Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Opinion: Is economic collapse good for Linux?

  Thus, though we may face economic hardships not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s, we can at least look forward to a Linux Renaissance.

• Asus Support – Excellent and Linux Friendly

  I’d heard stories from fellow Linux users about companies not honoring hardware warranties, unless Windows was reinstalled on the system. It’s wrong, but it does happen. I called up the Asus support line and after jumping through a countless number of automated menus I arrived at someone who could help me. After being walked through a few id-10-t checks the person on the phone agreed with me that the unit needed to be sent to a repair center. It didn’t matter that the system was running Linux, it was a clear hardware issue.

• Linux, Linux, everywhere!

  Not long ago, I started to realize that Linux is already creeping up on me from all sides. People who have never heard of Linux were raving about it. They were showing me their latest gadgets and telling me how cool they were. After several months of random people going on about their gadgets I did realize that Linux is everywhere and it came upon us from an unusual source. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I am talking about Android which is based on the Linux kernel. A lot of people purchasing their latest phones do not know what Linux is or that Android is based on the Linux kernel. However, they are definitely happy with their latest hardware and the many features Android has. Moreover, Android phones are selling in large quantities and are surpassing Blackberry and iPhone sales. This is amazing and the trend seems to be continuing with excellent and solid phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S2. The Galaxy S2 is a gorgeous phone and it is even better than the iPhone 4. Apple will definitely have to come up with many cool new features for the iPhone 5 to be able to compete with the Android Smartphones.

• Evolution of the Operating System

  UPDATE SJVN has an article out with a similar theme.

  “In the long run, the question isn’t going to be “Which desktop operating system is going to be the winner?” No, it’s going to be, “Which mobile operating system will be the winner.””

  I don’t quite agree with that. I see a very diverse ecosystem in the future with many systems working together. There will be a need for “desktop” systems for a long while:

  * huge screens just are not mobile…
  * there are heavy tasks that just work better with storage and computing power close together…
  * thin clients can work with large displays and still be cool, quiet and unobtrusive…
  * desktop systems and notebooks can shrink quite a bit if we get rid of huge hard drives, power supplies, and CD drives. I expect a lot of the mobile tech will invade the desktop/notebook space…

  see Is XP finally dying or is it the PCs it’s been running on?

• Linux Australia sorts out finances, keeps membership free

  Australia’s peak body for Linux and open source software, Linux Australia, will change its constitution and financial year arrangement this month and has committed to offering free memberships for anyone interested in the organisation’s programs and events.

  Linux Australia is an incorporated organisation in the state of NSW and operates as a non-profit, not a charity.

• Windows is Dying… and so are Macintosh and Linux

  Writing in ZDnet.com, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has an interesting article. Well, it was interesting to me, and I suspect anyone else interested in the future of computing will enjoy reading it also. Vaughan-Nichols points out that the number of Windows XP computers has now slipped to slightly under 50% of all installed personal computers. Windows Vista remains steady at 10% and Windows 7 has edged up slightly to about 28% of the market. The small remaining percentages comprise Macintosh OS X plus a tiny handful of people who use Linux.

• Indemnification assurance for community edition open source

  Bristol-based LinuxIT is launching an indemnification programme to underwrite community-based open source software. The company claims to be able to provide organisations with a “guarantee and assurance at zero risk”, no less.

  This arguably somewhat questionable claim is achieved by LinuxIT’s process of “verifying open source software” by running it through an accreditation process.

  The programme which is backed by an as yet unnamed “leading” global insurance-based financial services provider and a LinuxIT Service Level Agreement (SLA), which the company says enables LinuxIT to fix or replace software that does not work as expected. Cover to the value of £5m is provided.

• Desktop

  • GNU/Linux on the Server Side Helps ‘Desktop Linux’

    The myths about “desktop Linux” are mostly associated and tied to “easy of use”. Many people, mostly ones with next to zero experience when it comes to GNU/Linux, have blindly decided that the slow growth of GNOME and KDE is due to an inherent problem other than marketing. But perceptions are changing when people discover that they are surrounded by GNU/Linux, even if their own client machine does not run a Free/libre operating system.

  • Linux Netbook Review: ZaReason Teo Pro Netbook

    The Teo Pro is yet another netbook running Ubuntu Linux and equipped with the venerable Atom N450. In fact, spec wise the Teo Pro is almost identical to the Terra HD except that the Teo Pro has a 10.1 inch 1024×600 LCD and one less USB port. Everything else in the loaner they sent me is equivalent to the Terra HD. As shipped, my loaner had a Atom N450, Intel NM10 Chipset, Intel GMA 3150 graphics, Intel HD Audio, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 1.3 Megapixel Webcam, 10/100 Ethernet, 2 GB of ram and a 40 GB SSD. The default configuration opts for a 320 GB 5400 RPM hard disk and 1 GB Ram. The SSD makes this netbook a little faster than my normal netbook since it has a set of spinning platters.

  • KVM Virtualization: Ready for the Desktop?

    There are almost more virtualization tools out there today than even Wikipedia can count. KVM, however, stands out among them as perhaps the only free, non-commercial and open source hypervisor designed for enterprise-grade performance. And it’s come far in its (comparatively) short life — so far, in fact, that it may be time to consider it as a virtualization solution for the desktop as well as the server.

    KVM, which stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and has nothing to do with KVM switches, is a somewhat younger project than most of its major competitors including VMware’s hypervisors, VirtualBox and Xen. It’s also different from many other virtualization tools because it focuses on deep integration with the kernel itself, theoretically providing performance advantages over hypervisors that exist mainly in userspace.

  • 5 great uses for your old Windows computer

    Linux tester. Many Linux users start with an older machine to avoid the shame of buyer’s remorse (or, well, installer’s remorse, anyway). Linux isn’t a resource hog, so even decrepit old machines can usually handle it with grace and style. If you’re curious, it’s incredibly simple to install Ubuntu, and much easier than you would think to actually make a complete transition from Windows.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • LB – Episode 70 – Google+ or Minus

  • FLOSS Weekly 176: Colin Percival

    We chat with Colin Percival who has managed to put FreeBSD on EC2 and figured out a good way to have secure backups in the cloud.

    Guest: Colin Percival

• Kernel Space

  • A Look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 3.0

    It was big news when the 3.0 kernel was released at the end of July, but as luck would have it, another fundamental piece of your average distribution is about to bump its own version number up to 3.0 as well: the filesystem hierarchy standard (FHS). If you’re not sure exactly what that means or why you should care, don’t worry. It’s the distros that implement the FHS — when it goes well, all you know is that your system runs smoothly. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing important hidden away in this new release.

  • Linux Creator Linus Torvalds and Other Hackers Don Penguin Suits, Tuxedos at Formal Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Linux

  • The First Shot Towards GStreamer 1.0

    Back in June I mentioned the plans for GStreamer 1.0 and that work is now beginning to materialize. GStreamer 0.11 has just been officially released as the first development snapshot for what will turn into the notable GStreamer 1.0 release.

  • Intel Sandy Bridge Speeds Up On Linux 3.1 Kernel

    Last week the DRM pull went in for the Linux 3.1 kernel. For the Intel DRM graphics driver in the Linux kernel there is frame-buffer compression clean-ups, high color support, ring frequency scaling, shared LLC support, and hang-check module disabling. Compared to the Linux 3.0 kernel, the driver improvements significantly boost the open-source graphics performance for Intel Sandy Bridge hardware.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Multiple X Servers For One Graphics Card, Again

      One of the long sought after features of X.Org and the Linux graphics stack has been the ability to run multiple X Servers from a single graphics card. While this wouldn’t be used by many, there are still many interested in seeing this feature request become a reality.

    • A Handful Of Patches Arrive For Wayland

    • NVIDIA 280 Linux Driver Series Becomes Official

    • A Modular Rendering System For ioquake3 Engine

      The ioquake3 game engine, the open-source project built around id Software’s Quake 3 engine release and is used by a number of multi-platform games, has its rendering system now modularized.

      The ioquake3 project has long had asspirations to move to a modular rendering system (see this Wiki page from last uear) in order to modernize this Quake 3 engine adaptation while maintaining compatibility with original Quake 3 content. In particular, developers are interested in modernizing the graphics and content capabilities.

• Applications

  • Linux Apps That Will Help You Graduate College

    This is the second guest post written by Whitney from Technected. Whitney majored in journalism and has been using Linux ever since. She now works for a large automotive corporation in the Midwest. In her spare time she enjoys playing video games, gardening and watching Dr. Who.

    Linux is a very powerful OS, many people don’t know that. With all the mainstream programs that Microsoft creates, most people remain ignorant of the awesome programs out there for free that are being produced by Linux developers. Many of the apps out there can help you reach your traditional or online degree. Below is a list of 5 that will help you graduate college.

  • Learn About The Stars In The Sky With Open Source Program Stellarium

  • Google Music Manager now Plays to Ubuntu’s tunes.

  • Jokosher: A Completely Kosher Audio Multitool

    Depending on who’s using it, an advanced audio editing application can be either feature-rich or overly stuffed with complicated tools the user has no need for. Jokosher dials complexity down a notch and offers a powerful and easy-to-use multitrack editor. Advanced users may miss certain features, but others will appreciate the straightforward simplicity of Jokosher as well as its great interface.

  • Top 5 VLC media player skins

  • Best Linux Software Applications for Guitarists and Guitar Enthusiasts

    Whether you’re casually strumming the chords to your first song, or enthralling a head-bobbing crowd with your 20-minute solos, there are a few applications that a guitar lover like you must have on your Linux box. Even though there are countless guitar apps for Windows and Mac, it doesn’t mean that musicians on Linux should be left behind. Remember that the Linux platform has given birth to some of the most prolific songwriters of the century like Maestro Richard Stallman. His masterpiece, the Free Software Song, is still crooned by millions of Linux geeks, getting them through those atrocious weeklong coding marathons. So, there’s no doubt that Linux does have some excellent applications that every guitar player would love to have on his or her computer.

  • Proprietary

    • Linux gets a bit of good news on the Netflix front

      But regardless of the Chromium issue, I have to say…how cool is this? The Linux community cries out and the corporate world is actually listening. Of course it also helps that the Netflix engineers are Ubuntu fanatics, so we had them on our side the entire time. It could even be that these two particular engineers have taken this project squarely on their shoulders, just to make it happen. If that is the case — then bravo to them. The Linux community needs more fans like that, in high places, to do this kind of work.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Understanding dpkg’s file overwrite error

    • How to Install Latest Kernel 3.0 on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty)

    • How to customize Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment

    • Customize your Ubuntu 11.04 desktop

    • A simple introduction to fabric

    • 20 Linux Log Files that are Located under /var/log Directory

    • The Amber Tutorial

    • How to write your own pipe menu scripts

    • Image type and size from the Linux command line

    • How To Create an Ebook with OpenOffice.org

    • Coding Copy and Paste Functionality

    • How to Install Gnome 3 In Ubuntu

    • Install GNOME 3 in Ubuntu 11.04

    • Set Penguins Crawling on your Desktop!

    • Configuring Sendmail SMTP server on CentOS & Scientific Linux

    • Icons on menus for Openbox

    • Use Wine to run Windows software on Linux

    • Install Mandriva Desktop 2011 on a btrfs file system

    • Substitution with sed

    • Three Real-Time Animation Methods: Machinima, Digital Puppetry, and Motion Capture

    • Summer Hacking

    • PeaZip – A cross platform, desktop neutral file and archive manager

    • How to (Re-)Compress PDFs with Images for Free

    • A Fast(er) LibreOffice Build

    • please use indexes in your database tables

    • Quick Tip: Disable Certain File Types in digiKam

  • Wine

    • Top Windows games that run flawlessly in Ubuntu using Wine

      Even though most games wont run natively on Ubuntu there is still a sizeable number that runs flawlessly on it thanks to the almighty Wine. The Wine app database lists a few games that run flawlessly on Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution for that matter and assigns a rating for them based on precious metals.

  • Games

    • live.linuX-gamers.net: Linux games for the portable person

    • Humble Indie Bundle Updated With A New Game !

    • Multiplayer Game Teeworlds 0.6.1 Released for Linux

    • Interview with a 0 A.D. Developer

      With thanks to Constantinos of the greek Linux site OSArena, he sent me a request to publish an interview he did with 0 A.D’s Aviv Sharon.

    • Minetest

    • OpenClonk and Humble Indie Bundle updates.

    • Linux users pay 3x that of Windows users for Humble Indie Bundle 3

      Linux users are a generous lot. Could it be that they get most of their software for free meaning there’s spare cash to buy games and donate to charity at the same time?

      If the sales stats for the latest Humble Indie Bundle 3 are anything to go by then Linux users are willing to pay a lot more for their games. Although in this case it’s as much about giving to charity than it is purchasing some entertainment.

    • Link-Dead, New 2D Multiplayer Action Game Coming to Linux

      Link-Dead is a unique multiplayer-only 2D action game with a team-based realistic side-view combat. The first public alpha of the game has been released under pay-what-you-want model and development is on going on a really fast pace.

    • Doomsday Testin

    • Bundle In A Bundle: HIB2 now in HIB3!

      The Humble Indie Bundle 2 games: Braid, Osmos, Machinarium, Cortex Command and Revenge of the Titans have just been added to Humble Indie Bundle 3. Everyone who purchased Humble Indie Bundle 3 before 10:30am PST today will automatically see the extra games on their download page. New purchasers will have to beat the current average on the site to unlock the extra games.

    • What Should Linux Gamers Expect From QuakeCon 2011?

      QuakeCon, the annual gaming event and massive LAN party hosted by id Software, is about to get started in Dallas, Texas and run through Sunday. At this free public event, there’s usually a variety of interesting announcements made, some of which can impact Linux gamers.

    • 4 of the Best Economy Games for Linux

      If you’re anything like me, sometimes you just crave a particular kind of game. Maybe it’s an FPS, maybe a puzzle game, maybe a new Real Time Strategy. Lately for me, it’s been games of economy. SimCity and Tycoon type games – where you build up your business/city to greatness through clever monetary strategy. As a Linux user that naturally left the question “Are there any good economic games for Linux?” The following should be a helpful (though certainly not exhaustive) guide to a few of the best economic games for Linux.

• Desktop Environments

  • OpenBox 3.5.0 Window Manager Released

    OpenBox, the window manager originally derived from Blackbox and is used by the LXDE desktop environment and other niche configurations, has just reached its version 3.5 milestone release.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • new Plasma Active repos

    • Shadow and no Oxygen

    • Amarok 2.4.3 “Berlin”

      As you may remember, the last beta release was 2.4.2 beta 1. After that, we did roll a 2.4.2 (final) tarball, but because of some issues which were fixed right after the tag we decided to make another tarball and call it 2.4.3.

    • Kde 4.7 Released And In The Wild

      If you are a 4.6 user who has just upgraded, don’t expect to be aware of major changes the first time you reboot. Some of the core applications have been updated, but most of the work has gone into improving the underlying frameworks. The applications themselves have been shifted to a greater reliance on Akonadi, the PIM storage framework and NEPOMUK, the semantic information database.

      Kontact is the KDE PIM suite that includes email, contacts and appointments. Again, don’t expect to see many apparent differences when using the applications as most of the changes take the form of a switch to Anakondi for data storage. The mail component, Kmail is an example of this as it has been rechristened Kmail 2, although it looks almost identical to the previous version.

    • Modular KDE 4.7.0 arrives for Slackware

      The 4.7.0 release comes in the form of many more tarballs than usual. I needed to find time to re-write the KDE.SlackBuild we use to compile all of the KDE-related packages, and the holiday period was the first time I found some time to think and work on the script. I took the modular X.Org script and modeled the new KDE.SlackBuild after that. The advantage with the new script is that new source tarballs can easily be incorporated into the build framework now, and the new package that would be created from that source takes only a few extra lines of configuration to be added. Unfortunately, writing and testing took a while, and you had to wait for a complete set of packages a little longer.

    • Continuous Integration for KWin

    • New Pup is Born, Dolphin 2.0

      Dolphin, that underappreciated file manager shipped with KDE, has had a hard time. Many users didn’t want it in the first place. Many were upset that it replaced Konqueror as the default file manager. Some have real complaints and will never be happy with it. But those who use Dolphin might be happy with some of the newest changes coming in KDE 4.8.

      Peter Penz today blogged about his latest work on Dolphin and the major improvement he discussed was the “view-engine” for the view mode. Dolphin currently uses Qt’s Interview Framework which might be slow, unstable, and a pain for developers to work with. For these reasons Penz said he will be switching to Itemviews-NG which is said to make things “simpler, faster, and easier to use.”

    • Phonon VLC 0.4.1 – The Rise of Legacy Media

      This thrilling new release of the VLC backend for Phonon features vastly improved subtitle loading, support for it, s3m and xm, as well as greater stability in case of a broken libvlc installation.

    • Try KDE 4.7.0 now

    • Improvements in KOrganizer 4.7

    • KDE 4.7 – You didn’t think you would get off that easily, would you?

    • wetabirific

      Last week, I received a WeTab, hansomely provided into my care by the folks at OpenSLX so that I can track Plasma Active development on that device. Getting it set up was quite straight forward, particularly as the one I received already had firmware that supported booting from external media. Perfect. After a few small glitches related to the release of Plasma Workspaces 4.7, which caused some of the repositories to move around for us, I got the thing up and running. There are still some rough edges, and I’m hoping Sebastian and I can huddle together during the upcoming Berlin Desktop Summit to file some of them off as he probably currently has more experience with the WeTab and Plasma Active than anyone else.

      One result of having the WeTab in my hands is that I’ve been able to start collecting a list of tasks that need attention between now and the 1.0 release of Contour. It’s also giving me great hands-on opportunities with Plasma Active on a device of this form factor.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME Visual Identity manual

    • Can GNOME 3 Become the Next Big Open Source UI Contender?

      To my surprise, GNOME Shell in its latest iteration actually worked relatively well. Not only was it stable — more stable, in fact, than the normal Ubuntu 11.04 interface, which has been crashing my Intel Sandy Bridge graphics driver periodically for reasons I’m still trying to track down — but it was also actually usable, a far cry from the last (beta) version of the interface I’d tested.

• Distributions

  • FOSS, Linux, Distros and Life

    Distros. Fool me once, shame on you. My dear wife and I have come to the realization that distros are willing to throw their users to the curb for any or no reason. Those of you who drive the distro development need to pay more attention to your users. In fact, that is the only thing you should be looking at. I or we shall use what works. Make it hard to set up or hard to install missing whatevers and we will just download and try the other guy’s distro. If we have a distro we like and the community within that distro is rude or unfriendly, well I guess we know where we do not belong. Some of the communities that are distro-specific have become exclusionary to the extreme. They will not play with others. I live in a town of 12,000 or so people. We have 13 different churches, all Christian, and 14 AA groups. So maybe I am wrong, being divisive may be the way of the future? Group hug?

  • New Releases

    • SystemRescueCD & Parted Magic update to Linux 3.0

      The developers of the SystemRescueCd and the Parted Magic multi-platform partitioning tool have released new versions of their Linux distributions. Both of the updates are based on the latest 3.0 release of the Linux kernel and offer a number of changes and package updates, such as Firefox 5 and version 0.9.0 of the GNOME Partition Editor (GParted).

      Version 6.4 of Parted Magic has some “major improvements” on systems with Radeon and Mobile4 graphics cards. Other changes include updating Clonezilla to version 1.2.9-19. The developers also note that SMP support was removed from the i486 kernel, and an option to use the NV driver has been added to the failsafe menu due to issues with the Nouveau X.org driver.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Japanese in PCLinuxOS? Of course!

      After having installed PCLinuxOS 2011.6, I must say that I am very pleased with it. Differently from Mandriva 2010.2, I can see videos and listen to MP3 files out of the box and I don’t need to fiddle with the system to mount the partitions where my other Linux distributions are. It seems that everything works as expected. Great!

      But I still had one concern. Although I’m not a power user, for my work, I require a feature that is not very common: a Japanese input method editor. That’s one major area (of the many) where Windows 7 fails miserably; you are expected to pay more to obtain a Japanese-capable system, which is a rip off because regular XP did include a Japanese IME. Oh, well, we are familiar with the “Less-is-more” philosophy underlying Windows…Too bad it doesn’t apply to your pocket

    • Mageia 1

      It’s unfortunate that as venerable a distro as Mandriva ran into some corporate trouble. However, I’ve always been the type that believes you should make lemonade out of lemons and so apparently are the Mageia developers. They have taken a bad situation and turned it into something very positive indeed! Mageia is off to a very good start and I look forward to seeing more releases of this fine distro.

      I particularly like how community-oriented Mageia is; the Mageia developers have made it very easy for users to participate and help develop this distro. That’s a great approach and I think it will reap a lot of dividends for Mageia as the years go by and this distro matures.

    • Time for some news

      As most of you who are following either my twitter or facebook has already noticed, I am working at Intel now, within the Intel Linux Graphics group.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Review: CentOS 6.0

      So what’s the deal? CentOS is outwardly identical to Scientific Linux except for four things: branding, lack of boot splash, lack of multimedia codecs included out-of-the-box, and lack of compositing/desktop effects out-of-the-box.

    • Red Hat completes 10 years of Linux Kernel Leadership

      This milestone presents a good opportunity to reflect on what has been an exciting and vibrant period of time

      The recent numbering change in the Linux kernel brings to a close a 10 year history of the prior kernel series. This milestone presents a good opportunity to reflect on what has been an exciting and vibrant period of time – over 10 million lines of code have been added to the Linux kernel. This is a great testament to the power of community. Over time, the contribution levels among companies has fluctuated, however, Red Hat has consistently been among the top employer contributors. The fine folks at LWN in cooperation with several developers have long maintained statistics and reported results.

    • Red Hat Extends Open Source Summer Teaching Program to the Academic Year

      Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the expansion of its Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) 2011 that took place in late July in Raleigh, NC. Now in it third year, POSSE is a higher education faculty program that immerses professors in the culture, tools and practices of open source communities. Due to the overwhelming success of this year’s summer weekend workshop, several POSSE activities are scheduled throughout the 2011-2012 North American school year.

    • Fedora

      • Governance and scarcity.

        Recall the friction a year or two ago regarding how to advertise different spins of Fedora on the website, and whether or not the layout would recommend a default spin, or promote one spin as a first-among-equals. Real estate on the front page of fedoraproject.org is a scarce resource, which leads to lots of people debating the most efficient way to allocate it.

  • Debian Family

    • Debconf

      I’m very excited about the recent progress on expo.debian.net (a mentors.debian.net replacement), which could help streamline our sponsorship process.

    • Recent improvements with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

      Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was first released with Squeeze in last february. The “technology preview” label indicated, among other things, that it had a number of limitations when compared with what users would expect: missing features, incomplete functionality, etc.

    • Derivatives

      • Aptosid 2011-02: is it any good?

        Aptosid is Debian-based Linux distribution aiming desktops of users wishing to live on cutting edge of technology. It is based on Debian Sid, which is unstable branch. Sid is kind of sandbox where developers can test their ideas before they are moved to Testing and eventually to Stable releases. It means that while Debian as whole is considered by many as rock-solid system, Sid should never be considered as such. And this is a platform for Aptosid.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Software Centre’s New Look

          Few people would argue that the Ubuntu Software Cenre in its current forms needs a makeover. Thankfully it is getting one, although whether or not it will be ready in time for Oneiric’s release in October is a whole different debate.

        • Interview with Em

        • Many Ubuntu Users Still Hate The Unity Desktop

          Two weeks ago on Phoronix it was asked what do you dislike or hate about Ubuntu? This was following a discussion on the Ubuntu development list about Ubuntu developer applicants being asked about what they like the least about Ubuntu. The overwhelming response among Phoronix readers was clear: they still really hate the Unity desktop.

        • Getting to know Ubuntu Software Center

          For all of Ubuntu’s ease of use (and, yes, I do find it easy to use), installing software can be a pain. There are so many ways to do the deed: manually installing software, using apt-get, compiling, using .deb packages. And, of course, my (least) favourite: Synaptic Package Manager).

        • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 226

        • Canonical Sees Seven Opportunities for Ubuntu Partners

          Seeking to promote Ubuntu to resellers and distributors, Canonical is making a surprise appearance this week at CompTIA Breakaway in Washington, D.C. Here, Canonical is outlining seven potential profit opportunities for partners that back Ubuntu, a Linux distribution that has mobile, desktop, server and cloud computing capabilities. Equally important, Canonical is promoting Landscape — a remote management tool — for VARs and MSPs.

        • New game titles in the Ubuntu Software Center

          We’ve recently added a few titles to the Ubuntu Software Center and have been hard at work on getting more diverse applications landed there. BEEP! by Big Fat Alien and Heileen from Hanako Games have recently landed in the Software Center.

        • Ubuntu IVI Remix receives GENIVI Alliance Compliance Approval

        • Unity Facebook App Adds Muti-photo Uploads and Easier Installation

        • What’s Not To Like About Ubuntu?

          Phoronix recently ran a survey, asking users to tell them what they dislike (or hate) about Ubuntu. The results are interesting, but seem to me to be completely predictable to everyone except Canonical themselves. What do users hate the most? Unity, of course. A couple of others hit some of my pet peeves as well – such as the “Not Invented Here” syndrome, which causes Ubuntu to put massive amounts of effort into re-inventing things (often inferior), and their general slowness in updating packages. That slowness extends beyond the inherent delay because they try to make major package updates in conjunction with their own 6-month release cycle, to situations where they really fall significantly behind an upstream package release even after they have made their own 6-month release.

        • The Road to Alpha 3

          All the changes in this week’s desktop team report have landed for the Alpha 3 release of Oneiric that will be out sometime today.

        • Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 – behind the scenes with Oneiric Ocelot

          Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 (otherwise known as Oneiric Ocelot) is available today. The sub-cycle between Alpha 2 and 3 has been quite intensive with a number of things taking place, says Dave Walker, Ubuntu Server’s technical lead…

        • Canonical Expands Partnerships with Game Developers

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Arios and gNatty – two interesting remaster of Ubuntu

            Maybe you are disappointed by Unity and looking for something new? But you would not like to go away from the known Ubuntu environment?

            Of course, Ubuntu like any Linux distribution, you can customize the look and the behaviour in the way you want. Depending on the knowledge you have, it will be more or less successfully. Or if you do not have time to adjust, try some of the already finished remaster . You may find some that you will like.
            Arios and gNatty are two remaster of Ubuntu using Ubuntu 11.04 as a basis for the operating system.
            Arios is configured to be an usable distribution, while gNatty it’s just an interesting concept that still needs a lot of work.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Why the Tablet Craze?

      I made a post last year titled “The Year of the Tablet Computer”. It is now over half way through 2011 and it seems the touch screen craze is far from over. Apple has released the second iteration of their iPad, we are up to our ears in Android tablets from various hardware makers and a Meego tablet or two might still exist before the year is up. I’ve played with the iPad a bit, I’ve used more than a few different Android tablets (I even own one for purposes of developing Bodhi for ARM) and I must say I’m confused what all the hype is about.

    • Tablet for toddlers runs Android 2.3

      A start-up called Vinci is taking pre-orders at Amazon.com for a seven-inch Android 2.3 tablet designed as an educational tool for toddlers. The safety-compliant Vinci Tab is equipped with a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, 4GB or 8GB of flash, a seven-inch, 800 x 480 touchscreen, a three-megapixel camera, a wrap-around handle, and a variety of early-learning apps.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open Source Helps eBay Process $2000 Per Second

  The online auction house eBay continuously executes $2,000 worth of transactions a second and, to do so, requires a highly reliable transaction processing environment. EBay recently revealed that a key element of its transaction software is the WSO2 open source enterprise service bus (ESB).

• Netatalk returns to open source

  NetAFP, the Netatalk developers, have announced that they are to resume open development of Netatalk and have updated the project’s git repository with the latest source. In early July, NetAFP, the Netatalk developers, announced they were only making the source code for Netatalk 2.2.0 available to paying customers. The timing of the move was well chosen as, within weeks of that, Apple released its latest version of Mac OS X, Lion, which uses AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) 3.3. The latest version of AFP mandates support for Replay Cache functionality and this feature is also required by Lion’s Time Machine.

• Free Software for Little People: Interview

  Right, so I said I would follow up on the last post on this topic by asking a few questions to the comic’s creators, and I have! I dropped them an e-mail, Effy even tranSL:ated the first message for me, sent a few questions and these are their answers. I hope you find it interesting, I’m sure the team behind the comic will be pleased to hear any thoughts or further questions you have in the comments below.

  The interview was collaborately answered by: Iris Fernandez and Franco Iacomella (scrip authors); Emmanuel Cerino and Ivan Zigaran (artists).

• Events

  • OSCON 2011: Open Source has moved from “disruption to default”

    Portland Oregon is (apparently) famous for rain, rose gardens and (now) OSCON, the open source conference now in its 13th year.

    Staged under the banner of O’Reilly technical publishing, this event’s ex-post “content” is now all online, so rather than preview the event, I am going to point to a couple of links now fully live.

  • Back from OSCon

• Web Browsers

  • Web browsers offer more protection than you may think

  • Firefox Appears To Handle Lots Of Tabs Better Than Chrome

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla’s Boot 2 Gecko: Who Wants Another Web-Based OS?

      “If this doesn’t show Mozilla has lost their way, frankly I don’t know what does,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “Remember when Firefox was supposed to be the ‘fast, light’ browser? What happened? I’ll tell ya: They got a bad case of Chrome envy and have been shooting themselves in the foot ever since.”

    • Mozilla Cracking Down On Firefox Crapware Add-Ons

    • Dress Up Your Firefox Search With Harry Potter

    • Mozilla unveils new Firefox interface for Firefox 9 and beyond

    • Extending our Reach — Let’s Talk Gecko

      To fulfill the Mozilla mission, Mozilla needs offerings on new operating systems we find on phones, tablets and elsewhere. These new operating systems and their ecosystems are quite different from the desktop operating systems we’ve been accustomed to. They bring new challenges and new opportunities. To meet these, Mozilla needs to do adapt our current product offerings and to do some new things as well.

    • Add Convenient Print Preview for Firefox

• SaaS

  • The Subverted GPL

    Just look at how the GPL has been subverted by the client-server model. You are never technically in possession of the software – only the output – so it is apparently exempt from any distribution clauses your license may have. BSD, GPL, doesn’t matter – you can’t get the code. The only one that apparently solves this issue is the AGPL and nobody ever seems to use it. The valued ‘freedoms’ are almost entirely gone with the client-server approach. Want the code to the modifications I have made on this site? Tough. As an end user you still have no rights to the code nor the modifications made. Yet there seems to be little to no attention made to this fact despite the large focus on ‘freedom’. Surely putting two computers in a box with a VNC setup is enough to defeat the GPL entirely given these circumstances? It’s certainly massively against the spirit of the thing but is this ever even discussed? Or is it just GPL, praise, praise, when the actual license is irrelevant?

• Databases

  • 10 essential MySQL tools for admins

    The MySQL community is a hotbed of free, open source tools to enhance the performance and health of your MySQL systems

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice Developer Glimpse Proves Balance

    Florian Effenberger recently posted statistics of the number of developers contributing to the LibreOffice project. Several months ago, Cedric Bosdonnat offered data on the number of contribution and contributors from the various sources. While Effenberger’s post provides much less detail, it still provides a glimpse into the composition of the growing community.

• CMS

  • New features for the Mollom module for Drupal

    We have just released new versions of the Mollom module for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.

  • State of Drupal 2011 survey

    The last time I organized a State of Drupal survey was in 2008. The results of the 2008 survey were instrumental in shaping Drupal 7 as well as directing the work of the Drupal Association on drupal.org.

    Now three years later, I created a new survey. The results of this survey will guide thousands of people in the Drupal community over the next two years.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD 9.0 Goes Into Beta

    It seems that finally hitting the FTP mirrors are the ISO images for the first FreeBSD 9.0 beta. This is the first dramatic update to the FreeBSD operating system in nearly two years since the FreeBSD 8.0 release. FreeBSD 9.0 is officially expected to be released in September.

  • PC-BSD Goes Into 9.0 Beta With New Features

    Following the news yesterday that FreeBSD 9.0 Beta 1 is now available, the PC-BSD crew has spun their first 9.0 beta release. Beyond incorporating the updates from FreeBSD 9.0, the PC-BSD 9.0 release is set to carry other desktop-friendly advancements on top.

    Among the PC-BSD 9.0 Beta 1 features are support for multiple window managers, support for meta-pkgs, an improved PBI system, a new AppCafe, an updated installer, network setup GUI improvements, a new system-update utility, a new backup utility, and a new PC-BSD control panel.

  • Memory File System in FreeBSD

• Public Services/Government

  • EU-law on re-use of public sector data may include source code

    Public administrations in the EU facing resistance to their publishing of software as open source, are likePublic administrations in the EU facing resistance to their publishing of software as open source, are likely supported by a European Law, the ‘Directive on the re-use of public sector information’. The PSI-directive, part of member states’ national laws since 2005, obliges public administrations to avoid discrimination between market players, when making information available for re-use. Making source code available as open source is one way to avoid favouritism. ly supported by a European Law, the ‘Directive on the re-use of public sector information’. The PSI-directive, part of member states’ national laws since 2005, obliges public administrations to avoid discrimination between market players, when making information available for re-use. Making source code available as open source is one way to avoid favouritism.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • Space Exploration Gets Open Sourced

      Last week, O’Reilly’s OSCON 2011 dished out a couple of courses of open source for space exploration, with NASA discussing its General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT) and Ariel Waldman plugging the concept of “Hacking Space Exploration.” NASA is also bragging about the launch of its open government blog at open.nasa.gov.

• Programming

  • iTALC – POTM for August

    We are very excited to be honoring the iTALC project as our Project of the Month for August 2011.

  • A Blooming Garden of Codenames

  • Perl Weekly Issue #1 – August 1, 2011

Leftovers

• Health/Nutrition

  • Radiation and Smoke in the Workplace

• Privacy

  • In Defense of Internet Anonymity — Again

    A second flashpoint is the anti-pseudonym policy of the new social networking site Google+. Part of the problem is that Google appears to have been caught by surprise on the issue, and has applied its terms of service inconsistently, banning some users of pseudonyms from all Google services, and restricting others to read only access. There are even rumors that Google is preventing its employees from speaking on the matter, and that a massive internal debate is happening inside Google.

    But equally important is the fact that Google+ is applying the policy so strictly that even long established pseudonyms are rejected, as well as any names that are judged by Google employees to be false. Even the common practice among Chinese and other nationals of assuming an unofficial English name seems to have been rejected by Google in some instances.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Document Exchange: The World Has Changed, Billy

  Microsoft, for its part, needs to change some of its stances concerning open source if it wants to remain a big player in this new world that we see everyday. FUD campaigns are not working; users are gradually opening their eyes to see that they are suffering from the abusive policies of a company that lies to them. Some of them have already seen Linux computers which make their own Windows 7 PCs look like outdated dinosaurs that offer them the same problems found in computers a decade ago.

  Steve Ballmer is delusional if he thinks that young people, those mobile phone-thumbing individuals, belong to the recalcitrant, almost extinct user base that yells “Windows or nothing!”

  Bill Gates knew that the success of Windows depended on the ignorance of computer users. However, the world has changed, Billy… You wouldn’t believe how the world has changed…

• A new life for old computers

  One group of computer buffs was way ahead of the game when the state on July 1 required that old computers no longer could be thrown in garbage dumps.

  The Columbia Linux Users Group has been recycling computers in a different way for a couple of years. They take old (but not too old) computers, wipe their systems clean and install the free Linux operating system and Linux-based software. Then they give the computers to recreation centers and charity groups.

• Linux Day

• Desktop

  • Don’t fear the penguin – there’s a Linux package for every taste

    But the reputation is undeserved. Linux hardly makes any special demands on users and is about as simple to use as Windows or Mac OS. Indeed, the most daunting prospect with Linux is choosing between the variety of versions available – and the ability to dive beneath the user interface and get deep into the software, if you’re so inclined.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Episode 164: High Pass Sharpening

  • Linux Outlaws 220 – You Better Not Give Him Real Scissors

  • Full Circle Podcast Episode 22: Mad Max Meets Ben Hur

• Kernel Space

  • Graphics Stack

    • Hurd mentality

      While recently there was the merging of Mesa pipe-video to master. most of the recent video decoding work going on within the Gallium3D world has been into the ATI/AMD R600 Gallium3D driver for XvMC and now VDPAU support too. This is after the R300 support matured a fair amount, but the first one to the Gallium3D video decoding party was Nouveau. Worked on several years ago as part of the Google Summer of Code was Nouveau Gallium3D video coding. Fortunately, some of this work has been resurrected.

• Applications

  • Managing Your Dead Tree Library

  • GNOME Split – File splitter for GNOME desktop

  • Text Editors in The Lord of the Rings

  • Proprietary

    • Netflix Instant is coming to the entire Linux Community!

      I spent the entire last week networking at OSCON 2011 (Open Source Convention) in addition to running the Ubuntu Booth. One of the excellent networking opportunities I had was to sit down for about fifteen minutes with two engineers from Netflix who happen to use Ubuntu personally and when I called Netflix out for not having a solution to make Netflix Instant work on all Linux systems they told me that in fact Netflix has some engineers working on a proprietary client for Linux that should be available in the next 12 months.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Empty Trash with a CronJob

    • Xfce: StarCraft 2 command station

    • The Beginner’s Guide to Shell Scripting 3: More Basic Commands & Chains

    • Some handy Nautilus tips

    • Be nice with your process on Linux

    • How To Install the Spotify Preview Client On Ubuntu

    • Disabling Nepomuk in Akonadi

    • -feliminate-dwarf2-dups FAIL

    • HOWTO : Yet Another Update script for Back|Track 5

    • Add a line to a specific position in a file using Linux sed

    • Firefox, Focus Last Selected Tab Add-On

    • What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? – almost nothing

    • Installing And Using OpenVZ On CentOS 6.0

    • How to Enable Outgoing Keyserver port with iptables firewall

    • Use SSH for more secure browsing in public networks

    • The Importance of Keeping Notes

      All Linux Explorers, but most especially new ones, will find it beneficial in the extreme to keep notes of their adventures as they progress in GNU/Linux Land.

  • Games

    • Heroes of Newerth goes free to play!

      Well this is a bit unexpected (by me – i’m not up to speed on it all), but Heroes of Newerth has gone free to play!

    • 8 turn based games on Linux

    • Kot-in-Action announce a possible new game!

    • Penguspy: Just the best Linux games

    • 100 Best Free and High Quality Linux Games

      There are literally thousands of games that can be played on Linux, if you’re a casual gamer or hardcore Linux fan who is looking to have a bit of fun on your favourite distro, there’s plenty of games to choose from.

      If you are unsure what to get, this list will help you out. This list includes all the popular and free high quality games that runs on Linux natively, from action/first-person shooters to real-time and turn-based strategy games to rpg/mmorpg etc.

      If you have more games that you would like to recommend, feel free to share it.

      Below are the list. Have fun!

    • Spacely Cogs

    • IndieCIty – New game store coming soon!

    • Red Eclipse 1.1 First Person Shooter Released

      Red Eclipse, one of the many open-source first person shooters, just experienced its v1.1 release.

    • Red Eclipse, A Free And Open Source FPS

      The game is a single-player and multi-player first-person ego-shooter, built as a total conversion of Cube Engine 2, which lends itself toward a balanced gameplay, completely at the control of map makers, while maintaining a general theme of agility in a variety of environments.

    • GamePack 11.04- 156 games in 5 DVD`s for Ubuntu11.04 and LinuxMint11 users

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Smart Folders in KDE Workspace

      So, a few days ago I was talking with an apple fanboy friend of mine who used to be KDE user before being abducted by the i* family of products (he started with an iPhone, he ended with i*Everything…). Anyway he is still using KDE from time to time so I asked him what is the feature he misses most when he is using KDE, the answer as you may gest was “Smart Folders”.

    • Instant apps

      Recently the Plasma library just got a new neat feature: the support for packages of files the are pretty generic, not bounded to being a “plasmoid”.

    • Upgraded to KDE 4.7

      Some people may find it odd that I don’t track KDE releases very closely — at least, not on my Linux machines, which includes my laptop. There things tend to be “whatever DVD is on the top of the pile gets installed” and updates happen only rarely. Quite different from my OpenIndiana or FreeBSD boxes, which track KDE closely.

      Anyway, I saw so much buzz and enthusiasm for KDE 4.7.0 that I wanted to update my desktop machine at home. It was running Kubuntu 10.04 LTS (with whatever KDE came with that, probably KDE 4.4). That meant a three-step upgrade path: 10.04 to 10.10 (I used these instructions on techie-buzz), 10.10 to 11.04 (repeat the upgrade-to-newer-release steps) and 11.04 to 11.04 + KDE 4.7.0 (the install instructions are clear and point elsewhere to add the KDE backports repository — some of the screenshots don’t match what I saw, but it’s well done).

• Distributions

  • Choice is good

    Then I went to DistroWatch.com because, frankly, I hadn’t been there in awhile. For those of you who are interested in all things FOSS, DistroWatch is an interesting place to not only keep up with which distros are peaking and ebbing in the great scoreboard of FOSS, but also to see who has released what when, and sometimes, why.

    I decided to take a look at how many active distros — including those which also are Solaris- and BSD-based — there are as of today, July 31. It’s down a bit since I last looked, which has been literally several years ago.

  • Gentoo Family

    • KDE development environment in Gentoo

      In short, what I want is:

      * download the sources somewhere in my homedir
      * my everyday user to have write permissions to them
      * non-bare clones
      * url = anongit.kde.org AND pushUrl = git.kde.org, if possible directly on initial clone
      * if possible, have a live and a regular release side by side

  • Red Hat Family

    • Fedora

      • Fedora package social networking

      • Praise for Fedora 15 and KDE 4.6.x – A great experience!

        Some old time Fedora users may be aware of Fedora’s poor track record when it comes to KDE although things have been changing ever since the release of KDE 4.x. I regularly try Fedora KDE and so far haven’t been fully convinced with the experience until now.

        As a fan of both Fedora and KDE it gives me pleasure to say Fedora 15 with KDE 4.6.x is a great experience!

        Over the past few months I haven’t had a single crash or experienced any bugs with Fedora 15 and KDE 4.6.x. I am also particularly impressed with the fact that the latest (minor updates) versions of KDE are included in the standard update repositories.

  • Debian Family

    • New beowulf cluster at EDF (200 Tflops) based on Debian 6.0 Squeeze

      Électricité de France S.A. is pleased to announce that its new supercomputer, which is 200 Tflops and 43rd in the latest TOP500 (June 2011), is based on Debian Squeeze.

      This supercomputer, called Ivanoe, is made of compute nodes, graphical nodes, connexion servers and infrastructure servers. This represents 1454 IDataPlex IBM Servers and 200 Tflops.

    • DebConf11 ends as another success for the Debian Project

      The annual Debian Conference ended today after being held for the previous week in Banja Luka, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It has been a great success for the Debian Project.

    • Derivatives

      • Knoppix 6.7.0 Live Linux distribution released

        Version 6.7.0 of the Knoppix Live Linux distribution is now available to download free of charge from the project’s download server or via BitTorrent. As usual there are English and German versions for CD or DVD.

        Version 6.7.0 of the Debian-based live distribution uses the 2.6.39.3 Linux kernel and has LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) as its default desktop. It includes version 3.3.3 of the LibreOffice suite, the Chromium 12 web browser, the Pidgin IM client, GIMP and Wine 1.0.1. There is also a new release of the ADRIANE (Audio Desktop Reference Implementation And Networking Environment) version designed for blind and partially-sighted users.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Interview with Cheri Francis on UDS

        • Flavours and Variants

          • The Linux Setup – Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint

            Clement Lefebvre probably doesn’t need much of an introduction. As the founder of Linux Mint, he’s seeing more and more users flock to the various flavors of his distribution. Linux Mint began with a reputation for being a nicer, easier to use take on Ubuntu. Now, it often seems poised to replace Ubuntu as the go-to Linux distribution for new and experienced users.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Raspberry Pi Interview With Eben Upton

    The robot revolution just got a little closer thanks to some of the cool devices that are coming down the pipe. One such cool device is called the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi device is basically a $25 Linux PC on a credit card sized board! This microcomputer looks perfectly suited as a low cost, micro form factor, low power, PC performance robot brain. If you think that’s unbelievable, well, believe it! Sure it’s not available just yet but already the Alpha Boards are being manufactured and they anticipate the devices will be available for sale later in 2011.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Asus Unveils 2 New Linux-Powered Netbooks

      Asus introduced the Eee PC back in 2007. This quickly became the standard for netbooks. In fact, some say the Eee PC coined the term netbook. Earlier this week, the Eee PC line was updated with two new models, the X101 and R011PX (shown above). Both models feature 10.1″ displays, built-in cameras, 4 hour batteries, 802.11B/G/N networking, and SD card slots.

    • Tablet smackdown: Galaxy Tab 10.1 vs. iPad 2

      Before launching into this review, which pits Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 against Apple’s iPad 2, I took a few days to familiarize myself with the Galaxy Tab’s Android 3.1 (“Honeycomb”) OS. The thing is, I’d already used iOS on an iPod Touch for two years, but was a rank newbie when it came to Android.

Free Software/Open Source

• Song of the Leaders

  Leadership requires some mental agility in FOSS. For one thing, distributed development that includes a large number of volunteers means that hierarchal models of leadership don’t work. The means of coercion are automatically fewer, and aren’t as effective over a distance as they are person to person.

• Open source opening doors to IT

  Danishka Navin speaks to the Mirror about revolutionizing IT needs among those in the outstations with open source software

  Danishka Navin saw a problem. In the rural regions of Sri Lanka people were struggling with the advancement of IT; students had to compete with the internet savvy kids of more privileged surroundings and teachers found it hard to keep up with the computer related modes of teaching. Danishka realized that a certain percentage of the younger generation was being left behind.

  The solution was free open source software that replaced the more expensive variants like Windows software, giving them a better change at a fast developing future. Hanthana Linux is a remix of the popular Linux distribution Fedora and was built with the aim of easily fulfilling the needs of people who don’t have consistent Internet facilities and people with minimal computer experience.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Oracle’s Java virtualization support policy reignites controversy

    Oracle’s Java 7 virtualization support policy has IT professionals worried that their Java applications will not be properly supported on their virtualization platforms of choice.

  • LibreOffice Conference 2011

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Hurd mentality

    It’s taken more than 25 years to develop but the Hurd operating system may soon be released.

    It’s been more than 25 years in the making and yet most people have never heard of it. Now the Free Software Foundation’s Hurd operating system may finally get to show what it has to offer.

    A little history: decades ago Richard Stallman began work on a completely free (as in freedom) Unix-like operating system. Frustrated by the increasingly proprietary software world around him, Stallman set about to rewrite the tools and applications that made up a typical Unix operating system.

• Public Services/Government

  • CH: Proprietary competitors delay unwrapping of open source DMS

    A protest by Swiss proprietary software vendors is delaying the publication as open source of OpenJustitia, a document management system (DMS) developed in-house by the federal court. The court planned to unwrap the DMS in late August, but will now wait until after the court’s control committee in the parliament has looked into the complaints. This committee will consider the case sometime after the summer.

• Licensing

  • Harmony horrors

    On the other side of the web, I kept discussing Harmony with Allison (Canonical) until I asked something and got no response anymore.

    Bringing up arguments like “it provides more clarity to contributors, a ‘check point’ to look at the legal situation and reassurance of legal status to users” or the already-debunked “but it is helps protect the copyrights and handling of disappearing contributors” doesn’t convince me that contributors should sign away their code while running the risk TO GET SUED BY THE COMPANY THEY JUST GAVE THEIR CODE TO FOR WRITING IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Seriously, that’s a risk, read Michael’s post.

Leftovers

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • CD and DVD ripping to be legalised in UK copyright reform

      Time for another ripping yarn from CNET UK — and today the ripping in question is the copying of CDs and DVDs to your computer, which believe it or not is actually illegal. It’s a triumph for common sense as government takes on board a number of suggestions for reforming copyright and intellectual property law.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• 11 More Places You Would Never Expect To See Linux

  Here are 11 other cool or weird things that use Linux.

• Would you like fries with that?

  I learned this trick in the Nineties, when, for further reasons I won’t bore you with, a friend of mine was buying a desktop PC in a large UK electrical chain. The assistant then was busying himself trying to sell my friend the after-care service, and I assured him that we had a further friend who would be able to resolve any problems should they arise. “Oh”, hissed the assistant in question, “so your friend is a qualified Mitac engineer is he?”. I played this one simply and succinctly. “Yes he is”, I calmly answered. The sales assistant gave up. I felt, in truth, really quite pleased with myself.

  This time, though, I wasn’t quite so lucky. Once I’d found the laptop that I needed to get – with the only OSes on offer being Windows 7 and Mac OS – I called the assistant over. It was going well. “I’d like this one, please,” I said, expecting some favourable acknowledgement in return.

• [Joke] Top 10 Reasons to Switch to Windows

• [Joke] Why Closed Source Software is More Secure

• Desktop

  • The top five Linux desktop vendors

    It’s really not that hard to give Linux a try on a desktop or notebook. But, I get it. Not everyone is comfortable with burning operating system ISOs to a CD and then booting a computer from it. If that’s you, or a friend of yours, then consider just buying a PC or laptop that has Linux on it that’s ready to go.

  • Affordable But Capable Ubuntu-powered Laptop Computers

    Ubuntu, slowly but steadily, is gaining prominence in the Microsoft-dominated world of desktop, laptop and netbook computers. While this gradual rise may not be enough for your next-door Joe to switch to Ubuntu, it does however give the devoted Linux user some decent choice while buying his or her new laptop.

    Recently, laptops and netbooks have started showing up in the market and are pre-loaded with Ubuntu. Though this may not be any different than buying a Windows-based laptop and replacing the OS with Ubuntu, it does offer a few advantages. Buying an Ubuntu-powered PC allows you to overcome the initial hiccups many new Linux users face, which are mainly related to hardware incompatibilities.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • The Linux Link Tech Show – Episode 413

• Kernel Space

  • CUPS 1.5.0 Released With Several New Features

    For those still in a non-paper-less world, CUPS, the printing system for Linux, Mac OS X, and other operating systems, has been updated. CUPS 1.5 was just officially released today and its release, which is largely developed by Apple, comes just shortly following the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion release. CUPS 1.5 brings several new features and changes to the printing world.

  • Torvalds’s Git: The ‘it’ technology for software version control

    Git, the open source distributed software version control system pioneered by Linux founder Linus Torvalds in 2005, is now gaining real momentum with developers. But don’t count out rivals like Mercurial and the still-dominant Apache Subversion platform.

    In the past three years, the Eclipse Community Survey on open source development has seen Git grow from 2 percent adoption in 2009 to nearly 13 percent this year, says Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond, who has assisted with the survey. “Pretty impressive,” he says. “It’s one of the reasons Eclipse has adopted Git as a supported alternative to Subversion for Eclipse projects.”

  • The DRM Pull For The Linux 3.1 Kernel

    Previously I talked about some of the DRM changes for Linux 3.1. What is found in David’s tree for the Linux 3.1 merge window is nearly the same. The open-source graphics driver changes queued up for the Linux 3.1 kernel aren’t nearly as exciting as what has been merged during some of the past kernel development cycles. There isn’t any major new hardware support, no ground-breaking features, or other really fundamental changes, but just some modest updates.

  • Goodbye Linux 2.6, Hello Linux 3.0

    It’s not every week a new major kernel version is released. This past week, the Linux Planet witnessed the Linux 3.0 release, the first major since the 2.6 kernel came out in 2003. It’s a number change that has more to do with history than technology, but it is a significant milestone nonetheless. The Linux kernel wasn’t the only part of the Linux ecosystem with updates this week: Oracle, Red Hat and SUSE all pushed out new releases as well.

  • Further adventures in EFI booting

    Many people still install Linux from CDs. But a growing number install from USB. In an ideal world you’d be able to download one image that would let you do either, but it turns out that that’s quite difficult. Shockingly enough, it’s another situation where the system firmware exists to make your life difficult.

  • Virtualisation

    • Explore Xen virtualization with Xen Live CD

    • VirtualBox 4.1 Introduces Cloning Amongst Other Features

  • Graphics Stack

    • NVIDIA Releases A Batch Of Vintage Linux Drivers

      On the ATI/AMD Radeon side, when your hardware is no longer supported by the mainline Catalyst driver (e.g. right now all Radeon X1000 [R500] GPUs and older), you’re left to use just the open-source driver stack, which obviously works quite well for many consumers on new and old hardware. AMD doesn’t update their legacy Catalyst support for this older hardware in terms of bug-fixes and support for new X.Org / Linux releases. NVIDIA though, however, is continuing to support their vintage hardware via legacy Linux driver updates. This week they’ve released four new drivers.

    • AMD Catalyst 11.7 Driver For Linux Brings…

      As has been pointed out in the forums, the AMD Catalyst 11.7 Linux driver for Radeon and FirePro graphics hardware has been released this morning. What new features does this proprietary driver bring?

      Well, it does bring support for the Linux 2.6.39/3.0 kernels. The Linux 2.6.39 kernel is at least being reported to work with Catalyst 11.7 driver after in previous releases needing to apply a patch for the kernel. The Linux 3.0 kernel should also work with this driver, fortunately, making it possible to use under Ubuntu 11.10 (Canonical isn’t upgrading to xorg-server 1.11, so the core requirements should now be met) and other recent distributions.

• Applications

  • Plugins For Rhythmbox

  • For Personal Finance Tracking, You Can Bank on Eqonomize

    Eqonomize’s approach to its GUI makes it more than a mere checking and savings account ledger. The drop-down menus, tool bar and action panel make a click-and-view style natural and efficient. Despite a few missing features, Equonomize takes the sweat and toil out of personal bookkeeping and banking tasks.

  • Magicicada – A GTK+ frontend for Ubuntu One file sync

  • Subdownloader: An easy way to download subtitles

  • Help Choose A New Name For Linux Twitter App ‘Schizobird’

  • The Very Best Open Source Video and Digital Music Tools

    If you’ve used computers for any length of time, you can probably remember when watching video or streaming music was a guaranteed headache. Only a few years ago, the web was teeming with sites that claimed to provide streamlined video and audio experiences when the experiences were in fact filled with hiccups. Now, though, the web and our digital devices deliver perfect multimedia playback and we’ve come to expect it no matter where we are. In this post, you’ll find more than 15 good open source resources for getting the best video and audio available for digital devices, ranging from mobile phones to computers.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • GUI Tool to dump (clone/image) Files, Disks, Partitions – Gdiskdump

    • Creating command line aliases

    • Upgrading from CentOS 5.6 to CentOS 6.0

    • Git: change commit editor to vim

    • Install FUSE into Ubuntu the Easy Way – Use a Script

    • [How to] Enable OS X Lion-style ‘Natural Scrolling’ in Ubuntu

    • Allow Normal user to Install Software without root privileges – ZeroInstall Injector

    • Essential GIMP Scripts and GIMP Plugins

    • Natty & Nvidia driver not in use error – Read here

    • Apt-Undo – A simple way of undoing Apt actions

    • How To Get Hardware Information In Linux

    • How To Get Hardware Information In Linux

    • Quick Tip: Smooth Compiz Desktop Zooming

    • Dress up LibreOffice with Faenza-like Icons

    • Using Apache2 Content Negotiation To Serve Different Languages

    • How To Tether Your iPhone to Your Linux PC

    • How To Switch Between GDM, LightDM Or KDM In Ubuntu [Quick Tip]

    • Create a Suspension Bridge

    • Line Addressing in sed

    • Starting with sed: (a series of tutorials)

    • How to Check for Rootkits on Linux, BSD, and OSX

  • Games

    • Why I Like Roguelikes

    • Get into Fast Paced, Multiplayer Aerial Combat with Linux Game Altitude

      Altitude is a 2D side-scrolling airplane shooter game created by Erik Measure and Karl Sabo, the founders of Nimbly Games. The game is a fierce contest of fighter planes, battling for supremacy of the skies in a fast paced combat that is way more fun than a flight simulator.

    • Humble Indie Bundle #3 Now Live!

      The Humble Bundle is once again offering up a lot of five indie games at the “pay what you want” price tag. This is the second Humble Bundle offered this year and will be open for purchase for the next two weeks. The Humble Indie Bundle features a collection of games that are DRM free and run natively on GNU/Linux systems. If bought separately, they could cost you around $50. However, the Humble Bundle allows you to determine what you want to pay for the collection.

    • Humble Indie Bundle 3 Now Available

      Five games can be yours in the newest Humble Indie Bundle.

      The third bundle out features Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, Hammerflight and And Yet It Moves.

      All are playable on Linux, OSX and Windows, with some also available on Steam.

    • Latest Bundle Already Pulls $100k; Here’s A Contest

    • More Desura Information

    • More Screenshots and Updates on Desura Linux Client

    • The Desura Linux Game Client Is Soon To Be Ready

      It looks like we could just be weeks away from seeing the official release of the Desura Linux game client, a game distribution client similar to Valve’s Steam. Posted to the Desura blog is a rather lengthy update about the current status of the native Linux client.

    • OilRush Update

    • Yogboxin’ yer Crafts

      If you’ve been curious about the multitude of Minecraft mods out there, but haven’t had the opportunity to sort through them all, an enterprising team has compiled a package+installer dubbed Yogbox. The biggest change is what Millénaire brings: NPC villages you can interact with (which are really bizarre to first encounter given the single player game’s usual mindless denizens).

    • Project Zomboid working on Linux!

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME vs. KDE vs. Unity: Customization Tools and Ease of Use

    Customization has always had a high priority on the Linux desktop. That hasn’t changed now that the two major desktops have become three — GNOME, KDE and Ubuntu’s Unity. If anything, as much as two-thirds of the complaints are about this trio.

    Often, the problem isn’t that a tool is missing, but that it’s been renamed or repositioned. But the questions remain: Which of the three major Linux desktops offers the most customization tools, and which tools are easiest to use?

  • My GUI

    Once you’ve got those files in your .fvwm directory, logging out of your usual Gnome/KDE/XFCE/whatever session and selecting “FVWM” on the login screen should be all you need to do. If it’s not that simple on your system, you probably know how to deal with it.

  • I really want to show icons

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Contouring resources

    • on a cloudy wednesday

      Yesterday was also the day that the Ausie couch surfers went home. Aside from leaving little stuffed kangaroos all around the house for me to find (they had a great sense of humor and adventure), they also left behind some nice memories such as when one of them pulled out their laptop with a rather old version of Linux on it running Xandros with KDE. Crazy! She’s now looking to upgrade to a new system but isn’t too smitten with the idea of Windows and had been looking at a Mac. While here, I had my laptop out for work and what not and she shoulder-surfed a bit. The result was that she asked how she could get a computer pre-installed with Plasma Desktop on it. Just seeing what it looked like and how well it works on a commodity laptop was enough to create that desire.

    • Running KWin with OpenGL ES 2.0

      Today we expect the release of the KDE Plasma Workspaces in version 4.7 which is the first release including an OpenGL ES 2.0/EGL backend in KWin. This does not only allow us to run KWin on OpenGL ES powered devices (I am particular looking forward to see KWin on Tegra 2 devices), but also gives us a much better compositing experience on the desktop systems. Thanks to the work on OpenGL ES 2.0 our default compositing backend is now OpenGL 2.x based instead of OpenGL 1.x as it was till 4.6.

    • Awesomeness to land in KDE with release 4.7

      Ever since the bumpy start of KDE 4 series, KDE has maintained a steady improvement, consistently bringing stability, performance and features, as well as raising its overall quality release after release. Personally, I think KDE 4.4 was the first release to really bring stability and performance to high standard levels, while 4.5 and 4.6 have managed to improve that even further and expand that same level of quality to other areas.

    • KDE 4.7 – all your emails are belong to us

    • What is your best favourite KDE distro?

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME 3: Awesome Designs for “Music” and “Documents” File Browsing

      New and exciting ways of interacting with files are being explored in GNOME 3.

      Rather than just navigate to and ‘view’ your files the following designs show off features and interfaces that are helpful, modern and in keeping with the modern GNOME desktop.

    • Linus Torvalds would like to see a GNOME fork

    • DIDO?

    • GNOME Shell 3.1.4 released

      GNOME Shell provides core user interface functions for the GNOME 3 desktop, like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a visually attractive and easy to use experience.

    • GNOME Shell, Mutter Move One Step Forward

      In readying for the GNOME 3.1.4 development release, there’s new development builds available for the GNOME Shell and Mutter — two of the key components of the GNOME 3 desktop.

    • A Worthy Alternative to Gnome 3 and Unity

      I’m back with a few opinions about the world of Linux and specifically the controversial state of desktop/window managers.

      As anyone who knows anything about Linux is no doubt familiar, the state of Linux for average desktop users has been changing a lot since Ubuntu 11.04 came out in April. Instead of Gnome 3 Shell, or Gnome 2.3; Ubuntu now uses the Unity desktop interface. Many people like it, but many people also dislike it in its present state of development. It may have been released a bit prematurely, but I imagine Unity and its ability for customization will improve greatly when Ubuntu 11.10 comes out, and in the coming years.

• Distributions

  • Linux and BSD desktop distributions with support for disk encryption

  • Spotlight on Linux: Linvo GNU/Linux

    After an earlier quick look, it seemed Linvo GNU/Linux was worthy of a spotlight. Linvo is a Slackware-based distribution featuring GNOME 2.32 and is shipped as a live image. The desktop is pretty and features a handy set of applications. In addition, additional applications are available through a popular one-click format.

    Linvo has been in development since early 2009 and was recently added to Distrowatch’s distribution database. Slackware has long been known as rock solid and stable, and Linvo dresses it up and brings some advantages over Slackware itself.

  • Review: Kongoni 2011 “Firefly”

    his is another review that I’ve wanted to do for a while now. That said, until recently, the last new version of Kongoni came out quite a while ago, so I figured that I should sit tight and wait for the new version. I did, and it’s here, so I’m reviewing it now.

    So what is Kongoni? It’s a Slackware-based Linux distribution that uses KDE. Though it claims to also be relatively easy-to-use, its priority number one is to be a fully free software distribution, akin to Ubuntu-based Trisquel, which I have reviewed before. It also has a couple pieces of software to help it achieve the other goal of being easier to use.

  • 5 Tiniest Linux Distributions For Your Ancient Computers

    Not so long ago, IBM, in its ads, made a bold claim that read “Linux is everywhere”. While a Windows-crazy fanboy would be quick to repudiate that claim, any levelheaded IT guy would tell you how true that is. Linux can run on almost any kind of device, be it a gigantic supercomputer or a tiny mobile gadget.

  • Kongoni: You have the right to remain silent

  • DIY: How to find Linux versions needed for older hardware

  • antiX provides three great ways to build a Linux system to meet your needs

    I have been an enthusiastic user and supporter of the antiX distribution since it became available in 2006. The antiX distribution is a lightweight, flexible alternative to its parent distribution, SimplyMEPIS, which is based on the rock solid Debian Stable technology. As configured when installed, antiX uses the Debian Testing repositories instead of the Debian Stable repositories, and it also has entries in the packaging configuration directory /etc/apt for Stable, Testing, or Sid (Unstable).

  • Review: Chakra 2011.04-r2 “Aida”

    Desktop effects, though not enabled out-of-the-box, worked smoothly once enabled. Neither KDE nor the associated applications ever crashed. Finally, Chakra felt fast, and the numbers bore that feeling out: at idle, Chakra used just 280 MB of RAM, which is probably the lowest I’ve seen of any KDE distribution and is comparable to some of the heavier GNOME distributions like Ubuntu. The only other issue I had was in making the OS suspend, but it seems like Linux distributions all across the board dislike my laptop when it comes to suspending.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Linux Is Better Than Windows.

      My brother Jim finally got fed up with his Windows computers getting attacked by viruses. So, his son recently installed PCLinuxOS to his Netbook.

      The exact version Mike installed was the newest PCLinuxOS featuring the LXDE desktop Environment. If you have a netbook, PCLinuxOS LXDE is the perfect choice.

      You can get it here.

      Neal and his team at PCLinuxOS really did a superlative job. The Desktop is fast, light, and feature rich. And it’s quite familiar. If you’re coming over from Windows, you’ll have no problem finding your way around the desktop.

    • Mandriva’s Eugeni Dodonov Leaves Goodbye Gifts

      Dodonov states these tools may use Mandriva graphical front-ends, but the underlying tools should work on any distribution. He thought that previously use by other distros may have been hampered by subversion repository access and availability. He adds, “I’ll be still maintaining and developing them for the foreseeable future, but – as always – everyone is free to contribute, adapt and use them in the way you think the best.”

    • Mandriva Desktop 2011 pre-release screenshot review

      The last of the pre-releases of Mandriva Desktop 2011, Mandriva Desktop 2011 RC 2, was made available for download yesterday, just one day behind schedule. It, of course, looks better, runs better, than the previous pre-release, which I previewed here. As the title suggests, this article is not a full review, but a screenshot tour of the major features of what will be Mandriva Desktop 2011, due for final release on August 28, 2011.

    • Mandriva 2011 Almost Ready, RC2 Released

      Mandriva 2011 RC2 was released yesterday with lot of bug fixes and stability improvements. In the release announcement Eugeni Dodonov also introduced the new release manager, Denis Koryavov from ROSA Labs. ROSA Labs is taking a large role in this release primarily with its new interface elements.

    • Mandriva Directory Server 2.4.1 now available

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

    • Mandriva 2011 daily builds

  • Gentoo Family

    • Me + Gentoo: Not a good ideea… Great distro though

      Today I woke up with a wish to do a review on Gentoo Linux. I thought to myself “how hard could it be?”. Well let me tell you it’s hard… I personally do not have enough experience or knowledge about the linux system to get Gentoo up and running… yet.

    • Turn your grandma into an IT ninja

  • Red Hat Family

    • The Other Side of Red Hat – an interview with Craig Muzilla

      Not just a Linux company, Red Hat has quite the middleware business, too, says Alex Handy who recently sat down with Craig Muzilla, Red Hat’s vice president and general manager of the Middleware business unit…

    • Argus Systems Group to Announce PitBull Foundation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0

      Argus Systems Group will announce PitBull Foundation and PitBull Foundation Suite for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 at the 2011 Unified Cross Domain Office (UCDMO) Conference being held in Chicago, Illinois from August 1-4, 2011.

    • Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst: “I Want to Meet Linus”

      Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is speaking this year at LinuxCon on opening day about the challenges that still lie ahead as we embark on another 20 years of Linux. We wanted to know more about Whitehurst’s perspective as we prepare for the big event and the formal celebration of the 20th anniversary of Linux. Here’s what he told us.

    • Nuts and Bolts: ‘Red Hat is more secure’

      From as rudimentary but time-tested methods like open outcry, stock exchanges have slowly embraced paper-based systems and moved to electronic and technology modernization with panache. Here’s a stock exchange that has chosen Virtualisation to power its trading platforms. It picked Red Hat Enterprise Linux and does not see any problems, existing or potential with Open Source technology alternatives. To get a lowdown on some real issues and questions, we get to chat with Gajendarnath Mudaliar, VP – Technology, Inter-connected Stock Exchange of India Ltd.

    • Enterprise Linux 5.6 to 5.7 risk report

      Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 was released last week (July 2011), six months since the release of 5.6 in January 2011. So let’s use this opportunity to take a quick look back over the vulnerabilities and security updates made in that time, specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server.

    • Bob Young, founder of Red Hat and Lulu, on collaboration, innovation, and standing on the shoulders of giants

      Bob Young knows about open source and innovation. He’s co-founder and former CEO of Red Hat. Founder and CEO of Lulu. Co-founder of the Center for the Public Domain. Much of his life’s endeavors have been built on innovation through collaboration. Earlier this year I saw that he was giving a talk titled, appropriately enough, “Collaborative Innovation” on the lessons he’s learned from open source and community building. I asked if he’d bring those lessons to the opensource.com audience as well, and rather than edit down the stories he shared with me, I’d like to give them all to you in his words.

    • Red Hat’s 10 years of Linux leadership

      The recent numbering change in the Linux kernel brings to a close a 10 year history of the prior kernel series. This milestone presents a good opportunity to reflect on what has been an exciting and vibrant period of time – over 10 million lines of code have been added to the Linux kernel. This is a great testament to the power of community. Over time, the contribution levels among companies has fluctuated, however, Red Hat has consistently been among the top employer contributors. The fine folks at LWN in cooperation with several developers have long maintained statistics and reported results.

    • AscendOS – new kid on the Enterprise block? But can he dance?

      CentOS and Scientific Linux and Princeton’s Pisa, among others. What was once a simple (boring?) decision for Linux admins who wanted RHEL compatibility without RHEL’s various overheads, the neighborhood is becoming more and more crowded. And now, a completely new project is working its way out of the tall grass.

    • Enterprise Linux by any other name

      I’ve been doing a fair bit or reading and writing and talking about different versions of “Enterprise Linux”, and the more I talk and think about it, the more I come to realize that I’m not as comfortable with the definition of that phrase as I would like.

      The current working definition of “Enterprise Linux” is a Linux distribution based off of the Source RPMs and build methods of RedHat Enterprise Linux. Essentially a group of people get together, put together a build infrastructure, and make a distribution using RedHat’s released sources. However, there are interpretations and changes made that make each of these distributions unique in their own right. CentOS has its issues, of course, but tries to stay as faithful as it can to the RedHat product. Scientific Linux seems to be a livelier group right now, but they’re truly making their distribution their own.

    • Fedora

      • Boot times

      • Boot Times are Important.. sort o

        Adam W was at CLS and has been going over ideas he ran into. One of them was a talk by Dan Allen of Mojave Linux on speeding up boot times of Jboss

  • Debian Family

    • Debian 7 “Wheezy” to introduce multiarch support

      During this year’s annual Debian Conference DebConf11 made the introduction of “multiarch support” a release goal for the coming Debian release 7 “Wheezy” to be released in 2013. Multiarch is a radical rethinking of the filesystem hierarchy with respect to library and header paths, to make programs and libraries of different hardware architectures easily installable in parallel on the very same system.

    • Better video coverage during DebConf, thanks to our sponsors!

    • What is missing in the Debian desktop, or why my parents use Kubuntu

      While at Debconf11, I have several times during discussions mentioned the issues I believe should be improved in Debian for its desktop to be useful for more people. The use case for this is my parents, which are currently running Kubuntu which solve the issues.

    • Derivatives

      • Linux Mint Debian: A rough diamond

        The one I liked most is Linux Mint since it was quite nicely designed (I’m quite fond of my graphics) but it was no challenge at all. Almost everything worked out of the box. A kind user suggested i try Linux Mint Debian since it’s a tad rougher than its Ubuntu-based brother (or syster, I don’t know its gender) and this is what happened:

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 225

        • International Newsmaker Q&A: Jon Melamut

          A series of software programs known as Ubuntu Core from London-based Canonical is expected to bring a vast array of improvements and additional applications to the global in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) industry. The company’s vice president of operations, products and OEM services, Jon Melamut, recently explained some of the details surrounding the technology and its potential impact on the automotive marketplace.

        • Canonical announces the Ubuntu Advantage Partner Programme for resellers

        • Unity Progress Report – Alt-Tab style

        • Ubuntu 11.04 Review

          Another feature I enjoyed about Ubuntu 11.04 is the new functionality of the workspace switcher due to the choice of Compiz as the default window manager. You can simply click on the workspace switcher in the launcher to see a fantastic panorama of all of your available workspaces and all open windows. All of your open windows will have their own icons in the launcher as well which is quite convenient. But I can’t say that I am very fond of the new Mac OS style application menus which now appear along the top panel making it virtually mandatory. But to make up for that small fault, the system and notification area in the top panel now have enhanced integration with many applications.

        • Ubuntu goes head-to-head with Red Hat and Windows in businesses

          LINUX VENDOR Canonical is going head-to-head with Microsoft and Red Hat in the enterprise market with its Ubuntu Linux distribution.

          Canonical has been developing Ubuntu for the best part of six years now to become arguably the most popular consumer oriented Linux distribution. Now Canonical has set its sights on the higher end enterprise datacentre market by partnering with companies to flog Ubuntu Advantage, a support agreement for big businesses.

        • CPU Frequency Scaling Indicator, Fixed For Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

        • Ubuntu Linux gets serious about business partners

          Most people, who like Linux, love Ubuntu. Oh they may object to Ubuntu’s new Unity desktop, but at day’s end, they still use Ubuntu. Technology businesses though have a more jaundiced view of Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company. Canonical, though, is now taking steps now to make its potential hardware and software partners happier.

        • Why does Ubuntu need the Canonical Contributor Agreement?

          Several very important core components in Ubuntu are covered by the Canonical Contributor Agreement. These are Canonical-owned projects and include major items like Bzr, Upstart, indicator-applet and desktop-couch, to name but a few. A full list can be seen on the Contributor Agreement page.

        • Ubuntu Development Update

          Next week Alpha 3 of Ubuntu 11.10 will be released, so everybody is currently trying to get their latest updates in and everything tidied up for a release. For today I got an update from Ubuntu Desktop Team hero Sébastien Bacher, so if you’re interested in any other aspect of Ubuntu Oneiric, I’d refer you to the oneiric-changes mailing list and the big picture specification status overview instead. So what’s happening with the Ubuntu Desktop?

        • A retrospective of the first year of Ask Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu dressed in cheap elastic support, sent out in public

          Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux variant is popular out there on the public clouds of the world, but there is a serious mismatch between how support contracts are sold for bare-metal servers used inside corporate data centers and how virtual servers are deployed and used out there on the cloud. And Canonical wants to fix that and make a bit of money, too.

          Last June, Canonical rejigged its support services for companies deploying Ubuntu Linux server and desktop variants with its Ubuntu Advantage offering. Even though this new support structure offered tiered support levels in terms of coverage time and features, and even had add-ons to give companies a break if they were deploying Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud to build an internal clone of Amazon’s EC2 cloud, what it did not do is provide pricing for support contracts running on external public clouds like EC2.

        • Canonical: 3 Signs of Progress for Ubuntu Linux Partners

          The VAR Guy has to concede: In mid-2010, he was losing faith in Canonical — promoter of Ubuntu Linux. Amid multiple management changes, Canonical seemed focused on too many different priorities. And emerging threats like Google Android seemed to suffocate Canonical’s mobile Internet device (MID) strategy and even Ubuntu’s netbook momentum. Fast forward to the present, and several business developments suggest that Canonical is finally getting the Ubuntu house in order.

        • On conquering fears and future contributions…

          The next Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS-P) is scheduled to be held in Orlando, Florida at the Caribe Royal Hotel from October 31 through November 3, 2011 and the Ubuntu Community is busy preparing blueprints, requesting sponsorships, and checking to see if all the action items from the last UDS have been completed, deferred, or are in progress. (Gotta luv those burndown charts!) Reminder sponsorship requests close on August 24, 2011.

        • GUI tool checking system and hardware information in Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu takes UFOs to the cloud

        • Full Circle 51 has arrived!

        • [Oneiric Updates] Unity 2D and Ubuntu Software Center Improvements

          A new update to Unity 2D brings it almost at par with Unity 3D as now both have same shared settings. Unity 2D now uses GTK3 rendering and also new indicators. In last few days, Ubuntu 11.10 also received many other updates bringing in changes to Ubuntu Software Center, update settings and session menu.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Lubuntu to join the official Ubuntu family (Linux distro with light-weight desktop environment)

            t’s become something of a cliche to say that one way to breath new life into an older computer is to install a Linux-based operating system. But not all Linux distributions are created equal. While many can run on a PC with just a few GB of disk space or less, a small amount of RAM, and antiquated graphics, many newer Linux distros require fairly modern hardware if you really want to get the most out of the operating system.

            Ubuntu, for instances, is one of the most popular Linux operating systems around, but the system requirements for a basic installation include a 1 GHz Pentium 4 or faster processor, 512MB of RAM and 5GB of disk space. But there’s an alternative called Lubuntu which is designed to run well on computers that don’t meet those requirements.

          • Zorin OS Releases a “Lite” Version

            If your computer has put on a few pounds and needs to fit into a sleek new case, Zorin OS developers have released their “great taste, less filling” edition. Actually, Zorin OS 5 “Lite” is a more conservative version of their desktop system that’s designed for older computers.

            Zorin OS Lite is based on Lubuntu and features the LXDE desktop. Wine, VLC, and some games were removed and many other applications were switched for lighter alternatives in order to fit on a single CD and increase performance. Since it was designed with older computers in mind, it’s only available in the 32-bit variety.

          • Novacut: Not just vaporware.

            I am not here to be a cynic and say that Novacut’s funding efforts will fail (again). I am writing to say that the only way for the ideas behind Novacut to be realized is to stop pretending that throwing $25K worth of funding at it could possibly save the project. Over the past year, Novacut has put almost all effort into soliciting money. In the amount of time it would’ve taken to implement these features in existing software, Novacut has mainly been producing advertisements for itself.

          • New ISO images available : Lubuntu

          • Kubuntu 11.10 – A Very Early Review

            In the twilight hours of this morning, I thought I’d take a look at the new Kubuntu 11.10, codenamed “Oneiric Ocelot”. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, in my half-awake non-caffeinated state.

            Knowing how much you all dislike Ubuntu Unity and how many of you might be considering a change to Kubuntu, I thought you might like a non-technical peek review of Oneiric.

          • Lessons Learned: Linux + Sony Vaio F Series

            After a little over an hour of playing around with edids on my Vaio with no luck I started surfing through the comments and found a useful one. It mentioned that this setup was no longer needed with Ubuntu 10.10. After racking my brain for what the difference might be between Ubuntu 10.10 and Bodhi 1.1.0 I realized the largest difference was the kernel version. On a whim I installed the 2.6.35 kernel, installed the nvidia drivers from the Bodhi repo and poof! I was good to go (guess my first hunch about a kernel issue was correct).

• Devices/Embedded

  • ARM9 SBC features Linux 2.6.38, high-res touchscreen support

    Artila Electronics announced a Linux 2.6.38-ready 3.5-inch ARM9 industrial single board computer (SBC), notable for its support for up to 1280 x 860-pixel touchscreens. The M-505 is equipped with a 400MHz Atmel AT91SAM9G45 processor, 128MB of DDR2 SDRAM, 128MB NAND flash, plus Ethernet, USB, and serial I/O.

  • Old King of Computers now on Ubuntu

    If you have been using computers for a while now say around 40 years or more then you must have probably started you first lessons in computing on the Commodore 64 computer. Many modern day children and engineers won’t probably know what the Commodore 64 is. It is nothing but the old Keyboard computer which you might have now seen in old movies or preferably in museums or old government offices.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Cordia Tab, Open Tablet to cost only $300

      Just heard about a new brand tablet, Cordia Tab, an open source tablet device to bring a practical and openly hackable tablet. The tablet is able to run any Linux kernel based operating system such as Cordia HD, MeeGo, Ubuntu, and even Android OS, however it comes with Cordia HD preloaded.

    • OLPC Programs are a $25 Billion Dollar Global Economy

      Have you ever thought about to total investment in one laptop per child programs worldwide? Robert Fadel has and came up with an interesting calculation. His estimate: that one laptop per child programs – from XO laptops to Classmate PCs to EeePCs used in one-to-one educational programs – exceeds $2.5 billion dollars over the last three years…

    • Internet in a box

      I’ve been mulling over this for a while now, fiddling with hardware, software, networking, content, etc. Then, out of the blue, I had to make a *very* short trip to India on a few hours’ notice. I woke up early, dropped off my kid at summer camp, and sat down to install the OLPC XS School Server on a Fit PC. Given that we have 15 XOs or so in Bhagmalpur, a Fit PC should do. It runs at 12 volts DC and draws about 8 watts at the AC adapter end. Accounting for a 20% loss in AC-to-DC, I’d suspect the machine runs at 5 to 6 watts internally. I have a 64 GB solid state drive on this one, so no moving parts at all. After fiddling for an hour or so, I had the school server installed and ready to go. As a sidenote, I am using a mesh antenna on this install.

    • Asus Eee PC X101 With MeeGo Available for Preorder [Asus Retailers Now Accepting Orders for Cheap 10-Inch Netbook Running MeeGo Linux; Shipping in September]

      Asus has announced plans to release inexpensive netbooks under the Eee PC X101 product line. Cost is brought down by the use of modest specs and MeeGo Linux. If this is your thing, you can now pre-order the Eee PC X101, which will start shipping in September.

    • Life with an Android Tablet One Week On

      I’ve had my Asus Transformer tablet for approximately one week now. I have endeavoured to use it fairly constantly and as my sole means of computing. It has worked to varying degrees of success. After the first couple of days, I discovered that if I actually wanted to achieve anything, I needed a proper keyboard. To that end, I have ordered the keyboard docking station for the Transformer, and I am also writing this post on my three year old netbook.

      A word of warning though about the Transformer docking keyboard – buy the package of tablet and keyboard to start with! This only attracts a £50 premium over the tablet alone. Buying the docking keyboard separately has set me back almost £120. I purchased from Amazon and couldn’t find cheaper on eBay, Google’s shopping results nor Tottenham Court Road (where it was not possible to buy the keyboard as a standalone item). I’ll live and learn.

      There are both good and bad points about this Honeycomb 3.1 tablet. Let’s start with the good.

    • Quickbooks Ported to Linux

      Intuit has an app in Android Market for Quickbooks. This tool is used by many small and medium-sized business for all kinds of accounting. The port to Android/Linux will allow Quickbooks to run on any PC with an Android port. e.g. Android-x86 and dozens of smart phones and tablets.

Free Software/Open Source

• Project underway to achieve practical software engineering goals

  :The government is implementing a programme to develop open source software and help the students achieve practical software engineering goals.National Fund for Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) has provided Rs.37.63 million to execute the programme in National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NU-FAST), an official source on Sunday told APP that the project would also help address the issue of the scarcity of quality faculty in most of the universities.

• The new draw of open source: innovation

  Recent observations at OSCON has demonstrated that open source can never be thought of as an also-ran again, as new technologies are now being created that show open source is now a way to innovate.

  This is not, I have to say, my idea. During yesterday’s opening session at OSCON, Jay Lyman, Senior Analyst at The 451 Group, Twittered an interesting observation: “Overwhelming message @ Oscon so far is open source now driven mostly by innovation.”

• Ten open-source fallacies that need nailing

• Events

  • O’Reilly Open Source Convention coming back to Portland

    Thousands of software developers will converge on Portland this week for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention – or OSCON.

    The conference, one of the largest gatherings of its kind, runs Monday through Friday at the Oregon Convention Center.

  • OSCON 2011: Open source won. Now what?

    The theme of OSCON 2011 is “From disruption to default.” While that certainly captures the status of open source these days, it isn’t exactly news to anyone attending the conference. But the welcoming keynote addresses and early sessions devoted to data scalability and Java seem to be giving attendees fuel for thought and grist for some real soul-searching as the era of open source ubiquity (if not outright dominance) begins.

  • OSCON: Open Source Awards

    At the OSCON Conference, the O’Reilly Open Source Awards have been presented. Since 2005, the event organisers have been giving out these awards to people who have made an exceptional contribution to the development of open source software.

• Web Browsers

  • Browser Wars: Chrome vs. IE9 vs. Firefox

    Web browsers are converging. Since the arrival of Google Chrome nearly three years ago, all browsers have come under its influence, and they’ve all moved in the same three-pronged directions—speedier page loading, cleaner user interfaces, and greater support for new Web standards. All of the major browsers—Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera—have made significant strides in each of these three dimensions. The first two qualities are pretty much universally desirable, but the “standards” support piece, while also desirable, gets sticky: Each browser seems to support a different subset of the many features that fall under the label HTML5. All you have to do is check out each browser’s HTML5 demo site. Apple’s HTML5 demos, for example, flat out won’t function unless you’re browsing with Safari. So much for “standards.”

  • Tug of war on the web

  • Chrome

    • Chromium Browser Causing Significant Increase in Laptop Power Usage

      I recently noticed a strange bug while using Chromium web browser in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal powered laptops and netbooks(Intel platform). There is an immediate spike in power usage whenever Chromium is running.

  • Mozilla

    • Our Direction from Mozilla’s Senior Leadership

      Mozilla’s longest-serving and top two leaders, Mitchell Baker and Brendan Eich, have some great information on where the project is going.

    • Shadow Layers, and learning by failing

      A hot topic for Firefox at the moment is the new out-of-process rendering, but is it common knowledge that this has already been in Firefox Mobile for a long time? For mobile, there’s what we call a ‘chrome’ process (this processes and renders the main UI) and then ‘content’ processes, which handle the rendering of the pages in your tabs. There are lots of fun and tricky issues when you choose to do things like this, mostly centering around synchronisation – and recently, I was trying to add a feature that’s lead me to writing this post.

    • The Browser By Many Other Names

      In my last post I wrote about Mozilla creating more than a browser. There are many topics in that post to be explored further. I’d like to start with a discussion of the various aspects of Firefox that are important to bringing interoperability and user sovereignty to the Internet. Then we can think about how we make these various aspects effective in changing settings.

    • Top 15 Firefox themes for this summer!

    • Mozilla’s next Firefox moment?

      The fact that there were now three good browsers supporting those standards, two of which were open source, meant that Mozilla had effectively achieved its goal of promoting a vibrant, open web – something to be celebrated, rather than fretted about.

• Databases

  • MariaDB 5.3 released as beta

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Oracle, SUSE, Red Hat drive 70% of LibreOffice development

    Upon the release of LibreOffice 3.4.2, the Document Foundation announced that Oracle and SUSE each contributes roughly 25 percent of the latest commits, while Red Hat contributed another 20 percent. Following Oracle’s donation of Openoffice to the Apache Foundation earlier this year, The Document Foundation wants to reassure the technology public that corporate support for LibreOffice is strong and that this Office suite is “enterprise ready.”

  • Have You Taken The LibreOffice User Survey?

• CMS/Social Networking

  • Drupal 7.7 released

    Note: Drupal 7.7 is just Drupal 7.6 with a fixed VERSION string (7.6 was reporting itself as 7.5). No other changes.

  • Taking a look at Diaspora – Too little, too late?

• Business

  • Going Open, Going Closed: best practices and lessons learned

    It also tracks the progress (or lack thereof) of the vendors profiled in our 2007 Going Open report, including Covalent, Hyperic, Ingres, Intalio, Jaspersoft, Laszlo Systems, Openclovis and Qlusters.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Emacs distributions are not GPL-compliant

  • Emacs has been violating the GPL since 2009

    The files in question have been in Emacs releases from around version 23.1.90 from late 2009 and have been circulated in 23.2 and 23.3. Stallman says that “Anyone redistributing those versions is violating the GPL, through no fault of his own”. The Emacs developers are now searching for the original source files and plan to include them in the Emacs trunk and regenerate the violating tarballs.

  • GNU Emacs Developers Will Fix It; Please Calm Down

    The story, IMO, makes the usual mistake of considering a GPL violation as an earth-shattering disaster that has breached the future of software freedom. GPL violations vary in degree of the problems they create; most aren’t earth-shattering.

• Programming

  • Finding CPU flags using gcc

  • IDE for Ubuntu

    Linux, as with many other things, has no shortage when it comes to getting down to the more technical aspects in computing. Be it coding, testing or anything else that is related to the geeky arts, the free and open source community has a lot to offer. In this post we’ll be looking at some of the most popular and some not so popular Integrated Development Environments (IDE) out there which score a lot with regard to quality and flexibility.

Leftovers

• Hardware

  • Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive?

• Finance

  • Bitcoin Developer Denied Entry to US by Confused Customs Agents

    It’s no great surprise that most people are confused when they first hear about the amorphous digital currency known as Bitcoin. Some customs agents in Seattle were more than a little confused when they screened a well-known Chinese Bitcoin developer. “Doctor Nefario” arrived with just $600 in cash. Agents determined he could not fund his two month stay in America, so they shipped him home, but not before asking him some questions.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Bandwidth caps are rate hikes

    Internet Service Providers in the USA are trying to apply bandwidth caps to their users, with those caps being 2, 4, or 5 gigabytes-per-month for wireless users at various price levels and generally 250 gigabytes-per-month for home users. Most of the press coverage of this issue comes down on the side of consumers but lately the ISP publicity machine has been revved-up and we’re being told that bandwidth caps are necessary, even inevitable. This is, as my 87 year-old Mom would say, BS.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source

GNU/Linux

• Code 42 Software Reports New Data on Rapid Growth of Enterprise Linux Use

  Code 42 Software Inc., creators of CrashPlan, CrashPlan PRO, and CrashPlan PROe, continuous data backup for home and business, today reported new data about the rapid growth of Linux use in enterprise. Only halfway through 2011, Code 42’s CrashPlan PROe sales have grown 10 times 2010 levels. The company expects to end 2011 with a 14,000 percent growth in Linux revenue year-over-year. Since 2009, Code 42 has experienced substantial Linux growth. In 2010, the company recorded 400 percent year-over-year revenue growth of CrashPlan PROe for Linux.

• How and Why Wall Street Programmers Earn Top Salaries

  There’s actually a pretty wide range of languages/tools used, but Linux is the ‘default’ OS…

• Desktop

  • Linux Desktop Hits and Misses

    It seems like it wasn’t that long ago when Windows was an exclusive part of my computing life. Ever so slowly, I began to move away from Windows XP into some of the popular Linux distributions of the time.

    I found myself falling in love with a specific Linux distribution made popular by its ability to “just work” without a ton of configuration. At the time, this held a great appeal to me. After all, I had other things to do throughout my day besides having to configure everything on my desktop PC by hand.

  • Choosing the Right Linux Distro for Your Business

    In this article, I’ll look at the benefits of both corporate and community supported distributions and how they might best fit into the enterprise space. In addition, I’ll offer suggestions as to which option might make the most sense in each type of enterprise scenario. I’ll also take a look at specialized Linux distributions.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 3.0: More important than you think

    Ah vacation. It was a week of blissful lounging around a breezy beach side and playing in a water-filled world where I was no longer at the top of the food chain. There were no computers, no talk of networking this, security that, or anything in between. But then the hard reality of the world wormed its way back into my mind and I now find myself trying hard to get back into some sort of groove…an open source kind of groove (of course).

    And although it’s officially next month (the month of my forty-fourth birthday, thank you very much) Linux is about to turn 3.0. And although Linus Torvalds himself has said this is not a big deal, it is. Why? Because of the very fact it is not a big deal.

    [...]

    These assumptions occur whether they are true or not — even if it has been made clear there are no deal making/deal breaking changes in the kernel. After all, look at the major feature list in the 3.0 kernel:

    * Btrfs data scrubbing and automatic defragmentation
    * XEN Dom0 support.
    * Unprivileged ICMP_ECHO.
    * Wake on WLAN.
    * Berkeley Packet Filter JIT filtering.
    * A memcached-like system for the page cache.
    * A sendmmsg() syscall that batches sendmsg() calls.
    * The setns() a syscall that allows better handling of light virtualization systems such as containers.
    * New hardware support such as Microsoft Kinect and AMD Llano Fusion APUs.

• Applications

  • Super Collision At Studio Dave: The New World of SuperCollider3, Part 1

    SuperCollider is composer/programmer James McCartney’s gift to the world of open-source audio synthesis/composition environments. In its current manifestation, SuperCollider3 includes capabilities for a wide variety of sound synthesis and signal processing methods, cross-platform integrated GUI components for designing interfaces for interactive performance, support for remote control by various external devices, and a rich set of tools for algorithmic music and sound composition. And yes, there’s more, much more.

  • LiVES 1.4.5 has been released! | Video editor

    LiVES 1.4.5 has been released! the new release comes with many news features and fixed many bugs, it add -tmpdir startup option, Stop PAL formats reverting to NTSC in x264 encoder., Fix bug to add fewer blank lines to ~/.lives file, Do not show “Loaded subtitles” message when subtitles are not loaded, Instant opening of some .flv files, Move correct pointer (start or end) when the timeline is clicked in longer files, Add video fade in/out effect, Fix frames being cut after applying effects in virtual clips. more info about this .

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Ask Ars: how do I use the find command in a pipeline?

  • Games

    • REVIEW: BEEP – Linux platform fun!

      FPS games seem all the rage these days and after playing a few of them you would be forgiven for thinking there’s very little variety. Can you honestly remember vividly an FPS you played from a year ago on say the PS3, when all too often its the same generic gameplay albeit with different gfx and sound?

      As the Humble Indi Bundle, Minecraft et al showed, there’s a massive market for games which do not rely on the proven (and popular) FPS format. There are so many success stories that being an indi developer no longer means that you are resigned to selling only a few copies of your product – The Internet and word of mouth advertising mean that a decent product can be very lucrative.

    • First Person Shooter ‘Red Eclipse : Supernova Edition’ Released for Linux

      A new version for popular Linux FPS game Red Eclipse has been released. Codenamed ‘Supernova Edition’, this release sees many new features and changes.

• Desktop Environments

  • Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME For Xfce

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • New KDE Applications, Workspaces and Development Platform Releases Bring New Features, Improve Stability

      KDE is delighted to announce its latest set of releases, providing major updates to the KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Platform that provides the foundation for KDE software. Version 4.7 of these releases provide many new features and improved stability and performance.

    • Hands on: KDE 4.7 launches with KWin OpenGL ES support

      I tested KDE 4.7 in Kubuntu 11.10 on an HP netbook and in VirtualBox.

    • You, KDE!

      For me, it (still) feels very unnatural to talk about us as KDE. I’m still thinking in terms of the KDE community; and the KDE Project releases the KDE Desktop (or just KDE). I’m also fine with the KDE Workspace and other specialized variants. However, the login manager now also shows the term KDE Plasma Workspace. In my very own humble opinion, this is already too much of buzz words.

• Distributions

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Yes, I broke my computer with PCLinuxOS

      Let me put this straight: I’m not blaming PCLOS at all. The installer performed the actions I commanded, nothing less, nothing more. Granted, I might be a non-technical Linux user, but I’m also beyond that childish stage in which users blame Linux when something does not go as planned. I should have paid attention to the small voice telling me that it was not a good idea to use a free HD space BEFORE my Mandriva partition and that it was an even worse choice to install the PCLinuxOS GRUB to the main sector of the partition table, but I stubbornly ignored the still small voice of wisdom.

    • PCLinuxOS, the REAL deal!

      A couple of days ago, I described how I had an unfortunate experience while I attempted an install of PCLinuxOS. Because of lack of time, I had to remove the distro to recover my PC and finish my work, promising to get back at PCLOS later.

      Well, time has come: a kind reader of my post, to solve the problem of the multiple boot, recommended me to visit the PCLOS forums and find the wise sage, who goes through forum-land under the name of Old Pollack.

    • Not a Tug o’War, but Convergence

  • Red Hat Family

    • CentOS 6 – Simple, robust, efficient, and finally here

      CentOS 6 is a very beautiful, polished product.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Project News – July 25th, 2011

      Welcome to this year’s eleventh issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community.

    • Debian’s GNU/kFreeBSD

      I’ve heard two popular reasons for running a GNU environment on top of a FreeBSD kernel. One is script compatibility. The idea being that if a person needs a FreeBSD kernel (for whatever reason) they may still want to run GNU-specific scripts. I can see the reasoning behind this, though kFreeBSD does have a few quirks to it (such as the device names I mentioned above) which may introduce new incompatibilities. The other reason often cited is ZFS support. Though I didn’t find ZFS tools installed by default, ZFS utilities are available in the kFreeBSD repositories. This brings together great file system technology with an environment which will be familiar to GNU/Linux users. A third, and often overlooked, reason for running kFreeBSD is because we can. There is something compelling about running a mash-up of technologies from two different open source camps. For people who just like to tinker with computers kFreeBSD is right up there with trying MINIX or running NetBSD on a toaster.

      Given the problems I ran into with the installer and issues I ran into trying to login to a graphical environment, I have to say kFreeBSD isn’t a project I would recommend to many people, certainly not novice users. Given the defaults it appears as though the project is aimed mostly at people running servers who have an interest in both GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. And, though certainly not without rough edges, it is an interesting operating system. It has got warts and it can be a pain to get up and running, but the fact that it can exist — does exist — is, well, is pretty cool when you think about it.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Contributor Harmony

          I have made no bones about my opposition to unpaid copyright assignment in any quarter. Least understandable was the old Canonical contributors agreement, Mark wrote another of his personal defences in his blog on Friday; of what I consider to be unreasonable and assumptive. But this isn’t about that blog post.

        • Contributor License Agreement corner cases

          I’m looking at the Canonical Individual Contributor License Agreement (pdf here). In contrast to the previous copyright assignment, it merely grants a broad set of rights to Canonical, including the right to relicense the work under any license they choose. Notably, it does not transfer copyright to Canonical. The contributor retains copyright.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Joli OS Review: Is it the Best OS Available for Netbooks?

            Joli OS is a perfect combination of ease of use and good looks.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Raspberry Pi $25 PC goes into alpha production

    Game developer David Braben caused geeks to get excited back in May when he announced plans to develop and release a $25 PC. It is called the Raspberry Pi, and takes the form of a USB stick that can be plugged into the HDMI port of a display ready to act as afully-functional PC.

    The thinking behind the super-cheap PC is to get it into the hands of school kids and let them start experimenting and programming. The planend hardware included a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128MB RAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, and 1080p output. It will run Linux in some form, but importantly it’s only $25 and will allow access to the wealth of free tools Linux has access to.

    Two months on and the spec of the PCB layout has been finalized and an alpha release has been sent to manufacture. Any doubts this PC wasn’t going to happen should now disappear as this alpha board is expected to be almost the same as the final production unit.

  • Google TV box price drops to $99

    We learned in May that Amazon.com had dropped the price of Logitech’s Google TV system (aka the Logitech Revue) 33 percent, to $199. Now, Logitech says it’s dropping the Revue’s price to $99.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Canalys: Android has almost half of global smartphone market, Microsoft has one percent

        Canalys tracks smartphone sales in 56 countries around the world, and released a summary of its data for Q2 2011 on August 1. According to the firm, Google’s Android operating system led in 35 countries and achieved a global market share of 48 percent.

        Android, “the number one platform by shipments since Q4 2010,” was shipped on 51.9 million phones during the quarter, a year-over-year increase of 379 percent, Canalys says. It put in a particularly strong performance in the APAC (Asia Pacific) region, garnering a 85 percent share in South Korea and a 71 percent share in Taiwan, the firm adds.

      • Huawei launches a 3D smartphone

        THE 3D TREND is once again being foisted upon punters as Huawei has announced the launch of its first 3D smartphone.

        Aptly called Vision, the handset features a 3D user interface and a “carousel display”, by which we think Huawei means a revolving set of home page icons, or images, or something. With it Huawei will join the Korean handset maker LG in the 3D smartphone market, which – to be honest – hasn’t exactly taken off yet.

      • HTC Salsa Android smartphone

        HTC has released two ‘Facebook phones’ of late – the Qwerty-packing ChaCha and the Salsa, the latter being a compact bundle of fun, which wears its dedicated Facebook button just beneath its screen.

      • Study: Android is least open of open source mobile platforms

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Tablets will overtake consumer PCs, says Fujitsu CTO

      Content consumption rules for consumers and tablet sales will overtake consumer PC and notebook sales. That’s the view of Dr Joseph Reger, Fujitsu’s chief technology officer.

    • Asus spins three low-priced netbooks

      Asus is taking the netbook back to its roots, with two devices intended to sell for as little as $200. The low-cost EeePC R011PX and EeePC X101 come with the Ubuntu and MeeGo operating systems, respectively — but will also run Windows if you insist.

    • Binatone Homesurf 705 tablet video demo

      MAKER OF GADGETS Binatone gave The INQUIRER a look at its budget 7in tablet, the Homesurf 705.

      Binatone has jumped into the tablet party with its Homesurf 705. It has a 7in resistive touchscreen with 480×800 resolution, 2GB of internal storage, WiFi, microUSB and a microSD card slot.

    • Android will turn the tablet market on its head

      SCATTER CUSHION HARDWARE, the tablet computer, will make its way into most homes with the Android operating system in place, according to a report.

      Informa Telecoms and Media said that despite its considerable hold on the market Apple’s IOS based machines will start to fall out of favour with users over the next four years before being completely swept aside by Android devices.

    • Galaxy Tab vs Playbook vs Flyer video review

      BITTER RIVALS Khidr Suleman and Chris Martin fight to the metaphorical death over the best 7in tablet currently on the market. This video face-off features three 7in tablets that are assessed on their various merits, and a winner is crowned.

Free Software/Open Source

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla eyes mobile OS landscape with new Boot to Gecko project

    Mozilla has announced a new experimental project called Boot to Gecko (B2G) with the aim of developing an operating system that emphasizes standards-based Web technologies. The initial focus will be on delivering a software environment for handheld devices such as smartphones.

  • Boot to Gecko – Mozilla’s Project To Build A Web Based Operating System For Smartphones

    When Mozilla announced the Webian Shell last month, many wondered if Mozilla too is planning to launch its own version of a web-based operating system. There was no definite answer then, but there is now.

    Mozilla has launched a new project called “Boot to Gecko”. The aim of this project is to develop a complete operating system for the open web. Unlike Google’s version of a web-based OS – the Chrome OS – Mozilla’s version is not aimed at netbooks. With Boot to Gecko, Mozilla is aiming for smartphones – and Android forms a part of their plan.

  • Mozilla aims to play the OS game

    Mozilla is plotting to join the operating system fray with an “open Web” twist.

• Databases

  • Oracle Provides Early Access to MySQL 5.6 New Features

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • A Word of Thanks

    Yesterday Michael Brauer posted on the OASIS ODF TC mailing list his farewell post. Michael, like a very large number of the other employees of the “Oracle’s Hamburg Business Unit”, if not all of them, will be let go by the end of the month. If you wonder what the “Oracle’s Hamburg Business Unit” is, it’s the people who have been developing a large part of what was OpenOffice.org and before that, StarOffice. I remember the company when it was a privately owned entity called StarDivision. I have contributed and interacted with these people for over 10 years. I guess I will see some of them working for different employers; sometimes as competitors, sometimes as partners. But we will see us again one day or another, and I look forward that day. I have made a few friends there; these are bright people, and they have played an instrumental in the expansion of Free and Open Source Software, and dare I remind it? ODF and Open Standards as well. I sincerely wish them the best for the future, whatever road they choose to take. This “business unit” has been known under many names during all these years, and I understand very well that the present days must be sad and sorrowful days.

• CMS

  • Open source wars: WordPress vs Drupal vs Joomla

    Every IT person, developer, and programmer has an opinion when it comes to the various open source content management systems out there. It often comes down to functionality and ease of use, but even then the lines are often blurred and there is rarely a clear-cut victor. WordPress vs Drupal vs Joomla – which is really the king of open source CMS?

• Programming

  • Perl Weekly Issue #1 – August 1, 2011

  • Perl6 (aka rakudo) is available on Debian

Reader’s Picks

• United Nations University trains practitioners in GNU Health (formerly GNU Medical) and other free software.

• Gmail wins Harvard

  Gmail will serve as the email interface for most Harvard undergraduate accounts by the middle of next month, replacing the webmail client currently designated for those addresses but used by a fraction of those students.

• Trey Ratcliff likes Google+

  The interface of the streams and the hangouts enable me to get to know new people in a more human manner. Comparing it to Twitter, there is a not this matrix-like stream of symbols and bit.ly codes flying by my eyes. Here, I see photos, visual thoughts, videos, and the sorts of retinal stimulation that humans expect.

• The value of open virtualization

  Over a 3-year period, an open virtualization solution can cost less than half of a proprietary alternative. Also, open virtualization efficiently supports a wide range of guest operating systems, including Windows as well as Linux. In fact, we think that one of the major uses of KVM is going to be by customers who want to virtualize mixed Linux / Windows environments, and have a common hypervisor.

• Oracle throws Schwartz blog into the memory hole to hide his endorsement of Google’s use of Java. [2]

  Robert Pogson’s trolls taunt that use of free software caused the demise of Sun. Wikipedia’s explanation is that the Dot Com bubble burst ruined the hardware market, by flooding it with cheap Sun hardware from bankrupt companies. Anti-trust authorities should revisit this episode to be sure Microsoft did not engage in a classic second hand equipment anti-trust violation as well as Microsoft and telco retardation of the internet in the late 90s which ruined so many businesses.

• Judge Blasts Oracle in Android Software Fight

  PJ adds a link to the ruling and adds, ” I don’t think the judge altogether grasps the tech yet, but he definitely ruled that Oracle’s expert wasn’t fit for the jury to hear, and that the $6 figure proposed as damages was not defensible.” In other news, she summarizes the history of the case,

  some keep pushing every step of this litigation as doom for Google, what has happened so far? Well, for starters, Oracle has had most of its patents found invalid in the reexaminations. And the judge has told it to reduce the number of its claims. So right there, Google has won a great deal. If there are any damages at all, they won’t therefore be in the stratosphere. And the judge yesterday told Oracle its $6B-expert was all wet in how he came up with that ridiculous figure. … In other words, this case is now a lot smaller than when it started, and if there is a settlement, it could only be on terms Google doesn’t mind. … at the beginning, almost the whole world was saying that Android was doomed, that Google was going to be found liable, that this was a slam dunk for Oracle, blah blah blah. Was any of that true? Obviously not. And may I point out that there are no patent counterclaims in this case, and yet Google is winning? Duh. Time for the media to notice that they got spun.

• Praise for Web OS.

  If the tiny but powerful Veer and the absolutely rabid yet organised fan community is any indication of the direction WebOS is heading, the OS could make a rapid recovery under HP’s stewardship.

• Security

  • Here is a twisted analogy used to advocate a government cure for a Microsoft Windows problem.

    Microsoft advocates anti-virus scanning that would give Microsoft the ability to kick competitors off networks.

  • Non Free battery software can be bricked by malware and crackers are working on making them blow up.

    The battery has its own processor and firmware and I wanted to get into the chip and change things and see what problems would arise … By analyzing a couple of updates that Apple had sent to fix problems in the batteries in the past, Miller found that password and was able to put the battery into “unsealed mode.” … a second password was required to move the battery into full access mode … That password is a default set at the factory and it’s not changed on laptops before they’re shipped.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • HB Gary emails reveal a professional cracking company called called Endgame.

    HB Gary used the crackers mostly Windows tools to attack and spy on labor unions and other activists.

  • Massachusetts police will scan license plates of every car the police vehicle passes and transmit the location of the car to a database that will be made available to various government agencies indefinitely.

• Anti-Trust

  • Nokia shows the Microsoft touch – faltering sales and losses.

    Nokia, struggling to hold onto its place as the world’s number one mobile phone maker, slumped Thursday to only its second quarterly loss since 1998 as sales continued to fall. Having pinned its hopes for recovery on a tie-up with US giant Microsoft, Nokia reported a three months to June a net loss of 368 million euros ($520.5 million), compared to a profit of 227 million euros in second quarter 2010. Analysts had expected a net loss of 104 million euros

    I’d buy one of their MeGo phones if I could be sure it was not a jail.

• Civil Rights

  • Ralph Nater calls for US Supreme Court impeachments.

    Five Supreme Court Justices–Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Kennedy are entrenching, in a whirlwind of judicial dictates, judicial legislating and sheer ideological judgments, a mega-corporate supremacy over the rights and remedies of individuals. … the decisions are brazenly over-riding sensible precedents, tearing apart the state common law of torts and blocking class actions, shoving aside jury verdicts, limiting people’s ‘standing to sue,’ pre-empting state jurisdictions–anything that serves to centralize power and hand it over to the corporate conquistadores.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Apple discusses patent threats in their SEC filings.

    PJ laughs at the ambiguity and asks, “Time to fix the US patent system, then, don’t you think, if one of the most successful tech companies in the country can’t predict its own survival with certainty, due to the threat of invalid patents?”

  • Microsoft sued for Kinect patent infringement

    Impulse Technology filed the suit in federal court in Delaware, accusing Microsoft and several game makers–including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and THQ–of violating patents related to, among other things, tracking and assessing movement skills in multidimensional space

    This does not seem related to the HiE-D case.

  • Did Microsoft Steal the Kinect?

    [Carlos Anzola], an inventor, tinkerer, and self-ascribed geek from Bogotá, Colombia, had been working for years on a nearly identical gesture interface for the PC. His creation, the Human interface Electronic Device, or HiE-D – pronounced ‘Heidi’ – was capable of gesture recognition years before Microsoft would release the Kinect.

    This seems to be a typical wine, dine, steal by Microsoft of a not entirely obvious piece of hardware.

More Reader’s Picks

• Linus not happy with Gnome 3

  I’m using Xfce. I think it’s a step down from gnome2, but it’s a huge step up from gnome3. Really.

• A study showing that IE users tended to be stupid was a hoax.

  I still think this PR flim flam was sponsored by Microsoft in the first place.

• Security

  • McAffee admits complete and universal security failure.

    I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly), with the great majority of the victims rarely discovering the intrusion or its impact. In fact, I divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they’ve been compromised and those that don’t yet know.

    Last year, another study showed that 88% of Fortune 500 networks had a particular botnet and Google has shown that Windows itself is spyware, so only people who don’t mind Microsoft and criminals looking over their work should use Windows. All non free software carries the risk of backdoors.

  • Glen Moody calls out Windows for “Operation Shady Rat”

    This massive breach of security, and loss of possibly highly-sensitive information, was all down to two things: the abiding thoughtlessness of people opening attachments, and a range of flaws in Microsoft’s software. So the statement that “the only organizations that are exempt from this threat are those that don’t have anything valuable or interesting worth stealing” is not true; another class would be those wise enough not to allow any of their personnel to use Microsoft products.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Feds Say They Can Search Bradley Manning’s Friend’s Laptop Because They Can

    This border search had nothing to do with the border and everything to do with the feds using a questionable opportunity to seize data that it could not otherwise get access to via legal means. If House’s laptop were really crucial to the case, then the Justice Department should have gotten a warrant to view it. … the reason given for having to keep House’s laptop for so long … the laptop ran both Linux and Windows and the tech geniuses at Homeland Security had trouble understanding how to deal with that.

    If you must travel to, from or within the US, bring a clean laptop you don’t mind giving away, sftp via rsync your files to yourself when you get here and scrub the drive before you leave. If you must run Windows, do it in a VirtualBox.

  • Man arrested and beaten for taking pictures of police in Los Vegas

    Crooks can be heard yelling in pain while Colling can be heard telling him to “shut up” and telling him his decision not to turn off the camera put him in “a world of hurt.”

    Bullies often blame their victims.

• Cablegate

  • Vaughan Smith, host to Julian Assange for nearly a year, speaks about his houseguest

    “I know this guy very well, and at no time have I thought this is someone who’s inappropriate to have in my house. None of us believe he’s a rapist.” … Does he think Assange is a hero? “Certainly by some measures, yes.”

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Another lethal hotspot found at Fukushima

    Tepco said it found another spot on the ventilation stack itself where radiation exceeded 10 sieverts per hour, a level that could lead to incapacitation or death after just a short period of exposure.

  • Roundup-ready GMO foods are being defeated by mutant weeds that resist Roundup.

• Finance

  • Who’s Grabbing Africa’s Land? U.S. Speculators, Including Universities

    China and Arab countries have generally been scrutinized in the media for their land deals, but much of the cash flow comes through U.S. and European investors, according to Oakland Institute—through established pension funds, agribusiness behemoths and even educational institutions. … “We see really vertical integration and control of the markets [by investors] who will be able to both influence prices and also decide on what the production will be,” warns Oakland Institute Policy Director Frederic Mousseau. “We have the food chain, which is pervasively and quite rapidly in recent years being under the control of financial groups.

• Anti-Trust

  • Former Microsoft Exec Steven VanRoekel Named US Federal CIO

    VanRoekel previously served 15 years at Microsoft where his final position was as Microsoft’s Windows Server and Tools Division, followed by a year+ stint at the FCC starting in 2009, ending at this newest appointment.

    Techrights has a lot of articles about the stint at the FCC.

• Censorship

  • EFF – Vague Anti-Stalking Law Threatens Protected Speech Online

    In this case, the government has presented the novel and dangerous theory that the use of a public communication service like Twitter to criticize a well-known individual can result in criminal liability based on the personal sensibilities of the person being criticized. … “While true threats can and should be opposed, public speech about prominent people must be vigorously protected.”

    The rich and powerful would use anti-trolling laws and as a censorship tool which has no effect on corporate controlled media.

• Privacy

  • EFF: Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online

    Randi Zuckerberg [of Facebook] doesn’t just think that you should be using your real name on Facebook or Google+ or LinkedIn — she thinks pseudonyms have no place on the Internet at all … Not only is uncivil discourse alive and well in venues with real name policies (such as Facebook), the argument willfully ignores the many voices that are silenced in the name of shutting up trolls: activists living under authoritarian regimes, whistleblowers, victims of violence, abuse, and harassment, and anyone with an unpopular or dissenting point of view that can legitimately expect to be imprisoned, beat-up, or harassed for speaking out. … An Internet in which everyone has to use their real name is not necessarily going to be any more polite, but it is guaranteed to be a disaster for freedom of expression.

    Not mentioned is the fact that rules against nyms might be violated by the enforcers themselves, which simply gives authorities power that others lack. Put more concisely, Facebook and other ISPs would be the greatest fuckwads of all, a situation that mirrors the world of broadcast and physical media.

• Civil Rights

  • Biofuels from food crops and rampant speculation lead to starvation and people eating less.

    The surprising conclusion from all this is that, leaving out the impact of the biofuel boom of the 2000s, global consumption of both cereals and edible oils is actually slowing down. All the more tragic, then, that speculative forces are still allowed to run amok in global commodity markets and global food prices are kept so high as to increase the deprivation of the millions of hungry people in the world.

  • US insurance companies have raised premiums and reduced health care.

  • Alabama’s immigrant hate law rehtoric finds a target.

    Newlywed shoppers claim Wal-Mart’s false accusation that they tried to steal $2.90 worth of chicken neck bones caused the wife to be falsely arrested and lose her job, her husband to be deported, and both to lose their car, all their possessions and their house – though Wal-Mart’s security video showed they had paid for the damn chicken bones.

    So much for “The customer is always right.” This is what happens when political leaders turn on minorities. RMS notes, “That false accusation would only have caused a brief annoyance if it had not been followed by repeated violations of the couple’s rights.” The annoyance might be brief, but the bad attitude is pervasive here in Alabama and officially encouraged by the state.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Huffington Post notices US patent problems, Huffington Post Notices

    It’s possible that one consequence of first-to-file is that you’ll have a rush of more patents … The bill’s new review process inside the PTO does provide a cheaper way to challenge silly patents than the current court process, but tech firms aren’t likely to take advantage of it. Monitoring patent applications is nearly impossible, and challenging a patent alerts its holder to a potential lawsuit target if the challenge fails.

  • Google: When patents attack Android

    Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents. … A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a “tax” for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. … the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means – which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop. … We’re also looking at other ways to reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android by strengthening our own patent portfolio.

    It is sad to see Google buying into a corrupt system which Microsoft has long used to extort gnu/linux users. Money wasted on worthless patents won’t fend off lawsuits from IV and other shell companies. Software patents should not exist.

  • Microsoft nonsense about Nortel Patents

    PJ notes, “Google publicly announced they wanted the patents for defense only. But counterclaims by a defendant are defense. It’s how you defend, meaning if no one sues you for patent infringement, you never use the patents at all in litigation. For Shaw to pretend he doesn’t know that, assuming the media won’t, is cynical. And you thought “Get the Facts” was bad.” Google put it more clearly

    it’s obvious why we turned down Microsoft’s offer. Microsoft’s objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn’t fall for it.

  • Patents against prosperity

    This recent episode of Planet Money, “When Patents Attack”, is an informative and entertaining primer on the way America’s patent system squelches competition, slows innovation, and enables egregious predation through the legal system. Please listen to this. And then tell me that Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures is not our age’s authentic villainous robber baron, making a fortune gaming America’s dysfunctional patent-law system to shake down would-be innovators.

  • Copyrights

    • Two solicitors fined and suspended for file-sharer letters

      The Solicitors Regulation Authority has suspended two lawyers and fined them £20,000 each for sending out thousands of letters accusing people of illegally sharing files…. Davenport Lyons passed the work onto ACS:Law and Andrew Crossley in 2009 when it got sick of the bad publicity. Crossley was declared bankrupt in June

    • Righthaven, still angering judges, finally pays cash for its mistakes

      Now, it is finally paying defense lawyers, even if it can’t quite manage to send a check to the proper location.

      Fraud from start to finish.

    • The UK Musicians Union wants to tax every device that can play music.

      [Their argument] reveals the abiding and ingrained sense of entitlement that pervades all the creative industries. They are not content to be paid once like most people, but want to be paid again and again.

      It is difficult to imagine individual musicians that blockheaded, so the union must represent someone else.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 157

• Kernel Space

  • Compiling Linux kernel 3.0 with Emdebian ARM toolchain

    The Emdebian project works to bring Debian on embedded platforms, with repositories of custom distributions and toolchains to cross-compile software. I wanted to try their ARM toolchains, and coincidentally the Linux kernel 3.0 has been released in these days, so I tried to cross-compile it and emulate it on QEMU. These tests have been done on my Debian “wheezy” desktop.

• Applications

  • Cinelerra is very easy – 2/3

    Now, in the first section we stopped at: Now go to the timeline and move the white flashing line, then move the image in the composer one more time, then rewind and play the videoclip, you will be able to see the image moving on the video… looks good!

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Enabling Compiz Fusion On A Fedora 15 GNOME Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)

    • Tutorial: Create an animated radar with GAP

    • Resolving OSSEC active response iptables issues

    • Configuring Jack Audio with KDE Part 2

    • HTG Explains: What Are the Differences Between Linux Shells?

    • Limiting the number of connections to SSH Server using Iptables

    • Connect to Wi-Fi from CLI in Linux

    • Finch: instant message from the shell/command line

    • SABnzbd+ Install, Setup, & Configuration Guide for Ubuntu & Linux Mint!

    • How To Install, Secure, And Automate AWStats (CentOS/RHEL)

  • Games

    • Announcing C.R.A.B! Looking For Artists!

      0

      Pyrodactyl who released The A.Typical RPG are working on a new game called C.R.A.B which will also use emotions like with their last game and develop them deeper into “Mood”, “Content” and “Tone” which will offer much more combinations then in the usual cRPG.

    • Unigine OilRush Game Receives More Enhancements

      There’s still no revised release plans from Unigine Corp on when they plan to officially release their OilRush cross-platform game (the last official update was this “summer” but acknowledged to me delays were likely), but they did put out a new beta version. OilRush v0.72 brings a number of new enhancements to better this inaugural title developed by the Russian company.

    • First Person Shooter ‘Red Eclipse : Supernova Edition’ Released for Linux

• Desktop Environments

  • Moved to Fluxbox

    After giving Unity a try on Ubuntu 11.04 and hearing that GNOME2 will be dropped in Ubuntu 11.10, I’ve decided to find a new work environment. I tested a few desktop environments and window managers and decided on Fluxbox.

  • Change Isn’t Always Bad for Linux

    Mac users who don’t like the Lion changes don’t have that same kind of latitude. There aren’t really any alternative Mac distributions they can turn to.

    Linux users are better positioned to embrace change, since it’s usually not too hard to walk away from changes we don’t agree with. So why not be a little open to changes? Why not give more UI changes an extended look before we walk away in anger or disgust?

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Top Ten of the most viewed KDE Websites

      Some readers might remember, some time back we talked about setting up stats for most of our KDE Websites. Yes, we did. And i thought it is time to share something of that with you, my highly interested readers

      Let’s compile a chart of our most viewed sites.
      It’s no surprise, our highly dynamics sites are ranking very high. But which and how?

  • GNOME Desktop

    • New GTK+ Release Integrates Gail, Redoes File Chooser

      There’s another noteworthy GTK+ development release in the road to GTK+ 3.2. This new GTK+ 3.1.10 release integrates the Gail module, re-designed file chooser features, theming enhancements, and bug fixes.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Calculate Linux 11.6.1 released

      First update for distribution Calculate Linux 11.6 has been released.
      Major Changes¶

      * Fixed KDE-applet knetworkmanager.
      * Fixed installation with the first version of Grub.
      * Fixed permissions for samba server share distfiles.
      * Fixed auto-install the video driver on to the USB-HDD.
      * Fixed saving settings.
      * To display the disk size using the binary prefix instead of decimal.
      * Improved localization of the Bulgarian language.
      * KDE updated to version 4.6.5.

    • Zorin OS 5 Lite is now available

      The Zorin OS Team are proud to release the Zorin OS 5 Lite, the lightweight version of our operating system designed for Windows users using old and low-spec computers. We have released this version ahead of schedule. This new version of Zorin OS Lite is based on Lubuntu 11.04 and uses the LXDE desktop environment, which brings new and updated packages. Many program changes were also made for this release to increase size efficiency and to improve the overall experience. Most notable in this release is that in can now fit on a CD. We have removed WINE, VLC, a few games and other programs to save space and included them into our new and exclusive program, the “Zorin OS Lite Extra Software” which allows you to install these programs easily if you wish to do so. We have also included our other exclusive programs such as our Zorin Look Changer and Internet Browser Manager in Zorin OS 5 Lite.

  • Gentoo Family

    • Sabayon 6 GNOME review

      Chromium is the only Web browser installed, but Firefox 5 and Opera 11.50 are available for installation. Adobe Flash plugin and Java JRE are installed, and with libdvdcss installed, Totem, the installed video player, has no problem playing encrypted video DVDs, Essentially, the system comes loaded with all the applications that most users will need. Need some application that is not installed? Use the package management system to search the repository and install it.

  • Red Hat Family

    • 6 wonders of CentOS 6.0

      Do you know what CentOS is?
      No, this is a not a OS which costs you only one cent to buy. Although, I bought a DVD with Linux OS for 0.01 GBP once, it was not CentOS.
      CentOS is actually free Operating System based on RedHat Enterprise Linux. In other words, group of enthusiasts took out source code of RHEL, which they have to publish as part of Linux license, re-branded it as CentOS and published for open and free usage.

    • [CentOS 6.0 (LiveCD) is out]

    • Fedora

      • Ask Fedora – 24-7

        Enter the world of Ask Fedora. Of course this is just a test instance for feedback. So test it out, ask questions, provide answers and let me know how everything is working out for you. I am primarily looking at how well it scales and whether open id and your Fedora id is working as intended but any other feedback is welcome too. If you know Django and Python and want to help out, drop me a line. We are looking to add several features, fix some issues and provide excellent integration with Fedora including but not limited to auto linking to Red Hat bugzilla, theming it and providing its own logo!

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • CrunchBang worth more than just a test run

        However, I’m on my fourth day of using CrunchBang — also known in shorthand as #! — and, for once, the temptation to use it for longer that the simple “test drive” is overwhelming, to the point where it’s completely feasible that I may be using this for quite awhile.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Trying Kubuntu 11.04

            On a second thought, I am back into Kubuntu just to see how much I can endure it, I should say it is wow with all the effects as after rebooting it is with nvidia proprietary drivers and the effects are brilliant

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux thin client taps new Marvell ARM SoC

    Wyse Technology announced a Linux thin client based on Marvell’s new 1GHz PXA510 system-on-chip (SoC), with support for Citrix Receiver, VMware View Open Client, Wyse TCX and VDA, and Microsoft’s RDP (remote desktop protocol) 7. The Wyse T50 offers 1GB RAM, 1GB flash, DVI-I with a dual-display option, gigabit Ethernet, four USB ports, and support for 720p video within a browser.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Apple iOS versus Android

        As Android’s popularity grows its competitors look for ways to slow it down.

        Things are looking a little rough for Android right now. Its increased popularity is not only attracting millions of new fans but is also attracting unwanted patent attention from competitors unhappy with its success.

Leftovers

• Cablegate

  • Interview #WikiLeaks Cambodian Cables and Politics

• Finance

  • Goldman Sachs fights bias lawsuit, cites Wal-Mart

    Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) said a recent landmark decision throwing out a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart (WMT.N) means it should not face a wide-ranging case accusing it of systematic bias against women.

  • The Fed Audit

    The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study. “As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world,” said Sanders. “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.”

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Ars reviews the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook

  • Linux all-in-one phone and computer so near, so far

    For six months I longed for the Motorola Atrix Android smartphone first announced in January. That was, until I got one and reality fell short of my utopian vision. Now I must beseech Motorola, telcos and Linux hackers alike to bring my dream to fruition.

• Applications

  • Better Late Than Never: Google Music Manager Now Available For Linux

    Linux users who were invited to the Google Music Beta program back when it first launched quickly realized that the service offered little value to them. Why? Because, at the time, there was no native way to upload music. Today, after two-and-a-half-months, Google finally released an uploader designed just for Linux.

    The uploader essentially works just like the Windows version, with one small tweak: OGG support. OGG files will automatically be transcoded to 320kbps MP3 files, which will inevitably make the already painfully slow uploading process last even longer — but hey, at least you can finally use that beta invite, right?

  • Google Music Manager dusts off tuxedo, makes Linux debut

  • Virtualboxes.org Helps You Discover Your New Favorite Linux Flavour

    So you’ve gotten started with Linux, but you’re looking for a new flavour besides Ubuntu to try out. Instead of installing a bunch of them from scratch, web site Virtualboxes provides a bunch of free Virtualbox images for you to test out, no installation required.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Connect to Wi-Fi from CLI in Linux

    • How To Freshly Install Ubuntu Linux 11.04

• Distributions

  • Ten reasons for giving Slackware Linux a go

    Slackware Linux is one of the most powerful distributions available. But its power comes at a price. It’s far less user-friendly than many other distributions. In fact, only Gentoo tops Slackware for difficulty. But if you avoid Slackware for those reasons, you’ll miss out in a number of ways. Here are 10 of them.

  • Debian Family

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical releases Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS

• Devices/Embedded

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 screenshot tour

      This page of screenshots accompanies DeviceGuru’s initial review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet. The list below provides a handy index of the tour’s 200+ screenshots, which are grouped by function or application. Watch for the publication of our detailed Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Review in the next week or so, for the complete story behind these pictures.

Free Software/Open Source

• 19 ways to do your bit for open source

  It’s undoubtedly good to give back to a community you take so much from.

  And in doing so, you can also help improve the software that you use every day, both for your benefit and for everyone else.

  Here are 19 ways you can help open source projects.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla jumps to deal with Google Toolbar demise

      The toolbar offers a variety of services, including a search box, a way to use bookmarks stored on a server, and a measurement of a Web site’s PageRank–a score Google gives that measures its influence in Google search results. But Google has chosen to do in the Firefox version.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • OpenOffice Gets IBM Boost

    It’s curious how the recent OpenOffice saga has been downplayed by much of the media covering technology, but it seems pretty important to me. OpenOffice and LibreOffice are the two primary office suites available today that are both free and complete. There are others, too, but OpenOffice is the dominant suite, and LibreOffice is a fork of the OpenOffice code.

    The fork, which is a common phenomenon in open-source projects, was expected by many to supersede OpenOffice, but two things happened. First Oracle, who owned OpenOffice as part of the Sun takeover, wasn’t interested in maintaining what is essentially a labor of love, so it gave the whole thing to the Apache Foundation. Then this week IBM decided it wanted OpenOffice to stick around, so it handed over its entire Lotus Symphony Suite to the group and told them to use whatever they wanted.

  • Contest winner Ksplice wins big with Oracle buy

    Barely three years old, Cambridge startup Ksplice Inc. was bought by database giant Oracle Corp. for an undisclosed amount.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Fellowship interview with Bernhard Reiter

    Bernhard is founder and Executive Director of Intevation GmbH, a company with exclusively Free Software products and services since 1999. He played a crucial role in the establishment of FSFE as one of its founders, and architect of the original German team. Beside that he participated in setting up three important Free Software organisations: FreeGIS.org, FFII, and FossGIS.

• Openness/Sharing

  • The Free Technology Academy needs your help!

    Since the first pilot in 2009, the FTA programme [5] has expanded from 3 to 13 course modules, including subjects such as “The concepts of Free Software and Open Standards”, “GNU/Linux systems”, “Economic Aspects of Free Software”, “Software Architecture” and many others. According to the spirit of the Free Software movement, all FTA learning materials [6] are released under copyleft licenses.

• Standards/Consortia

  • FTC chairman backs national data security standard

    Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz said there should be a national data breach notification standard Thursday but declined to take a position on the SAFE Data Act that passed a House subcommittee Wednesday.

    Currently, 47 states have laws that require companies to notify consumers if their private data is breached, but there is no national standard.

    “You don’t want a crazy quilt patchwork of statutes even if most of them, or the vast majority of them, are reasonable,” Leibowitz said at a forum on privacy at the Brookings Institution on Thursday.

Leftovers

• Civil Rights

  • Eric S Raymond: Thoughts On No-Anonymity Policy Of Google+

    Google is clearly making some execution mistakes in implementing this policy, such as deleting the accounts of people with single-word legal names that merely look like handles. I agree these mistakes need correction and that Google needs to have a more responsive appeals process, but I think over-focusing on mistakes and edge cases obscures the most interesting question: is Google right? Will a no-handles policy produce a social network with higher value to more users than a network with handles?

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • The Usage Based Billing Hearing Concludes: Has the CRTC Come to Competition Too Late?

    The CRTC’s usage based billing oral hearing concluded yesterday with a final decision expected some time in the fall. This long post focuses on the shift in CRTC thinking on the state of broadband competition in Canada but wonders whether it comes too late to make a difference. For many years, the CRTC has steadfastly maintained that the Canadian ISP market is competitive. For example, in the net neutrality decision from October 2009 it stated:

    Consistent with the current regulatory approach, under which the Commission has granted forbearance for retail Internet services, primary ISPs may continue to apply ITMPs to retail Internet services as they consider appropriate, with no requirement for prior Commission approval. This approach remains valid due in part to the large number of existing ISPs. A change in the approach would amount to interference with market forces and would result in inefficient regulation, which is contrary to the Policy Direction.

• Copyrights

  • Access Copyright: It’s “Virtually Impossible” to Opt-Out Of Tariff

    Over the past few weeks, a growing number of Canadian universities have announced plans to opt-out of the Access Copyright interim tariff effective September 1, 2011 (the University of Calgary’s Gauntlet has an excellent article on the issue). Those universities join many others that opted-out from the start of the year. While many universities are moving on to alternative licensing approaches, the universities and Access Copyright continue to battle over the prospect of transactional (or pay-per-use) licensing which the universities want and Access Copyright refuses to grant. The AUCC filed its response on the issue earlier this week, which included some notable correspondence between Access Copyright and academic publishers.

  • ACTA

    • European Parliament ACTA study

      Act on ACTA refers to a European Parliament Trade Committee commissioned study on ACTA (pdf). The study highlights problematic aspects of ACTA and makes recommendations (see below). According to the study, “unconditional consent would be an inappropriate response”, and “There does not therefore appear to be any immediate benefit from ACTA for EU citizens”. The study confirms ACTA goes beyond current EU legislation. It recommends asking the European Court of Justice an opinion on ACTA.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Acer to deliver ARM notebook within nine days

    The – we suppose we have to say “smartbook”, the moniker once given to ARM-based netbooks but sadly much out of favour in these tablet-centric times – will run Android 3.2 Honeycomb, according to company chairman JT Wang, speaking this week in Asia, Digitimes reports.

  • Migrating to GNU/Linux in the Good Old Days

    It’s rather obvious that GNU/Linux is not that other OS but people seem to feel an OS that is not that other OS is somehow faulty. He wrote that it took him a year to get his system working as he wanted. It took me installation time. I think I installed five machines from scratch in two evenings. It was my first installation and the machines were ancient Pentium Pros. In 2000, they were slow, but I did not notice any of the problems the authour felt were important:

    * NO CRASHES – Amen. We both loved that. That’s what drove me to GNU/Linux and it was like entering the Garden of Eden. This feature alone justified the bit of adjustment required and returned blessing many-fold.
    * graphics – mine worked immediately with two lines changed in X11F86.conf (or something like that). His was faulty on a newer motherboard.
    * fonts – that other OS was using 800×600. GNU/Linux could do 1024×768 if I recall. He thought the fonts were “ugly”. I have no idea what he meant. Mine were fine.

  • Chrome for Mac OS X Lion is Coming, Even As Lion Mimics Chrome OS

    It will be very interesting to see the Chrome browser and the Lion OS march forward together, partly because Lion incorporates a number of ideas built into Google’s Chrome OS, which features the Chrome browser as its desktop interface. We covered this mimicry effort from Apple, where Lion allows for Chrome OS-like cloud-based treatment of data and applications here.

    As Google officials noted when announcing Chrome OS: “In Chrome OS, every application is a web application. Users don’t have to install applications. All data in Chrome OS is in the cloud.”

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Linux Outlaws 219 – Summer LULZ

    IBM to contribute Symphony, we look at changes in Ubuntu 11.10, Zuckerberg closes off Google+ account so he can’t be tracked and Fab reviews the Motorola Xoom tablet.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 3.1 Kernel Gains A Wiimote HID Driver

    As part of the HID (Human Interface Device) pull for the mainline 3.1 kernel is a Nintendo Wii Remote driver that makes it possible to use the Wiimote as an input device “out of the box” on future versions of Linux. There’s also been additions to the sysfs interface for setting and reading the four LED states of the Wiimote, which can be used for other purposes.

  • Linux 3.0 Real-Time Kernel Released

    After not being updated for a few mainline kernel release cycles, the real-time (RT) Linux kernel has been updated against the Linux 3.0 kernel release.

    Thomas Gleixner announced the Linux 3.0-rt1 kernel on the kernel mailing list yesterday, which integrates the RT patch-set atop the vanilla kernel.

  • Linux 3.0 scrubs up Btrfs, gets more Xen

  • Graphics Stack

    • 6 of the Best Free Linux Document-Oriented Databases

      Nvidia 275.21 has been released. Version 275.21 adds support for GeForce 540M and also fixes a handful of problems.

• Applications

  • Cinelerra is very easy – 1/3

  • 6 of the Best Free Linux Document-Oriented Databases

  • How to work as a Graphic Designer without sleeping with Adobe

    One thing I like about these open source program is that they don’t try to do everything. For example nowadays with Photoshop you can actually do pretty much all your design and illustration in there. But why is that? I personally prefer tools that does one thing, and one thing well. I guess that was the idea behind all the tools of the Adobe creative suite but the goal got lost in translation and now every tools try to do everything.

    The gimp is a great example of a tool that does what it does, and well! It’s a really solid image retouching and photo editing software. It a really mature open source project with a huge community of users and developer. It’s intelligently built and can be extended with Scheme or python script!

  • 5 More Dropbox Alternatives Recommended by Readers

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Configuring Jack Audio With KDE

    • How to Secure SSH server from Brute-Force and DDOS with Fail2ban ( Ubuntu )

    • CentOS 6 Webmin Install

    • How to install and run VirtualBox on Fedora (and Kororaa)

    • HOWTO : Solves the Wireshark not loading on Back|Track 5

    • SMTP Configuration

    • In order to send a signal (such as kill) to all process of a certain UNIX user, one can do

    • Weekend Project: Use HoneyD on Linux to Fool Attackers

  • Wine

    • Wine 1.3.25 Presents Rewritten Audio Support

  • Games

    • A look at StuntRally on Linux

      The game features 54 tracks in 8 sceneries, 7 cars and a Track Editor.
      It focuses on closed rally tracks with possible stunt elements (jumps, loops, pipes).
      The game and editor both run on Windows and Linux. The Windows installer has all tracks included.

    • Urban Terror: A Hollywood-Style First Person Shooter

    • Mini Spotlight: Balanced Annihilation Reloaded

      Currently our second ever (I think) game spotlight, I have decided to make a little post about Balanced Annihilation Reloaded.

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME & KDE Developers Go To Battle Over A Name

    Ahead of the Berlin Desktop Summit, several GNOME and KDE developers have begun a mailing list battle…over a name. In particular, that with GNOME 3.0 their control panel areas is called “System Settings”, which is precisely what the KDE developers call their system control area too.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE Dolphin’s Service Menus

      While it is well known that I’m a huge Gnome (classic) fan, I recently dipped into KDE grounds, again.

• Distributions

  • Custom distro hammers hardware to detect system failures

    Breakin is a distribution to run diagnostics on systems to find hardware issues or component failures. Put together by Advanced Clustering Technologies, Breakin is a Linux-based live CD that tests memory, the CPU, hard drives, (supported) temperature sensors, and looks for any Machine Check Exception (MCE) errors generated during the tests.

  • New Releases

    • Salix 13.37 (KDE)

    • Clonezilla 1.2.9-19

    • Finnix 102

    • Anniversary: Core Update 50 released

      Today, we are going to release the 50th update of IPFire 2.9. Because of that fact, a more detailed report:

  • Red Hat Family

    • Clone Wars 2 – Revenge of the Install DVDs

      Last week I found out some interesting information when I took an initial look at two of the most popular RHEL-based Linux distributions, CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL). The next obvious step is to install the two, side by side, and continue this comparison. To be clear, I’m not running benchmarks of any sort on the two operating systems. I have no doubt that they will perform consistently enough to make that exercise un-interesting. What I’m looking for is what makes these distributions different, and anything that would make me particularly like or dislike one of these distributions.

    • Red Hat moves to RHEL 5.7 as Oracle nabs Ksplice

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Community Week. It’s a Wrap!

        • Get a Glimpse of Unstable Apps in Ubuntu Without Risk

          Sergey “Shnatsel” Davidoff posted today that Alpha testing has just been revolutionized. Sounds exciting, huh? It really is. Glimpse allows users to test new or unstable updates without risk of breaking their current installs.

Free Software/Open Source

• The open internet and its enemies

  I believe that if we want an open society based around principles of equality of opportunity, social justice and free expression, we need to build it on technologies which are themselves ‘open’, and that this is the only way to encourage a diverse online culture that allows all voices to be heard.

  But even if you agree with me, deciding what we mean by ‘open’ is far from straightforward:

  Does it mean an internet built around the end-to-end principle, where any connected computer can exchange data with any other computer and the network itself is unaware of the ‘meaning’ of the bits exchanged?

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GNU Health training at the United Nations University

    I’m happy to announce the succesful GNU Health Academia at the United Nations University, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during the last week of June. Digg this article

• Licensing

  • Two questions about (Free) software development: copyright assignment and non-commercial use

Leftovers

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • In Defence of Publication Reform

Reader’s Picks

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has pushed nasty legislation is many US states since the 2010 election

    A steady stream of almost identical bills — bills to defund unions, require Photo ID’s make it harder for democratic constituencies to vote, bills to privatize schools and public assets, bills to enshrine corporate tax loopholes while crippling the government’s ability to raise revenue, bills to round up immigrants — were introduced and passed. An almost identical set of corporations benefited from these measures.

    These corrupt state governments typically favor Microsoft and unregulated telco monopolies.

  • Fans First and Fan Freedom Project are both astroturf groups funded by rival monopoly entertainment sales groups.

    I don’t agree that astroturf groups are rare in the US entertainment industry.

• Censorship

  • Cairn Oil got an injunction to ban Greenpeace protesters from posting photos of their sit-in.

    The rich and powerful try to frame the issue as one of privacy, and the Guardian reporter tries to be sympathetic to Cairn, but it’s censorship.

  • The United Arab Emirates is charging dissidents with the tyrannical crime of “insulting officials.”

• Civil Rights

  • “tort reform” bills pushed by tobacco and insurance companies on US states limit liability to a level so low that negligent practices will remain profitable.

    Tort reform is just one of the nasty programs from the influential ghost of Milton Friedman, ALEC which is a front group for tobacco and other ugly and exploitative businesses which should be put on a leash.

  • Increased productivity generates some $2 trillion more dollars per year than people were able to make in the 1970s, but workers get none of it thanks to market obstructions, regulatory failure and shifted US policy.

    This [Eisenhower and Kennedy administration] “Keynesian Consensus” never questioned the fairness of the initial capital/labor split, but it at least offered workers a share of the fruits of future economic growth. … The upward redistribution has remained as hidden as possible. The forms it has taken [bonuses, bloated salaries, stock options, consulting fees, sumptuous conferences, palatial offices, original artwork, retinues of superfluous support staff, hunting lodges, private corporate dining rooms, golden parachute retirements] – defy exact categorization. Some would appear as profit, some as interest, some as dividends, realized capital gains, gigantic pension programs, retained earnings, or owners’ income, with the remainder deeply buried as “costs of doing business.”

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Nathan Myhrvold can’t help but contradict himself,

    [IV] and the other patent trolls (and burnt-out companies like Microsoft that are becoming a new kind of patent troll by default) have realised that it is not actual, on-the-ground, expensive innovation that counts, but the piece of paper from the USPTO assigning nominal “ownership” of that innovation. He and his company have learned how to game the system

    There’s good evidence that Microsoft has used patents in the past to keep others out of markets.

  • Copyrights

    • Richard Stallman weighs in on the Aaron Swartz case:

      “Aaron Swartz has been charged with many federal crimes for downloading many articles from JSTOR. The only wrongdoers here are JSTOR and the journals it hosts. They ought to make the articles available to the general public, with freedom to redistribute. And if they don’t do this voluntarily, society should impose it.”

    • Sign this petition opposing the “PROTECT IP” censorship bill.

    • The difference between Google and Aaron Swartz

      [Aaron's intentions are unclear] Some folks, including the FBI, have made the claim he was planning to redistribute the data. Others have pointed to his past research analyzing influence in academic writing. … There are many, many research applications, including mine, that are still not possible with approved means of accessing data. This essentially means that if you want to understand the collaborative nature of a specific field or follow the trajectory of and idea across disciplines, a reference librarian can’t help you. Instead, you have to become a felon.

    • Why Are Hackers Becoming So Angry?

      It is because of a wave of severe copyright enforcement legislation like ACTA, HADOPI, the Digital Economy Act, La Ley Sinde and the US PROTECT IP legislation that hackers are angry. Not just because the proposals are in themselves unjust and unfair, but because of the way that they are being brought in. … drawn up at secret meetings of key politicians and representatives of powerful industries.

    • The Partnership for Integrity in Scientific Dis-semination argues against open access.

      That’s funny but the Aaron Swartz case and various attacks on network and software freedom show that real publishers are willing to eliminate freedom of speech and put opponents in jail to maintain their position. Scientists should only do peer review for strictly open access journals which allow free redistribution of articles by the public.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Pinoy IT activist Manny Amador found dead

  Passionate Linux advocate and local IT pioneer Manny Amador was found dead by authorities on Friday in his rented house in Cebu where he had relocated to work for open-source firm InfoWeapons.

• Software Wars are updated now in git

• Stats for browsers and operating systems accessing sutor.com

  Linux 12.82%

• Google’s Problems with Android Apps, Webmaster Tools and Oracle – RMS Says Don’t Go There

• Desktop

  • Simmtronics Launches India’s First Solar-powered Desktop

    The operating system used is Linux (exact distro is unknown) and the kit includes a 74W solar panel with charge controller, SMF battery and AC inverter.

  • This Desktop runs on Solar Power, Courtesy Simmtronics Semiconductors

  • Can sunlight power a desktop?

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Going Linux #145

  • Podcast Season 3 Episode 14

  • Listen to Linux Radio!

• Kernel Space

  • Linux by the numbers

    The latest version of the Linux kernel, Linux 3.0, was pushed out last night, marking the end of the 2.6 kernel series.

    As most people in the know understand, this does not represent a big sea change, since the new version numbering was really just a way to discontinue the 2.6 numbering, which would have been 2.6.40 for the kernel today, had not Linus Torvalds announced in late May that the time had come for a new numbering scheme.

  • Don’t Panic! It’s only Linux 3.0

    There have also been improvements with how the kernel works with the still experimental Btrfs (B-tree file system) and the now standard ext4 file system. This, in turn, should lead to faster and, in the case of Btrfs, more reliable, file systems.

  • Graphics Stack

    • July 2011 Open-Source Graphics Driver Comparison

      This article presents these Linux graphics results for eight configurations.

• Applications

  • Geeqie: A Lightweight Image Viewer on Ubuntu

  • We’ve Just Revolutionized Alpha Testing

    Think back to the last time you wanted to look at a newer, unstable release of some app. Was it easy to do? Or was it a compilation from source full of mystical errors, booting a newer OS release from a live CD while fighting black-screen-on-boot bugs, or a terribly slow and awkward virtual machine installation (which still didn’t make much sense because you couldn’t try it with your real data)? I’ll guess it was closer to the latter.

  • 3 graphical clients for managing the Uncomplicated FireWall

    ufw, the Uncomplicated FireWall, is Ubuntu’s user-friendly, command line frontend to IPTables, the command line utility for managing Netfilter, the firewall application built into the Linux kernel. It is installed not just on Ubuntu, but also on all Ubuntu-based distributions. As simple to use as ufw is, a graphical interface is even better, especially for new users.

  • Proprietary

    • Google Music Manager Finally Launches On Linux

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Formatting Files in Bash

    • The Five Minute How To Install VirtualBox 4.1 Guide

    • Enabling Compiz Fusion On A Fedora 15 GNOME Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)

    • DIY: Secure a MySQL installation on Linux

    • How to free some space with apt-get

    • How to Rotate Apache Log Files in Linux

    • OpenSSH Best Practices

    • Quick Tip: Install Canon MP250 Drivers in Linux

    • Effortless File Sharing Across Platforms with FreeNAS

    • How To Install OpenERP 6 On Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server

      Recently at, we’ve been setting up several new instances of OpenERP for customers. Our server operating system of choice is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Installing OpenERP isn’t really that hard, but having seen several other “How Tos” online describing various methods where none seemed to do the whole thing in what I consider to be “the right way”, I thought I’d explain how we do it. There are a few forum posts that I’ve come across where the advice is just plain wrong too, so do be careful.

  • Games

    • Blocks That Matter Tech Demo Updated

    • BEEP now on USC

    • 0 A.D. Alpha 6 ‘Fortuna’ Released with New Maps, Sounds, Textures and Many Other Features

• Desktop Environments

  • Desktop Summit Announcements

    In case you missed them, there have been a couple of exciting announcements around the Desktop Summit in Berlin, Germany.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • public transport plasmoid looking for your input

      I really like the ability to quickly see route information with times and associated alerts for my home station, and with multiple instances of the Plasmoid I can keep track of several stations quite easily at a glance. The journey features are also indispensible.

      Using it with Contour, which is getting support for random Plasmoids in addition to the Nepomuk-derived resources that are associated with an activity, is going to be very, very nice for someone like me who travels a fair amount: I’ll end up with one Activity on my tablet per trip with all my files, contacts and even transit information agregated in one place that I can switch to with a simple thumb swipe. Oh, yeah!

    • ++performance

      Plasma uses a lot of files from disk, particularly when using QML and scripted Plasmoids, but also whenever something requests an image from the theme. The Package class is responsible for the former functionality and the Theme class for the latter. We already cache the results of the Theme rendering, but not the results of looking around on disk for the requested image. There is essentially no caching at all for Package: every request for a file sends it looking on disk for it.

    • KDE Plasma Desktop Introduction

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 17th July 2011

    • Improving KDE’s Plasma Performance

      Due to KDE’s Plasma extensive use of the hard disk for Plasmoids and other activities, and thinking about KDE’s performance on mobile device, Aaron Seigo has been working to make the library consume less memory. He has achieved at least partial success in this effort.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Setting up GNOME 3 on Arch Linux

      It must have been my curiosity that drove me to exploring Arch Linux a few weeks ago. Its coming on a Linux Format DVD and a few kind words about its being a cutting edge distribution were enough to set me installing it into a VirtualBox virtual machine for a spot of investigation. In spite of warnings to the contrary, I took the path of least resistance with the installation even though I did look among the packages to see if I could select a desktop environment to be added as well. Not finding anything like GNOME in there, I left everything as defaulted and ended up with a command line interface as I suspected. The next job was to use the pacman command to add the extras that were needed to set in place a fully functioning desktop.

• Distributions

  • A Linux Distro From the US Department of Defense

  • Lightweight Portable Security (LPS)-A Linux disto from the US Department of Defense

  • Preview: What’s Coming Up In VectorLinux 7?

    A while ago I received an invitation to view a video presentation giving 10 good reasons to review VectorLinux, and it’s true that I cannot recall to have read a review of it in years. This venerable distribution has been around for a long time but has also garnered some controversy around offering a paid for Deluxe version, introducing a paid for members club, and has been accused of not making source code freely available and thereby infringing on the GPL. It seems the club did not take off as I cannot find any mention of it anymore on the web site.

    All that aside, VectorLinux 5.0.1 was my distribution of choice when returning to Linux in 2005, and a nice experience it was. Basically what I had been looking for was something like Mandrake Linux back in the late 90′s but based on Slackware, and Vector did just fit the bill.

    It had and probably still has a very enthusiastic, helpful and polite community, and the forums were a great resource. I still remember the names and the fact that all these people are still actively involved as you can see in the credits during installation speaks volumes.

  • Not Your Average Linux Distribution: DOD’s Flavor

    The Department of Defense (DOD) has released a unique Linux distribution designed to be a secure option for people, such as telecommuters, who need remote access to internal government and corporate networks from potentially insecure desktops.

    Created by a collaboration between the DOD and the Air Force Research Laboratory, Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) can be booted from a CD or flash drive onto nearly any Intel-based PC or Mac, according to information posted on the project’s website.

  • Arch Linux: I stand corrected

    In my last article, ArchBang: A small review I was a bit unfair to the distro. I did not want to see these distros (ArchBang and Arch Linux) for what they really are and I consider that to be very wrong. Therefore, I bring you a few thoughts on Arch Linux after playing around with it for about 2-3 days.

    Arch is not your average, over-dressed, underpowered and over-popular Linux… as I so wrongly tried to see at as. Arch has the ability… no, gives you the power…

  • New Releases

    • Google Kills Labs, Experiments Continue

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • On exorcisms and other fun – specially for opennet.ru

  • Red Hat Family

    • Apple Lion? No – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 instead

      In a week peppered with massive exposure for Apple’s new OS X release Lion, open source converts will hopefully be more interested to read that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 is now here.

      Key “extra toppings” in this iteration centre on features that enhance the flexibility, security and stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 environments.

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 Updates Linux Security

    • Red Hat updates Enterprise Linux 5.7

      Red Hat has updated Enterprise Linux 5.7, which now includes several features from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

      The operating system processors supports deployments on Intel, AMD, POWER and IBM System z architectures.

      Red Hat also offers a security framework based on the OpenSCAP Security Content Automation Protocol, including a library and set of utilities, giving a standardised approach to validating Red Hat Enterprise Linux security.

    • Ouch! Oracle Drops Support For Red Hat, Suse Linux

      Oracle is dropping support for the leading open source operating systems — Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse Linux. The company made this announcement post its acquisition of Ksplice, the creator of innovative zero downtime update technology for Linux.

    • The changes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7

      The main improvements to the latest release of RHEL series 5 are optimised virtualisation with KVM and Xen, as well as new and revised drivers. Slowly but surely, the series is nearing the end of the first and most active phase its lifecycle.

    • Fedora

      • Font Rendering in Fedora

        Shortly said, it’s not very impressive. But what are the options we have? Can we improve it? Well, there are some font settings that are available. See e.g. this blogpost about making fedora fonts look Ubuntu-like. Although I personally see that as making things worse, there are people who think otherwise. What I decided to do was to skim through most of the hinting options we have and decide for myself what looks best. And of course, provide my readers with some images so that they could decide for themselves.

      • Fedora 15 Shutdown

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • What Do You Dislike or Hate About Ubuntu?

        • The responsibilities of ownership

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android Market adds multiple-APK support to battle fragmentation

        Android Market now lets developers mount multiple Android Package (APK) files optimized for different devices and releases, instead of selling the optimized versions separately, says Google. Meanwhile, security firm Dasient reports that eight percent of Android apps are transmitting personal user data to unauthorized computers, and some Android malware is specializing in “drive-by downloads,” leaving users unaware of what’s being installed.

      • Toshiba tablet’s loaded with ports, but too hefty for eWEEK reviewer

        Toshiba’s Thrive is a decent, if unspectacular, entry to the trundling Android “Honeycomb” tablet market, according to this eWEEK review. However, the availability of multiple ports will please enterprise users, who might also like the removable battery better than did author Clint Boulton.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source Vs proprietary: the war goes on!

  Torry Harris Business Solutions (P) Ltd., (THBS) is one among them who are actively embracing open source solutions and contributing to open source community.

  “Being a player in the software services space, Torry Harris considers the open source software as a key enabler to cost-effective software solutions,” says Karthik T S, head of CoE SOA, Cloud and OSS, Torry Harris Business Solutions (P) Ltd. in an interaction with CIOL.

• Indian open source community, biggest in the World

  The technology industry in India has developed significantly in the last few years and India has evolved relatively well to the idea of open source software and adoption rates are remarkably good.

  With many companies embracing for open-source technologies, the role of open source in IT has been changed in many companies.

• Before you get locked into Lync, consider open source options

• Events

  • Talking About Linux and Open Source for Public Administrations

    During the first meeting of the Open Source Focus Group 2011, held in May at the ForumPA, I have been interviewed by the organizers to take stock of how Linux and Open Source are doing in the Italian public administrations.

  • Java 7 Summit to be held at EclipseCon Europe

    The Eclipse Foundation has announced that, in collaboration with Oracle, it will be presenting a Java 7 Summit at this year’s European EclipseCon conference. EclipseCon Europe 2011 will take place from 2 to 4 November at the Forum am Schlosspark in Ludwigsburg, Germany.

  • OSCON Will Stream Keynotes and More Online

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Thunderbird 6.0 arrives in Beta Channel

      Mozilla has announced the release of version 6.0 of Thunderbird – its open source news and email client – into the Beta Channel. While a final release date for Thunderbird 6.0 has yet to be confirmed, a production version will likely follow shortly after Firefox 6.0, which is scheduled for 16 August.

    • Google Toolbar drops support for Firefox. Why now?

      Google has decided to drop support for Firefox for the Google Toolbar.

      No, that’s not a bad thing at all. The toolbar is a relic of any older era. An era when Firefox Sync didn’t exist, an era when the awesomebar wasn’t truly aweseome.

      Apparently however, Mozilla is seeing the Google Toolbar issue as being a potential barrier to adoption for Firefox 5.

• SaaS

  • Is open source in the cloud still open source?

    Open source platform as a service (PaaS) platforms are one of the most exciting topics in the software industry nowadays. Following the $212M acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce.com, we’ve seen how in a matter of months, platforms like dotCloud of VMWare’s Cloud Foundry have emerged with complete PaaS suites based on popular open source technologies.

    The value proposition behind this type of PaaS offer is very simple. These platforms will enable the foundation to host, manage, provision and scale solutions based on some of the most renowned open source technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Hadoop, MySQL among dozens of others.

  • Open source and the IT company, a lucrative proposition

    As my colleague Derrick Harris suggests, the open-source cloud-computing project OpenStack has come a long way in just a year. But it’s only one of a growing number of open-source projects challenging expensive and proprietary incumbents across the IT industry. From storage to networking, open-source projects are emerging that offer viable alternatives.

  • Rackspace’s cloud going all OpenStack

  • WS02 Brings Middleware to the Cloud

    Middleware servers used to be locked down to on-premise deployments, but that has now changed in the modern world of the cloud and Platform-as-a-Service.

    Middleware servers used to be locked down to on-premise deployments, but that has now changed in the modern world of the cloud and Platform-as-a-Service.

• Databases

  • EnterpriseDB Announces the Postgres Enterprise Manager BETA!

    EnterpriseDB is proud to introduce Postgres Enterprise Manager, the first enterprise-wide architected management tool for database professionals who are looking to efficiently manage and monitor Postgres servers throughout their organizations.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Test-Driving VirtualBox 4.1 on Linux: Bumpy but Pretty Good

    Oracle released VirtualBox 4.1 on July 19 with a slew of improvements ranging from usability improvements to rasing the ceiling for RAM to 1TB for 64-bit hosts. With 4.1, we decided to take VirtualBox out for a spin and see how it handles.

    I’ve been using desktop virtualization since the early days, when VMware was a scrappy little company shipping a nearly unheard-of product — a desktop virtualization tool that would let you run Windows in VM in Linux. No more dual-booting for those folks who had to have access to Microsoft Word or QuickBooks but wanted to enjoy Linux as their desktop of choice.

• CMS

  • Acquia Raises $15 Million, Plans Drupal Sales Push

    The specialist in commercial support for open source content and community management will use the money to gain share in the social software market.

• Semi-Open Source

  • Zenoss Community Alliance (ZCA)

    The community has created the Zenoss Community Alliance (ZCA) which is a group of senior community members who are working to evolve Zenoss core and the community to better serve the needs of the community and the entire Zenoss ecosystem. To this end, the board of ZCA has provided the following agenda…

  • Jaspersoft may be looking to acquire with its $11M funding

    Business intelligence software maker, Jaspersoft, announced yesterday that it raised $11 million dollars in funding. The round was lead by existing investors Red Hat and SAP Ventures in addition to including newcomer Quest Software.

    Jaspersoft caters to the enterprise with business intelligence products. It aims to centralize the way data is secured, delivered and analyzed.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GNU Parallel 20110722 (‘Murdoch’) released

• Project Releases

  • nginx-1.0.5

    2011-07-19

    nginx-1.0.5 stable version, nginx-0.8.55 and nginx-0.7.69 legacy stable versions have been released.

  • Imixs open source BPM, workflow engine reaches 3.0

    And in May, BonitaSoft upgraded its open source BPM suite which is also developed in Java and available under the GPL.

  • The Evolution of Asterisk (or: How We Arrived at Asterisk 10)

    We are fast approaching the seven-year anniversary of the release of Asterisk 1.0.0, which occurred at the first AstriCon in September, 2004. If you look back a little further, there were various “0.x” releases made as early as December of 1999… my, how time has flown!

    We’ve had quite a few ‘major’ releases of Asterisk since then, including 1.2, 1.4, and most recently, 1.8. Each of these releases has included significant changes, and sometimes architecture-improving changes. Each of them has also included substantial new functionality for Asterisk users. Along the way, we’ve been asked by many people in the community when we are going to start working on (or release) “Asterisk 2.0.” Typically, we’ve responded by saying that will not happen until we can really justify such a significant change in the version number. Many open source projects have gone through similar progressions, and quite a number of them have in fact undergone complete (or nearly complete) rewrites resulting in new ‘major’ versions.

• Licensing

  • Harmony’s curiously flat tune

  • Linux Foundation Releases New White Paper on FOSS Compliance for Suppliers

    The Linux Foundation strives to provide relevant, useful guidance to organizations setting up their free and open source software (FOSS) compliance programs. Last month, we released a white paper titled “A Five Step Compliance Process for FOSS Identification and Review.”

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • Azavea Releases Source Code for PhillyTreeMap to Provide Municipalities and Citizen Groups With Collaborative Urban Forestry Inventory Tools

  • Open Access/Content

    • Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to the Pirate Bay

      A user called Greg Maxwell just uploaded a torrent with 18,592 scientific publications to the Pirate Bay, in what appears to be a protest directed both at the recent indictment of programmer Aaron Swartz for data theft as well as the scientific publishing model in general. All the documents of the 32-gigabyte torrent were taken from JSTOR, the academic database that’s at the center of the case against Swartz.

• Programming

  • ActiveState Advances New Cloud Platform, Stackato, to Beta With New Features

    PostgreSQL, Python 3 and Additional Core Services Added, Opens Testing Group Further

  • Google Summer of Code 2011: midterms and statistics

    Google has published “a few more interesting statistics” from this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event; in May, a statistical breakdown of accepted students was published. According to a post by Stephanie Taylor on the Google Open Source Blog, 202 (18.1%) of this year’s 1,115 student participants took part in last year’s programme. Of those students, 35 were also part of the 2009 programme, meaning that 3.1% are three year students.

  • Gearing up for Java 7

    The last four Java Specification Requests (JSRs) required for Java 7 have received the blessing of the Java Community Process (JCP). JSR 292, support for dynamically typed languages, JSR 334, small enhancements to Java language and JSR 203, more new I/O APIs (NIO.2), all passed with unanimous support in the final approval ballot. The only note of dissent was from Google in the final approval vote for JSR 336, the umbrella JSR which incorporates all the JSRs required for Java 7.

  • European Space Agency Summer of Code

• Standards/Consortia

  • DOJ Delays Web Accessibility Regulations

    Earlier this month the United States Department of Justice admitted what many of us have suspected: we will not be seeing web accessibility regulations in the United States for commercial and public entities any time soon. Some time in 2013 at the earliest.

    In July, 2010, the Department issued what is called an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rule Making indicating that it was planning to issue regulations about web accessibility. The step after an “Advanced Notice” is a “Notice of Proposed Rule Making” (NPRM). After that is the rule itself. In its semi-annual regulatory agenda for Spring 2011, however, the DOJ called the NPRM for Web Accessibility a “Long Term Item” not expected until December, 2012. That’s well over a year from now. And it is close to two years after the public comment period on the Advanced Notice closed, and almost two and one half years after the DOJ announced the possible regulations in July, 2010.

  • TinyOgg finally comes to an end

    But now, it seems that what we are doing is obsolete. In May 2010, Google set free the WebM format which was quickly adopted by major web browsers in addition to the largest online video provider, YouTube. 99% of what people watch on YouTube is now available in WebM and thus playable without Flash or any other unfree technologies. (Well, in addition to the fact that I have not posted any entry in many months, which meant that there was no itch anymore!)

    Now is the time to move on to other projects (or to college life, who knows? ). By July 15th, TinyOgg entries URLs will be automatically redirected to the original video page and I will run the service for at least eighteen months more.

Leftovers

• Government shutting down hundreds of data centers

  The U.S. government is aiming to pull the plug on hundreds of unneeded data centers over the next few years in an attempt to save taxpayers some hard-earned cash.

• No apologies for Microsoft Windows

  Recently I’ve had some discussion with colleagues about Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux in comparison to each other. Generally, I’ve found that most people agree that Mac OS X is more stable than Windows, and those that are familiar with Linux feel that it too is more stable than Windows. But after that being said, they come back with an apology for Microsoft stating that they (Microsoft) have to get Windows to run on fragmented hardware, whereas Apple standardizes the hardware and can therefore provide a more stable operating system for it, because there aren’t nearly as many variations in hardware configurations.

• Cablegate

  • Petition defends David Hicks from censorship attempt

    Julian Assange, John Pilger and Noam Chomsky have added their names to a new online petition in support of former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks.

    They join scores of other signatories, including Greens MP Adam Bandt, human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, Liberty Victoria President Spencer Zifcak and Overland Journal editor Jeff Sparrow. Overland released the online petition on July 21.

  • Framing The Narrative: Murdoch v. Assange

    In Murdoch’s empire, talking points from above dictate the news delivered to the masses. Yet Rupert’s writers need only scan the front pages to discern how best to please their boss and get prominently featured. It’s a culture of corruption, as countless recent articles have documented, designed to maximise profits and political power.

    But the media landscape is changing. Why should we ordinary citizens of the world keep paying for news, when we can get it online for free? But then, if media organisations are not making a profit, how can they afford to keep supplying news for free? This remains the great unresolved Catch-22 of the C21st Fourth Estate.

    News Corporation is planning more firewalls to protect media content, despite the previous failure of such models at organisations like the New York Times. The UK Independent newspaper is now running an online survey asking readers to tell them how the paper can deal with the shifting media paradigm. The Economist prominently features an on-going debate on the subject.

    Meanwhile, I suspect The Guardian’s apparent anti-WikiLeaks crusade may be motivated by a desire to “own the space” that WikiLeaks has staked out (namely, the safest place to publish leaks in this new globalized, digital world). Yes, all the big media organisations are scared, even Murdoch’s dreaded nemeses at The Guardian.

  • Wikileaks report reveals corruption in Lithuanian newspapers

  • Library of Congress: We didn’t call WikiLeaks ‘extremist’

    The Library of Congress says it was not responsible for categorizing a WikiLeaks-related book as “extremist” and that it has decided to removed that label.

• Finance

  • Consumer Bureau Launches in Shark-Infested Waters

    According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street and the financial services lobby spent an eye-popping $1,400,000,000 between 2008 and 2010 to kill financial reform. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a whole unit dedicated to killing it. This year, the those same forces spent $156 million on lobbying in the first quarter. The big banks are fighting the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill with a stable of willing Congressmen and an army of lobbyists fanned out across a dozen federal agencies where Dodd-Frank rulemaking is underway.

  • Debt debate reverberates in state governments

    Virginia’s governor is livid that his famously tight-fisted state could face higher borrowing costs to build roads and schools. Maryland has put off a $718 million bond sale for three days because of the current financial uncertainty. And California plans to borrow about $5 billion from private investors next week to ensure it can cover day-to-day operating expenses should the federal government default on its debt.

  • House votes to check new consumer agency

    The House greeted the official opening Thursday of the new agency to protect consumers from financial abuse by voting to change its structure and reach.

    Republican sponsors said they were trying to make the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau more transparent and accountable. Democrats said Republicans wanted to cripple the agency before it gets on its feet.

  • Morgan Stanley Posts Loss That Hints at Recovery

    At Morgan Stanley, even a loss can be a win.

    Although the financial firm reported a second-quarter loss of $558 million on Thursday, three crucial divisions posted significant gains, a promising sign that the turnaround plan Morgan Stanley embarked on after the financial crisis was taking hold.

  • On Its First Day, Consumer Bureau Finds Support

    The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau formally opened for business on Thursday, much to the consternation of Congressional Republicans.

    But as conservative lawmakers step up their attacks on the new regulator, aiming to undermine its structure and authority, champions of the bureau are pushing back.

  • 4 more Credit Suisse bankers charged in tax case

    Federal prosecutors in Virginia have charged four more bankers with Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group with conspiracy in what they say was a long-running scheme to help U.S. taxpayers hide as much as $4 billion in assets.

    Prosecutors originally charged four people in the scheme in February, so the charges announced Thursday bring the total number of people charged up to eight. Charging documents filed in the case do not specify what bank the group worked for, but The Associated Press previously reported its identity.

  • Why aren’t Obama’s numbers lower?

  • Harry Reid: Cut, cap may be among ‘worst legislation’ in history

    Majority Leader Harry Reid said the Senate will vote Friday on the Cut, Cap and Balance Act, a bill backed by conservatives that he called “weak and senseless” and “perhaps some of the worst legislation in the history of this country.”

    The Senate had been expected to vote Saturday on the House-passed bill, which has little chance of passing the Democratic-controlled upper chamber. But Reid expedited the vote so the Senate can quickly move to a backup plan he and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are hatching to raise the debt ceiling and avert a financial default by the Aug. 2 deadline, a Democratic aide said.

  • Economy’s spring slump could last through summer

    The economy could lapse even further if Congress and the Obama administration fail to reach an agreement on raising the nation’s borrowing limit in the coming week.

  • Goldman wins dismissal of Timberwolf CDO lawsuit

    NEW YORK (Reuters) – Goldman Sachs Group Inc won the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing it of causing an investor to become insolvent by fraudulently misleading it about risky debt it expected would tumble in value.

    In a decision made public on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones in Manhattan said the plaintiff, Basis Yield Alpha Fund, failed to sufficiently show that its investment in the Timberwolf 2007-1 collateralized debt obligation was a “domestic” transaction, entitling it to sue in a U.S. court.

  • Goldman Model Championed by Blankfein Planted Seeds of Distress

    The window shades were lowered to block out the sunlight soaking lower Manhattan on a Friday afternoon in June as 14 students in Eric H. Kessler’s executive MBA class gathered in a conference room to present their analyses of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s leadership.

    The firm’s management shows “resistance to change” and is “doing business in a bubble,” one of the three student teams explained in a PowerPoint presentation. Another recommended creating an “ethics role” within Goldman Sachs’s securities division. Kessler, who teaches management at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business, peppered the students with questions. Could cohesive culture be a weakness as well as a strength?

  • 15 Reasons You Don’t Want To Work At Goldman Sachs

    There are plenty of good reasons to work at Goldman Sachs; we’ve written about them before.

    But inspired the bank’s miserable earnings report this morning, we realized that the negatives are piling up considerably.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • ALEC Exposed: The Koch Connection

    Hundreds of ALEC’s model bills and resolutions bear traces of Koch DNA: raw ideas that were once at the fringes but that have been carved into “mainstream” policy through the wealth and will of Charles and David Koch. Of all the Kochs’ investments in right-wing organizations, ALEC provides some of the best returns: it gives the Kochs a way to make their brand of free-market fundamentalism legally binding.

  • The Murdochs must stop spinning and resign

    In 2004, I created Outfoxed to expose Rupert Murdoch’s war on journalism. Focusing on Fox News, we examined how NewsCorp has long blurred the line between corporate interests and journalistic integrity. The film presented an in-depth look at the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know. Those dangers were shown to include ethic-less journalism, as well as the role of public relations spin in replacing the honest presentation of facts.

    On Tuesday, as Rupert and James Murdoch appeared before parliament, this theme was repeated. Their testimony was less about true and honest answers and more about the script of a public relations firm, and an attempt to spin the public debate on issues of corporate disgrace.

    If their testimonies presented any information at all, it would be how much the Murdochs want to promote the spin of willful ignorance. For two incredibly involved businessmen, their testimonies would lead you to believe that they have long had absolutely no idea about what happens within their company.

  • Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News ran ‘black ops’ department, former executive claims

    Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News television channel had a “black ops” department that may have illegally hacked private telephone records, a former executive for the station has alleged.

• Censorship

  • Website blocking minutes released under FOI

    109 MPs have now signed Julian Huppert MP’s EDM 1913, which called for the Government to reconsider policies such as website blocking, in light of the recent UN Special Rapporteur Report that was expressly critical of blocking on freedom of expression grounds. More recently, the Organisation for Security an Cooperation in Europe released a report that reached similar conclusions about disconnection and website blocking jeopardising rights to freedom of expression. Over 8,600 people have written to their MPs about this issue.

• Civil Rights

  • The Government still wants to hack your phone

    While politicians are convinced that Murdoch’s press has over-stepped the mark by routine hacking of citizen’s phones, let’s remember that plans for mass, pervasive hacking of our phones and emails is still sat waiting for revival by the Home Office.