The voting was close, but Beefy Miracle ended up winning by almost 150 votes, and it was released yesterday.
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For the most part, Fedora Linux releases have had names that weren’t particularly controversial. For instance, Fedora 16 was named Verne and the default desktop wallpaper had a submarine type theme (an hommage to 20,000 Leagues under the Sea). With Fedora 17, which was officially released on Tuesday the codename is Beefy Miracle. It’s a theme that has its own mascot and it’s a fun one.
Yet despite that, the default Fedora 17 desktop has no Beefy Miracle.
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I wrote about an Ubuntu user’s experience with Fedora last year when Fedora 16 came out. It was pretty impressed with Fedora 16, and now Fedora 17 is out so I wanted to share my experience about F17. But, I also realized that how different is it going to be from the previous review. One of my friends helped me out. He threw a challenge at me that what if he takes my Ubuntu box away from and leaves me with Fedora 17, will I survive? Sounds interesting so I took up the challenge.
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Debian Family
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Later than originally planned, Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper has released an update to version 7.0 of his popular Live Linux distribution. The first point update to Knoppix 7.0, which was a special “CeBIT Edition” from March, includes a number of improvements and package upgrades, while removing proprietary packages, such as Adobe Reader.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu developers have decided to remove the migration-assistant package from the stock Ubuntu installer. This software package was supposed to make it easy for transferring files and settings to Ubuntu Linux from Windows.
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Now that Ubuntu 12.04 has arrived, a number of questions have bubbled up from the curious minds of those wondering about the state of Ubuntu. When 11.04 hit, faithful Ubuntu users were up in arms about how bad Ubuntu Unity was. It was buggy, it was far from user friendly, and it seemed a slap in the face to those who had worked so hard and so long on the previous default desktop: GNOME.
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Flavours and Variants
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My first ever experience with Xubuntu started much later. It was Xubuntu 11.10 which found its way to my hard disk.
When the version 10.10 was released, I upgraded my (K-)Ubuntu 10.04 systems almost immediately. It was a painful exercise.
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The big moment has come. If this isn’t it, then nothing will ever be. One year after discovering the fickle truth of the would-be modern desktop, the Mint team has decided to go back to its roots and offer the users what they want – functionality. And so, a whole new desktop concept was born.
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Reviews give us a lot of feedback and we pay special attention to them. They boost our motivation when talking about the good and help us pinpoint areas of improvement when talking about the bad. They also give us an opportunity to react to some of the points they make and to start a discussion where we can explain certain things, justify decisions and give you an insight on what is going on behind the curtain when preparing for a release.
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Phones
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Android
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This week, Google introduced a new Chromebook and a new Chromebox–both systems designed around the company’s Chrome OS. The moves, along with recent comments from Google leaders, illustrate that Google is not throwing in the towel on Chrome OS, despite a lukewarm market reaction to it. Other comments from Google leaders pointed toward an event that many people have scoffed at for years: the eventual merger of the Android mobile OS and Chrome OS.
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The new Chromebooks and Chromeboxes may not have gotten much attention outside of tech circles, but Chrome OS will be everywhere…and soon.
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You might have seen people wearing a nifty iPod Nano as the watch. As an Android user you may wonder if there are similar watches running Android. The answer is yes. There are many Android powered watches which are more than just watches. Sony SmartWatch is one such watch, but it does much more than just telling the time.
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It seems like Android powered HTC One X is the Hummer of smartphones. A YouTube video is showing an Asian HTC One X user putting two nails in a wood with is HTX One X phone. You can clearly see in the video below that he was using the screen to hit the nail. At the price of $577.49 on Amazon.com, HTC One X earns the reputation of the most expensive hammer. HTC One X uses the Corning Gorilla Glass for protection of its display.
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The government is missing opportunities to make significant savings by dismissing open source software when procuring products, Tariq Rashid, lead architect at the Home Office, has said.
Rashid, whose role covers information, applications, infrastructure, open standards, and open source, told the Open Gov Summit in London that he has had “lots of battles internally” with the IT security team at the Home Office around open source.
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People tend to ask me why do I do work for free, while I have a company that provides similar services to those I’m giving away to open source. I must say that I don’t completely agree with their way of perceiving contributions to open source. While it superficially looks like working for free, there are a lot of benefits to gather from it, both concrete and abstract.
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Events
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Have you ever been in a situation when you had to wait for some documents to arrive such as your health diagnosis, documents about your house where you live or you are planning to live in? Were you ever curious how much money your country spends on certain resources? This is interesting and important data.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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There’s been a lot of talk about open source and the cloud, which makes sense given the proliferation of open source technologies that actually comprise cloud computing.
But what about open source in the cloud? Can cloud computing and storage provide open source projects less expensive access to computing resources?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the relase of LibreOffice 3.5.4, the fifth version of the free office suite’s 3.5 family.
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Today The Document Foundation released the latest version of their Open Source office productivity suite. This release comes with lots of bug fixes and something everybody loves: improved performance. In fact, the release announcement claims that one could experience as much as 100% better performance.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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A campaign for free software has garnered the support of 267 candidates running for France’s National Assembly in next months’ elections. Most supporters (149 signatures) are Europe Ecology–The Greens candidates. The Pirate Party comes second, with 54 signatures.
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Government IT projects that don’t explore alternatives to closed and proprietary software are getting kicked back and denied funding.
The civil servant running open source, open standards and information management under No 10’s digital change agenda called such spending controls a “key gateway” in complying with new IT procurement rules.
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Licensing
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Conservancy announced today its new coordinated Free Software license compliance effort. As you might guess, in between getting things together for Conservancy conferences, making sure developers get reimbursed on time, and all the other primary work of Conservancy that I’m up to each day, I’ve been spending what hours that I can coordinating this new effort.
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Openness/Sharing
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Freedom doesn’t begin and end with software, though. We are big fans of Free culture in general. There are a few reasons for this. First, we like sharing stuff with people and really enjoy experiencing the creative efforts of others. It’s thrilling and enjoyable and highlights how “Make” and “Play” fit together so well.
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Finance
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I had made the analogy between disease and unemployment: would any reasonable person who understands the cause of a disease oppose a cure? If you knew that a vaccination can prevent smallpox, would you oppose providing vaccinations (at least to those who want them—I do not want to get into a debate about forcing vaccinations as we have never advocating forcing jobs on those who do not want to work)?
Now I do realize this is not quite a fair comparison because it is possible that there are many cures for the disease of unemployment. MMTers advocate the Jobs Guarante (JG) cure. I am open to alternative cures. I just do not hear any coming from the critics.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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In the first official assessement of the Internet access restrictions imposed by Internet access providers, EU telecom regulators depict a very alarming situation. The Internet as we know it is very much at threat, and the EU Commission’s reluctance to take any resolute action on the matter is irresponsible. Like in the Netherlands where the Dutch Parliament adopted a Net Neutrality law earlier this month, Net Neutrality must be enacted into European law.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Votes were cast in three of the four parliamentary committees preparing the EU Parliament’s final decision on ACTA. Citizens’ concerns, as well as Internet innovators & start-ups’ interests have been upheld in “Civil Liberties” (LIBE) and the “Industry” (ITRE) committees. Even the “Legal affairs” (JURI) committee, usually very conservative and keen to support repression on copyright issues, rejected Marielle Gallo’s pro-ACTA opinion. Citizens should rejoice but keep up the pressure for the upcoming steps, up until the final vote scheduled for early July. A massive rejection of ACTA would create a political symbol of global scale.
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05.30.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kumaran wants to make Linux more popular for desktops as an operating system, and is creating his own distribution system to make it happen. “Linux is faster, virus-free, free of cost, has free updates and never crashes. It is used in laptops using distribution systems like Ubuntu. I’m creating my version of Ubuntu called ‘Freaks 2012′,” he says. Kumaran, a national talent search examination scholar from class 8, began missing school often from the class of six, because of a weak knee. Just as he finished his class 10, he realised that he could not eat anything. “I would throw up, suffer bad stomach aches and not be hungry.
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Desktop
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Across the district, computers used to account for nearly 20% of all electricity use. But since they’ve pioneered a new approach to offering computers in classrooms, they’ve cut computer energy use by more than 75%, avoiding costs in excess of 100,000 per year on electricity.
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Google has upgraded the Samsung family of Chromebooks with more powerful hardware and redesigned UI. Android maker has also introduced a new class of ChromeOS-powered device called Chromebox.
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Server
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If people didn’t want ARM-based servers, Dell wouldn’t build them, and so with the launch of the “Copper” ARM server sled for the “Viking” C5000 microserver chassis we know that people want ARM servers. And this is not some experiment that Dell is doing, either, Steve Cumings, executive director of marketing for Dell’s Data Center Solutions bespoke server unit, tells El Reg.
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Applications
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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There’s a Southern expression that goes, “Says easy, does hard.” In this case, it’s easy to say that your company is focused on collaboration and ideas. But many executives conflate the terms “collaboration” and “consensus.” Seeking consensus and creating a democracy of ideas is not what we at Red Hat would call collaboration. In fact, it’s a misstep. Rather, managers at Red Hat make it a practice to seek out ideas from those who’ve shown that they typically have the best ideas — those who have risen to the top of our meritocracy.
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Fedora
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The Fedora Project officially served up their “Beefy Miracle” today. The announcement, chock full of hot dog references, introduced the new release, “At the heat of a thousand hot dog cookers, the seventeenth release of Fedora shall be forged by contributors the world over, and it will be known as: Beefy Miracle. The mustard shall indicate progress.”
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced the release of an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) image of Ubuntu Server for ARM architecture. The image was originally designed for internal testing and has now been made publicly available for developers who want to experiment with software running under Ubuntu on ARM servers. It enables users to quickly set up a completely configured instance of Ubuntu ARM Server in Amazon’s cloud.
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Phones
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It appears the reports of webOS’ death are once more exaggerated. True, several key members of the Enyo development team have joined Google, but the project is evidently still alive and well. Another release of Enyo is on the way, and the core of Enyo 2 is “solid,” HP insists.
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Android
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…powered by what appears to be Ice Cream Sandwich.
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Designed for “smart devices,” the new panel will feature a 440ppi pixel density, beating out the 330ppi Retina display found on Apple’s iPhone.
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Microsoft has already ruffled more than a few feathers with the exclusionary potential of its forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, and this past week the open source community has been up in arms again.
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Databases
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CMS
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The open source WordPress blogging platform turned Nine years old on Sunday (first WordPress release was May 27, 2003). It’s hard to believe that it has been that long isn’t it? (I’ve been a user for the last 8).
WordPress started out as a ‘simple’ blogging platform that valued the user interface and ease-of-use over fancy knobs and deep features.
The focus on usability and adherence to standards has been the hallmark of WordPress in every release since. It’s a focus that has propelled WordPress to become one of the most widely used open source projects on the web today, powered over 10 percent of all websites.
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Education
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I don’t think it’s enough just to teach children how an e-mail client works without also explaining what’s happening behind the screen. I don’t think it’s enough just to show children how to assign variables or manipulate lists without providing some way for them to think about these rather than just using them. It’s just this sort of understanding which we’ve come to label as computational thinking: there’s a strong case for this providing a unique way of looking at the world, with wide applications across (and beyond) the curriculum:
With scientific method, we took things apart to see how they work. Now with computers we can put things back together to see how they work, by modelling complex, interrelated processes, even life itself. This is a new age of discovery, and ICT is the gateway.
–Douglas Adams, 1999
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Version 2.7 of Apache JMeter has arrived, adding new system sampling for operating system processes, improved JMS, WebService and Test samplers, and improved graphs and reports. JMeter is a desktop application designed to load test applications and measure performance; it can test web, SOAP, JDBC, LDAP, JMS, Mail or native commands using its multi-threaded framework to concurrently sample many different operations.
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Licensing
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GPL enforcement within the free software community has just stepped up its game.
Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has announced a coordinated effort among several of its member projects to ensure compliance with their Free Software licenses.
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The Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that it is heading up a “unified effort” among a number of its member projects to ensure compliance with the free software licences they are distributed under. The conservancy is also launching the GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers, which will see Linux kernel contributors request that the Conservancy pursue GPL violators over the Linux kernel.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Apparently, in Python, it is easier to ask for forgiveness rather than seek permission. That is to say, the normal approach when writing Python code is to assume that what you are trying to do will work properly. If something exceptional happens and the code doesn’t work the way you were hoping, then the Python interpreter will tell you of the error so that you can handle that exceptional circumstance. This general approach, of trying to do something, then cleaning up if something goes wrong is acronymically called EAFP (“easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Since the uprising in Syria began last year, Syrian citizen journalists have risked their lives to fill a media void and bring the news of the oppressive government crackdown to a global audience. This has been done often with little recognition for the activists who have laid their lives on the line to report on the government’s assault on an unarmed civilian population.
In March 2011, the arrest of 15 students who had written anti-government slogans on walls enraged the population of Deraa and sparked the first mass protests against the Assad regime. President Bashar al-Assad, who inherited Syria’s harsh dictatorship from his father, launched a series of crackdowns on protestors across the country, sending tanks into cities and opening fire on demonstrators. The violence has only escalated. This week, the country saw the deadlist attack since the protests began — at least 90 people were killed in the town of Houla. Video of rows of dead children lying in a mosque in their bloody shorts and T-shirts shocked the world. A local activist reached by Skype told the Associated Press that pro-regime fighters known as shabiha stormed the village, raiding homes and shooting civilians. The United Nations estimates that the conflict has left more than 9,000 dead and thousands more displaced.
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Finance
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The worst corruption in the world is on Wall Street.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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When it comes to the issue of “net neutrality” I want to ensure that Internet users can always choose full Internet access – that is, access to a robust, best-efforts Internet with all the applications you wish.
But I don’t like to intervene in competitive markets unless I am sure this is the only way to help either consumers or companies. Preferably both. In particular because a badly designed remedy may be worse than the disease – producing unforeseen harmful effects long into the future. So I wanted better data before acting on net neutrality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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La Quadrature has sent letters to three key committees of the EU Parliament urging them to work toward the rejection of the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, along with its voting recommendations.
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05.29.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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ZPODD is short for Zero-Power Optical Disk Drive and is one of the features of the Serial ATA 3.1 specification. What this ZPODD technology allows for is to zero-out the power consumption of an idle SATA ODD to further the power-savings benefits. If the SATA device is completely idle, there’s no need to feed it anything.
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Cadillac’s latest model, the 2013 XTS sedan is all set to go on sale from June, marking the company’s first new launch in three years. This latest product from General Motors highlights CUE (Cadillac User Experience), a Linux powered radio and navigation interface designed for infotainment purposes of Cadillac owners. Early reviews suggest the touch inputs to lag slightly, though the voice input feature appears to be top notch, well in contention with the performance standards of BMW’s iDrive and Ford’s Sync.
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Desktop
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I love buying gadgets, and I’m not one to deprive myself. My house has just about every piece of equipment I’ve ever lusted after, from a Mac Mini hooked up to an Apple Cinema Display to a Sony Bravia 3D TV connected to my PS3. I have a MacBook Air, PS Vita, iPad, Nintendo 3DS, Kindle touch—the list goes on.
I wouldn’t want to do without any of them. But out of all my gadgets and computers, there’s one I respect above all others, and it’s an old piece of junk.
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My name is Lee Hachadoorian. I am a geographer who recently completed a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center. My focus is on using geographic information systems (GIS) and other geospatial tools for urban analysis. My dissertation was on the relationship between metropolitan fragmentation and spatial inequality/segregation. I currently teach GIS at NYU-Poly and work as a Research Assistant at CUNY Center for Urban Research. I’m a backpacker, yogi, and gamer. I use games in my teaching. Last week I had my students do a treasure hunt in downtown Brooklyn and import their GPS tracks into a GIS software.
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Server
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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As the latest Intel Ivy Bridge Linux graphics benchmarks to publish, here is a comparison of some of the different desktop environment options of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when using the Intel Linux graphics driver on the Core i7 3770K with its HD 4000 graphics. The desktop environments being compared include Unity, Unity 2D, KDE, and Xfce. The default Ubuntu Unity desktop with Compiz continues to have problems for the open-source friendly company’s drivers.
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Applications
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Sound is one of those portions of the Linux operating system that is often unappreciated and not even given a second thought. When examined from a technical perspective, the sound frameworks and architectures used within Linux are quite fascinating.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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PlayOnLinux 4.1 was officially announced a few days ago, bringing support for Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system.
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Games
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From May 24th to June 1st, World of Goo creator Ron Carmel is arranging a sale of 383 indie games by roughly 180 developers in an enormous event titled Because We May.
The event’s website allows you to view all the offered games and link to their purchase pages. Games are available on Steam, Google Play, App Store, Desura, Indievania and even directly from the developers.
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For those curious what OpenGL gaming frame-rates are like if trying to run LLVMpipe on the latest Intel Ivy Bridge processors, here are some numbers.
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Wolfire Games has been working on a native Linux port of their forthcoming “Overgrowth” game. This title that’s much anticipated by many Linux gamers now finally has the Linux support available with its new 180 build.
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Desktop Environments
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This time we will look at the Xfce 4 dictionary which is naturally included with the Xfce 4 desktop. Use this tool to find detailed information about any words you specify.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In KDE, there are quite a few apps out there to manage your personal photo library with. The prominent ones that come to mind are DigiKam and Qwenview. While both of these applications are fantastic and highly regarded, they miss one huge mark. The average user. DigiKam literally sets the bar as far as Linux editing, collection and workflow is concerned. Qwenview excels at being a general purpose image viewer. Neither of these 2 applications focus singularly on the task of collecting personal photos in an easy and straight-forward way.
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New Releases
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Robert Shingledecker announced last evening, May 24th, the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core 4.5.3 Linux operating system, including the Tiny Core Plus edition.
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Here’s a quick note to mention that I’ve posted a couple new Installation DVDs for Dream Studio 12.04.
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At LinuxTag 2012, currently taking place in Berlin, the Kanotix development team announced the release of an update to the Hellfire branch and a preview of the Dragonfire branch of its live Linux system. Kanotix appeared in 2003 as a Knoppix derivative and evolved into its own distribution, based on Debian. Designed for use as a general purpose Live CD/USB Linux system and able to boot on a wide range of hardware and with a full range of applications, Kanotix also happily installs onto hard disks to provide a permanently resident operating system.
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François Dupoux proudly announced a couple of days ago, May 26th, the first point release of his popular SystemRescueCd 2.7 Linux-based operating system for rescue and recovery tasks.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia 2, the second edition of the Linux distribution forked from Mandriva Linux, was released just two days ago. Made available for download, were Live CD installation images for KDE and GNOME 3, and other ISO installation media that allows you to install desktop environments and window managers other than KDE and GNOME 3.
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It has taken a few days to get both of these distributions loaded on everything I have around here, but I finally have it done, and I can write up a quick summary of the results. The news is almost all good, with just a couple of minor exceptions.
Samsung N150 Plus, Acer Aspire One 522, Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 – On all of these, both Mint 13 and Mageia 2 installed with absolutely no problems, and run flawlessly. All of the hardware is recognized and supported, displays come up at the correct resolution, wired and wireless networking, Bluetooth, Fn-keys, suspend/resume, power management, screen brightness, it all works.
HP Pavilion dm1-3105ez. The accursed Synaptic “ClickPad” system. Well, Mint 13 at least handles it the same way that Ubuntu 12.04 does, meaning that a two-finger tap produces a right-click, but drag-and-drop and scrolling are still difficult to impossible. Mageia 2 doesn’t handle the ClickPad well at all, it has all the typical problems with right-click, drag-and-drop and scrolling.
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Red Hat Family
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As Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst declared at this week’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, California, open source and its children – including cloud computing – are laying waste to the economics of how traditional enterprises do business, forcing them to gravitate to information to compete. Red Hat’s role in this tectonic shift? Arms dealer.
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Fedora
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Fedora 17 will be shipping next week. It’s got a bunch of new features, none of which I contributed to in the slightest. What I did work on was improving our support for installation on x86 Apple hardware. There’s still a few shortcomings in this so it’s not an announced or supported feature, but it’s sufficient progress that it’s worth writing about.
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The Fedora ARM team, through Paul Whalen, announced earlier today, May 24th, that the Beta release of the upcoming Fedora ARM 17 edition is now available for download.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Google recently announced its Google Drive which is clearly positioned as a competitor to iCloud, SkyDrive or alternative to services like Dropbox or semi-open source Spider-Oak. A lot of Linux users are upset as there is no client for Linux at the moment. The good news is Google Drive will be coming to Linux soon. That doesn’t mean that Linux users were cloud deprived. Almost every cloud solution has its Linux client, including Dropbox and Spider-Oak, and excluding Ubuntu One. Then we have ownCloud for those who want complete control over their cloud. That makes one wonder what future holds for Ubuntu One, Canonical’s personal cloud offering?
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Ubuntu 12.04, codenamed Precise Pangolin, rolled out last month. The new version of the popular Linux distribution brings updated software and new features, including the highly-anticipated Heads-Up Display (HUD) interface. The HUD is one of several excellent improvements that have helped to make Ubuntu’s Unity desktop shell even better in Ubuntu 12.04
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Whenever there has been new transition, people have resisted to adapt to changes. Same has happened for gnome 3 based desktops. Specially from people who used to use gnome 2 as their primary desktop environment. Change for just the shake of change is not the best solution in most cases. However changes with desktops is something that can make or break the deal.
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Canonical, through Victor Tuson Palau, announced a few days ago that they’ve published an AMI image in Amazon Web Services, providing an ARMhf (hard-float) Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system running on an emulated hardware system.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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In June of 2010, Cisco announced their entry into the tablet market with the open source Android powered Cius. As is the case with all Cisco announcements, there were bold predictions about how it would change the market yadda, yadda yadda.
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Some people think the Android/Linux phenomenon on ARMed CPUs is all about mobility. Mobility is a good fit. Availability of apps is great. The real story, the one we will tell our grandchildren about is ARM taking over on desktop and server. While touch is advantageous for small gadgets and ARM is great for battery-powered equipment, both of these are useful on systems with monitor, keyboard and mouse (or other pointer) and network/storage servers. Because Linux is unerneath, nothing prevents monitors, keyboard and mice from being added to ARM systems except connectors. “Desktop” units are large enough to hold connectors. The ARM CPUs of today are sufficiently powerful for many tasks done by desktop-users and servers.
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It’s no secret that open source software is playing an increasingly prominent role in businesses around the globe, but a recent survey has uncovered a few surprising findings about adopters’ motivations for choosing it.
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According to a report by the 451 Group, many companies are now identifying freedom from vendor lock-in as an important reason for switching to open source software. In a recent survey by the group, 60% of respondents said that the top factor that made open source software “attractive” was the absence of the dependency on one particular vendor. The second most quoted factor was lower acquisition and maintenance costs (51%) followed by better code quality (43%) and the ability to look at the source code (42%).
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As all geeks know, today is the 35th anniversary of the release of Star Wars (and it’s also Towel Day too). What you may not have known is that today also marks the release of Apache Wookie 0.10.0.
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The Open Source Software Institute, a non-profit group that supports open-source adoption and the National Security Agency (NSA), the organization in charge of all out of country eavesdropping, will co-host an Open Source Software Industry Day on Wednesday, May 30, 2012. The unclassified, one-day event will be held at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Kossiakoff Conference Center near Fort Meade, MD, which is where the NSA is based. Alas, pre-registration is already over.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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First came the BlackBerry, bringing the smartphones for suits perfected by RIM to consumers. Next came the iPhone, which quickly hoovered up 23 per cent of the market. But the iPhone came at a price: the freedom of users and coders. It is tightly controlled by Apple, as Adobe quickly found to its cost with Flash.
Next up was Android. In just four years, Android exploited consumers’ desire to poke and stroke their phones to become the world’s most popular smartphone OS – burying the iPhone – with 59 per cent of the market.
Android had a plus: freedom of choice for both coder and consumer thanks to an open-source code base.
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BSD
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BSD systems are the technological neighbors many of us meet daily, but few know much about. Martin Husemann of NetBSD explains, analyses, compares and refers to everything there is to know about BSD and NetBSD. Meet this fantastic operating system through another Monday’s interview on Unixmen.
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Project Releases
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I have big news for all the people whose lives involve video editing. Today, literaly in few hours, LightWorks will be released, which is an Open Source professional non-linear video editor.
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Public Services/Government
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The October 2009 memo on Defense Department use of open source software may have inadvertently created an additional roadblock to it, said attendees of a conference on military use of open source.
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Openness/Sharing
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Scholarly publishing in the English-speaking world has been in turmoil since the reduction in higher education funding in the 1970s affected university presses and libraries. Scholarly publishing is not about money, at least not directly, but about personal reputation, research dissemination, impact and the advancement of knowledge. Open publishing accounts for a relatively small proportion of scholarly publishing, though its impact is growing and affecting the commercial publishing models. Agata Mrva-Montoya
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Even better is the fact that the company got few complaints — meaning that IE support isn’t a big deal anymore.
This is fantastic news for Linux users (who can’t run IE) and good news overall that the hegemony of IE is now a thing of the past. Reality of course is that today, desktop users run multiple browsers and developers go mobile first (WebKit/iOS/Android) first in many instances.
It’s also interesting to see how much more it costs to build an IE website. It’s shocking that it could cost $100,000 more isn’t it?
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Security
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Cambridge University researchers find that a microprocessor used by the US military but made in China contains secret remote access capability
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Copyrights
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Some Microsoft Advocates often refer to Linux/FOSS users with the derogatory term “freetard” and even if we look past at the apparent double standards Bing employs in comparison with requests made of Google and we ignore the millions of Windows users using the uTorrent client and downloading copyrighted material, we need only look to Microsoft themselves and a very interesting article by torrent freak, who, after researching a few Microsoft IP addresses, find that records show, their machines have been very busy downloading copyrighted material for free too. Hypocricy? Would we expect anything less from a company that employs a man someone like Steve Ballmer?
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05.28.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The new wave of fun geek toys is inexpensive, hackable, tiny Linux-powered ARM computers, and they’re red hot. This is the year to go small.
The ARM platform has been around for a long time, and nearly everyone has used an ARM-powered device. ARM CPUs come in 32-bit, 64-bit, and multiple core flavors. They are paired with amazing tiny powerful GPUs that deliver high-end video in mobile phones, tablets, media players, game consoles, calculators, routers, backup drives, GPS devices, e-readers, set-top boxes and digital video recorders, robots, 3D printers, home automation, and cameras. ARM Holdings claims that over 20 billion ARM-based chips have shipped since they were developed.
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Desktop Linux is slowly gaining market share but its advancement is excruciatingly slow. The desktop itself is loosing market share to mobile operating systems like Android and iOS primarily because Internet usage is shifting towards mobile devices. A lot of people use their mobile phone as their primary computing device and mobile phone hw is developing leaps and bounds to serve these use-cases (bigger screens, quad-core processors…etc).
Due to its touch-oriented, mobile-centric features + Google’s strong push, Android is rapidly expanding its market share among the mobile operating systems and is the most successful Linux distribution ever.
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Desktop
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The second generation Chrombooks are coming. These Chromebooks are more powerful from the previous generations and run on Intel Celeron processor instead of sluggish Atoms chips. We know this because of some leaks. NewEgg listed SAMSUNG XE550C22-H01US aka Samsung ‘Edison’ Chromebook priced at $549.
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Kernel Space
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The brand once known as the “Standard of the World” has fully embraced the Standard of Geeks for its latest play for the hearts, minds and cash of the upwardly mobile. This is the all-new 2013 Cadillac XTS, and while it certainly isn’t your great-great (great) grandfather’s Cadillac, it’s designed to appeal to everyone from octogenarians to their baby-boomer spawn, and maybe — just maybe — even you….
While the XTS’ spate of processors and controllers isn’t running the open source offspring of Linus Torvalds, the game-changing infotainment intender known as the Cadillac User Experience (CUE) is.
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Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of the 3.4 version of the Linux kernel. While Linus notes that there have been no majorly exciting changes since the last release candidate, it’s worth taking a look at some of the things that have made their way into this release of the Linux kernel and what it means to the Linux community as a whole.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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There’s another Kickstarter-backed game that may be coming to Linux and it’s causing Linux gamers to become extremely excited. In the past day I’ve received no less than 30~40 emails from readers talking about this possible Linux port of Carmageddon: Reincarnation.
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Okay so I am still catching up on the news, Xenonauts the game heavily inspired by one of my all time favourites X-COM has been confirmed it will head to Linux! It’s another kickstarter project but has already hit way over it’s goal so it’s confirmed it will come out!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Akademy, the KDE community summit, is happening in just a few weeks, from the 30 of June to the 6 of July, in Tallinn, Estonia. The Akademy Organizing Team is pleased to welcome this year’s Akademy sponsors whose support is critical to the success of the conference.
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I’m not going to provide screenshots of the installation process, it has been years since I do not do this. I’m going to tell that installation of the base system of Arch Linux is easy, but you will end up with bare bones system. Just the console and the base Linux system, more like a server than a Desktop system.
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Mageia 2 arrived a few days ago as well. “”We’re the Mageia community, and we are very happy to announce the release of Mageia 2! We’ve had a great time building our community and our new release, and we hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed making it. Here are some of the nice things included in Mageia 2: KDE 4.8.2 SC, the current release of the popular KDE desktop; GNOME 3.4.1, Xfce 4.8.3; VLC 2.0.1; Flash Player plugin 11.2; Chromium Browser 18; GIMP 2.8 featuring the all new single window interface, and Amarok 2.5.”
The public release of Fedora 17 was pushed back to May 29 last week, but in their traditional pre-release Go No Go meeting yesterday, the release team agreed the fourth RC can be tagged final and that “The Beefy Miracle” would be shipped on Tuesday, May 29. kparal didn’t even wait for the meeting to adjourn to go “partying.”
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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The RPM project has announced the availability of RPM 4.10.0, which includes great number of changes since the 4.9.x branch. The RPM package management tool was originally developed by Red Hat and is used by many Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, PCLinuxOS and more.
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Red Hat Inc. (RHT), the largest seller of the open-source Linux operating system, fell after an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co. projected a slowdown in billings growth.
The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company declined 3.4 percent to $54.43 at the close in New York, for the third-worst performance in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. The stock has climbed 32 percent this year.
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Red Hat has lured two of the brains behind JRuby, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, who once worked at Sun Microsystems.
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It was about two months ago when the now $10 billion open source software provider Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) blew up – in a good way – for shareholders. The company had just released fiscal Q4 numbers and tech geeks everywhere were all aflutter. Revenue was up – again – and management guidance for the balance of 2012 and 2013 was unwavering.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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How the whimsical naming scheme of Mark Shuttleworth managed to dodge adding a P-adjective to ‘Penguin’, we’ll never know. As founder of Canonical, the commercial company behind Ubuntu, it’s Shuttleworth who pulls these names from his imaginative hat.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Worlds Favourite Distribution gets a new version based on all the good parts of the Ubuntu LTS, and bundled with two traditional desktop environments
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Fans of Linux Mint 13 can look forward to getting their hands on KDE and Xfce variants before the end of June, if predictions by project leader Clement Lefebrve pan out.
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On May 23, 2012, Linux Mint 13 “Maya” was released. There are two desktop flavors available, the MATE Edition and the Cinnamon Edition. MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop since the GNOME project has abandoned GNOME 2 in order to work on GNOME 3 development. Cinnamon is a project started by Linux Mint in order to include a classic GNOME 2 style interface in a GNOME 3 environment. Both of these flavors are available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions.
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Phones
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However, before it sets its sights on the big players, it first needs to overtake the little players, and one of those is Linux.
Yes, Linux.
So how come Linux has a presence on smartphones? It’s mostly down to Samsung and its Bada operating system. By the end of the quarter, Samsung accounted for over 80 percent of all Linux-powered smartphone shipments. Interestingly, Samsung is also the dominant player when it comes to Android too, accounting for over 45 percent of shipments.
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Android
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Toshiba has unveiled a quad-core powered tablet that may pack a punch, but also – the manufacturer hopes – won’t look out of place at Paris Fashion Week.
The Toshiba AT300 boasts a 10.1-inch LED backlit display with a resolution of 1280×800 pixels, with 10-finger multi-touch support, should you need it. The screen itself is Corning Gorilla Glass, which should ensure it stays scratch free for the foreseeable.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Embedded below is the video of the Portal Companion Cube on Linux via Google’s Android platform and running on the hardware that makes up the Vivaldi Tablet.
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Years ago it was Extremadura switching to GNU/Linux over a weekend, more recently Andalucia switched. Now Galicia is investing nearly €1 million in promotion of FLOSS for business and government. They have already saved €2.5 million last year.
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The open source Puppet configuration management system is widely used to get software onto servers. Now the developers behind Puppet are going a step further, taking aim at bare metal provisioning in an open source effort with EMC called Razor.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The eighth update to the 4.1.x branch of VirtualBox has been published with compile fixes for the recently released Linux 3.4 kernel. The new version, 4.1.16, of the open source desktop virtualisation application improves the overall stability of the software by rectifying various regressions, including some that could lead to crashes, and a problem that caused some rpm-based packages to have an incorrect help file path on Linux hosts.
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Most observers are applauding Google its successes in the Oracle v. Google case… but not everyone is thrilled about it.
The jury for the Oracle vs. Google trial delivered their verdict for the second phase of the case–the patent phase–and as you probably know by know, found absolutely no patent infringement on the part of Google.
With no patent infringement found, and only minor infringement found in the earlier copyright phase of the trial, Judge William Alsup dismissed the jurors early, since the planned damages phase was pretty much rendered moot by yesterday’s decision.
The trial is not over, of course: Alsup will probably rule on damages himself, and there’s still his ruling on the copyrightability of application programming interfaces to come sometime next week. That API ruling is now arguably the most important remaining part of the case.
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Funding
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As part of a project to create a non-DRM fixed media standard for high-definition video releases, Terry Hancock has launched a Kickstarter campaign which will produce two Lib-Ray video titles and player software to support them (“Sita Sings the Blues” and the “Blender Open Movie Collection”).
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Openness/Sharing
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From the beginnings of human literature, there has been an instinct to identify with the community, the collective, more than with any individual author. Many of our most valuable texts have been created by social groups and belong to those groups. Multiple, anonymous authorship brought China its cherished Classic of Poetry, gave England Beowulf, and even accounts for parts of the Christian Bible, such as the book of Hebrews—author unknown. The Bible, by the way, tells not one definitive account of the story of Christ, but four that contain conflicting details. So despite the current celebrity mystique surrounding the individual, named author, it’s safe to say that at the core of human civilization lie values of collaboration, shared experience, and shared ownership. And certain movements in literature today remind us of those values.
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Programming
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As I reported on Phoronix earlier this month and was widely-carried by other news outlets after that, FreeBSD 10 will using the LLVM/Clang compiler and deprecate GCC. The BSD camp wants to get rid of the GPL-licensed compiler from the Free Software Foundation and replace it with the younger but promising Apple-sponsored and BSD-style-licensed LLVM and Clang; see the earlier Phoronix articles on the topic for greater detail.
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Microsoft doesn’t really expect that 500 million “users” will have Windows 8 next year, but it’s still juggling the numbers.
The company has said reported comments by chief executive Steve Ballmer on Windows 8 uptake in 2013 are a “restatement of data” by a company employee in December 2011, and that these stats relate to Windows 7 licence upgrades.
Ballmer was reported by the AFP to have told the Seoul Digital Forum in South Korea this week: “500 million users will have Windows 8 next year.”
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Finance
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In times like these, companies might need a scorecard to keep track of the alleged misdeeds and missteps of those at the top. Take, for example, an especially problematic seat on the Goldman Sachs (GS) board. On March 19, 2010, Goldman put out a press release announcing the nomination of a new board member — former Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott. Goldman was still feeling the heat in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and Scott had the right résumé and experience. After all, he had led Wal-Mart through its own public relations troubles.
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Copyrights
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There are some welcome provisions in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012, and some worrisome provisions. Pranesh Prakash examines five positive changes, four negative ones, and notes the several missed opportunities. The larger concern, though, is that many important issues have not been addressed by these amendments, and how copyright policy is made without evidence and often out of touch with contemporary realities of the digital era.
There are some welcome provisions in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012, and some worrisome provisions. Pranesh Prakash examines five positive changes, four negative ones, and notes the several missed opportunities. The larger concern, though, is that many important issues have not been addressed by these amendments, and how copyright policy is made without evidence and often out of touch with contemporary realities of the digital era.
The Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012 has been passed by both Houses of Parliament, and will become law as soon as the President gives her assent and it is published in the Gazette of India. While we celebrate the passage of some progressive amendments to the Copyright Act, 1957 — including an excellent exception for persons with disabilities — we must keep in mind that there are some regressive amendments as well. In this blog post, I will try to highlight those provisions of the amendment that have not received much public attention (unlike the issue of lyricists’ and composers’ ‘right to royalty’).
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ACTA
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