• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

TLWIR 39: GNU/Linux is Officially Too Big to Fail

The story of Eimi’s HD failure

We were watching some YouTube clips when the computer rebooted and the OS refused to launch. It turns out that there was a power surge and some sectors of the HD fried. Yes, it was my fault because I forgot to replace the old UPS unit.

I started using LINUX because I didn’t want to wait 20 minutes to find out the weather forecast

At the beginning of the century I moved away from my home in Southern England to the North East of Scotland. My job however remained in Southern England. Fortunately I wasn’t required to commute a 1400 mile a day round trip. Instead I was able to work from home.

Blame the user, not the tool

For the past several days people have been tweeting at me (and Linus) to change the license of Linux to forbid the kernel’s use for war. These tweets were due to the issue of Linux being used in the drones of the US Military. I tweeted back “Do not blame the tool”, but I think that answer was too subtle, as the people kept tweeting. So here is a longer answer for them.

First of all, Linus (and certainly not I) do not “own” Linux. The copyright holders of Linux are many, and some of them are no longer working on the project or even dead. Therefore to change the license terms at this point is both legally and morally impossible.

Secondly, this request flies in the face of GPL Freedom #0, which states that the software can be used for any purpose.

Many years ago we discussed the issues of Linux (or even GNU/Linux) being used in weapons, or for purposes that some people did not agree with.

Part of the issue is that given a large enough audience, there are always some people that disagree with every use or with every person who uses it.

For example, some people might not like the fact that Linux is used in robots that are used in the military. Yet some people’s lives might be saved by having that robot go into a situation that would be dangerous or even fatal to a human being. Should we ask that Linux not be put in that robot, knowing that a human life might be sacrificed instead?

Desktop

• Clambook Turns the Laptop Into a Smartphone-Powered Peripheral, Cats Herd Sheep

  This year’s latest generation of smartphones will be equipped with new, more powerful mobile processors that rival the power of most laptops. So it almost seems fitting that Clamcase, the company that makes iPad keyboard docks, is making the laptop-like peripheral that’s completely powered by a smartphone.

  The Clambook is essentially a Macbook Air styled thin-as-hell laptop–minus all the guts. It’s equipped with a 16:9 display, 3D Cinema Sound system, track pad, and a full keyboard with Android specific keys.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.5-rc2

  Ok, it’s been only 6 days, but as noted earlier I’m going to be traveling starting tomorrow, and I wanted to make the -rc2 release before I left.

• Linux Foundation Brings Training to the Enterprise

  The Linux Foundation is launching a new Enterprise Linux Training program. The program is all about preparing IT pros in a vendor-neutral way for Enterprise Linux architecture deployments.

  Linux isn’t just for developers anymore, which is where the Linux Foundation’s focus had been until now. Now to be fair, Red Hat has had certification in this area for some time, but they aren’t exactly vendor neutral are they?

• Linux Scholarship Submissions Open, Expanded Enterprise Linux Training Available

• Linux Foundation launches 2012 Scholarship Program

  The Linux Foundation has announced the 2012 Linux Training Scholarship Program, which will award five scholarships to computer science students, Linux developers and architects who show promise but “but do not otherwise have the ability to attend Linux Foundation training courses”.

• 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: Linus Torvalds

• Linus Torvalds Receives The 2012 Millennium Technology Prize

• The Linux Foundation starts Linux Training Scholarship

• Linux and FOSS Are Not Selfish

  This “selfishness” business has never sat right with me, and lionizing Linus’ “cute” insults is tiresome and counter-productive. Characterizing the motivations of FOSS contributors “selfish” is wrong, and here is why.

• Brazilian Government Consultant Increases Knowledge with Linux Training Opportunities

Applications

• Liferea: A Feed Reader That Prefers a Simple Life

  In a world in which mobile is getting bigger every day, desktop news aggregators might appear to be a vestige of a bygone time. But for those who still prefer to get news on the big screen, Liferea is a great way to go. Its installation process is simple, as is its feature set.

• Skype jumps the shark: Seven alternative VoIP services

  Hundreds of millions of people use Skype for its free voice over IP (VoIP) services every day. Indeed, Skype claims that in March 2012, 35-million people were all talking at the same time on the service. But, how many of them are going to stick with it when Microsoft, Skype’s owner, sticks ads in your face?

  Microsoft announced that “While on a 1:1 audio call, users will see content that could spark additional topics of conversation that are relevant to Skype users and highlight unique and local brand experiences. So, you should think of Conversation Ads as a way for Skype to generate fun interactivity between your circle of friends and family and the brands you care about.” Oh yeah, I always like having an ad pop-up when I’m talking to a friend or co-worker.

• Best System Cleaning Software for Linux

  As a Linux user, when you see your Windows-using friends cribbing about their bloated computer, you couldn’t help but chuckle a bit. We all know how Windows, after a certain amount of time, tends to slow down as if a tired bull. And, despite many software that claim to remedy that problem in a jiffy, nothing works as good as a freshly installed operating system. But well, you can’t always keep formatting your system, especially on a productive machine or even your friend’s precious laptop. And that is one of the most important reasons why we’re seeing a steady growth in migration towards Linux.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Canvassing

  • How To Change Your Boot Screen In Linux

  • Reset Windows password with Linux in under 5 minutes

  • A spreadsheet jukebox

  • Running Shopware Community Edition (Version 3.5.6) On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 12.04

  • Linux / Unix Desktop Fun: Text Mode ASCII-art Box and Comment Drawing

  • Heimdall: Odin Alternative That Runs On Linux (Tool To Flash ROMs On Samsung Galaxy S Devices)

  • Cisco Netflow with Nagios XI

  • The Monitoring Setup Part 1: Installing Centreon, Nagios & NDOUtils

  • Evaluate performance for Linux on POWER

  • Install Or Upgrade To Latest Stable Version Of Rsyslog On CentOS 5 And 6

  • 10 things to do after installing Linux Mint 13

  • How To Watch UEFA Euro 2012 Live (Online) Under Linux

• Wine

  • Wine 1.5.6 has been released!

    Wine is a free and open source application that allows users to run Windows software on other operating systems. Wine is always under heavy development with the team preparing one release every 2 weeks. Yesterday, the founder and current leader of the project Alexandre Julliard, announced the availability of version 1.5.6, that brings some important additions and fixes.

• Games

  • Ryan ‘Icculus’ Gordon explains game development for Linux

    The following presentation video of Ryan ‘Icculus’ Gordon’s talk is a must for those, who are interested in the modern game development, want to learn more about the technology behind it, or even going to port or develop a game to Linux. In his talk at the conference Flouish 2012 in Chicago Icculus presented some of the leading open source technologies that are used for the development of modern games like Crysis or World of Warcraft, and which he has used porting games to Linux and Mac OS X. Among other things, he talks about SDL, OpenAL, SQLite, LUA and many others.

  • Linux Gaming Update: Carmageddon, Lodestar, From Dust + More

  • Humble Bundle seeking Linux developers!

  • Most Open-Source Game Artwork Is Awful

Desktop Environments

• Why Microsoft’s Metro Push Is Good for Linux

  With Ubuntu presenting its new Unity desktop to newcomers, I have been surprised to see how quickly many people are adapting to it. Like Windows 8′s Metro desktop, Unityalso presents something new to the end user.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Plasma Active – a New Approach to Tablet Computing

    Despite the success of Apple’s iPad, that is a question that seems to have defeated most hardware and software vendors. MeeGo struggled to define a tablet user interface, never quite managing more than a pre-release. It presented a few simple options, such as watching videos, playing music or browsing the Web—really no more than a modern phone with a larger screen. Even the iPad, an acknowledged success, is little more than an oversize iPhone. Its “wall of apps” approach has been largely copied by the Android-based tablets so far appearing on the market.

  • KDE Announces 4.9 Beta2

  • Amarok 2.6 Polishes, Adds Transcoding

• GNOME Desktop

  • Gnome gets ready to unleash the beast: An App Center!

    Gnome three point six will surprise us in many ways. After the redesigned Shell we will get a new pretty package manager and ..a bit further a brand new fancy software center!

  • 10 GNOME games your friends will enjoy

    Back in February of this year, I wrote an article about casual games for the KDE desktop that non-Linux users would enjoy. Here is a list of some of the more popular games for the GNOME 3 desktop environment. Obviously they can be installed under a different desktop, but if you are already using GNOME, Cinnamon, or Unity, these will not add extra files that you wouldn’t use otherwise. The “gnome-games” meta package will install a total of 16 games, among which are all of the ones below.

  • Spice Up Your Desktop with Cinnamon!

    If you are disgruntled by the new interfaces provided by recent distribution releases, namely GNOME 3 and Unity, you might want to take a look at Cinnamon. With its traditional feel and extreme theme-ability, Cinnamon is a desktop interface bound to spice up anyone’s computer. The general feel is that of GNOME 2, or perhaps XFCE, but its polished look and downloadable themes make it truly exciting to behold.

Distributions

• Linux Gets Fresh and Tasty with Sabayon 9 and LinuxMint Box

  There are a lot of Linux distributions on the Linux Planet, very few of them have their own branded hardware.

• Interview with Ikey Doherty – creator of SolusOS

  SolusOS is a Debian-based distro that still uses Gnome2 as the desktop environment and it has gained a lot of attention of Linux users recently ( read my review for SolusOS ). 2 weeks ago, Burjans from com-sl.org sent me an interesting email about his interview with Ikey Doherty, the creator of SolusOS, about SolusOS and its future.

• SolusOS 2 Alpha 4 Has Firefox 13 and GNOME 3.4

  Ikey Doherty announced yesterday, June 12th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the fourth Alpha version of the upcoming SolusOS 2 Linux distribution.

• SolusOS 1 Eveline review – Very interesting

  SolusOS is a distribution with a clear mission – bringing back GNOME [sic]. This does not refer to your home garden midgets, mythical creatures or Gnome 3, but in fact the good old Gnome 2 desktop environment, the best one. SolusOS is based on Debian, sans the politics thingie, so there’s something for everyone.

• New Releases

  • Press Release: Sabayon Linux 9

• Gentoo Family

  • Sabayon 9 KDE and GNOME preview

    Sabayon 9 is the latest release of Sabayon, a multi-purpose Linux distribution derived from Gentoo Linux. Made available for download are 32- and 64-bit installation ISO images for KDE, GNOME 3 and Xfce desktop environments.

    Sabayon is a rolling-release distribution, so existing users do not have to reinstall to get the latest core and applications of a Sabayon release. That is one of the best features of the distribution.

    This article features a few scree shots from test installations of the KDE and GNOME 3 editions. A detailed review should be published by the end of the week. The first four screen shots are from the GNOME 3 edition.

• Debian Family

  • Debian project leader Stefano Zacchiroli and the controversy over Debian Multimedia

    I came across Debian project leader Stefano Zacchiroli’s Bits from the DPL on Planet Debian — the most recent bits also living on Stefano’s blog and on a Debian mailing list.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Introducing Ubuntu Clear Dark Sky Lens for Unity

        The Ubuntu Clear Dark Sky Lens is a very nice plugin for the Unity interface that can be used for planning stargazing activities directly from the Unity Dash, by displaying stargazing conditions and locations. The plugin retrives data from the Clear Dark Sky website.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin: Discovering a world of PPAs

      • Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, 12.04 LTS, 12.10 On An Old Laptop

        Last week I shared how the open-source R500 driver can compete with the legacy Catalyst Linux driver on an old Intel laptop with ATI graphics, but how has the performance for other areas of the system changed with the latest Ubuntu Linux code? In this article are benchmarks from other areas of this Core Duo laptop when running Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and then a recent development snapshot of Ubuntu 12.10.

      • Reviewed: Linux Ubuntu 12.04 — the pipe dream

        Ubuntu is a lot of things. Linux is a lot of things. For one thing that everyone can agree on — including the ones that hate Linux — is that it is probably the best server operating system available. The problem with it is that most people want it to become a bigger player in the desktop market. What could be the problem there? Well it’s simple. Linux is the kernel, like Windows NT is the kernel of almost all of the Microsoft Windows builds. Linux is used in almost everything from Android to your fridge.

      • Introducing Ubuntu Rotten Tomatoes Scope for Unity

        The Ubuntu Rotten Tomatoes Scope is a very useful Unity Dash plugin that allows users to search for review articles of movies, directly from the Unity Dash. The information is gathered from the Rotten Tomatoes website.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Quelitu 12.04 released

          Their comparison chart says that 12.04 has an idle RAM usage of 102 MB, which is a bit larger than my Debian/LXDE installation but not too much for an older PC, and pretty good for a Ubuntu-based distro.

Devices/Embedded

• Bodhi Linux ARM Alpha Release for RaspBerry Pi

  I’ve been busy with lots of different Bodhi things of the late. The latest of my many projects has been getting the Bodhi desktop functional on the RaspBerry Pi:

• Small low cost linux pc’s, an overview from 06-2012

• Phones

  • Android

    • Keep away the bugging bugs

    • Camera FV-5: Android Camera App for Serious Photographers

      The Camera FV-5 app is designed for serious photographers, and as such, it lacks fancy trimmings like scene modes, effects, and sharing capabilities. Instead, it puts all essential controls at your fingertips, and offers a handful of genuinely useful features. Camera FV-5′s interface resembles that of a DSLR camera, so photographers will feel right at home using the app. The main screen provides quick access to key settings, such as focusing mode, metering mode, White Balance, ISO settings, and exposure compensation. The dedicated Menu button lets you configure the exposure bracketing feature and intervalometer. The latter tool can come in rather useful for time-lapse photography. The Program button can be used to switch between two modes: Program (automatic exposure) and Speed priority (manual exposure). You can use the pinch gesture to zoom in and out. The app also allows you to use volume hardware keys for zooming.

    • Linaro Makes Android Faster by Recompiling it.

      There is a long-held belief that optimization is best left until never. It is generally believed that optimization is a tough challenge and not a rewarding one. So news that simply recompiling Android 4 makes it run twice as fast is stunning.

      Linaro is a not-for profit organization formed to improve the quality of Linux on ARM based hardware with members such as ARM, Samsung, TI, IBM etc.

    • Android is about to get a lot faster thanks to Linaro

    • Samsung’s GT-B9120, a Gingerbread-powered flip phone

    • Exclusive: First Pictures of the Motorola DROID RAZR HD

      What’s interesting is the move from Motorola to put the micro HDMI and USB ports on the bottom side of the device again, similarly to what we saw from multiple devices like the Bionic and DROID X/X2. In the RAZR, they switched it up a bit and put both ports on the top of the device, something I admittedly was not a fan of. So, thank you to Moto for righting that wrong.

    • Sony will announce a new Xperia Android smartphone in the next 10 days

      Sony is getting ready to announce a brand new Xperia handset, and – in what seems to be a first – it allows fans to decide exactly when this will be announced. The new smartphone’s official announcement was set for June 22 initially. However, anyone who goes to Sony’s Facebook page (here) and clicks the “Fast Forward” button found there can, and will “bring the next Xperia announcement a little bit closer.”

    • HTC confirms One S with the S3 processor being sold in select Asian, European markets

      We recently saw that the HTC One S was being sold in Taiwan with a different processor than what’s included in other regions, utilizing Qualcomm’s previous-generation S3 Snapdragon instead of the latest S4 on the device that we reviewed.

    • New Android mod protects privacy by feeding apps fake data

    • New Xperia Miro announced by Sony

    • What’s better than Apple’s Siri? Android’s Tap & Speak, that’s what.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Acer Launches $450 Iconia Tab A700 Tablet, With HD 1080p Display, Android 4.0

    Laptops have become passe, you don’t much hear about the ‘new’ laptops coming out any more. What we have started to hear is launch of Android powered tablets and smatphones. Acer has unveiled the Acer Iconia Tab A700 tablet with an amazing 10.1-inch full HD 1080p display.

  • E FUN debuts $170 8-inch Android 4.0 tablet

What do open source enterprise developers really need to know?

After decrying an open source survey issued last month from BlackDuck Software as somewhat simplistic and contrived in its initial presentation of facts, I’m pleased to say that we have a direct response from the company.

Speaking to Black Duck’s Peter Vescuso who is the company’s executive VP of marketing and business development, the Computer Weekly Developer Network offers this short punchy Q&A to provide some insight into what software applications developers really need to know when it comes to some of the most pertinent issues found at the open source coding coalface.

Bach Goes Open-Source With A Little Help From Some Fans

u have to hand it to good old J.S. Bach for the latest project taken up in his name: a successful campaign to open-source and app-ify one of his most beloved works, The Goldberg Variations.

The Open Goldberg Variations project is a dream come true for Bach enthusiasts, open-source fans, app-makers, remixers, mashers-up of all stripes, and anyone with interested ears, created with the aim of “Setting Bach Free.” Pristine recordings of this masterwork are available for free in sound qualities all the way up to 24-bit 96 Kbps FLAC (torrent), but that’s just for starters.

5 Best Free and Open-Source Bible Study Programs for Linux and Windows

Web Browsers

• Chrome vs. Firefox for Ubuntu

  According to the independent web analytics firm, StatCounter Chrome has excelled as the world most popular browser with the highest browser usage share for the month of May 2012. But does that apply to Linux platform too? Is Chrome the best browser for Linux? The post compares the widely popular Mozilla Firefox browser version 4 with relatively new Google’s Chrome version 16, distinctly for Ubuntu!

• Chrome

  • Google Introduces Offline Apps Section For Chrome Web Store

SaaS

• VMware works to make Hadoop ‘virtualization-aware’

• Hadoop, the elephant in the enterprise

• VMware launches Project Serengeti to make Hadoop virtual-aware

  VMware launches Project Serengeti and contributes IP to help automate Hadoop workloads running in its virtual platform. It is available as a free download under an Apache 2.0 license.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• What’s in a Feature? Wordcount in LibreOffice 3.6

BSD

• OpenBSD forked to create Bitrig

  A group of developers have created “Bitrig”, a new fork of the OpenBSD free BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. The developers say that they forked from OpenBSD because they “want to be a bit more loose when it comes to experimenting with features”; as a security-focused distribution, OpenBSD tends to be more conservative when adding new features.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Introducing our new copyright & licensing associate

  Donald Robertson, III is the new copyright & licensing associate at the FSF.

• I have some big shoes to fill

  I’m sad to announce that I will no longer be able to work alongside Brett Smith, who served as the FSF’s licensing and compliance engineer since 2007, but whom I first worked with at the FSF a decade ago when we both were interns for a summer. Brett has moved on to work with the World Wide Web Consortium and we wish him the best of luck! And, I hope you will all wish me the best of luck as I am changing roles here at the FSF. I am moving from campaigns manager to the newly re-branded, “licensing and compliance manager.”

• Hostility to Free Software

  The free software community has been around for quite some time now–longer than I remember, since I’ve only joined in the past few years. And for some reason, though that time seems to have been spent on good works that benefit humanity, and advocacy that teaches people how to be free, the movement is sometimes the object of some hostility.

Project Releases

• Lightspark 0.6 Released, an Adobe Flash Alternative

Public Services/Government

• Larry Lessig: The corruption of the American political system

  Two years ago, I interviewed law professor, author, and Creative Commons co-founder Larry Lessig to discuss his work on institutional corruption and what he describes as the “economy of influence” in American politics. This week he was back in Durham, NC to discuss his new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It.

• Data.gov Releases Open Source Software

  The General Services Administration (GSA) announced on May 21 that Data.Gov partnering with the Government of India National Informatics Centre has produced an open source version of Data.gov that is being made available today, the third anniversary of Data.gov. The open source product, called the Open Government Platform (OGPL), can be downloaded and evaluated by any national Government or state or local entity as a path toward making their data open and transparent.

Openness/Sharing

• An architecture of participation

  What is changing now is that participatory models are becoming the rule, not the exception. The world used to be about command and control. Someone told you what to do. There still is a lot of that. But collaborative innovation is taking over. We are coming to a stage in our civilization where regular functions are masterfully automated and industrialized, and our focus as human beings can and will increasingly be on innovation. In the area of innovation, the most powerful creation happens in teams, groups, and crowds–across organizational boundaries. When we architect for such participation, we can multiply the power of innovation.

• Patent granted to encourage purchase of digital textbooks

  In a newly approved patent, an economics professor hopes to bring to the academic publishing world what seems to be forthcoming in the video game industry—new restrictions that would seemingly eliminate a secondary market for digital goods and prevent legal borrowing.

Standards/Consortia

• Open Source Law Releases Report On Open Standards

Raunchy dance at Microsoft Azure presentation

The dance included several drug references and one classic line that must have taken a lot of time to write: “The words Micro and Soft don’t apply to my penis.”

But then, acutely aware of the fact that there could be accusations of sexism with these lyrics, the words “Or vagina” were added below on a monitor that displayed the lyrics as they were sung.

Security

• Attackers target unpatched PHP bug allowing malicious code execution

• Intel CPUs affected by VM privilege escalation exploit

• Diving Into Flame, Researchers Find A Link To Stuxnet

  Researchers digging through the code of the recently discovered Flame worm say they have come across a wealth of evidence that suggests Flame and the now-famous Stuxnet worm share a common origin.

  Researchers from Kaspersky Lab say that a critical module that the Flame worm used to spread is identical to a module used by Stuxnet.a, an early variant of the Stuxnet worm that began circulating in 2009, more than a year before a later variant of the worm was discovered by antivirus researchers at the Belarussian firm VirusBlokAda. The claims are the most direct, to date, that link the Flame malware, which attacked Iranian oil facilities, with Stuxnet, which is believed to have targeted Iran’s uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz. If true, they suggest a widespread and multi-year campaign of offensive cyber attacks against multiple targets within that country.

• Attacks Targeting US Defense Contractors and Universities Tied to China

  UPDATE: Researchers have identified an ongoing series of attacks, possibly emanating from China, that are targeting a number of high-profile organizations, including SCADA security companies, universities and defense contractors. The attacks are using highly customized malicious files to entice targeted users into opening them and starting the compromise.

Finance

• UK Uncut makes high court challenge to Goldman Sachs tax deal

  A deal worth at least £10m between banking giant Goldman Sachs and the head of HM Revenue and Customs is set to be challenged in the high court on Wednesday by tax-avoidance campaign group, UK Uncut Legal Action.

  The high court in London is expected to hear that a multi-million pound agreement sealed with a handshake between David Hartnett, the head of HMRC, and Goldman Sachs senior employees, which permitted the investment conglomerate to keep back £10m in back taxes, should be quashed under judicial review.

  UK Uncut Legal Action have accused customs officials of giving the US multinational giant favourable treatment in a settlement of a tax dispute which saw Goldman Sachs let off £10m in interest payments.

Civil Rights

• A Digital Citizen’s Bill of Rights

• Websites to be forced to identify trolls under new measures

  Websites will soon be forced to identify people who have posted defamatory messages online.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• U.N. could tax U.S.-based Web sites, leaked docs show

  Global Internet tax suggested by European network operators, who want Apple, Google, and other Web companies to pay to deliver content, is proposed for debate at a U.N. agency in December.

Copyrights

• If Megaupload users want their data, they’re going to have to pay

  U.S. federal prosecutors are fine with Megaupload users recovering their data — as long as they pay for it.

  The government’s position was explained in a court filing on Friday concerning one of the many interesting side issues that has emerged from the shutdown of Megaupload, formerly one of the most highly trafficked file-sharing sites.

  Prosecutors were responding to a motion filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in late March on behalf of Kyle Goodwin, an Ohio-based sports reporter who used Megaupload legitimately for storing videos.

  Goodwin’s hard drive crashed, and he lost access to the data he backed up on Megaupload when the site was shut down on Jan. 19 on criminal copyright infringement charges.

  U.S. law allows for third parties who have an interest in forfeited property to make a claim. But the government argues that it only copied part of the Megaupload data and the physical servers were never seized.

• ACTA

  • Endspiel ACTA

    ACTA moves closer to the plenary. Next week the Trade committee (INTA) of the Parliament would take its decision. Commissioner Karel De Gucht invited himself to the meeting, what is tried now is delaying the Parliament vote. MEP Moreira mocked that since De Gucht has to come whenever INTA calls, he also enjoys the right to appear when he desires. Commissioner De Gucht would appear before INTA on Thursday 21 June at 10h (Room 4 Q 1), just before the crucial vote.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

What Price an OS?

Let’s assume the consumer can subtract… Identical hardware + “7″ – Identical hardware – GNU/Linux Mint = “7″ – GNU/Linux Mint = $589 – $476 = $113. Hey, do you really want to spend $113 more than you need to get the machine running? I like it. Competition in operating systems. What a concept…

Mainstream Notebook in China Runs GNU/Linux

Thanks to Google Translate, I was able to find a ton of links to a recent model of Acer 14 inch notebook available in China and there’s no sign of that other OS, just GNU/Linux. The price is a lot lower than similar products supplied with that other OS. It’s not a netbook, folks. It has a ton of RAM and a Sandy Bridge processor.

A Modern Day (computing) Fairy Tale

Once upon a time there lived a young squire (engineer) who learned to ride a seasoned horse (computer) with a trusted saddle (UNIX OS) for it was his job. While learning to ride, the squire learned to tweak the saddle (write scripts) to make the horse uniquely his. One day a saddle salesman named William came to the squire’s village (company) and told the village elders (IT department) that, for much gold ($$), he could sell them a new kind of saddle. One that could make the village’s horses do wonderful things. Never mind that the saddle was full of holes and had bugs for if they did not buy his new saddle, the village across the river would best them in tournament for they had already purchased his new saddle. All the saddles of the village elders were sold and soon all the old saddles, along with the squire’s saddle, were retired. Unfortunately the horses, with William’s new saddle, didn’t do all that William had promised. When asked about this, William replied “to make the new saddles work best you must spend more gold and buy new, more powerful horses.” The village elders were sold and soon the trusted horses were retired for new, more powerful ones.

Desktop

• Newegg: Installing Linux On Your Computer Is Basically The Same As Breaking It

  One would think that Newegg, beloved electronics supplier to the world’s geeks wouldn’t have a problem with customers installing different operating systems on their systems after delivery. Heck, they should expect it. Which is why Norma was surprised when she returned her new Thinkpad that had a glitchy display after only three days, and Newegg refused the RMA. Why? Well, she had installed Linux Mint on it, which voids the Newegg return policy for computers.

• Why Google Should Subsidize Chrome OS-based Systems

  Chrome OS is undoubtedly seeing a second wave of interest from Google, with officials from the company making very clear that they have no plans to give up on the operating system. New Chromebook systems are arriving, and Google is complementing the very cloud-focused Chrome OS platform with extras such as Google Drive–which offers free storage in the cloud–and the acquisition of Quickoffice, which provides office productivity applications for mobile devices. It’s becoming clear, though, that Chromebook systems are too expensive, and Google must address the issue.

• Free As In… Trademarks? Linux And The Small OEM

  If anyone can help clarify this, please feel free to do so. I would like to know exactly what is required to advertise and sell small numbers of computers pre-loaded with Ubuntu.

  I decided to share my findings here – without prejudice – so that small OEMs considering free and open source operating systems might educate themselves, to ensure that they are not breaching the trademark policies of the organization(s) in question, and potentially exposing themselves to legal issues.

  Linux is an excellent operating system and a worthy first choice for many applications, however, computer OEMs must be aware of other requirements where commercial interests are involved.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 268 – Software Necromancy

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds: Linux succeeded thanks to selfishness and trust

  Linux creator Linus Torvalds will find out later if he has won the Millennium Technology Prize and an accompanying cheque for about 1m euros ($1.3m; £800,000) from the Technology Academy of Finland.

Applications

• Tweeting from the Linux desktop with Polly

  I’ve found a number that I’ve been happy with. But then I went back to using the Twitter’s web interface. Why? Hard to say. Mainly I found that I could do everything I wanted to do on the desktop I could do on the web, too.

• Things You Didn’t Know You Could do with the Gwenview Image Viewer

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Recover Deleted Files in Linux

  • Rock Out with Your Console Out

  • Things to know about leap seconds and your Unix system

  • How To Set Wallpaper In Chromebook: Chrome OS Updated

  • A Bash Script To Demonstrate The Collatz Conjecture

  • Linux Detect Mouse Button Numbers Easily

  • How to Turn Your Ubuntu Laptop into a Wireless Access Point

  • 30 Handy Bash Shell Aliases For Linux / Unix / Mac OS X

  • Using PHP5-FPM With Apache2 On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

  • Embedded Linux Development in 6 Easy Steps

  • Camera FV-5: Android Camera App for Serious Photographers

Desktop Environments

• The GNOME Exodus and KDE

  Over the last fourteen months, discontent with Unity and the GNOME 3 series of releases have sent GNOME users galloping in all directions in their search for alternatives. Xfce and Linux Mint’s Cinnamon and Mate in particular have benefited from this search. However, one alternative that users have not considered to any extent is KDE.

  Considering the years in which GNOME and KDE were considered the main desktop environments for Linux, this trend is surprising at first.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • New KDE Telepathy version features audio and video calls

    After four months full of work, the KDE Telepathy team is back with another release. Version 0.4 of the Instant Messaging suite for KDE Workspaces now supports making audio and video calls right from the desktop. It also adds the ability to browse chat logs. We focused strongly on stability and performance, so most of the improvements are “under the hood”. In addition, work was started to have a Kopete log importer in the next release.

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 27th May 2012

• GNOME Desktop

  • A Day With Gnome 3

    At UDS in Oakland I was asked me what I thought of Gnome 3. I answered honestly that there were parts I liked and parts that I did not. I also expressed that I thought that it would have been better if Gnome and Ubuntu had been able to work together so that efforts were not split on the ‘next generation’ Gnome experience. It had been a while since I had used Gnome 3 so I made a mental note that I should give it another try when I had the chance.

Distributions

• The best Linux netbook distro?

  Most netbooks (if not all) use weak, low-voltages Atom processors and less RAM than normal laptops. When this hardware specification is very friendly to the battery life, it is not designed to be heavily taxed. That’s why the linux distro you use on the netbook should be simple and light-weight and not use too much memory.

• Dick MacInnis is a “Dreamer” | Interview

  Why did a musician decide to develop his own operating system? What was your problem with the available software, and even music production oriented GNU/Linux distributions?

• New Releases

  • SystemRescueCd 2.8.0

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia 3 is on Its Way

    Mageia 2 was released on May 22, and while many are still planning their upgrades or thinking about a test drive, Mageia 3 is already on its way. In a blog post today Anne Nicolas announced the official kick-off of Mageia 3.

    Nicolas stated the full release plan is set for Mageia 3, which includes a final release date in March 2013. Users will get their first peek with Alpha 1 scheduled this September.

  • Mandriva finally died! Well, sort of…

    Many Linux users have already proclaimed Mandriva deceased and buried it. But is this old Linux distro quite dead? Well, yes. Sort of. Mandriva became a zombie!

• Gentoo Family

  • Sabayon 9 arrives with Linux 3.4 and new app browser

    The developers say that much of their effort over the past three months since the previous release has been put into making the base system packages more secure. This has been done by introducing the Hardened Gentoo profile – Sabayon is derived from Gentoo Linux. The hardened profile adds several additional security services and enables various risk-mitigating options in the toolchain. However, the developers note that a hardened Linux kernel is not yet included, but that it “might come in the near future”.

  • Sabayon 9 Review

    In my review of Sabayon Linux 8, I praised Sabayon’s ability to combine spectacular beauty, breathtaking performance, bleeding-edge updates, competitive application selection, server-grade stability, and superb resource management. Sabayon provides an experience any experienced Linux user can fall in love with, and so far as I can tell there is still no Linux distribution that quite matches it in sheer awesomeness.

  • Sabayon 9 Released

    Sabayon 9 was released a few days ago with the usual updates as well as a new package management interface, Gentoo Hardened, and PAE. As is tradition, Sabayon 9 comes in several flavors and your choice of architecture and purpose.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • A Look At A New Hat — Fedora 17

    • Fedora ARM head claims 64-bit ARM chips will be tipping point

      THE RED HAT sponsored Fedora Linux distribution believes a 64-bit ARM architecture will prove to be the tipping point for ARM servers.

• Debian Family

  • Debian wheezy for Raspberry Pi goes into testing

    The developers working on Raspberry Pi are working on a release of the next generation of Debian, “wheezy” and have released a test image for users to try out on the mini-computer. The current release of Debian GNU/Linux for the Raspberry Pi is based on the current release of Debian, “squeeze”.

  • The MagPI Raspberry PI Magazine Issue 02 Released | Download pdf

  • Debian Project News – June 11th, 2012

  • My Mighty Debian Squeeze 64-Bit

    People always run after high performance and less resource-hogging computers and operating systems. In that run they stumble upon barely usable linux distro forks with lxde or xfce environments, or go for big muscle hardware such as core i7 extreme processors, latest intel chipset mobos, discrete graphics cards and the latest maximum memory modules. May be out of ignorance.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Fans: Humble Bundle Games Are Now Available In The Software Center

        If you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you might be excused for not knowing about this Humble Bundle thing. As a long-time Linux user, the Humble Bundles have always been of interest to me, and I’ve always tried to support them financially. It’s also always been interesting to me that Linux users typically pay more for the Bundles than their Windows or Mac counterparts. Clearly there’s a profitable market for Linux games.

        Canonical has jumped on the Humble Bundle bandwagon this time around, and are making it easy for Ubuntu users to install the games they’ve purchased. Each of the Humble Bundle games is available individually for direct purchase through the Ubuntu Software Center at full retail price; but if you buy the current Humble Bundle you can quickly and easily install them through the Software Center, rather than download them and manually install them.

      • Ubuntu Linux 12.10 ‘Quantal Quetzal’ Alpha 1 – New features in free OS

      • I’ve had enough of Ubuntu Unity!

        Everyone I know who’s used Ubuntu of late can’t stick the Unity interface. Admittedly, a dozen people does not maketh a statistically coherent sample. But still, I feel it’s indicative of some real problems.

      • It’s Time for Canonical to Stop Protecting Unity

        I recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my T43, just to take it for a test spin, and because I had heard a lot of really nice things about the release. I’m still totally in love with OpenSUSE 12.1, which is my day-to-day home OS, but the vast Ubuntu repositories are always a selling point for me. I was curious if Unity was workable for me down the line.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 family boot times – Start the clock

        All right, time for another boot time competition. It’s definitely not the most important aspect of the computer usage, but it can show some rather interesting trends in how an operating system behaves, especially if you can compare successive editions or nearly identical versions.

        The last time I gave Ubuntu and its family a timely [sic] shakedown was shortly before the spring release, with Oneiric, Kubuntu of the same numerical persuasion and Mint Julia competing on my rather unusual old-new T61 machine with SSD. Surprisingly, the results were not what I expected; there was quite some variation and the overall boost the SSD gave over conventional disks was not that spectacular. Now, Precise Pangolin is out there, so let’s see what gives. Tested: Ubuntu, Kubuntu and – a newcomer – Xubuntu. After me.

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 269

      • Ubuntu App Developer Goings On

        With the release of Ubuntu 12.04, there have been many different viewpoints on which parts are the most important features and facilities for our users; Unity, the HUD, application choice etc etc.

      • Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal Now Ready for Download

        In just a few weeks after a previous version called Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin arrived, a new alpha build of Ubuntu has been made available. The new version is called Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal and it is slated to come out in the fall this year. However, for those who want a preview of the new features, the software is now ready for download at the Ubuntu website.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • A Bodhi Linux 2.0.0 FAQ

          I’ve been getting a good deal of redundant questions regarding Bodhi’s upcoming 2.0.0 release. Today I would like to address a few of the more common questions I’ve been getting.

        • Review: Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” MATE

          Linux Mint has been my OS of choice for the last 3 years now. For the last 2 years, I have been using Linux Mint 9 LTS “Isadora” GNOME. That will be supported for another year from now, but that also means that I need to start looking into replacements for when the old version loses its official support. I’ve played around with Cinnamon, but it’s still a bit immature and unstable and doesn’t quite fit my needs; given that MATE is supposed to be GNOME 2 with the essential components simply renamed, it seems like this would be the best candidate for remaining on my computer’s hard drive for the next few years.

        • Bodhi Linux ARM Release Candidate for Genesi

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Are Multi-Core Processors a Waste of Time for Android?

      It’s tempting to suggest that Intel has a vested interest in rubbishing the current state of the Android market, especially when it comes to multi-core processors. After all, its hopes are pinned on its Medfield chip—which just happens to be a single-core design.

    • Linaro boosts Android 4.0.4 performance

      Using a customised version of Google’s open source Android mobile operating system, developers at Linaro have managed to improve the performance of some tasks by up to 100 per cent. In a recently published video from Linaro Connect Q2.12, Bernhard Rosenkränzer, a software engineer at Linaro, compares a stock build of Android 4.0.4 “Ice Cream Sandwich” from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) web site to the tweaked Linaro Android 4.0.4 build to show off its optimisations.

    • Android: not-so-open open source

      Google has just come through a searching examination of its claims to ownership of the Android mobile operating system, with one of the most aggressive tech companies in the US, Oracle, having gained nothing from a trial by jury.

      Google was accused of both copyright infringement and patent violation; the former claim was upheld but the jury was unclear whether the unauthorised use could be covered by fair use or not. The patent violation charges did not stick.

    • Android already offers more than iOS 6, but…

      There’s no doubt about it. Android, especially Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), version 4.0, already offers more than what is coming in Apple’s forthcoming iOS 6. But, Android has its own flaws.

      True, as Tom Henderson, principal researcher for ExtremeLabs and a colleague, told me, there’s a “Schwarzschild radius surrounding Apple. It’s not just a reality distortion field; it’s a whole new dimension. Inside, time slows and light never escapes– as time compresses to an amorphous mass.

      “Coddled, stroked, and massaged,” Henderson continued, “Apple users start to sincerely believe the distortions regarding the economic life, the convenience, and the subtle beauties of their myriad products. Unknowingly, they sacrifice their time, their money, their privacy, and soon, their very souls. Comparing Apple with Android, the parallels to Syria and North Korea come to mind, despot-led personality cults.”

      I wouldn’t go that far. While I prefer Android, I can enjoy using iOS devices as well. Besides, Android fans can be blind to its faults just as much as the most besotted Apple fan.

    • The iOS Fragmentation Begins

      iPad and 3rd generation iPod Touch will not be getting any iOS 6 upgrade at all. Even the devices which will be upgraded to iOS 6 won’t be getting all the ‘new’ (already found on Android) features.

      According to The Verge only “(the iPhone 4S, iPad 2, and new iPad) will be able to use the new Flyover and turn-by-turn navigation features in iOS 6.”

      iPhone 4 won’t be getting the Facetime over cellular networks feature whereas iPhone 3GS will miss quite a lot of features including shared Photo Streams, VIP and flagged email features, and the offline reading list.

    • Android performance boosted 30-100 percent by Linaro toolchain

      Linaro’s efforts have boosted Android’s performance, delivering an improvement of 30 to 100 percent in various benchmarks. They achieved these impressive gains by adapting Android 4 so that it could be built with their improved GCC toolchain.

      We first wrote about Linaro in 2010 when the non-profit organization was founded by a consortium of hardware and software companies, including ARM, Samsung, TI, and Canonical. Linaro has worked to improve the quality of Linux on the ARM architecture, focusing largely on hardware-enablement and tooling.

    • Android 4.0.3 update out for T-Mobile’s Samsung Galaxy S II

    • Sony To Launch Android SmartWatch In India For Rs 6,299

      Sony is planning to launch its Android-powered SmartWatch in India for the price of Rs 6,299. The SmartWatch features a multi-touch 3.3cm color OLED display. The SmartWatch can be used with any compatible Android smartphone or tablet.

    • Getting Work Done On Android

      With increasingly powerful Android smartphones and tablets, and the vast usability enhancements Android itself has gotten through its various incarnations, it’s increasingly likely that your day to day computer use can be reduced or eliminated by using your mobile device. I myself have not had a desktop computer since 2010 when I first got an Android device.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Tablet PC ASPs declined significantly in 1Q12, says IMS

    Despite booming shipments of low-end tablets, vendors of this tier have also pulled the average price down. Low-end tablets typically have prices below US$200. However, brands like the white-box tablet PCs have lowered prices below this average and as a result have won widespread adoption in the quarter, primarily in emerging countries.

Robin Miller’s formula for a successful open source career

For an audience composed primarily of open source programmers, developers, and system administrators gathered at SouthEast LinuxFest, Robin Miller’s message might be tough to swallow.

“You cannot be a ‘Linux sysadmin’ in today’s world,” he said. “Not if you want to maximize your income and job satisfaction.”

It’s an odd statement to hear in a presentation entitled “Using Linux to Boost Your IT Career,” which Miller, the former Slashdot editor known affectionately as “roblimo,” delivered June 9, the second day of the conference in Charlotte, NC.

Publication of Sixth Issue – International Free and Open Source Software Law Review

The Editorial Committee is delighted to announce the sixth issue of the ‘International Free and Open Source Software Law Review’ (IFOSS L. Rev.) which is available for free access on our website in HTML and PDF formats. IFOSS L. Rev. is a peer-reviewed biannual legal review dedicated to analysis and debate around Free and Open Source Software legal issues.

Events

• Best Of LinuxCon Japan 2012

  Here are some of the highlights from this year’s edition of LinuxCon Japan, the largest yet with some 650 attendees. There were lots of sessions beyond those touched on here, as well as a lively hallway track—not to mention the lunch, dinner, and drinks tracks. One suspects that next year’s conference will be bigger and better still.

• The Linux Foundation Announces 2012 Linux Scholarship Program

  The Linux Foundation has announced its 2012 Linux Training Scholarship Program, part of an annual program that offers scholarship funds to five computer science students. The organization is also today announcing a new Enterprise Linux Training program aimed at “preparing the next generation of enterprise architects.”

• Five Reasons The Atlassian Summit Was a Great Show

• Akademy 2012 Special Events

  Akademy is more than inspiring talks. It’s also a place to plan, collaborate and get a lot of work done in BoFs and workshops.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 14 Beta Arrives with an Extra Shot of Security

    Mozilla’s new Firefox 13 browser may have just barely landed on users’ PCs, but already forward-looking fans can check out the beta version of Firefox 14–and the Aurora version of Firefox 15, too.

  • Firefox 15 Aurora has native PDF support

    A new in-development version of Firefox 15 has arrived in the open source web browser’s Aurora channel. The experimental build of Firefox is the first version to include native support for viewing PDF documents; in contrast, Google added built-in PDF support to its Chrome Dev channel in June 2010, integrating it in the stable 8.0 branch later that year.

SaaS

• Hortonworks Announces Version 1 of its Hadoop-centric Data Platform

• Concurrent launches open source API to ease Hadoop development

  Concurrent is promoting its open source data workflow API — an alternative to MapReduce — to ease Hadoop application development headaches. The open source API, now available under an Apache 2.0 license, is used by Twitter, Amazon and Razorfish

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• TDF InfoGraphics, May 2012

• Using HUD In LibreOffice

  When Mark Shuttleworth introduced the HUD earlier this year in his blog post, most of us were amazed by it and the tabloids called it the most exciting feature of Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’.

• LibreOffice 3.6.0 Beta1 Available For Testing

  The Document Foundation, the body behind LibreOffice, has announced the availability of LibreOffice 3.6.0 Beta1. The fist beta of the next major version of LibreOffice (aka LO) is intended for evaluation, QA testing, etc. If you are a LibreOffice user and want to help the team in evaluating the upcoming release, you can download it from this link.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Thief open-sources Richard Stallman’s laptop, passport, visa

  Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, was distressed to find his personal belongings had been liberally distributed sans GPL – his prized laptop, wallet and passport were nicked at a conference in Argentina.

  [...]

  Stallman’s laptop will be even harder to replace than his passport and visa: it’s a Leemote Yeeloong, which runs free software from the BIOS up and is one of the rare bits of hardware compatible with his hardline stance on software freedom. Presumably the thief will have spent the day battling a command prompt and failing to install the right codecs and packages just to watch a YouTube video.

• esr v rms – promoting good technology versus fighting evil technology

• Free Software More Secure than the Real World, Stallman Learns

  THE OUTSPOKEN father of Free Software Foundation and GNU Richard Stallman, was mugged of all his important belongings last Friday after giving a talk at UBA Buenos Aires University, learning an important lesson on Basic travel security in the process…

Project Releases

• GNU Emacs 24.1 introduces new packaging system

  The GNU Emacs developers have announced version 24.1 of the venerable text editor. This latest release introduces a new packaging system, support for right-to-left (RTL) scripts, an improved theming system and unified text completion behaviour in many modes and packages.

• Lightspark 0.6.0.1 released! Adobe flash alternative

  The open source and adobe flash player alternative Lightspark 0.6.0.1 has been released, according to the announcement, this is a major release that comes with a lot of improvements and bug fixes.

• MPlayer 1.1 released after nine years development time

Openness/Sharing

• How bikers and artists create community with LocalWiki

  If you’re a civic hacker then you know nothing brings developers together like the shared experience of solving a hard problem. But for you, “solving problems” is probably almost synonymous with “writing code.” What’s not always clear is how people who aren’t developers can work with Brigades to solve pressing civic issues.

Programming

• Why Do Some Programming Languages Live and Others Die?

• AMD R600g LLVM Back-End Is Working A Bit Better

• Clang Compiling Against GCC On Ubuntu ARM Linux

• GStreamer SDK aims to simplify cross-platform multimedia development

  Fluendo and Collabora have teamed up to launch an official GStreamer software development kit (SDK). The aim of the new SDK is to lower the barrier to entry for new GStreamer adopters and make it easier to use the framework across platforms.

  GStreamer is an open source multimedia library that is widely used on Linux. GStreamer is implemented in GObject-based C and is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). It has a pipeline-based architecture that offers a lot of flexibility, making it suitable for many different usage scenarios, including playback and editing.

Security

• MySQL vulnerability allows attackers to bypass password verification

• Simple authentication bypass for MySQL root revealed – Update

• Preventing Stack Overflow Attacks

Finance

• Gorman to Blankfein Treated as Junk Before Cuts: Credit Markets

  Investors are fleeing global financial institutions as Europe’s escalating fiscal crisis threatens to poison the balance sheets of the region’s lenders and spread to trading partners globally. Moody’s, which has been reducing ratings for banks from Australia to Austria, has said that 15 banks with a combined $28.2 trillion of assets may be the next group it cuts as part of a review that will conclude this month.

• Investors In Hedge Funds Are Starting To Head For The Exits

  There are signs that investors are becoming increasingly impatient with hedge funds and that 2012 will be an important year for this very rich $2 trillion industry.

  Investors pulled $5.1 billion from hedge funds in April, according to BarclayHedge and TrimTabs Investment Research, and more than $12.7 billion flowed out of the hedge fund industry between May 2011 and April 2012. There were net outflows in 6 of those 12 months.

Censorship

• 451: Web censorship status code

  Back in the early days of the Web, we set up Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) status messages to let people know what was going on with a Web server. Today, we still use 401 error messages for pages you’re not authorized to see, 403 pages for pages you can’t see even with authentication, and the ever popular 404 for Web pages that can’t be found. Now, with the rise of Internet censorship, Tim Bray is proposing a new HTTP code: 451, for Web servers and pages that are being censored,

Privacy

• 30,000 secret surveillance orders demanded annually to spy on Americans

  Even without CISPA on the books, the federal government can still use antiquated legislation to leer into the personal communications of Americans. One judge, in fact, says that thousands are approved each year.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Major Change Takes Place at HeliOS Project

In 2007, I became a good friend of Don Davis. Don has done much for the Free Software community, either initiating or participating in several films and documentaries about Linux and Open Source.

He is also the founder of REGLUE – Recycled Electronics and Gnu/Linux Used for Education.

Don’s organization had almost exactly the same mission as HeliOS. Don is now a Doctoral Candidate at Texas State University and the requirements of his studies have left him little time to do little else.

Desktop

• First Linux Mint PCs go on sale

Server

• Why IBM Is Trying To Surf The Linux Wave With Power Systems

  If you are wondering why IBM is all hot-to-trot with its new PowerLinux machines, which are Power Systems servers tweaked to only run Linux and with lower hardware and software prices than regular Power Systems iron that runs AIX and IBM i, then you need look no further than the latest server numbers from IDC. Sales of Linux-based machines shot up like a rocket, thanks to some big supercomputer and hyperscale cloud deals and are outpacing the market substantially.

• Is this the end of Windows Server?

  Well, probably not quite yet – just look at how long it’s taken Unix to die in the data centre. However I can’t but feel that Microsoft’s announcement this week, that they will now be supporting Linux under Azure, represents a fundamental shift in the balance of power of server operating systems.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.5 Can Massively Boost AMD Radeon Graphics Performance

• Graphics Stack

  • Open-Source R500 Driver Can Compete With Legacy Catalyst

  • DRI2 Offload Slaves, Output Slaves For September

Applications

• The ‘Leet Text Filter Toys Of Linux

• Proprietary

  • Netflix and Linux, What are Your Options?

    I have only recently discovered Netflix and signed up without thinking there may be issues playing back the streaming media on Linux. I have done many searches on the subject and found some interesting discussions and the only solution that seems to work.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Setup Squid3 as Transparent Proxy on Ubuntu Server 12.04

  • Installing KVM Guests With virt-install On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server

  • Wallbase.cc commandline bash wget downloader

  • How to: Take screenshot of the login screen in Ubuntu and Linux Mint

  • Making sense of memory usage on Linux

  • How to install Flash player on Fedora 17

  • 8 Linux Commands: To Find Out Wireless Network Speed, Signal Strength And Other Information

  • How To Configure Ubuntu To Update Through Proxy – Ubuntu 12.04/11.10

• Wine

  • Wine 1.5.6 released

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Biweekly report #2

    this is my second update on my Summer of Code project.
    As planned in the previous report, I spent the past two weeks implementing notification integration in the lock screen, and this is the result…

  • The long hard road towards GNOME 3.6 -issue 190

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 203

    · Announced Distro: Kororaa 17 Beta
    · Announced Distro: Snowlinux 2 Cinnamon
    · Announced Distro: Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 1

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Dangerous Concessions: Red Hat, Fedora and the Secure Boot Shocker

      “This certainly gives me a bit of concern because it puts Microsoft in the position of controlling the hardware and being a gatekeeper on what can be installed,” explained Google+ blogger Kevin O’Brien. “IS there any evidence that they have ever had this kind of power and *not* used it to crush their competition?” O’Brien wondered. “I hope the anti-trust authorities look into this.”

• Debian Family

  • Browse like Bond: Use any computer without leaving a trace with Tails

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 12.10 Looks To Use Intel SNA Acceleration

      • How to run Ubuntu Linux on the MK802 $74 PC-on-a-stick

        The MK802 is a tiny PC that looks like a USB thumb drive. While it ships with Google Android 4.0, it’s actually pretty easy to convince it to run an alternate operating system. In fact, if you have a properly prepared microSD card, all you need to do is insert the memory card, turn on the MK802, and it will boot Ubuntu 10.04 Linux.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Project Magenta is Linux-based mobile OS that aims to replicate iOS on generic hardware

  • Project Magenta is ambitious Linux-based mobile OS

    Where most of the excitement exists today when it comes to operating system advancements is not in Windows and Mac. Nope, it’s within the intensely competitive space that contains Android and iOS. And just like any strong and exciting segment in the consumer electronics industry, this market is now the target of a new initiative that wants to push its way to the front of the pack.

  • Is Media Explorer following MeeGo to the graveyard?

    Media Explorer is a media center originally target for MeeGo, but also is the first real native GNOME 3 multimedia box powered by Clutter and Mx.

  • Android

    • Android smartphone activations hit 331m in Q1 2012, says report

Banking on open-source software

COMPUTER engineer Musa Ngog has high hopes of winning funding from KTS Group’s inaugural Sarawak Youth Talent Discovery (SYTD) project with his plans to create public awareness of computer software piracy and educating users on better alternatives to getting much-needed software — for free.

“Evaluating the harm from closed source”

For those of you with a more philosophical best, Eric S. Raymond has posted an interesting essay, “Evaluating the harm from closed source”.

Evaluating the harm from closed source

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Running Chrome with less memory: disable extensions

Openness/Sharing

• Free as in Bach: Open Goldberg Variations released

• Open Access/Content

  • Kahn to MIT graduates: Open content is the future

    Open education innovator Sal Khan, MIT alumnus and founder of Khan Academy, gave the commencement address at MIT graduation ceremony on June 8, a speech that included both a nod to the power of open education as exemplified by MIT’s OpenCourseWare program and Khan’s own web site, and an homage to the importance of the unique academic community that is MIT.

    Khan spoke eloquently of the inspiration he drew from MIT’s 2001 announcement to make all of its courseware openly available on the web. “MIT announced … that it was going to take knowledge and resources that used to be behind the wall of elite institutions and not charge for them but give them away for free to the world … When I read that press release, I had never been so inspired. I had never been more proud to come from this community.”

Programming

• Open Source Languages – Pros and Cons

  Many developers love to use open source software for the variety of benefits that come along with it. Some of the most popular open source languages used include C, PHP, Javascript, and C++. Although many people code using these languages, are there any major reasons not to use them? Let’s take a look and find out.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs Hires Single Morally Decent Human Being To Work In Separate, Enclosed Cubicle

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Scott Walker and Ted Kaczynski in the Heartland

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Where does Linux fit into a BYOD world?

Android is the Great Green Hope for end user Linux devices. Android and BYOD are perfect mates.

Essential Tips When Switching From Windows to Linux

If you’re a Windows user and are always intrigued by the Linux world, then many times you might have wondered about switching to the light side. As easy as it sounds, and easy as it really is, there is a certain sort of paranoia Windows users have before trying out anything Linux-related. This inhibition can be partly attributed to Microsoft’s long-standing domination and partly to the bad reputation Linux has with the so-called ‘normal’ users.

US Navy buys Linux to guide drone fleet

The US Navy has signed off on a $27,883,883 contract from military contractor Raytheon to install Linux ground control software for its fleet of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drones.

Filling out my FAFSA on FOSS

Over a year ago I wrote a post complaining that you where unable to complete the “free application for federal student aide” from an FOSS operating system without first tricking the government’s website into thinking you are running Windows.

HPC Research Projects Find Muscle in Linux Lab Partner

Linux and FOSS are key players in science and research, and together they power the biggest research projects in the world. Here are four projects that show four different ways Linux is used in large-scale research.

Server

• Advertisement Above a Pharmacy in Thailand: Peace, Love and Linux – IBM eserver

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 4 Episode 10

Kernel Space

• Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 1 Has Linux Kernel 3.4

• Download Linux Kernel 3.5 Release Candidate 2

• Btrfs Creator Chris Mason Leaves Oracle

  Chris Mason, creator of Btrfs, has quit Oracle. Chris is joining Fusion-io, a next generation storage memory specialist.

• Graphics Stack

  • On the future of Graphics Drivers

    Ubuntu 12.04, Compiz 0.9.8 and Unity 5.12 are fantastic. My colleagues, Daniel and Alan and I have invested a significant amount into refactoring the compiz code so that we can split it up and test it, writing test coverage for most of the fixes that are going in, improving performance through profile guided optimization and fixing some of the most important architectural issues within compiz. We’ve streamlined the development process by merging together a large number of branches into one source repository, moved to test-driven-development practices with a stringent review process.

    This has made Ubuntu 12.04 fantastic. Fantastic it seems, unless you are using the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver.

  • Linux 3.5 Can Massively Boost AMD Radeon Graphics Performance

    The Linux 3.5 kernel is capable of delivering some massive performance gains for some of the more recent generations of ATI/AMD Radeon graphics processors. Here’s some benchmarks showing the hefty performance gains found when using the latest kernel that is still being developed.

Applications

• Flowblade: A Cool, Non-Linear Video Editor For Linux

  Flowblade is a multitrack non-linear video editor for Linux designed to “provide a fast, precise and as-simple-as-possible editing experience”. The application can be used to join or cut videos, create movies from video clips, audio clips and images, add filters and more.

• 8 Best Free Linux Renderers

  One of the many strengths of Linux is its good range of open source software for artists, photographers, animators, and designers. With inexpensive hardware, free software, and a modicum of talent and inspiration, anyone can create professional-looking computer graphics.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Setting up Awesome as a GNOME WM…

  • Some tweaking tips for Linux Mint 13 – MATE edition

  • 6 Ways to Speed Up Your Ubuntu PC

  • How to Encrypt Your Home Folder After Installing Ubuntu

  • Create and enable new swap space on a Linux server

  • Get Multi-touch Working on Ubuntu 12.04 HP dv9000

  • How To Use LightDM Instead Of MDM In Linux Mint 13

  • Introduction to C

  • Install Scrollout F1 Anti-Spam Firewall On Ubuntu In 30 Minutes

  • Rails Install and Deployment Get Easier with New OSS Tools

  • How To Install VMware Player In Ubuntu 12.04

  • Porting applications to Linux for System z

  • How to Access VirtualBox Shared Folder from Ubuntu 12.04 Guest Machine

  • Use Linux to Rejuvenate Old Computers

• Games

  • Linux Game Publishing Still Silent On New Titles

    It was at the end of January that Michael Simms, the founder and original CEO of Linux Game Publishing had stepped down after suffering burn out and not much coming out of the company in recent years. Taking over Linux Game Publishing was Clive Crous. Four months ago from yesterday, Clive blogged about the new work and his “great plans for Linux Game Publishing.”

  • Will Unreal Engine 4 Games Come To Linux?

    This week from the E3 Expo there’s been new details to emerge about Unreal Engine 4 as the latest game engine that’s in development by Epic Games. But will there be any native UE4 Linux games to come or will it face a similar fate to Unreal Engine 3 on Linux?

  • Update: added 3 games to The Humble Indie Bundle V

    Yes, you got it! Other 3 great games have been added to The Humble Indie Bundle V!
    IMHO, this makes this bundle the best bundle ever created, because now, if you beat the average price (about $8), you have 8 games!!!

  • Holyspirit, Free and Open Source Diablo Like Action RPG for Linux

  • A New Post From Valve; More Linux Love Needed

    The blog post can be found at blogs.valvesoftware.com where Abrash goes into detail about becoming involved with computer programming at university, etc.

    As far as why this blog post is being mentioned on Phoronix: Valve is still in need of more high-quality Linux talent. Just this week from one of the Valve Linux developers I hear again, “Got a ton of work to do…Need more good people. :)”

Desktop Environments

• What’s your favorite desktop environment?

  –>

  I’ve been having a case of writer’s blockage lately – a creative constipation if you will. Over the past week I drafted about a dozen articles, and ended up hating all of them so much I couldn’t bring myself to finish typing them up. So in lieu of actual content lets do an audience participation thing again, while I go and find my creative muses again.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE SC 4.8.4 Is Now Available for Download

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 20th May 2012

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3.5.2 introduces default power off button

    The GNOME project has released the latest development snapshot in their unstable 3.5 branch; the 3.5 branch will eventually become the basis for the stable GNOME 3.6 branch. GNOME 3.5.2 includes a new font viewer application and gives the users a power off button in the user menu by default. This addresses one of the biggest criticisms of the GNOME 3 release, as users were previously only able to shut down their computers from the menu by holding down the Alt key to make the power off option visible.

  • 29 new things this Google Summer of Code will bring to GNOME

  • Gnome-Shell gets its first facelift!

    Great news everyone! Gnome-Shell went to plastic surgeon and gained a brand new face!

    One more controversial feature has been added and that will get Shell again be discussed but not being disgusting!

Distributions

• antiX-base M12.0 has been set up for Mother to use!

  I installed the antiX-base M12.0 pre-final version on a 2004-vintage Dell Dimension 3000 desktop that I acquired from my sister, and I put it in my Mother’s den, and configured it to automatically login to a JWM desktop with Rox icons, containing a Web browser and a terminal.

• Gentoo Family

  • Sabayon 9: released

    After more than 3 months of hard work. I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Sabayon 9.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Launches CloudForms to Manage Open Hybrid Clouds

    Open source software provider Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) released for general availability Red Hat CloudForms, an open hybrid cloud management platform designed to enable enterprise customers to deploy and manage IaaS hybrid clouds, with the opportunity to provide computing resources to users “in a managed, governed and secure way.”

  • CentOS details efforts to maintain speedy release schedule

    CentOS developer Johnny Hughes has detailed recent efforts by the project to improve the release timing of the distribution. The CentOS team of volunteers has created new workflows and has also secured funding for developers to work full time on the project, and says that these efforts have already paid off.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 17 on Samsung Netbooks

      I am preparing for a trip to Iceland this summer, and have been considering which computers to take along. First, why plural “computers”? Because if anything happens, whether it be lost/stolen/damaged baggage along the way, or equipment failure/malfunction while we are there, I don’t want to be without a netbook. We stay in touch, check routes, roads, conditions and weather, unload pictures from cameras, send postcards and much more that we would not want to do without. So I take two, and I make sure that one is in checked baggage and one is in a carry-on.

    • Kororaa 17 (Bubbles) Beta released

    • News flash: Sky NOT falling

      I wasn’t going to weigh in on this issue because it was really is not the huge, Chicken Little-esque matter some people — some people I once held in high esteem — are making it out to be. I’ve commented on this on social media outlets and in e-mail exchanges, and frankly I’m a little surprised at how this infinitessimally innocuous development has caused some in our happy little FOSS circle to become Harold Camping.

      Actually, I’m going to let Brian Proffitt drive here, since he explains the whole Fedora/UEFI issue pretty well. In his blog, Brian points out that it is hardly an ideal situation, but it’s a trade-off. Not a very palatable one, but nonetheless a trade-off.

• Debian Family

  • My week with Debian

    I’ve long been a fan of Debian-based Linux OSes in general, and Ubuntu in particular. However, my disaffection with Ubuntu’s new Unity desktop had left me yearning for a suitable alternative. Finally last week, I removed Ubuntu 11.10 from my primary desktop computer and substituted the Linux Mint project’s latest Debian implementation: LMDE 201204. What a breath of fresh air!

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • First Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” alpha arrives

      • Canonical’s Computex Booth is a Thing of Beauty

      • Eight New Features in Ubuntu Linux 12.10 ‘Quantal Quetzal’ Alpha 1

        The arrival of Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” was a major event a few weeks ago, not least because it is a Long Term Support release and thus a good, stable choice for both business and individual users.

      • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 1 Screenshot Tour

        As Canonical unleashed the first Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system earlier today, we’ve taken it for a test drive and reported the new features.

      • Ubuntu 12.10 Will Have OpenJDK 7

        The Ubuntu development team, through James Page, announced a couple of days ago (June 6th) that they plan to move to OpenJDK 7 as the default Java Runtime Environment.

      • XFCE 4.10 on Ubuntu 12.04

        I’m a Xubuntu user, and so i was a bit disappointed that for some days my Xubuntu 12.04 missed the 4.10 release of XFCE.

      • Preview: A Cheap 12-Core, 30-Watt Ubuntu Cluster

        It’s quite easy these days to build a many-core compute cluster that is low-powered, running Linux, and performant-friendly. Here’s a small cluster build that’s begun at Phoronix and has twelve 1.2GHz cores while the total system power consumption under load is just about 30 Watts.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • BlackBuntu – Ubuntu-flavored Linux Penetration Distro

          Blackbuntu is a Ubuntu-based distro used for penetration testing and security auditing. Blackbuntu is designed to be used by students and practitioners who are interested in the field of information security.

        • Linux Mint 13 Maya with MATE desktop review

        • Introducing the mintBox

          We’re passionate about what we do and for our very first Mint device, we wanted something unique, something special and extraordinary. The mintBox is Mint in a box. It’s tiny, it’s silent, it’s extremely versatile and it comes packed with connectivity.

        • Linux Mint announces mintBox PC, available now

          CompuLab teams up with Linux Mint to create the mintBox, a slimline, portable PC running the popular operating system

        • Linux Mint Presents the mintBox

        • Introducing the mintBox

        • Linux Mint 13 MATE/Cinnamon review

Devices/Embedded

• New STM32 Discovery board can now be programmed on Linux

• Phones

  • Android

    • Turn Your TV Into An Android Smart TV

      Android has taken the world by storm and is now found in places where one won’t even expect it. The Pocket TV, a Kickstarter project, turns any TV into a Smart TV.

    • Huawei intros 4G LTE-ready Activa 4G for MetroPCS

    • Blurrycam and Clearshot pictures of the LG “Snapshot” LS730 leak

      A source of BriefMobile has leaked some images of a new device from LG, headed to Sprint. The “Snapshot” (how appropriate), also known as the LG LS730, should be coming out in the last quarter of 2012. The device is a standard design, with a square body, physical home button, and – from what we can tell – metal bands along the sides.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Wintel Abandons Netbooks

  • Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 review

Open-Source Software Extends Robots’ Reach

The newly formed Open-Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) wants to take robotics development into the future as fast as possible, and says it will support the development, distribution, and adoption of open-source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.

Independent software developers go full time with open source

While many software developers get paid to work on open source by their employer or volunteer their time for free to various FOSS projects, some end up deciding to quit their day jobs to work on free and open source software (FOSS) full time. That’s exactly what Bryan Lunduke and Patrick Verner are now doing and they’re both hoping that the respective communities for their projects will help to support their efforts financially.

Interview with Lars J. Nilsson, author of free online gambling software

Not long ago, after giving a speech about free software I was asked by an audience member whether the free software community had come up with free (as in freedom) gambling software. I answered “no”, and… I was wrong. A bit of research told me that there us such a platform: that’s Cubeia’s Firebase. Yes, it’s fully free software/open source, the real deal. I couldn’t resist: I asked its founder (and software engineer) for an interview. So, here we go!

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Thunderbird Offers Unique Email Domains, Works with Big Files

    This week, Mozilla released new versions of Mozilla Thunderbird, its free and open source email application, for Windows, the Mac, and Linux. The new version 13 of Thunderbird offers some major improvements, most notably the ability to register personal email domains. Previously, if you wanted to have an email address such as Frank@geniuswork.com, Thunderbird couldn’t handle the task of personalizing the domain part of the address. Mozilla has solved the problem by working with hosting services Hover and Gandi.

SaaS

• Cloudera Updates Enterprise Hadoop

  As demand for Big Data technologies grows, one technology has stood head and shoulders above all others – Apache Hadoop. Adding enterprise-class management and packaging up all the disparate parts of Hadoop is where Cloudera comes into play.

  This week, Cloudera updated its core open source CDH 4 (Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop) and Cloudera Enterprise platforms. The new releases provide more security and scalability than prior releases, according to Cloudera.

• 9 Open Source Big Data Technologies to Watch

Databases

• Four Advantages of Using PostgreSQL in the Cloud

• What are database Indexes?

  In this tutorial we are going to review indexes. I never cease to be amazed at how many people do not know what indexes are or how to use them. An index is simply a data structure that provides a fast access path to rows in a table based on the values in one or more columns (the index key). This allows for fast search techniques to be used to find the values ,rather than having to scan the entire table row by row, which results in much faster data retrieval. This can be a big performance booster in your environment, lowering the amount of time it takes to run a SELECT query and get data back.

Funding

• Free software programmers should be paid, too

  You’ve probably heard of this intriguing new crowd-funding service called Kickstarter, right? (If not, how are you getting this website from that cave of yours?). A lot of people are using it to fund all kinds of exciting new things, and it’s obviously useful option for free software projects. Properly used, it can allow us to close the gap against proprietary applications that still have more polish or exist in niches that require more capitalization. But the idea that it is somehow immoral to ask for money to work on free software has got to go!

Project Releases

• Emesene 2.12.5 Released With Single-Window Mode

• Collabora and Fluendo launch GStreamer SDK

• After 21 Alphas, Samba 4.0 Finally Enters Beta

Openness/Sharing

• Open source meets capitalism: Collaborate by competing

• The future must be decentralized

  Nicholson, community outreach director for Open Invention Network and community manager for the MediaGoblin project, says movement in the opposite direction–toward decentralization–is necessary for a more open, safe, and competitive future. And in “We Are Legion: Decentralizing the Web,” a presentation she delivered today at SouthEast LinuxFest in Charlotte, NC, Nicholson explained how open source projects are at the forefront of attempts to realize this future.

  “I’d like to see more people working on decentralized services,” Nicholson said.

Standards/Consortia

• Open Source Law Releases Report On Open Standards

• EU Clears Way to Use Consortium Standards

  While the decade long debate in the European Union over the definition of “open standards” has been well-publicized, it may come as a surprise to some that EU member nations are required to utilize a second standards filter in public procurement as well.

  That filter relates to whether a standard has been developed by a “formal” standard setting organization (SSO). In other words, by either an EU SSO, such as CEN/CENELEC or ETSI, or by one of the global “Big Is” (ISO, IEC or ITU). If it doesn’t, then it’s supposed to be off limits – until now.

  That filter has roots in a sixty year standards-based quest to benefit European trade, both within the EU and internationally. Historically, this goal was met by seeking to develop EU-wide standards that member states would be required to adopt, thereby replacing the national standards they had long used to keep the goods of neighboring nations out of their own markets. At the same time, these standards would be designed to facilitate EU goods internationally.

Security

• Lessons From The LinkedIn Password Attack

Finance

• What Europe Needs is Democracy: Striking at the Root of Europe’s Crisis

  I am appalled by the dramatic change of regime in Hungary and what is referred to as the European debt crisis. These two episodes, while being themselves the outcome of a complex chain of events, reflect our inability, as citizens, as a culture and perhaps as humans to remember the lessons of the past.

• Big Banks Double Whammy: New Asset Management Rules And FHA Subpoenas

  In what finally seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel for many homeowners who were bushwhacked by the big banks during the 2008 financial meltdown, the federal government made its oversight presence known to some of America’s largest financial institutions on June 7. The U.S. government made two separate moves, which demonstrated a strong presence amongst financial services companies. First, the Federal Reserve laid the groundwork for a stricter set of capital regulations for financial institutions with assets of at least $500 million. Second, federal regulators served a handful of financial firms with subpoenas that cited potential violations of FHA rules.

• Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein: Company Engaged in Contingency Planning for Defaults in Europe

  In February, it was revealed that Goldman sold $142.4 billion in credit default swaps that would pay out in the event Greece, Ireland, Portugal or Spain defaulted on its debt. Goldman also purchased swaps on the same debt worth an estimated $147.3 billion in all, according to Bloomberg.

  Blankfein’s comments echoed remarks he made at the end of his testimony at the Gupta trial earlier this week. Both the public and private sector are laying the groundwork for responses to defaults, Blankfein said Thursday, but stopped short of confirming outright that Goldman is preparing as well.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux UEFI compromise reasonable, still sucks

The EFI system has slowly been making headway in recent years, and right now EFI firmware is compatible with Windows supporting the GUID Partition Table (GPT), OS X/Intel, and Linux 2.6 and beyond machines. EFI is seen as a better hardware/software interface than BIOS, since it is platform-agnostic, runs in 32- or 64-bit mode, and GPT machines can handle boot partitions of up to 9.4 zettabytes. (That’s 9.5 billion terabytes to you and me.)

Less freedom is no freedom

I wanted to write about the Linux boot and UEFI from a while now, but I figured out is better to learn first more about the issue and take a deep breath before taking a position. In the meantime, many faces of the debate were talked in various places, so I think I have a better grasp.

From the beginning, when people started talking about Secure Boot some warned about the treat to Free Software, but they were pretty much dismissed by many as a bunch of hippies following the smelly RMS, we’ll surely find a way around when will get to it. Now, after mjg wrote a long technical pieces about the struggles of making Fedora boot on UEFI with Secure Boot enabled, we can the alarmists were right and Microsoft managed to give a fatal blow to Free Software on the desktop with the help of many hardware manufacturers.

M$ Attempts to Build a New Monopoly

Allowing M$ to pick and choose which OEMs can install that other OS is leading to a new monopoly designed to replace Wintel, at least on ARM. No longer will consumers be able to install an OS from M$ on a PC if M$ gets its way. M$ will have loyal OEMs only blessed with the privilege and revenue streams.

[...]

Are you paying attention, US Department of Justice?

7 More Heroes of Linux

Kernel Space

• ACPI Updated For The Linux 3.5 Kernel

  The ACPI feature pull request for the Linux 3.5 kernel merge window was submitted on Saturday.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD R600g Still Tackling Hierarchical Z

    While patches have been around for more than one year to support Hierarchical Z on the ATI/AMD R600 open-source driver, the Gallium3D support still hasn’t been merged.

  • X11R7.7 released

    The X.Org Foundation and the global community of X.Org developers
    announce the release of X11R7.7 – Release 7.7 of the X Window System,
    Version 11. This release is the eighth modular release of the X Window
    System. The next full release will be X11R7.8 and may happen in 2013.

  • Radeon 6.14.5 Linux Graphics Driver Released

  • A New Open-Source GPU Comes About

    While the university crew designed an open-source graphics processor using an FPGA, they haven’t written a proper Linux graphics driver, at least not yet. From part of the email I received, “While this is not anywhere close to OGP, it’s a step in the right direction. The big difference is that the only requirement for our implementation is a FPGA and a RAM. This can easily be integrated with a softcore processor like Microblaze or NIOS or the one we have worked with: the OpenRISC. Yea, thats right we are running a open source graphics accelerator connected to a open source cpu architecture. When we get a linux driver up and running it will be a true open source computer with USB, Ethernet etc all open source.”

Applications

• Lightspark 0.5.7 Released : Free and Open Source Alternative Flash Player

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Install and Configure Samba Server as File Server on Ubuntu Server 12.04

  • How to Install 200+ Free and Open Source Games in One Command on Ubuntu 12.04 – 11.10 – 11.04 -10.04

  • How To Upgrade From Fedora 16 To Fedora 17 (Desktop & Server)

  • How to Install Diablo 3 on Linux

  • Tune mod_jk to Boost HTTP/Java Server Performance

  • 8 Linux Commands: To Find Out Wireless Network Speed, Signal Strength And Other Information

  • How to Install Diablo 3 on Linux

  • CentOS / RHEL CacheFS: Speed Up Network File System (NFS) File Access

  • Seamlessly Extending IRC to Mobile Devices

  • How to dual-boot Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon/MATE and Windows 7

• Games

  • That Exciting Game Is Coming To Linux

    Last month I wrote about Linux Gamers Are Going Crazy For This New Game that was possibly coming to Linux, but today it’s been officially confirmed by the developers that it will indeed be ported.

    The game in question is Carmageddon: Reincarnation, which has been a very popular Kickstarter project. Funding ends today and with a “stretch goal” of $600,000 USD they were going to provide a Linux and Mac OS X client. They’re only at $578k right now, but the developers have said regardless they will be providing a native Linux version of this unique racing game (via this update).

  • Carmageddon Reincarnation Mac and Linux versions confirmed

  • Carmageddon: Reincarnation

  • ioquake3 Developers Working On “baseio” Game

    Some of the developers behind the ioquake3 game engine that is derived from the id Tech 3 engine are working on a truly open — all game assets / content are Creative Commons licensed — game called baseio.

  • Humble Bundle V Crosses Three Million Dollars

Desktop Environments

• Trading Ubuntu for Chromebox Running Google Chrome OS

  The VAR Guy is trading in his Ubuntu PC for a new Samsung Chromebox running Google Chrome OS. What motivated the move to a cloud-centric thin client? Here’s the explanation.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE Ships June Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3.5.2 first sights :p

    Not the whole GNOME stack has reached version 3.5.2 so we can’t review it just yet. But we can share what Matthias Mclasen post in his blog -and enrich it a bit

Distributions

• Users voted for the best XFCE-based distribution… again!

  People kept voting, despite the announcement of the results. Today I publish second round of the poll results, with number of participants more than doubled since last time: 169.

• Interview with Patrick Volkerding of Slackware

• New Releases

  • Distribution Release: Snowlinux 2 “Cinnamon” LTS has been released

  • Parted Magic 2012_06_07

  • Clonezilla 1.2.12-63

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • PCLinuxOS (Kinda) Saved My Laptop

    Today, I was alarmed to see that I could not boot into my Linux Mint system; the OS would give a “no init found” error after the boot splash. First, I had to boot into Microsoft Windows 7; thankfully, that worked as Linux Mint was the OS I was [of course] using when I accidentally unplugged my computer. I looked up the error, and it turns out it’s a common one that can be solved by a file system check (“fsck”) from a live CD. All the guides I saw recommended using a live CD of the same OS whose hard drive partition is affected, but I had left my live CDs and USB sticks in my dormitory room. Whoops again. What I figured would just be a minor inconvenience turned into a semi-major problem.

  • June 2012 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo Does An x32 Stage 3 Release Candidate

    Linux x32 is the effort for a native 32-bit ABI for Intel/AMD x86_64 systems but where 32-bit pointers are used to reduce the memory footprint while still allowing for x32 programs to take advantage of the rest of the 64-bit benefits. There’s x32 support within the Linux kernel, GCC, glibc, binutils, and even LLVM/Clang.

  • A Gentoo x32 release candidate

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat CloudForms Now Available

    Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat CloudForms, an open hybrid cloud management platform. CloudForms enables enterprises to create and manage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hybrid clouds with the ability to make self-service computing resources available to users in a managed, governed and secure way.

  • Red Hat Debuts CloudForms for Cloud Management

  • Red Hat carefully repositions CloudForms as open hybrid cloud management platform

  • Red Hat Shows What Real Cloud Looks Like

    While many enterprises have been experimenting with private clouds over the last year, moving real workloads to the platform means dealing with public clouds and others’ cloud platforms, a problem dubbed hybrid cloud.

    CloudForms, originally created as a Red Hat Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS offering, has now joined the OpenStack development group founded by competitor Rackspace (RAX) and is pushing CloudForms as a method for interoperating among different cloud infrastructures.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 17 Review: It’s an Upstream Experience

      Fedora 17 came out just last week. This is the first time I’ve installed it as a desktop in more than a year — last time was Fedora 14 (or was it 13?).

      Fedora for me has always been something I install to check out what’s new, and to get a feel of what all I shall get in other distros in the coming months/years. Here, I’m specifically talking about system-level utilities — for example, systemd and stuff like that. Although, I gotta admit, I still use the service and chkconfig commands as most distros, including Fedora, have managed to keep these tools systemd-aware — and hopefully not retiring either any time soon.

    • Fedora 17 LXDE Review:

    • Firefox 13 Officially Lands in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

    • The Perfect Desktop – Fedora 17

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • ‘Download for Ubuntu’ Button Campaign

      • Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon Talks About Ubuntu for Android, Humble Bundles, Steam, Gaming and More

        Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager at Canonical recently replied to user questions while doing ‘Ask Me Anything’ session at Reddit.

      • Ubuntu 12.10 Sets To Make ARM Even Stronger

        With Ubuntu 12.04 for ARM there were performance improvements thanks to switching to ARM hardfp binaries by default rather than the soft floating-point version. The switch to the hardware floating-point build made a noticeable difference and for some hardware there were performance improvements due to upstream kernel improvements. With the Linux kernel found in 12.04 (Linux 3.2), there is proper support for the OMAP4460 as found in the PandaBoard ES. With that, the dual-core Cortex-A9 can now properly clock up to its rated 1.2GHz speed. Those reasons represent a bulk of the improvements for the ARM architecture in Ubuntu 12.04.

      • Ubuntu 12.10 First Alpha Released

        Ubuntu 12.10 has started churning releases. Kate Stewart of Ubuntu has announced the release of 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Alpha 1. As you are aware alphas are not meant for ‘regular’ consumption. However, if you are an Ubuntu user and want to help find and fix the bugs you can install it on your secondary machine.

      • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 1 now available

        It feels like it was just April when Ubuntu 12.04 was released… oh right, because it was. But the folks at Canonical are already working on the next version of one of the world’s most popular Linux-based operating systems. Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal is scheduled to launch in October, but you can download the first Alpha builds today.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux Drives Cadillac Into the Infotainment Era

  This month, GM is shipping a 2013 Cadillac XTS sedan that is “technologically gee-whizzed to the gills,” according to USA Today. Novelties include adaptive headlights, ten airbags, and a driver’s seat that vibrates in different locations depending on the direction in which sensors detect a possible collision. Yet the highlight is a Debian Linux-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system called Cadillac User Experience (CUE).

• Phones

  • Android

    • No Ice Cream Sandwich for You? Clone It!

      Add widgets and shortcuts if your install is a keeper. You’ll be able to change desktop layout and preferences, like autofit, that can fix anomalies with look; change user preferences like gesture behavior; configure the status bar and its content; tweak the colors and tints; customize text preferences; change battery indicator preferences; and reboot the launcher.

    • Most Popular Android ROM: CyanogenMod

      Most Popular Android ROM: CyanogenMod If your Android device is feeling a little stale, or maybe the manufacturer has abandoned it and you’d love to breathe a little life into it, your best bet is to root it and install a new ROM. It’s like installing a brand new operating system on your phone or tablet, and an in many cases can give you features the manufacturer never thought to offer. Last week, we asked you which Android ROMs you thought were the best. Then we took a look at the five best Android ROMs based on your nominations, and put them to a vote. Now we’re back to highlight the winner.

    • Holo Launcher Brings the Ice Cream Sandwich Launcher to Any Android Phone

      Holo Launcher Brings the Ice Cream Sandwich Launcher to Any Android Phone Android: If you’re stuck on a device running 2.3 Gingerbread (or even worse, 2.2 Froyo) and your manufacturer has no plans on upgrading your phone anytime soon, Holo Launcher gives you all of the features available in the stock Ice Cream Sandwich launcher, right now, completely free.

    • Intel “improving” Android – but is it willing to share?

      Intel claims it is making significant improvements to the multicore performance of Android – but isn’t sure if it’s willing to share them with the open-source community.

    • Parrot bets on Android winning in-car device market

      Parrot, an upstart French technology company, is betting that drivers want their cars to be fitted with an all-in-one “infotainment” device based on Google’s popular Android operating software to give hands-free control of its smartphone, radio, music and satellite navigation functions.

    • HTC introduces dual-SIM devices – Desire V and Desire VC

    • Acer reveals sub-$200 7-inch quad-core Iconia Tab A110

      Android’s had a quiet showing here at Computex Taipei, but Acer just snuck out a new product that could well represent a breakthrough for the platform at large. The Iconia Tab A110 is at the company’s booth without much fanfare, and on the face of it isn’t particularly interesting — a 7-inch tablet with Android 4.0 that’s powered by an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. However, we spoke to an Acer representative who said that the A110 would be positioned as the company’s main low-end device when it’s released in the third quarter of the year, and that it will cost less than $200. If true, the aggressive pricing means it could well be the first beneficiary of Nvidia’s $199 Kai program, though the representative wasn’t able to comment on this.

    • Ubuntu OS may be coming to Android Devices

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Sierra Wireless outs thinnest-ever 4G LTE module, teases skinny AT&T-ready laptops and tablets

    One of the bigger challenges of spreading LTE has been size; going 4G has tended to put on a little weight. A new Sierra Wireless embedded modem, the AirPrime EM7700, could be just the ticket to shedding those pounds. It’s reputedly the thinnest module ever made, at a tenth of an inch deep, and should slot into an Ultrabook or tablet without anyone making snide comments about the extra bulk.

Netflix delivers using commodity hardware and open source software

Zipkin: Twitter’s new open source distributed tracing project

Gathering information about how quickly services are running, or not, can get very complex when dealing with dozens of disparate services over many systems. To solve this problem, Twitter created its own distributed tracing system called “Zipkin” and has now made it available as open source. According to its developers, Zipkin is “closely modelled” after a Google research paper from 2010 about Dapper, a large-scale distributed systems tracing infrastructure.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Can Mozilla right the ship?

    Several years ago, Mozilla was a real up-and-comer — its Firefox browser was the first serious challenger to Internet Explorer in a long time, and the company’s identity with open source enhanced its public perception as a worthy upstart.

  • Which Firefox is right for you — 13, 14, 15 or 16?

  • Good Reasons to Get Firefox 13, and Good Ways to Install It on Linux

  • hunderbird 13 has been released!

  • Firefox 13 Tweaks Tabs, Home Pages, Speed and Security

SaaS

• Ease Big Data Hiring Pain With Cascading

• Is OpenStack the new Linux?

  I’m standing in the lobby of the downtown San Francisco Hyatt Regency, where the 2012 OpenStack Conference has just commenced. As with most open source events, I feel like I’m surrounded by ComicCon refugees.

Databases

• What is MySQL denormalization and should you be doing it?

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice vs. MS Office: Spreadsheets and Slide Shows

  If functionality and stability are the criteria, LibreOffice’s Writer is a more powerful tool than Microsoft Word.

  But how do the other main productivity tools in LibreOffice and Microsoft Office (MSO) compare? In other words, how do Impress and PowerPoint, the slide show applications in the two office suites, compare? Or Calc and Excel, the spreadsheet apps?

  The answers are far more complicated than with the word processors. Writer and Word are applications with distinctly different approaches and assumptions about how users work. By contrast, LibreOffice’s Impress and Calc, which were developed after Writer, are designed for compatibility with their MSO counter-parts, and are more similar to them in design.

BSD

• PC-BSD 20120605 Snapshot Now Available

• NetBSD: Will It Stand As A Light Desktop?

Project Releases

• Stabilising update for BIND DNS server

• MPlayer 1.1 Magically Surfaces With New Features

  The last official release of MPlayer was version 1.0-rc4 and it came in January of 2011. Since then there’s been no official releases so after more than a decade, MPlayer 1.0 has yet to be released, but being quietly available now is… MPlayer 1.1.

Public Services/Government

• What open source can teach government officials

  What started with a unanimous vote to adopt an open source resolution eventually became a long-term commitment to the open source way. How many of you have had an elected official attend a citizen-lead event? Probably some of you. But how many of you have had your entire city or town council attend an unconference?

Openness/Sharing

• Sharing the path to success with your employees

• OpenRelief Launches Open Source Disaster Relief Drone

  We’ll never forget last year’s LinuxCon Japan conference, which took place shortly after the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March. As the country still reeled from the disaster, LinuxCon presenters discussed how open source software could contribute to disaster relief.

Security

• Germany readying offensive cyberwarfare unit, parliament told

  Germany has set up a cyber-warfare unit designed to carry out offensive operations, the country’s Defence Ministry has admitted for the first time in a parliamentary report to legislators.

  According to German reports, the Bonn-based Computer Network Operations (CNO) unit had existed since 2006 but was only now being readied for deployment under the control of the country’s military.

Finance

• Wall Street and Republicans team up to curb CFTC: Kemp

  Politics is brutal. Just how brutal became apparent Wednesday when Wall Street teamed up with Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives to emasculate the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) by slashing its budget while imposing new requirements for cost-benefit analysis and rule-writing.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Big Tobacco Cash Floods California to Defeat New Tax

Censorship

• EU Governments Push Global Alliance for Net Censorship

  In an unanimous decision, EU Member States have decided to promote website censorship at the global scale under the pretext of tackling child pornography. This dangerous initiative must be denounced by lawmakers and citizens: Europe cannot give up on its commitment to the rule of law by legitimizing Net censorship internationally.

Civil Rights

• Claim: Encrypted Chat Developer Detained, Interrogated at US Border

  A developer for encrypted chat application “Cryptocat” has recently claimed that he was detained and interrogated at the US border. Apparently, border guards took his passport and interrogated him about the application, demanding to know “which algorithms Cryptocat used and about its censorship resistance.”

• FBI accused over removal of Megaupload data

  The FBI has been accused of “illegally” copying evidence used in a case against file-sharing site Megaupload.

  The site was shut down in January and its operators arrested in New Zealand because, alleged the FBI, it was being used to pirate content.

  Lawyers acting for Megaupload said the FBI had illegally removed hard drives containing evidence.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Copyright law threatens to destroy the world, in Year Zero

    Check out an exclusive first look at the book trailer for Rob Reid’s Year Zero, a “Swiftian Satire” about aliens who love our music a little too much. This is the zaniest book trailer we’ve seen in quite some time, and it showcases what an unusual, offbeat premise this book actually has.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

ELCOT PCs Being Stripped of That Other OS

It turns out that students are removing that other OS [...] They have done many roll-outs of GNU/Linux and should have been aware there was no need for that other OS in Indian IT.

Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 202

Old-School Linux Software Updating Techniques

When I patch one of my Linux systems or add new software, 99 times out of 100 I use a modern program like the Ubuntu’s Software Center or Linux Mint’s Software Manager. But there are times, especially when I’m working with a system that needs automated updates using cron or with a remote system via ssh or telnet, that I need to use a good, old-fashioned command line tool—and you will too. So, for times like those, it helps to keep the shell commands in mind.

Desktop

• Chrome OS: The Second Wave

  In case you haven’t noticed, after lukewarm reception for its Chrome OS in the market, Google is doubling down on its efforts to gain acceptance for the operating system. And maybe the effort can still be successful. After all, hasn’t Google steered the Android mobile OS to remarkable success in a short period of time? Here are some of the latest assessments of Google’s chances to build a strong user base for Chrome OS despite lackluster user enthusiasm so far.

Server

• Linux Leads Server Growth

  While worldwide expenditures on server hardware declined in the first quarter, server unit shipments actually increased, led by double-digit growth in Linux-based systems. HP, IBM, and Dell were the dominant players, according to two reports released in the last week.

• IBM PowerLinux aims at Linux/x86 market

  Last month’s news that IBM would be pushing out Linux-on-Power based servers may very well have given you a sense of been-there-done-that, but the new focus on IBM’s Power architecture is giving Big Blue another shot at taking on the Linux on x86 sector.

  The question is, will the shot hit its big data target? Or are the new PowerLinux systems too expensive for their intended markets?

• ARM-Based Server From MiTac of Taiwan Shown at Computex

Audiocasts/Shows

• Going Linux #174 Listener Feedback

Kernel Space

• Significant improvements coming in Linux 3.5

  Linus Torvalds published the first Linux 3.5 release candidate on Saturday night, although the official release email wasn’t sent until Sunday afternoon. As usual, the first RC of the new kernel version signals the end of the merge window phase at the beginning of the development cycle, during which nearly all of the major changes are made. Aside from a few stragglers, the function set Linux 3.5-rc1 offers should be almost identical to the one in the 3.5 kernel, which is expected to be released in late July or early August.

• Linus Torvalds finds GNOME 3.4 to be a “total user experience design failure”

• Linux 3.5-rc1

• Download Linux Kernel 3.5 Release Candidate 1

• Fedora 17 Debuts as Linux 3.5 Release Cycle Begins

  Linus Torvalds kicked off the latest kernel release cycle late Saturday night with the first release candidate for the Linux 3.5 kernel. The release comes just two short weeks after Linux 3.4 was officially released.

• Linux Kernel 3.4.1 Is Available for Download

• Compiler Tuning With Intel Ivy Bridge Processors

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD drops proprietary Linux drivers for older graphics hardware

    Users of Linux distributions with the latest versions of the Linux kernel and X.org’s X Server will in future only be able to use the 2000, 3000 and 4000 series of Radeon HD graphics hardware with open source drivers. This is because version 12.4 of AMD’s proprietary Linux graphics driver Catalyst (fglrx) doesn’t work with X Server 1.12, which was released in March. Although the recently published beta of Catalyst 12.6 is supposed to fix this, while also supporting Linux kernel 3.3 officially, it was announced in April that this version only works with the Radeon HD models from the 5000, 6000 and 7000 series, which are compatible with DirectX 11. This is the case for both Linux and Windows.

Applications

• Proprietary

  • Steam for Linux will launch in 2012

  • Valve’s Gabe Says “Yes” To Steam Linux This Year

    Here’s the latest in the steaming excitement concerning Valve’s Source Engine and Steam client coming to Linux.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Effective management of log files

  • Reverse DNS, It’s easier than you think

  • Things To Do After Installing Fedora 17: Taming The Beast

  • Enable RPMFusion, Livna Repos In Fedora 17: Taming The Beast

  • Installing Yumex In Fedora 17: Taming The Beast

  • Install Gnome Tweak Tool, Gnome 3 Extensions In Fedora 17

  • Change Default Fonts In Fedora 17

  • Install Flash, Google Chrome, Proprietary Codecs In Fedora 17: Fedora Utils vs Autoplus

  • Dashboard Plugin: A better way to search, find and open files in Gedit (Part Two)

  • Calibre in the Cloud

  • Your Cloud, Your Data, Your Way! – ownCloud 4.0 On CentOS 6.2 + nginx + PostgreSQL

  • How to Install and Configure Dropbox on Ubuntu Server 12.04

  • How to add VLC to the Ubuntu sound menu

  • Your Cloud, Your Data, Your Way! – ownCloud 4.0 On CentOS 6.2 + nginx + PostgreSQL

  • Howto install Adobe Digital Editions on Ubuntu 12.04 and use it with an e-book reader

  • How To Play The Marathon Trilogy In Ubuntu 12.04

  • Fedora 17 Post Installation Guide

  • Creating An NFS-Like Standalone Storage Server With GlusterFS 3.2.x On Ubuntu 12.04

  • Virtualization With KVM On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

  • How to change the height and position of the KDE panel

  • Install multimedia support on CentOS 6, Scientific Linux 6 or RHEL 6

  • Create a working compiler with the LLVM framework, Part 1

  • Testing Linux Code

  • LPI Announces Online Resource for Linux Education

  • How to install Firefox 13 on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora

  • How To Upgrade From Fedora 16 To Fedora 17 (Desktop & Server)

  • How To Take Screenshots On Ubuntu

    Screenshots are not only useful for tech bloggers to showcase cool apps, they’re also an integral component of most of the web-based tutorials. Following the ‘show don’t tell’ technique that many writers swear by, tech bloggers lean on the demonstrative power of screenshots to review the latest applications. Tutorial writers too use these screenshots, and sometimes, they edit them so as to point out particular details about the application. Whatever be the case, taking screenshots takes time, and in many cases, it also demands a certain amount of effort from the user as you need to capture aspects of the app in action.

• Games

  • The raw truth about Linux game ports

    Previously I’ve mooted an obstacle preventing Linux adoption is the need for more big game titles, rather than productivity apps. This week, in the wake of its Humble Indie Bundle debut, Tim Schafer explains what porting Psychonauts to Linux was like.

  • Canonical tag teams with Humble, wraps up Indie Bundle installation with bow (video)

    Love your Linux games, but hate painful installs? Ubuntu maker Canonical understands, and has kicked the usual, less snappy, procedure to the curb creating a new approach for the Humble Indie Bundle. The company already expanded Linux gaming, recently adding EA titles to its Ubuntu Software Center, and now you can download the Humble quintet from there as a single file, and install it in one go. In true open source style, you can pick the price you’d like to pay at Humble’s site and even juggle how that sum is distributed to the games’ developers and charities. So with the install obstacle gone, trundle on past the break and see if the promo video seals the deal.

  • Humble Bundle Devs Talk Gaming on Linux

  • Voxeliens Is Being Ported To GNU/Linux

    A very small indie gaming company called “Volumes of Fun” are now porting their first game “Voxeliens” to GNU/Linux !

  • Limbo On Linux Incites Humble Bundle Petition

    …bundle organiser Richard Esguerra explained the reasoning behind the move

  • Is Linux Maturing as a Gaming Platform? Humble Thinks So…

    One of the thing that some find lacking on the Linux desktop today is the availability of good games.

  • Pulling A Lunduke: Holding Source Code Hostage

    Lunduke claims the only way he could release his software under the GPL is if he was making at least $4,000 per month in subscriptions, a sum which (according to him) is below what he’s currently making by selling the applications individually. The idea that Lunduke is making north of $4,000 per month via one time purchases of games like a Linux distro simulator is already difficult to believe, but if true, shows the most glaring omission of logic in this entire project.

  • Linux Game Publishing Still Silent On New Titles

    It was at the end of January that Michael Simms, the founder and original CEO of Linux Game Publishing had stepped down after suffering burn out and not much coming out of the company in recent years. Taking over Linux Game Publishing was Clive Crous. Four months ago from yesterday, Clive blogged about the new work and his “great plans for Linux Game Publishing.”

Desktop Environments

• Beautify Grub 2 Boot Loader by Installing Themes

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE 4.9 Beta 1 Available, Nice Improvements

    The KDE team has announced the release of KDE 4.9 Beta1. This release brings renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.

  • KDE Announces 4.9 Beta1 and Testing Initiative

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 13th May 2012

  • KDE Response to the UK Open Standards Consultation

    KDE e.V. has responded to the United Kingdom Open Standards Consultation on behalf of KDE, one of the largest and most influential Free Software communities world-wide with thousands of volunteer contributors and countless users. Open Standards align with the goals of the KDE Community, especially with regards to digital freedom and contributions to the common good, while patent mania and malicious licensing terms threaten KDE and other Free Software projects.

  • First Beta of KDE SC 4.9 Is Available for Testing

    The KDE Project announced last evening, June 5th, the first Beta release for the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.9 environment.

  • 2 cool features to expect in KDE 4.9

    The first beta of what will become KDE 4.9 was released yesterday, just four day past due date. After the usual round of testing and more pre-stable releases, the final, stable version of KDE 4.9 should hit the proverbial shelves early August 2012. The complete release schedule is available here.

  • Registration opens for Akademy BoFs and Workshops

    The schedule for Akademy Workshops and Birds of a Feather sessions (BoFs) is available for registration. Organized in the Unconference style, people attending Akademy can select the preferred times and locations for topics they will lead.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Gnome 3.4 Now Available In Debian Wheezy

    There is good news for Debian Sid users. “The final bits of GNOME 3.4 have landed and if all looks as good as it does now, they should migrate to wheezy in about a week,” posts Jordi Mallach on his blog.

  • Gnome Developers Should Start Listening To Linus Torvalds

    When Linus Torvalds sneezes, the Linux world catches the cold. We often find Linus complaining about Gnome, no surprises you will complain about the flaws in the technology you use and not about the one you never touch. But when he says something it carries a lot of weight as he shares his experience as a user and not the father of Linux. His rants are also important as it gives voice to thousands of users who share the same plight but no one listens to their problem. So, what irked Linus this time?

  • GTK 3.6 will bring exciting improvements!

    Red Hat employee and member of the GNOME foundation Cosimo Cecchi, explained yesterday through his blog, the various improvements that the GTK 3.4 release brought for the GNOME users, and the work that is being done on the next 3.6 release.

  • Update safer with GNOME 3.6!

  • Gnome-Shell (r)evolution with charts

Distributions

• PinguyOS 12.04 Beta Screenshots

  Pinguy OS an out-of-the-box working operating system for everyone, not just geeks

• DoudouLinux Brings Educational Software To Your Children’s Fingertips [Linux]

  The days that Linux were thought of as complicated are over. If you don’t believe that, realize that Ubuntu for instance, has reached 20 million active users. There are even Linux distributions aimed for children, which is great news since that means your child might be on his or her way to gaining exposure to Linux as a simplified operating system as well as exposure to healthier games and applications.

• New Releases

  • Baltix 2012-05

  • Open Xange 2012.06

  • 2X 7.1

  • Neptune 2.5 release

    The Neptune team is proud to announce the release of Neptune 2.5.
    This release comes with Kernel 3.3.4 with lots of patches and drivers. As usual and for the last time we ship two official variants: 1. Full Edition with KDE 4.8.3 and 2. our Minimal Edition with LXDE and E17.

  • Tiny Core Linux: The latest version: 4.5.4

  • Tiny Core Linux 4.5.4 Is Available for Download

    Robert Shingledecker announced last evening, June 4th, the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core 4.5.4 Linux operating system, including the Tiny Core Plus edition.

  • The ISO Images of Mageia 2 Have Been Updated

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia 2 review

  • First Impressions of Mageia 2

    Mageia began its life not so long ago by being a community fork of the Mandriva Linux distribution. The future of Mandriva, as a company, has been in question for years prompting several developers and users to push for an independent, community-oriented distro. The first release of Mageia, version 1, got off to a fairly good start. It didn’t vary much technologically from Mandriva and felt a bit like a test run, as though the developers were making sure all the proper infrastructure was in place.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s Biggest Cloud Rival: CentOS?

  • Red Hat Clarifies Doubts Over UEFI Secure Boot Solution

  • Red Hat Delivers Cloud Flexibility and Agility to Enterprises with Innovative Infrastructure-as-a-Service Platform

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 17 Enterprise Preview

      Fedora is always loaded with new technologies, and the new Fedora 17 release has the most ever. Get a head start on what’s going to appear in Red Hat Enterprise Linux by grabbing a copy of the new Beefy Miracle.

    • Fedora gets its plans together for UEFI Secure Boot

      Those of us using GNU/Linux have probably heard about the UEFI Secure Boot scheme and how it demonstrates Microsoft’s strong grasp on PC hardware vendors. If you are not quite sure what UEFI Secure Boot is yet, I highly advise reading up on it as new PCs will begin to have this feature enabled by default in the near future to comply with Microsoft’s requirements for Windows 8. Yes, a software company is controlling hardware companies. Luckily though, the feature can be disabled so that we will still be able to install GNU/Linux on the same x86 hardware. Matthew Garrett from Red Hat summarizes the UEFI Secure Boot issue on his blog.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel

    Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the Debian Edu and Skolelinux mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the Debian Edu Squeeze version.

  • Debian welcomes diversity

    The Debian Project is pleased to announce the availability of its diversity statement [1], approved by a large majority of the project members [2].

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Impresive Designs

      • Why I Dislike Ubuntu – Reason #37

        I got burned by Ubuntu again this morning – as if I needed to be reminded why I dislike it so much. I have a number of computers around here, and they all have a moderately complicated multi-boot configuration. Each of them has multiple Linux distributions installed, and most of them have some sort of Windows as well. I always use the openSuSE Legacy GRUB bootloader. The overall result is that it does what I want, and it’s reliable. At least, it was reliable until I installed some Ubuntu updates this morning.

      • Ubuntu for Android Will Be Demoed at Computex

        Computex will take place between June 5th and 9th, and Canonical will have a booth there, located at M0106 in the Nangang exhibition hall.

      • Ubuntu OS for smartphones may come next year

      • Rhythmbox 2.97 Released With Improved Interface [Ubuntu 12.04 PPA Available]

        Rhythmbox 2.97 has been released a couple of days ago, bringing a new, more compact header layout which includes album art by default, along with a new podcast subscription interface and other minor new features and bug fixes.

      • Ubuntu: Tool For Creative Writing

        GNU/Linux is the go-to operating system for advanced software developers world wide, and yet may not be seen as a good fit for creative writers.

      • Canonical teams up with Humble Indie Bundle, Ubuntu installations streamlined

        As if there wasn’t reason enough to be a fan of Canonical and its Ubuntu flavor of Linux (Unity aside), the company announced that it has joined forces with the Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) to both raise awareness of the ability to play high quality games on the free platform as well as raise money for some awesome causes. Starting with this latest bundle of independent DRM-free games, Ubuntu users have a streamlined installation process that utilizes the Ubuntu Software Center in conjunction with the HIB purchasing engine to make it easier than ever before to download and install the games being offered. For those of you who are avid fans of supporting both the open-source movement and independent development houses this is a win-win scenario!

      • Ubuntu coming to smartphones as early as next year

        The fine folks over at Canonical have been hard at work on a mobile version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distro, and have announced that the final build will be making its way to smartphones later this year or early next year. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth would not provide a specific date to PC World, instead indicating that announcements would likely be coming later this year.

      • Trading Ubuntu for Chromebox Running Google Chrome OS

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint Maya vs. Windows 8!

          Microsoft has shortly released the consumer preview of its flag ship operating system, Windows 8, that is evidently re-skinned to better suit touch-screen devices. Unfortunately, in attempting to revamp the OS, Microsoft has done some serious damages to it’s self and more importantly to the end-users. The post compares Windows8 to Linux Mint 13.

        • Snowlinux 2 with Cinnamon Has Been Released

          Dubbed Cream, Snowlinux 2 Cinnamon is based on the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system and it is powered by Linux kernel 3.2.0 and Cinnamon, a fork of the GNOME 3 desktop environment.

        • Mint 13 Is Sweet, Refreshing and Cool

          Mint is a relative of Ubuntu, but don’t let that make you think it’s a recycled Ubuntu distro. Think of Linux Mint 13 as a better OS with all the good stuff that made Ubuntu so popular so fast and none of the stuff that dragged it down in recent releases. Longtime Linux users and newcomers alike will not be disappointed with Mint’s latest version.

Devices/Embedded

• GNU/Linux in China

  Last year, I sent spies to China who took days off to go shopping and snapping pictures but forgot/neglected to gather intelligence on GNU/Linux in Chinese retail spaces.

• Raspberry Pi Cases Now Avialable From ModMyPi

  Back in February of this year, Raspberry Pi began taking orders for $35 desktop PCs. The Ultra Low-cost PC (ULPC) is just a circuit board and requires you to supply your own storage media, micro USB charger (for power), display, keyboard, and mouse. Though many people have expressed interest in this little product, there’s still no easy was to house it.

• First Steps with the Raspberry Pi

  The Raspberry Pi received an extraordinary amount of pre-launch coverage. It truly went viral with major news corporations such as the BBC giving extensive coverage. Not without reason, it is groundbreaking to have a small capable computer retailing at less than the price of a new console game. There have been a number of ventures that have tried to produce a cheap computer such as a laptop and a tablet but which never materialised at these price points. Nothing comes close to the Raspberry Pi in terms of affordability, which is even more important in the current economic climate. Producing a PC capable of running Linux, Quake III-quality games, and 1080p video is worthy of praise.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Agora 10″ 8GB Tablet – Powered by Android ICS!

    • Huawei’s Emotion UI for Android set to debut in July, will be detailed on June 9

      Another Android phone maker is set to unveil a UI overlay sitting atop Google’s mobile operating system. This time it’s Huawei. Its Sense/TouchWiz competitor will be called Emotion UI and is going to arrive in July.

    • Linux Users Sign a Petition Requesting Only Native Games in Humble Bundles

      Humble Indie Bundle 5 was launched recently with five popular and award winning indie games. All these games are supported natively on Linux except one, LIMBO.

      LIMBO doesn’t run natively on Linux and instead uses a Wine/CodeWeavers wrapper. It has been a hot topic for debate in last couple of days and Humble Bundle organizers have commented on this.

    • Researchers Find Methods for Bypassing Google’s Bouncer Android Security

    • iThingies Fall to 14th Place on Walmart’s Best-sellers List

    • Five Best Android ROMs

    • Android Ice Cream Sandwich Expands Market Share in May

      In its latest statistics on the market penetration of the various iterations of the Android mobile operating system, Google has revealed that Ice Cream Sandwich could now be found in up to 7.1% of all Android devices. In comparison, data released last month showed that Ice Cream Sandwich only ran 4.9% of the entire population of Android devices.

    • Kotlin M2 now runs on Android too

      Kotlin, one of the newer alternatives to Java that runs on the Java Virtual Machine, has reached its second milestone and can now run on Android. The open source language is being developed by JetBrains, developers of the IntelliJ IDEA IDE. Kotlin offers the ability not only to compile to Java byte code but also to JavaScript. Announced in July 2011 and open sourced in February, Kotlin is working past a set of milestone targets to become a production ready language.

    • Baidu Custom ROM for Nexus S Swaps Google’s Apps for Baidu’s Own, Gets Few Fans in Mountain View

    • Android 4.0 for Droid Razr delayed, Verizon says June 12

      Last month I reported that Motorola Droid Razr and Razr Maxx users might get to taste the sweetness of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich as soon as May 21, while Xoom 3G and 4G owners seemed stuck in Honeycomb thanks to an upgrade holding pattern for the foreseeable future.

    • Researchers bypass Google’s Android malware detector

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Intel total Classmate PC shipments to reach 12 million units by end of 2012

    In addition to Intel, Shuttle has also been aggressively entering the education market with its e-backpack solution. Shuttle’s 8-inch V-series V08CN01 tablet PC features Nvidia’s Tegra 2 and Android, while weighing only 570g.

  • What Is the Best Tablet for a Linux User?

  • Turn Your Old Netbook Into A Touchscreen Tablet

    Tablets are taking over the portable-computing market, but that doesn’t mean the netbooks that they’ve replaced are useless. It’s possible to jam the processing power and battery life of most netbook models into a smaller, touchscreen-equipped package. The project is very straightforward: Remove a few parts, add a touchscreen overlay (about $80; MyDigitalDiscount), reseal the device in its new tablet form, install a driver, and calibrate the screen. And if you use an old netbook you have lying around (or buy a used one), it costs a fraction of the price of a new tablet.

  • ViewSonic’s Android Smart Display is a 22-inch tablet for your desktop (hands-on)

    If you like the look of the Asus Transformer AiO but don’t care about the portability factor, ViewSonic’s Android Smart Display VCD22 may be of interest — it’s a 22-inch 1080p Android 4.0 machine with an all-in-one form factor that you’re unlikely to want to use on your lap. There’s a 1GHz dual-core processor inside, along with 1GB RAM, and it seemed to back up the software smoothly enough with impressively speedy touch response.

Facebook Open Sources Library of its Components

Even as Facebook continues making headlines in the wake of its IPO and a precipitous drop in its share price, the company has made a big contribution to open source. Not everyone realizes that Facebook is built on open source technology, and it has released many components to the open source community before. Now, as Jordan DeLong explains in an extensive post, the company has released a reusable C++ library of components called Folly.

Revolution Analytics’ big data platform built on open source R language

Revolution Analytics debuted today a major upgrade of its R Enterprise platform for handling big data. R Enterprise 6.0, which like its predecessor is based on the open source R statistics language, is designed to give enterprises better ways of handling big data and discover “hidden correlations” in data to transform businesses, the company said in a [...]

Facebook unveils Folly, a treasure trove of open-source C++ gold

Open Source: Oooo that rackin’ frackin’ … e-mail!

Yes, a VM install of Mageia 1 with Evolution 2.32.2 will still send e-mail via our hosted mail SMTP server. Yes, Thunderbird will send e-mail via our hosted mail SMTP server. Yes, every other e-mail application I have tried will send e-mail via our hosted mail SMTP server. But not Evolution 3.4.x in Mageia 2, which is what I want to use since I settled on Evolution after abandoning Kontact + Kmail many moons ago. Again, I am considering yet another e-mail application switch due to a broken e-mail application following an upgrade. (Broken for me! I don’t care if it “works” for you!) I do not care to go back to KDE’s Kmail since my experience with that breaking following upgrades was just as problematic. My requirements are still the same as last time:

Netflix launches Content Delivery Network; Open sources software and design

Events

• Preparing for my first open source conference

  I’ve been an open source and free culture advocate for more than half a decade. I’ve used open source operating systems and applications on my computers and mobile devices for nearly as long. I’ve contributed to open source documentation efforts. I’ve organized a university event to promote the principles of open source in college. And I’ve been writing for opensource.com.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 13 Available Now

    Exactly as the company promised it would early last year, Mozilla is proceeding full steam ahead with its rapid release cycle for the Firefox browser. Version 13 of Firefox first arrived in a beta version in April, adding a number of notable features. Now, version 13 is available (although it officially launches tomorrow). Here is what’s under the hood.

    Complete release notes for Firefox 13 are available here, and you can download the new version here.

  • Firefox Has a Redesigned Home Page and New Tab Experience That Make Browsing the Web Faster and Easier

  • How To Register And Create Personalized Email Account With Thunderbird

  • Mozilla Resets Firefox 13

SaaS

• MapR, HStreaming Hadoop Upgrades Open Big Data Horizons for Integration, Real-Time

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice receives “Technology for Citizens Award” from Guarulhos city, Brazil

• What are OpenOffice backers doing for cloud/mobile era?

  As enterprises consider alternatives to Microsoft Office in the cloud era, Google is zipping along with Enterprise Apps and now QuickOffice and IBM has IBM Docs in beta but all is fairly quiet on the OpenOffice mobile/cloud front. Xform Computing is one developer trying to take OpenOffice to the mobile masses.

• Google Acquires QuickOffice, Crushes Microsoft’s Office Deams

  While Microsoft is planning to bring its Office suite to Android and iOS (after repeatedly failed attempts in mobile OS market and sinking Nokia’s boat), Google has acquired QuickOffice, the best mobile office suite for Android and iOS devices. With this acquisition, Google now has an off-line office suite for Android and iOS to compete with Microsoft’s Office.

• With the Quickoffice Acquisition, Google will Square Off with Microsoft

Project Releases

• Snapshotting backup tool Obnam 1.0 released

  Obnam, “a snapshotting, de-duplicating, encrypting backup program” has been released by its developer, Lars Wirzenius. The application has been in development since 2006 when Wirzenius decided that he could not find a backup application which met all his demands, despite finding various applications with one or two of his requirements.

Licensing

• 3M, DoD and VA release the Healthcare Data Dictionary under a public use license

  An announcement was made on May 16th, 2012, regarding an agreement between the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and 3M to create a public use version of the HDD, called HDD Access, which will be available for download from the HDD Access website later this year. Digg this article

Standards/Consortia

• Mozilla’s Open Source Project Shumway To Translate SWF To HTML5

Windows 8 success will initially depend on demand from North America, says JT Wang

However, PCs based on Windows 8 are not expected to adopt entry-level pricing so the initial target markets will be developed economies where purchasing power is strong and users appreciate product innovation. Wang pointed to North America as being the key market, stating that Windows 8 needs to be as successful as Apple in the higher-end of the PC market.

Finance

• The 2008 Meltdown And Where The Blame Falls

  Armageddon was threatening the financial system on Wednesday, September 17, 2008. The largest bankruptcy in American history, that of investment bank Lehman Brothers on Monday, September 15, had roiled global markets, accelerating the stupendous decline in values of every possible investment vehicle– common stocks, corporate bonds, real estate, commodities like oil, copper and gold, private equity and hedge funds alike. In the midst of the chaos Merrill Lynch, the firm that had brought Wall Street to Main Street, was absorbed in a shotgun marriage by Bank of America.

  [...]

  And later another $100 billion, still not paid back to Uncle Sam.

• Grading Goldman’s Charm Offensive

• Rajat Gupta, Former Goldman Sachs Director, Hears CEO’s Testimony At Insider Trading Trial

• Wall Street’s (Other) Great Deleveraging

  Wall Street has good reason to be rattled by the news that Goldman Sachs laid off senior personnel, including managing directors, last week. It is likely the beginning of a new kind of deleveraging that will occur at every major Wall Street firm.

  It’s well known that Wall Street has been forced by markets and regulators to delever in the wake of the financial crisis. For the most part, this has been a matter of financial deleveraging: reducing debt to capital ratios, reducing dependence on short-term debt, reducing compensation (especially bonuses) to revenue ratios.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Canvassers Paid to Campaign for Walker; Systemic “Vote Fraud” Claims Still Unsupported

  A paid canvasser supporting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker before the recall election has been implicated in a “voter fraud” allegation. But despite claims by Walker and his allies, there is still no evidence of a systemic effort to fraudulently change election outcomes.

• Rampant Voter Fraud in Wisconsin or “The Martians Are Coming?”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Sky blocks the Pirate Bay – Pointless and hypocritical?

    Its now a few days since Sky blocked its customers from Pirate Bay after the High Court ruling encompassing UK ISP’s.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Why should we go for Linux!

Linux is distributed using the Free Software Foundation’s copy left stipulations that mean any modified version that is redistributed must in turn be freely available. The below mentioned features gives Linux a winning edge once compared to most Operating Systems.

Desktop

• Hands On With The System76 ‘Lemur Ultra’ Ubuntu Laptop

  When it comes to laptops that solely ship Ubuntu as an operating system one of the most well known names is System76.

  During the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, CA a few weeks back I had an opportunity to chat over lunch with System76 CEO, Carl Richell about the exciting products they are working on at their Headquarters in Colorado.

• Migrating Real People to GNU/Linux Desktops

• Chrome OS Sells Out But in a Good Way

  Lightweight Linux distributions have grown in popularity in recent years, but few have been as buoyant as Google’s Chrome OS. When it debuted a year ago on Samsung and Acer Chromebooks, the web-centric operating system was basically a Chrome browser and a media player linked to cloud services. The open source platform has evolved over the last year, however, and on May 29 Google unveiled a more robust version 19 on Samsung’s new Chromebook Series 5 550 laptop and Chromebox Series 3 net-top.

• Samsung Offers New $449 ChromeBook, $329 ChromeBox

• Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook Review

• Google makes new push for Chromebook adaptation

  Google (GOOG) will try to win more converts to a computer operating system revolving around its popular Chrome Web browser with a new wave of lightweight laptops built by Samsung Electronics.

• Google makes new push for Chromebook adaptation

• Zero-client Linux desktop virtualization launched

  Userful Corp. says as Web-based applications grow, open-source virtualization will provide big cost benefits. But a Gartner analyst says the “history and legacy” of Windows is still too powerful for widespread Linux adoption

• Ordissimo Laptop 15″

  We looked at the Laptop 15″ — which is, in fact, a 15.6in. Toshiba Satellite C660D-14C running a customised Debian-based Linux distribution and including a simplified keyboard overlay that provides one-button access to applications and a range of common functions. The idea is to appeal to people — particularly the over-50s — who have so far resisted computers and the internet. The Laptop 15″ costs £599 (inc. VAT), while its 17in. sibling costs £899 (inc. VAT).

Server

• Dell to create its own ARM server ecosystem

  Dell intends to create a complete ARM server ecosystem running on Ubuntu or Fedora Linux, and has already shipped its first “Copper” servers to select customers and partners; the servers are, however, not yet generally available. Dell is running its own cluster that developers and customers can access remotely. Dell is also planning to offer products such as Crowbar for ARM and Crowbar for Hadoop on ARM, to help customers set up cloud environments – Crowbar is Dell’s open source management infrastructure software.

• Dell Unveils ARM-Based Copper Servers for Select Customers, Partners

• Epic Systems authorizes EHR system to run on Intel x86 Linux servers

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Nouveau Work On The Fermi Scripting Engine

    Supreet Pal Singh has provided an in-depth overview of his X.Org EVoC project for providing a Fermi scripting engine for the Nouveau driver that will allow for safe and dynamic GPU core / video memory re-clocking on modern NVIDIA GPUs.

  • AMD Evergreen Compute Support Lands Mainline

  • AMD Catalyst Linux 12.6 Beta Has Arrived

Applications

• 10 Best Orthodox Free Linux File Managers

  A file manager is software that provides a user interface to undertake file management activities with file systems. Common operations performed on files or groups of files include create, open, rename, move, copy, delete, search/find, edit, view print, play, as well as modify file attributes, properties and file permissions. The file manager is one of those essential applications for many users which is almost impossible to function without. Linux is blessed with a good range of file managers that help to make file management a breeze.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Easy way to Install XFCE 4.10 Desktop Environment in Ubuntu 12.04

  • High-Availability Storage With GlusterFS 3.0.x On Debian Squeeze – Automatic File Replication (Mirror) Across Two Storage Servers

  • A guide to packaging systems

  • Raspberry PI Emulation

  • Etckeeper – Keep under control your configuration files !

  • How to Transfer File From Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to Blackberry Playbook

  • Configuring UNIX and Linux to work together

  • Add These Modules to Enhance Apache Web Server

  • HTG Explains: Why Linux Doesn’t Need Defragmenting

  • Set up your Raspberry Pi like a pro

  • Power searching using UNIX grep

• Games

  • Psychonauts: Classic Xbox Platformer Now Available For Linux

  • EA hunting crowdfunding, bringing Origin for Linux?

  • Humble Indie Bundle V is out !

  • Humble Team and Game Developers Share Their Linux Experience

  • Humble Indie Bundle Raises $2 Million in 24 Hours, Game Makers Celebrate on Reddit

  • The Humble Indie Bundle V

  • Humble Indie Bundle 5 comes to the Ubuntu Software Centre

  • Ubuntu Game Selection Expands with Humble Indie Bundle

  • Humble Indie Bundle V released – smashes previous record

    The average paid is US$7.63 with Linux users being the most generous…

  • New Humble Indie Bundle passes $1 million sales mark in five hours

Desktop Environments

• MATE vs Cinnamon

• Desktop Environments RAM use

  Method – This is a very casual test (sorry no “benchmarks”), I merely booted the appropriate Live CD, opened a terminal, and reviewed the RAM use. YMMV.

• LINUX MINT & COMPULAB TEAM UP

  Linux Mint, the fastest-growing Linux distribution (outpacing Ubuntu in DistroWatch.com page hit rating) is launching its own hardware! The free operating system known for its stability, security, and ease of use, is teaming up with Compulab maker of fanless mini PC for the mintBox.

• Why Should You Use FreeBSD? Here’s Some Reasons

  David Chisnall of the FreeBSD project is working on updating their advocacy material regarding this leading *BSD operating system. As such, he asked on the mailing list Why Are You Using FreeBSD?

• GNOME Desktop

  • Complaining about GNOME is a new national sport

    I mean, we all know GNOME 3 and its Shell have some rough edges. Given that computers users since the stone-age have been adverse to change, it’s not surprising that people complained about GNOME 3.x being different than GNOME 2.x (actually, more to the point, being different than Windows 95. How dare they?). Even though we believe in what we’re doing, we’re up against it for having shipped a desktop that imposes workflow and user experience changes on the aforementioned change-adverse hypothetical user.

  • 5 Nice GNOME 3.4 Themes [Ubuntu PPA Available]

  • SkyDrive Support Coming to GNOME 3.6

    As we’ve stated two months ago, in article about the upcoming features of GNOME 3.6, the GNOME developers will implement support for Microsoft’s cloud service, SkyDrive, in the Documents application.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Clonezilla Live and Parted Magic updated

  • grml 2012.05 Has Linux Kernel 3.3.7

    Michael Prokop proudly announced last evening, May 29th, the immediate availability for download of the final and stable release of the grml 2012.05 Debian-based operating system.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • A conversation with the community

    My name is Charles-H. Schulz, you may know me from other Free & Open Source Software projects, and I will be assisting Mandriva and its community in defining our future and how best we will serve the interests of the community, of software freedom, and of Mandriva SA. I am humbled by this task and the trust that has been bestowed upon me. After all, my first job was at MandrakeSoft years ago, before the company became Mandriva. I look forward working with all of you and I’m open to constructive suggestions and ideas. You can contact me at cschulz AT mandriva DOT com and follow my other (personal) blog here.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat to Webcast Results for First Quarter Fiscal Year 2013

  • RedSleeve does RHEL-ish clone for ARM

    If you are tired of waiting for Red Hat to do an official port of its Enterprise Linux commercial distribution to the ARM architecture, well then Red Sleeve Linux has just what you are looking for.

  • Dell Deals A Blow To Intel

  • CloudLinux Enhances Shared Hosting Security

  • Fedora Linux, RHEL Evolve with New Release

    The Fedora Project, which develops one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions, serves essentially as a sandbox for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). But that hasn’t stopped the Fedora team from pushing out a variety of new features in the latest release, Fedora 17, that should appeal more broadly than to Red Hat’s customer base alone. Here’s a look at the most important.

  • Red Hat dilemma: Cloud players balk at new support fees

    Enterprise Linux leader Red Hat is changing its support pricing model in a way that opens the door to rival operating systems — at least in the cloud service provider market — and perhaps more broadly. One large cloud provider said the move will more than double his costs, making the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) option as pricey as Windows.

  • How My Company Made Truly Open Management Work

  • Fedora

    • Goodbye Fedora 15

    • Fedora 17 Review

    • New Fedora Linux Release Promises Improved Desktop Look

      The Fedora Project, Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, released a new edition of its free, open-source operating system Tuesday, offering a range of new virtualization capabilities, performance enhancements and new development tools.

      The new release, Fedora 17, also provides new desktop features via a new release of the Gnome desktop environment and graphical user interface.

    • Booting Fedora 17 In Less Than Three Seconds

      It’s possible to optimize the Fedora 17 boot process to boot the system in less than three seconds. One developer went from a boot time of 15 seconds down to just 2.5 seconds.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Humble Indie Bundle coming to Ubuntu

      • Mark Shuttleworth at Linaro Connect

      • Unity Dash Extension for Gnome Shell Now Available for Download

        A launcher thats a fusion of the Ubuntu dash, the Gnome-shell overview and the classic Gnome 2 menu which replaces the overview.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 13 OEM Has Been Released

        • Download Ubuntu Secure Remix 12.04

          Introduced by Softpedia at the beginning of the year, the Ubuntu Secure Remix operating system has just reached version 12.04 and it is available for download on mirrors worldwide.

        • Snowlinux 2 delivers a GNOME 2 based Ubuntu

        • Bodhi Linux 2.0 alpha arrives for testing

          The Bodhi development team has published the first pre-release build of Bodhi Linux 2.0, the project’s next major update. According to project lead developer Jeff Hoogland, the goal of the new version “is not to introduce ground breaking new features”, but rather to “allow our distro to transition to the next major Ubuntu LTS as a distro base”. As such, Bodhi Linux 2.0 is built upon Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, incorporating changes and new features from that release; the 1.x branch of Bodhi is derived from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

        • Gigatux Announces Immediate Availability of Linux Mint 13 (Maya) on Its VPS Platform

        • mintBox mini-PC with Linux Mint coming soon

Devices/Embedded

• IPv6 Creates Opportunity for Linux in Embedded Computing: A Case Study

• GENIVI 2 compatible automotive platform from MontaVista

  MontaVista has announced the arrival of a new release of its Automotive Technology Platform (ATP). Version 2.0 of ATP is compliant with the new GENIVI Specification 2.0 from the GENIVI Alliance, a non-profit industry alliance founded in 2009. The GENIVI compliance standards are designed to provide an open reference platform for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems.

• Beagle I/O

  Last time I wrote about the BeagleBone, a simple and inexpensive ARM Cortex-A8 development board that can run (among other things) Linux. Being Linux based, you don’t have to worry about a lot of things you would when you are programming close to the “bare metal.” For example, Ethernet, serial ports, USB, and the like just work, which is really very productive.

  On the other hand, some devices aren’t part of a normal desktop Linux OS. Luckily, the Angstrom distribution I mentioned last time even has drivers for these special devices (actually, the standard gpio-sysfs drivers). For example, consider general-purpose I/O ports. The BeagleBone can support up to 66 3.3V input/output pins. The board has 4 pins (GPIO1_21 to GPIO1_24) connected to LEDs. Well, connected to transistors that turn on LEDs. If you output a high, the LED turns on.

• Raspberry Pi impressions: the $35 Linux computer and tinker toy

• How tinkering can bear fruit

  The incredibly inexpensive credit-card-size Raspberry Pi harks back to a simpler time, when programmers intimately built gadgets from the ground up.

• Phones

  • Alibaba’s Linux phone pulls in one MILLION punters

    Chinese web tat flogger Alibaba finally has some good news to report after sales of smartphones based on its Aliyun OS hit the million sales milestone in the People’s Republic less than a year after its launch.

  • Facebook phone may run on Linux and Opera

  • Open Mobile brings Android support to Tizen OS

  • Android

    • Xperia go and Xperia acro S Images

    • Google tablet with Android 4.1 & Tegra 3 quad-core processor gets closer to reality

      A rumored 7-inch tablet branded by Google has been outed by a RightWare benchmark test and it appears the device includes a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and runs Android 4.1, according to some deep reporting by Android Police.

    • ZTE teases 6.2mm-thick ‘Athena,’ crams in 720p IPS display and Cortex-A15 chip

      Cortex-A15 chip (a source of ours said it will be multi-core) and up to 64GB of internal storage, as well as a “Miflavor UI” — something that we’ve already previewed on the Era at MWC — to go on top of Android 4.0. Lu also hinted that there will be several color options, but we’re more than happy to nab that black kevlar edition in the above shot (and someone should tell Motorola to take a look at this). Two more pictures after the break to keep you busy for the time being.

    • ASUS readies new Transformer tablets for Computex

    • Samsung: We’ve sold 50M Galaxy S and S II phones

    • Fujitsu M532 tablet surfaces on video

    • Android 4.0.4 rolls out to Samsung Galaxy Nexus phones

    • Android Handsets Tops Smartphone Market Share Worldwide

      It appears that the smartphone race is really heating up. Different operating system (OS) such as Windows Phone 7, Linux, Blackberry OS, Symbian, iOS and Android platforms are all competing to get the consumers loyalty and to get the top spot in the mobile OS race overall. But like any competition, there could only be one winner.

    • Mini X is an Android 2.3 Network Media Player

      This media device that fits right into one’s palm looks like a plastic box with an antenna protruding from its body to receive wireless signals. It has measurements of 2.8″ x 2.4″ x 0.5″ and a weight of merely 1.8 oz.

    • The Android Back-End For Wayland’s Weston

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Purported Google tablet benchmark points to Tegra 3, 7-inch screen

Open source data integration from Aston Martin to the Large Hadron Collider

Content and data is everything right? But device usage at the enterprise level necessitates real-time integration, or that data becomes less valuable and potentially even worthless if it exists in some standalone silo.

Open source: an emerging driver for mobile first strategy

Events

• OSCON Nonprofit Pavilion deals with limited space

• Open Django Central Brings Chicago Open Source Developers Together Jun 8-9

Web Browsers

• Kylo web browser for TV turned Open Source overnight

  There’s been a relatively large announcement made by Hillcrest Labs tonight in that they’ve turned their own “Kylo Web Browser for TV” over to the Open Source community. This announcement sets the Mozilla-based TV browser up for open-sourced management for its many features, features such as its ability to work with Mac OS and Windows machines and its ability to work with Freespace-enabled in-air pointing controls.

• Kylo browser for HDTVs goes open source

• Mozilla

  • Download Firefox 13 for Linux With Speed Dial

    Mozilla uploaded earlier today, June 2nd, the final packages containing the Mozilla Firefox 13.0 web browser for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

SaaS

• The open-source answer to big data

  Open-source source platforms for big data have exploded in popularity. And in the past few months, it seems like nearly everyone is feeling the fallout.

• Look out, Amazon Cloud! HP’s on the warpath

  You might think the hard work for Hewlett-Packard is done, after it came from behind to build its own Amazon-style cloud so quickly. But the difficult part – taking on Amazon and winning with open source – lies ahead.

• Open Source Cloud Project Backers Duking It out for Support

• Open Source Will Continue to Lead Cloud Computing

• Open Source Cloud Computing: Could It Be Part of Your Next Cloud Project?

• An open dialog on open source cloud

CMS

• Open Source Cloud Project Backers Duking It out for Support

  François Hollande won the presidential election in France last week, with the help of an impressive campaign and kiwi content management system SilverStripe.

• François Hollande running on open source CMS SilverStripe

• Which Open Source CMS is right for you? (Infographic)

Education

• University of Wollongong joins the Open Source Moodle Movement

  NetSpot is pleased to announce that they will be partnering with the University of Wollongong to provide enterprise-level hosting and services of open source e-Learning systems: Moodle and Mahara.

Business

• New Open-source CRM App Uses Gamification

• Zurmo Open Source CRM Beta Adds Gamification

BSD

• Reasons Why You Should Not Use FreeBSD

  After a few days ago sharing a list of why you should use FreeBSD as said by FreeBSD developers and community members who use the BSD operating system, here’s a list of reasons for why not to use FreeBSD or missing functionality.

Project Releases

• Piwik Open Source Analytics: A Primer

• Piwik 1.8 released

  Piwik is a free software/open source Web analytics software developed in much the same manner as most open source applications – global collaboration of talented coders doing what they love.

  It is an alternative to Google Analytics and from my experience, better in many respects. If you manage websites and want to have complete control over traffic monitoring, Piwik is what you want to use. The latest version, released just today June 1 2012, is Piwik 1.8, and it comes with its share of new and improved features and bug fixes.

• Open Source Gluster 3.3 Melds Object and File Storage

  The Gluster open source distributed filesystem is out with version 3.3 after a long development cycle. Gluster 3.3 unifies file and object storage and provide a Hadoop HDFS compatible API for Big Data Storage.

Public Services/Government

• EP wants a report on its use of open source

  The European Parliament’s Directorate General for Innovation and Technological Support is to produce report on the EP’s free and open source software programmes. MEP Bart Staes (Group of the Green and European Free Alliance) on 10 May added this as a requirement for the discharge of the EP’s 2010 budget committee.

• Spain’s Navarra region shares it law court records management system

  The government of the Navarra region in Spain is making available its ‘Justice Management’, a document management system (DMS) tailored to judicial documents. The system is already used in courts in Navarra and Cantabria. Galicia and La Rioja, two more autonomous regions in Spain, are considering to use the DMS.

• Swiss parliament demands vendor independent e-government services

  The national council of Switzerland on 3 May adopted a resolution signalling that electronic governmental services must work on all kinds of computing platforms and should not depend on a single IT vendor. The parliament voted in favour of a motion for improving a software application ‘Agate’, which must be used by the country’s cattle farmers for filing livestock data.

• Open source patient task list wins UK Health service hackathon

  Patient List, a software application making it easier for doctors to hand over patients, has won the NHS Hack Day 2012 which took place in London last weekend. The application is made available as open source.

• Italy’s Lazio region adopts law on open source and open data

  Public administrations in Italy’s Lazio region are encouraged to replace proprietary software with open source alternatives, according to one of the articles of a law on open data adopted on 23 May. The law also says that software developed for and by the regions public organisations should be made available as open source.

• Portugal’s citizen and business portals rebuilt using open source

  Portugal’s Agency for the Public Services Reform (AMA) is revamping the country’s main eGovernment portals for citizens and businesses. It will use the open source portal software Liferay.

• Can UK “IT” PLC save money via open source?

  The UK government appears to be taking positive (possibly even ‘assertive’) steps towards more implementation of open source technologies at this time. The Open Government Summit today will be held on 30th May in Central Hall Westminster and speakers have just been announced.

  While the UK public sector is arguably far better at organising “congressional summits” than it is at decisive implementation and action, there will reportedly be examination and analysis into how the open source model allows public sector organisations to be more efficient, save money, meet mission-critical IT demands and improve their services.

Licensing

• Why the GPL licensing cops are the good guys

  The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) — a nonprofit project hosting the Samba and BusyBox projects — has announced a new initiative to engage in enforcement of the Gnu General Public License and related free software licenses. The move arises following a controversy earlier in the year when it seemed that a former developer of BusyBox — a command-line interface used in embedded devices — was working on ToyBox, a non-GPL-licensed clone of the project. This concerned GPL enforcement activists because BusyBox is a popular entry point to wider GPL enforcement by the SFC on embedded devices.

• The Linux Foundation Releases Free FOSS Component Tracker

• Linux Foundation introduces bar code tracker for FOSS licences

Openness/Sharing

• State standards, open source, and Universal Design for Learning

  With UDL Book Builder, children can freely create, share, publish, and read digital books. They can express their thoughts, ideas, and feelings in words, pictures, and sound. They can create their own interactive digital stories. This gives children the chance to become an author, to have a voice, to make learning relevant to their experience and their personal lives. They can control the content and the message. Printed materials may still exist and be used in classrooms today, but we’re in a transitional world where print is in flux and digital learning is paramount for young children.

• Should Music Be Open Source? A Remixed Conversation

  The Polish Ambassador, a “beat machine from the future,” raised a number of interesting questions on Facebook about “what it would mean to be an ‘open source’ musician.” Discussion ensued. Mike Masnick pointed to this discussion on TechDirt. More discussion ensued.

• Open Data

  • Use of open source software for open data ‘pragmatic and logical’

    Using open source software to build open data application is pragmatic and logical, says Pieter Colpaert, board member of the newly founded Belgian chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. The OKF is assisting the government of the Belgian region of Flanders in organising a open data hackaton, in Brussels on the 15 of June.

• Open Hardware

  • Is Open Source Hardware IT’s Next Big Thing?

  • Can We Open-Source Hardware?

Standards/Consortia

• ISA Member State representatives endorse key specifications for e-Government interoperability

  During a round-table meeting in Brussels, the Coordination Group of the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) Programme has endorsed four open specifications for e-Government interoperability.

Finance

• SEC: Taking on Big Firms is ‘Tempting,’ But We Prefer Picking on Little Guys

• Goldman Sachs plans to profit on euromisery

  The folks on Wall Street are busily dry-washing the hands in glee at the thought of a massive wave of European bank collapses.

Privacy

• IBM bans employees from using Siri over privacy fears

  The reason? Siri ships everything you say to her to a big data center in Maiden, North Carolina. And the story of what really happens to all of your Siri-launched searches, e-mail messages and inappropriate jokes is a bit of a black box.

Copyrights

• Google dealt blow in book scanning lawsuit

  The coalition of authors suing to stop Google Book Search scored a key victory on Thursday as the judge overseeing the case ruled that three individual authors and the Author’s Guild could represent the class of all authors whose works had been scanned by Google. Google had sought the opposite result, arguing that including all authors in a single lawsuit would make the case too complex, and that most authors actually supported the scanning project.

  Judge Denny Chin, who rejected a controversial settlement of the case last year, ruled on two distinct legal issues. The first was over whether the Author’s Guild was entitled to serve as a representative of its members. Google had argued that only individual authors could be plaintiffs because the case will require the participation of those individual plaintiffs to consider issues such as fair use.

• Tides Turn for Kim Dotcom?

  Mr. Dotcom, founder of the online storage site Megaupload.com, was arrested in New Zealand in January on charges including criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy to commit racketeering. The Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down Mr. Dotcom’s website, which it claims was used to pirate half a billion dollars worth of entertainment content.

• Distributions

Linux Can Take Over If It Sticks To What It Does Best. Appliances

Everyone is always so fixated on desktop Linux and why it can’t get decent numbers in the desktop market.

The answer is obvious. You can’t come late into the game when someone has a huge installed base and expect to win based on free over easy.

Because that what the desktop battle is (not really a battle, by the way). It’s low cost versus “here, let me do that for you” that MS provides it’s already huge pre-installed base.

You will never win that battle and to prove it, Linux can’t even get a firm foot in the door.

Four ways a business can immediately benefit from Linux

There are far too many small to mid-sized businesses still relying exclusively on proprietary software and costly hardware solutions to drive antiquated technology.

Desktop

• Google Chromebox: Not An Apple Mac Mini

Server

• Linux Server Revenues Growing Faster Than Windows, Hit $2.4 Billion in 1Q12

  According to IDC, Linux servers generated $2.4 billion in revenue for vendors in the first quarter of 2012. That’s a 16.0 percent growth rate, which is better than the 1.3 percent revenue growth rate for Windows servers.

Audiocasts/Shows

• tllts ep #457

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD admits it has to work on improving Linux OpenCL support

    AMD’s considerable effort in releasing its Llano and Trinity accelerated processor units (APUs) has been offset by stumbling support from applications for its GPGPU architecture. Now AMD has admitted that it needs to beef up support for Linux.

Applications

• Grive: Free and Open Source Google Drive Client for Linux

• Instructionals/Technical

  • The Perfect Desktop – Linux Mint 13 (Maya)

  • Start your Linux terminal with a running train

  • ERROR: database disk image is malformed in Fedora 17

  • Download and Organize Photos with Fotobasher

  • First monitor calibration using ColorHug

  • How to upgrade to Fedora 17

  • How to Install Enlightenment Desktop on Ubuntu-Based Distribusion

  • Using The New GIMP Cage Transform Tool

  • Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On Debian Squeeze

  • Calculating Day of the Week

  • Secure Linux: Part 1. SELinux – history of its development, architecture and operating principles

  • How to Install LEMP Server In Ubuntu Precise 12.04

  • How to Install and Configure Proxy Server with Squid3 on Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS

  • HOWTO: Give Network Manager Sufficient Privileges

  • Install Cinnamon 1.4 on Fedora 17

  • The Perfect Desktop – Linux Mint 13 (Maya)

  • Fedora 17 Brings Stability and Some New Features

  • Linux system debugging super tutorial

    In the last two years, I have introduced you to a number of so-called super-duper system administration tools. We learned how to properly analyze a range of problems by carefully studying symptoms and then isolating and fixing the root cause. We learned about strace and lsof, both immensely powerful tools. We focused on system profiling and auditing. We also worshiped the omnipotent GNU Debugger (gdb). Now it is time to combine the powers of all these into one mega tutorial.

• Games

  • ‘Lilly Looking Through’ Adventure Game is Just Beautiful

    Lilly Looking Through is a new adventure game for Linux by Geeta Games. The game has absolutely beautiful art, pleasant animations and a totally great soundtrack.

  • Tiny & Big in: Grandpa’s Leftovers Now Available for Pre-order

    Black Pants Studio’s action platformer game Tiny & Big in : Grandpa’s Leftovers can be now pre-ordered for $12.99 (Windows, Mac, Linux).

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Meet Blue Systems—Akademy 2012 Platinum Sponsor

    This year we have Blue Systems as a Platinum sponsor of Akademy 2012 Tallinn. Recently, they made news by offering continous support for Jonathan Riddell, lead developer of Kubuntu, the KDE distribution that they would like to become one of the best on DistroWatch.

  • Akademy 2012 Call for Volunteers

• GNOME Desktop

  • 5 Nice GNOME 3.4 Themes [Ubuntu PPA Available]

  • GNOME gets a fancy cloud video viewer!

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Parted Magic 2012_05_30

  • Parted Magic 2012_05_30 Has Been Released

  • Alpine 2.4.3 released

  • Parsix GNU/Linux 4.0-preview-053012 Release – May 31, 2012

  • VectorLinux 7.0 SOHO Edition

    The final release of VectorLinux 7.0 SOHO is now available. This release is built on the 7.0 GOLD release featuring the recently released KDE4.8.3 desktop experience. VectorLinux is the fastest Linux desktop in it’s class bar none. We have spared no expense to bring the KDE4 desktop to the Linux community in a unique fashion that is best tried to see KDE4 at its most awesome potential. With the custom artwork, visual tweaks and a little Vector magic, behold SOHO as you have never seen it before.

  • SolusOS 1.1 Released

    The SolusOS team is pleased to announce the release of SolusOS 1.1. This release brings greater hardware support and newer application versions, as well as support for hybrid GPU’s, such as the NVIDIA Optimus. A new 3.3.6 kernel is at its core with the BFS patch, alongide the Gnome 2.30 Desktop Environment. Many new application versions are present.

• Gentoo Family

  • FLOSS Weekly 212

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • `Fedora Utils` Adds Fedora 17 Support

      Fedora Utils is a tool to tweak Fedora and easily install packages which are not available in the main Fedora repositories.

    • Fedora 17 – Install Codecs, Drivers and Fonts in under 5 minutes!

    • Fedora 17 Enterprise Preview

      Fedora Linux is a high-quality community-supported distribution, and a showcase for new technologies. SELinux, Systemd, PulseAudio, new kernels, new Gnome and KDE releases – if it’s bleeding-edge chances are you will find it in Fedora. Some call Fedora a testbed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a characterization that the nice RH folks don’t always agree with. Regardless of what you call it, new features appear first in Fedora, get pummeled by users, and then work their way into RHEL. It’s a great way to get an early look and start testing new goodies.

    • Detailed Fedora 17 Review

      I must admit that Fedora was the first GNU/Linux distribution that introduced me to this world. We used it as the default OS in Linux For You magazine where I worked as a writer and editor. Fedora was also the first GNU/Linux OS that I installed on my PC. I moved to PCLinuxOS, then Mandriva, then Debian and then to Ubuntu. These days I multiboot between Ubuntu, openSUSE and some random OS. I stayed away from Fedora due to RPM Hell. I still remember being burnt by it in Fedora 14. But things have changed dramatically. Fedora is now extremely useful for novice users. I build confidence in Fedora with version 16 and planned to revisit it as 17 hits the Internet. I confess, I never used Fedora as my primary OS, outside my work at LFY.

    • Fedora 17 Brings Stability and Some New Features

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 12.04 (“Precise Pangolin”)

      • Canonical Provides Easy Access to Linux Games for Ubuntu Users

        Developers who would like to learn more about adding their games to the Ubuntu Software Center can also get information through Canonical.

      • Ubuntu’s HUD: Heuristic Universal Discovery

        Like it or not, these sort of fresh ideas are the only thing pushing the Linux desktop forward these days. Gnome wants to take a step backward and try to ‘bling’ its way into your heart. KDE, no matter how excellent it is, lives on tried-and-true desktop idioms and only pushes forward in aesthetics. Unity, as much as you force yourself to believe that it’s uncool, is really innovating and with each release becomes more and more compelling to the nay’ sayers.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 13 OEM released!

          Reminder: OEM images are for computer vendors and manufacturers. They allow Linux Mint to be “pre-installed” on a machine which is then used by another person than the one who performed the installation. After an OEM installation, the computer is set in such a way that the next reboot features a small setup screen where the new user/customer has the ability to choose his/her username, password, keyboard layout and locale.

        • Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon Review

          After a very successful launch of Linux Mint 12, we’re taking a look at the newest edition of Linux Mint to see what’s new with this edition.

        • This Week in Linux

          Linux Mint is getting difficult to keep up with these days. They officially have 38 different variants of their popular operating system (well, maybe not quite 38) and now they are getting their distro factory installed on another some of those little tiny PCs. Apparently, that little nugget was tucked away in a regular progress report. Today, the Mint guys released their OEM version.

        • A Bodhi Linux 2.0.0 Beginning

          The Bodhi team and I are happy to announce the first pre-release (Read: Not suitable for daily usage machines) of our next major release Bodhi Linux 2.0.0! This release is considered alpha quality and is intended to allow our community to help test this release before it becomes our “stable” version.

An open source analogy: Open source is like sharing a recipe

Should Apple Open up, and What Does Liberty Have to Do With It

Electronic Frontier Foundation just posted an article discussing “Apple’s Crystal Prison and The Future of Open Platforms” in which they characterize Apple’s and Microsoft’s restrictive policies as affronts on users freedom, and call on Apple to lead the way by aligning with Steve Wozniak’s call for Apple to open up.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chrome Extensions for Privacy & Ad, Tracking, webbugs and other sneaky things blocking

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Has Found its Rhythm

  This week, Susan covered The Document Foundation’s release of the latest version of the LibreOffice open source office productivity suite. The release announcement claims that the suite offers as much as 100 percent better performance than previous versions, and some early reports from users are confirming that. Meanwhile, there are strong signs that the Linux community is embracing LibreOffice, and that Windows users make up the majority of new downloads for Apache OpenOffice.

CMS

• One on One with a Joomla student coder

Licensing

• Enforcing the GPL – Kernel hackers join the fight

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • New Zealand judge orders US to hand over Megaupload documents

    Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants scored a significant victory on Tuesday when a New Zealand judge ordered the United States government to hand over evidence the defense will need to prepare for an upcoming extradition hearing. He rejected the government’s argument that the defendants should make do with the information about its case the government itself chose to introduce in court.