05.23.12
Posted in News Roundup at 3:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Desktop
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Earlier this month, at a conference dedicated to Ubuntu, Google developer Thomas Bushnell — who works under CIO Ben Fried — detailed the company’s use of Goobuntu, which has long been an open secret but was rarely discussed in public. According to Bushnell, Goobuntu is based on the LTS (long-term support) releases of Ubuntu, with modifications made to improve security and stability. Fried confirms that Google is currently using the “Lucid Lynx” version of Ubuntu (10.04), but that the company is moving to the “Precise Pangolin” release (12.04).
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Back to basics computing the Ordissimo way offers users a simple range of applications that have, the company claims, been hugely simplified to reduce the number of mouse clicks necessary to perform basic tasks.
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Dell’s PC division constitutes 20% of its stock by our estimates. Looking ahead, another potential source for sales is the open-source Linux based Ultrabook, which is aimed at capturing the web and mobile design market share dominated by Macbook. For this earnings report, we however expect a slight fall in PC sales due to seasonality, but guidance on ultrabook trends could spark investor interest.
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Kernel Space
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Red Hat developers Tim Waugh and Richard Hughes have announced what they call a “modern print spooler” for the Linux desktop. The printerd daemon is PolicyKit-enabled and uses D-Bus to communicate with other applications. Waugh points out, that as a design decision, printerd will only accept PDF files as input.
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It’s been a “calm” release cycle, according to Linus Torvalds, but the 3.4 Linux kernel released on Sunday still has plenty of interesting new features. Top of the bill? A X32 application binary interface (ABI) that will help provide better performance for applications that don’t really need huge chunks of memory or 64-bit variables.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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OpenVAS is a framework that includes services and tools for scanning and the complete managment of vulnerability.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Gamers are not exactly the first group that comes to mind when one thinks of Linux users. Yet eRacks, a PC vendor specialized in open source systems, recently launched a new line of high end desktops, called AresPro, aimed at gamers and other customers with specific needs for powerful computers. Here’s the scoop, and its meaning for the open source channel.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In the wake of the announcement of the first ever KDE powered tablet, quite a few interesting things are happening in the background. One of them is the formation of a professional Partner Network for devices such as the Vivaldi tablet. Let’s look at this Partner Network in more detail.
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Rock musician and software developer Dick MacInnis, announced a few days ago the availability of the new Dream Studio release which is based on Ubuntu 12.04.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva, the company behind the GNU/Linux based distribution with same name, recently announced that they are giving the control of the distribution to the community. CEO of Mandriva SA, Jean-Manuel Croset, wrote, “After reviewing all your messages, suggestions, ideas and comments, Mandriva SA took the decision to transfer the responsibility of the Mandriva Linux distribution to an independent entity.”
The development raised questions about the role Mandriva fork Mageia will play in this community controlled Mandriva. Mandriva clarifies that there will be active collaboration between the two teams. For their server product, Mandriva will collaborate with the Mageia community.
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We’re the Mageia community, and we are very happy to announce the release of Mageia 2!
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The Mageia team has announced the release of Mageia 2, the community-driven fork of Mandriva.
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I am jumping the gun a bit and upgrading my Mageia 1 installation on my personal / business SOHO desktop PC tonight, May 21st, to Mageia 2. Officially Mageia 2 is not due to release until May 22nd. But the online repository for Mageia 2 is in place at my preferred mirror and I know that it is basically ready to go right now. So, I am upgrading. Ironically, I am starting this article from my soon-to-be-retired Mandriva 2011 install on the SOHO router / Bacula backup server. I have X and fluxbox installed on here just for occasions such as this where my main PC is being serviced. I am publishing this and will update as I go, so any of you that follow this site via RSS can make comments if you wish while this is being written.
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Red Hat Family
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While the so-called Information Age has been touted since the public opening of the Internet nearly 20 years ago, the real dawn of the Information Age is just about to start.
That was the central theme of this morning’s Open Source Business Conference keynote from Jim Whitehurst, President & CEO Red Hat, who also told the audience that open source is setting off the explosion of new innovation.
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Debian Family
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Last month, Stefano Zacchiroli was re-elected as leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project for a third term, the first leader to earn such a mandate. Only the founder, Ian Murdock, has headed the project for anything approaching three years.
Debian is the biggest volunteer project of all distributions, has the most ports and provides, arguably, the best distribution; its package management tools are the stuff of legend. It serves as the basis for some of the better known and more widely used distributions, like Ubuntu and Knoppix, and also functions as some kind of conscience of the FOSS movement.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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My mother in law, Sue, has what can be best described as a dog-earred mess of a laptop. A reasonably modern Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows Vista, it was painfully slow to use, crammed with all manner of bloatware and pre-installed rubbish that came with the machine and the applications she installed, and likely hiding some spyware, viruses and other uglyness.
Now, I am not a fan of Windows at the best of times, but this was beyond software preferences: the machine was barely usable. Sue though, being the trooper she is, gritted her teeth and just got on with it, going about her business as usual.
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Flavours and Variants
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There’s been much attention focused lately on Canonical’s recently released Ubuntu Linux 12.04 “Precise Pangolin,” but it’s by no means the only popular Linux distribution out there with a major update in the offing.
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The Raspberry Pi $35 Linux computer, which is equipped with a 700MHz processor, 256MB of RAM, an SD card slot, two USB ports, an Ethernet jack and both HDMI and RCA outputs, will soon feature support for a camera add-on. The current prototype features a 14-megapixel camera that can be connected directly to the Rapsberry Pi through its CSI pins.
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A blog post published by the Raspberry Pi foundation offers the first look at an experimental camera module that is designed to plug into the organization’s popular $35 Linux computer. The camera component, which will likely be available for purchase later this year, is relatively small. The foundation says that it is “ideal for some robotics and home automation applications people have been wanting to build.”
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Couple of days ago, WonderMedia (subsidiary of VIA Technologies, which in turn is a subsidiary of Formosa Plastics) announced its latest SoC processors, the 800MHz WM8950 and the faster 1.2GHz WM8850. We’re not sure why exactly the higher number part is the lower-performing one, but we’ll leave that one to you to figure out.
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Phones
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After we have seen Tizen OS in action on a Samsung slate a few days ago, today we are bringing fresh news about this fresh platform. As probably know, Intel, Linux Foundation, Samsung, Sprint and many other big names of the telecom industry are involved in the Tizen Project.
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At the Open Source Business Conference 2012, the president of mobile data synchronization software company Funambol explained how open source software, such as Google Android, came to dominate the mobile space.
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Android
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Google announces completion of its deal to buy Motorola Mobility and enter the hardware market. The marriage will likely bolster Google’s Android-based smartphone business and Xoom tablet business but maybe not its OEM business. The extent of its success will also be determined by its support in the greater open source community, especially among open source developers, in the Software-as-a-Service era.
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Google has cleared the final hurdle standing in its way of acquiring Motorola Mobility. The government of China has given the pair its blessing, but one of the conditions regulators set was that the Android OS must remain open for at least the next five years. Google will have to file a report with China’s Commerce Department every six months.
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Some readers may remember that back in February we discussed the planned Google acquisition of Motorola Mobility and concerns over the possibility that Google’s Android might not remain an open-source platform. The promising news today for Android enthusiasts is that as part of the recent agreement for China to approve the giant search company’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility, Google has said it will maintain a 5-year free and open source plan.
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With the final nod from China, Google has closed the acquisition of Motorola Mobility this morning. Motorola will be run as a separate company, just the way YouTube is run as a separate company. So, there is no fear of Motorola getting an edge over competitors. On the contrary Google recently announced that they will give partners early access to Android to be able to bring products to the market in time. Motorola will remain a licencee just like other Android partners.
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Randall, Randall, Randall. AT&T’s CEO has a habit of getting himself in hot water when he talks about his company’s network, and with his latest remarks about Android, he’s managed to make himself look like a fool yet again.
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Open source continues to make big strides, and leads in key growth segments including cloud, big data, mobile applications and enterprise mobility, according to a survey published yesterday.
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The board is happy to announce that this has occurred, and Simon Phipps is the new President. Alolita Sharma and Martin Michlmayr are again Treasurer and Secretary, respectively, continuing their long service to the organization. The board congratulates them on their selection and thanks them for their future service.
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Software defined networking (SDN) is triggering a major change in the way network administrators think about their networks. With SDN, the data and control planes can be separated enabling more programmable and flexible networks. One of the primary technologies behind SDN is the open source OpenFlow protocol. While the protocol can be supported on multiple types of switches from vendors big and small, it also requires a controller to actually manage and direct OpenFlow. That’s where startup Big Switch Networks comes into play.
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Registering a USB vendor ID normally costs around $2,000 USD while a block of MAC addresses costs $1,600. With there being large sums of IDs left under the OpenMoko Inc company, they’re looking to freely dispose of them for worthy open-source causes.
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The part of my job I enjoy the most is meeting interesting people and companies from all over the world.
One such company is Allevo in Romania. They have decided to open source their core business.
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Reviewing HijackThis is like talking to an old friend for the first time after a lengthy communications hiatus. I lost track of the program’s development shortly after Trend Micro took it over. Not that I or my repair colleagues ever stopped using it–it’s too darn handy when it comes to spotting malware and removing detritus from your system. Now, Trend Micro has placed the program in open source, so perhaps development will continue beyond the version 2.0.4 that it’s been stuck at for a while.
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OpenFlow and its part in the growing SDN ecosphere started out life as a Stanford University research project in 2008.
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This is my first guest post here on Noobpreneur.com and I wanted to start with something that is really close to my heart.
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Events
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I started thinking about the value of information here in San Francisco at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), held May 21-22. It’s the first day of a two-day conference, and some of the leading experts in open source are here presenting, learning, networking and more. During the opening remarks by John Amato, Vice President & Publisher, Computerworld, and Matt Asay, Vice President Business Development, Nodeable, we discovered that about half the attendees are new to the conference, which is great for open source.
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From the 23rd of May through the 26th is the LinuxTag conference that once again is happening (the 6th time) at the Berlin Messe. This trade show and conference that’s sponsored by the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, and Nokia usually has some interesting booths and sessions.
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The EU are pushing Reuters on opening access to their RIC codes, with open access one option, it will be interesting to see how this pans out. It raises a much bigger question though; will Reuters try to use open source as a way to shore up its diminishing trading room status?
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In their Call for Papers (CfP), the organisers of the Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMB) have asked potential speakers to submit presentation papers for the network monitoring conference, which will take place on 17 and 18 October in Nuremberg, Germany. This event is the seventh of its kind and is organised by German IT firm Netways.
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William Davis, Editor of the Bangor Daily News in Maine, USA, discusses how his 50,000-circulation daily newspaper moved from an outdated content management system (CMS) to using web-based tools that has improved its online efficiency.
Mr Davis says that in the old way of doing things, the print CMS didn’t talk to the website or support links. Furthermore, the paper’s bureau-based reporters couldn’t access the CMS, so they would email their stories to editors, who would edit them and add copy-and-paste links, and then any changes would start the process over again.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Spaces, the initiative to create open working spaces for open web and open source developers to gather in and work together, has officially launched the London Mozilla Space. Situated near Covent Garden, the new space is attached to Mozilla’s new offices where a number of the non-profit’s employees can work. The open space includes six meeting rooms, a larger meeting area with a “Splendid Bar”, Wi-Fi, and a space for storing bicycles.
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SaaS
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ownCloud has announced the version 4 of its community edition – adding innovations and enhancements that make the popular project even more flexible, secure and innovative.
ownCloud 4 adds innovative features like file versioning, – which actively saves files, allowing users to “rollback” to previous versions – and a new API — giving developers an easy, stable and supported way to develop applications on top of ownCloud capabilities.
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Databases
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When developing Hive-based applications, developers always have to deal with different HiveQL queries to perform basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) and other operations on Hive table data. The queries also vary from one application to another. For applications where multiple types of Hive tables are used and many of them are created on the fly during the execution of the application, managing a table’s lifecycle and querying data dynamically become very difficult. Developers have to hardcode various HiveQL queries for each operation. This makes developing, managing and maintaining the application very difficult.
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CMS
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Students from around the world will be working on open source coding projects that may be used by content management (CMS) software Joomla, as part of the Google Summer of Code.
There are eight separate student projects, each being worked on by a different student, that have the potential to be incorporated into the open source Joomla platform and core.
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Education
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Seneca Professor Chris Tyler has been named among the first Industrial Research Chairs for Colleges by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
The $1 million renewable five-year grant recognizes Seneca’s expertise and establishes Tyler as a research leader in open source technology for emerging platforms. In this new role, his research will focus on foundational software for new energy-efficient computing platforms, ranging from the revolutionary $35 Raspberry Pi computer to large data centres, with industry partner Red Hat Canada. Emerging ARM computer systems have the potential to reduce energy, space, and cooling requirements by 90 per cent or more.
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Healthcare
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3M Health Information Systems will release a public version of its Healthcare Data Dictionary as open source software, making it free and available worldwide.
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Funding
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Take Eclipse, for example. The Eclipse Foundation organizes the code base, polices the license, and builds a community around its code. Its funding comes from members and sponsors, who are all free to extend the code base to make their own products.
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Project Releases
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The recently released update to Lightspark, version 0.5.7, improves the graphics capabilities of the open source Flash player implementation for Linux. According to lead developer Alessandro Pignotti, this has been done by adding support for the BitmapData copyPixels method, soft masking and memory usage profiling, features that are all used by graphics-intensive Flash games.
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Public Services/Government
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OneBigVoice is an online platform for activists, politicos, and the everyday citizen to raise awareness of the things that matter to them. Through the site, organisations can raise funds for advertising campaigns, provide information on issues, and allow communities of interest to participate, as well as local politicians.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Open Access/Content
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Open-source textbooks, long considered a promising way to cut costs but still not widely used, could become more readily available and easily vetted as a University of Minnesota project expands.
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The University of Minnesota is hoping to pioneer a project that would see professors being paid in order to review open source textbooks. The university would offer $500 for each review in order to vet the books, and professors who adopt the books for teaching will also receive $500. Faculty members are welcome to submit their own reviews, but won’t be compensated for the effort.
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Open Hardware
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MAKE’s Hardware Innovation Workshop takes place May 15-16, at PARC in Palo Alto. The Workshop is a one-and-a-half day intensive introduction to the business of making and the makers who are creating these businesses.
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Founded in March, the OSRF has now announced its board of directors. Current directors include Professor Wolfram Bungard, who leads the Laboratory for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the University of Freiburg; Ryan Gariepy, co-founder and CTO of Clearpath Robotics; Brian Gerky, Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage; Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot and currently CEO of CyPhyWorks; and Sam Park of South Korean robotics company Yujin Robot.
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Programming
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Past participants have helped improve everything from popular web frameworks to browser add-ons and even operating systems. Summer of Code is also not a half bad way to get yourself on Google’s radar — the company looks at the results of the program to help it “identify potential recruits.”
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NVIDIA today announced that LLVM, one of the industry’s most popular open source compilers, now supports NVIDIA GPUs, dramatically expanding the range of researchers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and programming languages that can take advantage of the benefits of GPU acceleration.
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Hardware
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Confused, mentally ill or just failing in facility due to advancing age, M$ is clearly not adapting to a new reality but trying to create a comfortable hallucination in which it alone can save mankind from ARM… Reality is that mankind must be saved from M$ by real innovation and unfettered imagination stimulated by FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software).
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Security
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Canonical announced a few hours ago, May 21st, in a security notice, that a new Linux kernel update for its Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system is now available, fixing two security vulnerabilities discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various developers.
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Finance
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An investigative report published Sunday by the New York Times provides a glimpse of the predatory practices of major Wall Street banks that played a central role in the financial meltdown and global economic crisis.
The article, headlined “Testy Conflict With Goldman Helped Push AIG to Precipice,” documents the role of Goldman Sachs, the biggest and most profitable US investment bank, in pushing the insurance giant American International Group (AIG) to the brink of bankruptcy.
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05.22.12
Posted in News Roundup at 4:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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System maker Oracle has upgraded its version of the Xen server virtualization hypervisor with its own variant of the Linux kernel to bring it in synch with its Enterprise Linux server operating system distro.
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Kernel Space
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Linux 3.4 follows the Linux 3.3 release by two months and is now officially “stable” after Linux creator Linus Torvalds pushed out seven release candidates.
“I think the 3.4 release cycle as a whole has been fairly calm,” Torvalds wrote in his release announcement. “Sure, I always wish for the -rc’s to calm down more quickly than they ever seem to do, but I think on the whole we didn’t have any big disruptive events, which is just how I like it.”
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation recently mused on the topic of non-free games on Linux, and unsurprisingly he rejects them, even though admitting that they “might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux”. His position has been consistent for decades. What’s important is teaching users about their freedom as software users, and making that a priority, and not so much increasing the Linux market share and mind share.
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Debian Family
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We are pleased to present our first release of siduction in 2012. siduction is released ~4 times per year and is based on the Debian Unstable repository.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It appears that Mark Shuttleworth, father of the Ubuntu project, gave an interview to Jason Gerard DeRose, the lead developer of Novacut, an open-source video editor app for pro HDSLR users.
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The laptop is available with a 15.6″ 1080p Full High Definition LED Backlit Display (1920 x 1080) for a base price of $899. The base model is powered by 3rd Generation Intel Core i7 CPU i7-3610QM Processor and comes with 4GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz.
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Flavours and Variants
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Last week the release candidate for Linux Mint 13 was made available, code named Maya. Based on the recent release of Ubuntu 12.04, Linux Mint 13 takes the core of Precise Pangolin and adds it’s own branding and desktop environments on top of it. It’s these additions, and more, that go towards making Linux Mint so great – and here are five fantastic reasons to look out for the next version of Linux Mint.
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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, we’re pretty sure you’ve heard about the Raspberry Pi by now — a $25 credit-card sized PC that brings ARM/Linux to the Arduino form factor. As a refresher, the system features a 700MHz Broadcom BCM2835 SoC with an ARM11 CPU, a Videocore 4 GPU (which handles HD H.264 video and OpenGL ES 2.0) and 256MB RAM. The board includes an SD card slot, HDMI output, composite video jack, 3.5mm audio socket, micro-USB power connector and GPIO header. Model A ($25) comes with one USB port, while Model B ($35) provides two USB ports and a 100BaseT Ethernet socket. Debian is recommended, but Raspberry Pi can run most ARM-compatible 32-bit OSes.
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Phones
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In the wake of Meego’s demise a new open source mobile operating system has emerged. Known as Tizen and backed by Samsung and Intel, the Linux-based OS recently hit the version 1.0 milestone and has even been paired with an official reference hardware platform. Unlike the alternative OSes that came before it, Tizen does not use the Qt application framework. Instead, Tizen apps are created using HTML5 and other web standards. It is intended to be used in smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, vehicle entertainment systems, and low-power notebooks.
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Android
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Motorola Mobility announced in a Form-8K filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission that now that the Bureau of the Ministry of the Commerce of China has cleared Google’s acquisition, the companies will finalize the transaction “within two business days.”
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To truly disrupt Android, other OS makers face an uphill battle. It is no longer 2009, when Android stepped into a mobile market hungry for options beyond the iPhone (then only on AT&T) and the aging BlackBerry and Windows Mobile ecosystems. The market is now well established and the only two players that currently mean anything are iOS and Android.
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Chinese handset manufacturer ZTE has confirmed that a security vulnerability is present in the Android-based ZTE Score M smartphone. The phone includes an application, /system/bin/sync_agent, with a hard-coded password that can, now, be easily found on the internet. The application, when run with the password, gives the user root access to the device and therefore could be used to completely take over a phone.
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It’s official, Samsung’s next superphone is destined for T-Mobile and AT&T. At least, that’s what industry interest group the Bluetooth SIG seems to think. Apparently the body has approved T-Mobile and AT&T flavors of the mighty Galaxy S III.
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More than 50 percent of all software purchased within five years will be open source, according to a survey released Monday by a collaboration of 26 open source companies.
This year’s “Future of Open Source Survey” results signal a tipping point for open source software adoption in the enterprise and non-technical industries such as automotive, health care and finance. In the auto industry, for example, 59 percent of the companies surveyed use open source software and 35 percent said they’re evaluating it.
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Intended to simulate “in theatre” scenarios to stimulate team building skills and wider training and analysis initiatives, the work to test out as many as 400 use cases is being carried out in the Research Lab Simulation and Training Technology Center in Orlando.
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As the Open Source Business Conference gets underway in San Francisco, a survey shows that open-source software is contributing to development in some of the top IT trends of the day.
Mobile computing, cloud computing and analyzing huge amounts of data are among the top IT trends in 2012 and are also the focus of the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) 2012 that begins May 21 in San Francisco.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Well THAT was quick. Just six months after Google Chrome eclipsed Mozilla’s Firefox to become the world’s second most popular Web browser, Chrome finally surpassed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on Sunday to become the most-used Web browser in the world, according to Statcounter.
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Chrome has passed Internet Explorer in browser share according to StatCounter’s latest numbers and Firefox’s recent downward trend appears to be over. Google’s open-source-based Chrome has been steadily gaining share according to StatCounter’s logs and, for the week just past, had a 32.76% share. IE on the other hand has been steadily declining since 2009, and in the same week took a 31.94% share.
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Mozilla
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We here in the Linux blogosphere tend to be pretty good at that, but recently a surprising turn of events left us befuddled. Namely: Mozilla’s decision to leave Linux support out of the initial release of its upcoming Web Apps marketplace.
Mozilla has been nothing if not a friend to FOSS over the years — indeed, it’s one of our very own best successes — and Linux users tend to be among its most ardent supporters.
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle has released version 3.1.1 of its Xen-based virtualisation solution, Oracle VM Server for x86, which uses the Linux 3.0-based Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 2 as its Dom0 kernel.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Open Hardware
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Bring up the term open source to many people, and they’ll immediately think of community-driven software projects, but we’ve covered many open source hardware concepts here on OStatic over the years. And, last year, the official Open Source Hardware (OSHW) definition arrived in version 1.1. Recently, TED fellow Marcin Jakubowski delivered an address in which he discussed the open source blueprints for 50 farm machines, ranging from tractors to harvesters. You can get his thoughts in a video, but these farm-focused ideas are only a small part of the open source hardware scene.
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Programming
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The Perl developers have announced that Perl 5.16.0 is now available, after twelve months of development following the release of Perl 5.14.0. The changes in Perl 5.16 are designed to improve the language without breaking any past software.
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Software giant Microsoft is offering to delete all the crapware which OEMs are forever installing on computers.
Microsoft will do this for a fee. Sorting out your computer so it is bloatware free will cost you $99.
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Finance
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Ultimately the particulars of J.P. Morgan’s losses are so much noise. What they point to is an economic system designed to self-destruct. Add increasing environmental degradation in the face of global warming to structural financial fragility and what capitalism appears to have created is a full-blown suicide machine. And to invert Mr. Haldane’s premise—the $60 trillion in lost production (minimum) was never going to go to us anyway. The trajectory since the 1970s had it going to corporate executives, bankers and machines (automation).
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05.21.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Leonard Tsai (shown), a key executive at Taiwan ODM Compal Electronics, is trying to navigate the unknown waters between today’s Wintel PCs and tomorrow’s ARM/Linux tablets.
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Desktop
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We have hardware manufacturers and OEMs willing to crank out supported systems. The last barrier to adoption are retail chains catering to the Wintel monopoly. Read all about it in a thoroughly researched report by The Association of Open Source Software Companies of Portugal.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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After another seven Release Candidates, Linus Torvalds proudly announced a few hours ago, May 20th, the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.4.
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Just two months back, we got the news of Linux 3.3 Release that had Android support included. And now, Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 3.4. Apart from the new drivers and fixes, among the major features in the 3.4 release, we have several Btrfs updates. It includes support for more than 4KB metadata blocks with better performance. A new X32 ABI ((Application Binary Interface) allows us to run programs in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers. The GPU drivers have been updated as well. It supports early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 ‘Kepler’, AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and also support of Intel Medfield graphics.
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The new version sees a number of important changes affecting graphics drivers. The x32-ABI promises the advantages of x86-64-CPUs without the overhead of 64-bit code. Btrfs is reported to be quicker, and Yama prevents processes from accessing each other’s allocated memory.
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Graphics Stack
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ARM has published a new open-source X.Org DDX Linux graphics driver while working to enable support for their next-generation ARM Mali T6xx graphics core.
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Applications
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Version 2.52 of Transmission, the open source cross-platform BitTorrent client that strives to be as simple as possible, is now available for download.
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Shell prompt fans! here’s a microblogging client for Twitter and identi.ca you can use through the command line interface. Twidge allows you to view the recent tweets, add a new tweet, view messages, replies, retweets by those you follow and many other features.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Indie game studio SkyGoblin has released a new point and click adventure game The Journey Down: Chapter One. The game is a commercial remake of their free adventure game with same title but it comes with new content, fully voiced cast and HD art and animations.
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Desktop Environments
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EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a desktop for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. Simply said, desktop that doesn’t get on your way.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This week we heard about the death of KDE contributor Claire Lotion. People within the KDE Community were shocked and upset by this tragedy.
Claire was a vibrant person with strong ideals. She will be remembered for pursuing these ideals, and as a good friend and colleague. She also thought a lot about how KDE as an open source community could find connections to the real business world. Her energy, fresh look at things, positive mindset and intense commitment inspired many people. So did her dancing.
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In the world of Linux there’s plenty of choices to choose from, whether it be distribution or desktop environments (KDE, Gnome2, Gnome 3, XFCE) but then there are those who would like a new distro with an older desktop environment.
SolusOS is a Debian “Stable” based distribution that uses GNOME 2 as its desktop environment. Currently SolusOS is only available in 32 bit but will see a 64 bit release in the near future. SolusOS is also an installable Live distribution.
Installation of the distribution was quite straight forward and feels like an Ubuntu based distribution being installed. There were very standard options to choose from when installing your distribution from keyboard language, to setting up your first user account.
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Last year Mandriva partnered with Moscow based ROSA Labs to create a new look for their once popular and user friendly distribution. The result was the attractive but seriously flawed Mandriva 2011 Hydrogen release and a rebranded version called ROSA Desktop 2011. Since then ROSA Labs and Mandriva appear to have parted company. ROSA Labs has forked the Mandriva distribution, creating a distribution that, while still resembling Mandriva 2011 at first glance, actually has gone its own way in many important respects. The first post-Mandriva release, ROSA 2012 Marathon, was officially unveiled last Monday. This is also the first ROSA LTS (long term support) release, offering security and software updates for five years. The release notes state that ROSA 2012 Marathon is intended for enterprise and small business use and is intended to provide stability, not “bleeding edge technology.”
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The XFCE Desktop Environment has risen greatly in popularity over the past few years. Major credit for it goes to the XFCE team who has been putting out releases with incremental updates and advancements but there is a misconception among many people that XFCE is bland. I encourage you to come on a voyage with me and you may discover something splendorous.
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New Releases
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Lucid Imagination has announced the 2.1 release of its open source LucidWorks Enterprise product for search of both structured and unstructured data located across an organisation.
Utilising Apache Lucene/Solr as its base, LucidWorks Enterprise 2.1 adds features such as Crawler Configuration, the ability to schedule external data source crawling and new connectors for high-speed Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Twitter and Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS).
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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When the going gets though, as the saying goes, the tough gets going. That is usually a test of character. When it comes to software companies in a financial mess, that old adage can be paraphrased as: When the going gets tough, we dump our software on the (open source) community.
It certainly was true of HP/Palm and their webOS mobile operating system. Oracle did something similar with OpenOffice.org (now Apache OpenOffice). And is that not what Sun Microsystems did with Solaris/OpenSolaris? And recently, there has been calls from some quarters for Research In Motion (RIM) to do the same with its mobile platform.
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Gentoo Family
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Try a source-based Linux distribution so you can tailor it perfectly to your needs. The choices are endless…
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu’s Unity interface made a brief appearance in a popular Japanese ‘children’s’ show last weekend.
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I have become a Linux user since 2008 and my first Linux distribution was Ubuntu. Ubuntu is currently the most popular Linux distribution and when somebody is talking about Linux, very likely that he is talking about Ubuntu. I personally have a very complicated opinion toward Ubuntu, I both love it and hate it. In this article, I will enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of Ubuntu to justify my love and hate for it.
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I read this article today by someone called Hoo-Ann and I was very disappointed by how short the article was. I have been using Ubuntu off and on since it was Breezy Badger and I can come up with a lot more to say about the advantages and disadvantages of using Ubuntu. So, as someone that believes if someone else can’t do it “right” then you should it yourself, I’m going to list the (much longer) advantages and disadvantages I’ve personally found with using Ubuntu.
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Anyone who knows the world Linux will surely heard of Ubuntu. A distribution that has done so much for Linux and the Open Source world itself! In fact, thanks to the hard work of Canonical, Ubuntu is one of the first user-friendly distributions that have brought many people in the Linux world. Especially those most skeptical!
But if Ubuntu is a distribution that has done so much in the past, now we must curb our enthusiasm. In fact, for some time now, this same distribution is becoming a lot more criticized by veterans of the Linux world.
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Flavours and Variants
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While the main thing that would make Raspberry Pi’s diminutive $25 / $35 Linux setups better would be if we could get our hands on them faster, the team behind it is already working on improvements like this prototype camera seen above. The add-on is slated to ship later this year and plugs into the CSI pins left exposed right in the middle of each unit. According to the accompanying blog post, the specs may be downgraded from the prototype’s 14MP sensor to keep things affordable, although there’s no word on an exact price yet. Possible applications include robotics and home automation, but until the hackers get their hands on them you’ll have to settle for one pic from the Pi’s POV after the break and a few more at the source linked below.
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Wind River has announced that it has been recognized as the continued real-time operating system (RTOS) and embedded Linux market leader by VDC Research Group in its 2012 “Embedded/Real-Time Operating Systems” report. The report covers the global market for commercially available RTOSes and non-real-time operating systems and other related bundled products and services used in embedded applications.
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It’s the hottest thing in computing, it has a price tag of around $45, and it has finally arrived in New Zealand.
RS Components sales manager Mike Kelly brought a Raspberry Pi Model B into the Computerworld office on Friday to show us how the tiny Linux computer is assembled.
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tive comments, but to me they seem to reflect society’s move away from the concept of “tinkering” with technology. The personal computing revolution was driven by people who were curious as to what makes things tick. They were hackers in the true sense of the world, people who could see hidden potential and find ways to unleash it.
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The next few weeks I want to further explore the BeagleBoard and embedded Linux, in general. To tell the truth, I had planned to do this several months ago when I first got the BeagleBoard, but it didn’t make a very good first impression.
I got one of the A4 version boards (the 2nd run of PC boards, apparently). There was a hardware bug on the board that prevented the Ethernet port from working most of the time. It took a while to find the answer, which was to remove a surface mount resistor. This has been fixed in subsequent releases.
The other problem was the Linux distribution. You can load many different operating systems on the board (including Android, and some non-Linux operating systems like QNX and FreeBSD). By default, however, the board ships with a microSD card loaded with the Angstrom Linux distribution.
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Phones
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Android
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Over the past few months there have been no fewer than three tiny, cheap Linux PCs making headlines, and now there’s a fourth to add to the list.
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Still wishing for some more functionality on Sony’s touch-friendly watch? Well there’s good news if you’re into slider puzzles and music playing apps, as both of these have arrived open source in the SmartWatch’s latest SDK. The music extension will allow devs to start work on their own music player, already including support for Android’s generic music player.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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So, GNU/Linux on netbooks is not dead, just localized… Anticipating claims of “old stock” I looked up this message about interpreting the serial number. The first character is the last digit of the year and the second character is the hex month (1-C). So, this unit starting with “C1″ was made in 2012-01.
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ZaReason, the Linux computer builder, is launching its first tablet called ZaTab. Unlike the company’s desktop computers and laptops that feature Ubuntu Linux, the tab will be powered by Android.
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PuppetDB is the next-generation open source storage service for Puppet-produced data. Today, this includes catalogs and facts, and will be extended in the near future. The initial release provides a drop-in replacement for both storeconfigs and inventory service.
We’ve designed PuppetDB to empower Puppet deployments, and built it from the ground up with performance in mind. It’s built on technologies known for their performance, and is highly parallel, making full use of available resources. It also stores all of its data asynchronously, freeing up the master to go compile more catalogs. Beyond that, we’ve devoted copious time to benchmarking and optimizing the performance.
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The centre, supported by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), has so far taught 40 students basic GNU/Linux skills along with opensource tools to provide image and graphics software. “We use free software to bring home the idea of equality and freedom. Besides teaching computer skills, we also touch upon the issues of caste and gender discrimination. Also, we emphasise that free software does not mean subsidy for the poor. It’s about freedom from copyright. The focus is on freedom and equality offered by the community software as compared to corporate ware,,” says Balaji Kutty, an IT professional and board member of SFLC who also teaches at the centre.
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The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) have developed a simulation tool for the electric industry to analyze geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) on their systems.
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Supercomputers are powerful tools for scientists. They are also very expensive, so wasted time can mean a lot of wasted resources. But making the most efficient use of them is not the easiest proposition in the world; it’s not just a case of clicking a button to analyse a protein. However, fitting out the world of supercomputers with a user-friendly, web-based interface is the focus of an open source project based at Western Australia’s Murdoch University.
Last year Murdoch publicly launched Yabi, a tool equipped with a web interface to make using supercomputers simpler.
The computational physics community, as an example, may be very proficient in the intricacies of shell scripts and working with a command line, says Professor Matthew Bellgard, Director of Murdoch’s Centre for Comparative Genomics. “They’ve had a lot of experience in the past running their Fortran code using 4000 cores or 10,000 cores,” he says. However, “there are other domains where scientists don’t necessarily have that skill running command line code or porting their code from one supercomputer to another.”
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Good morning. Open source software is enjoying somewhat of a revival in business environments, although the revival is more about perception than reality. IBM‘s decision to swap out Oracle customer-account management software for similar software from SugarCRM was probably motivated at least in part by a desire to inflict some pain on rival Oracle, but also indicates an underlying confidence in the reliability, stability and scalability of open source software.
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While budgetary constraints and increasing commercial competition has clearly taken its toll on NASA, one area where the iconic government institution has unquestionably made headway is the implementation of open source.
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While there are quite a few budget and even open source logic analyser platforms for recording and evaluating digital signals, each of them usually comes with a custom interface protocol and dedicated evaluation software of varying functionality. Usually, the software only works with one analyser family made by a specific company.
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Open source software has come a long way. From the days when it was seen as a curiosity, to today’s scenario where some of the world’s biggest computer setups run atop Linux including Amazon and Google, it has been an interesting journey. According to IDC, Linux accounts for about 18-20% of the server market by revenues in any given quarter. That’s within striking distance of Unix, which had a market share of 20-22% in the second and third quarters of 2011. Of course, Windows ruled the roost with 45-50% in revenue terms.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Anytime you pay a visit to Mozilla.org, the home page of the open source Mozilla project, you’re landing on a page served by a brand new type of machine. A SeaMicro SM10000 server — a fat box about the size of an air conditioner that houses 64 Xeon processors.
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SaaS
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Openness in the cloud depends on open source code, open data and open APIs, according to Marten Mickos, chief executive of infrastructure-as-a-service software provider Eucalyptus Systems.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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In fact it is about the difficulty to get started at the LibreOffice project, which is a quite bad thing, because we need supporters and contributors of any kind. In the past, the decade of OpenOffice.org, one thing what we missed were the developers (I was not involved at that time, but I heard it several times and I think it is true…). Now, at the LibreOffice project we have easyhacks (At least I assume this, because of THIS Google search). Loads of things have been done about that. Now, I would really want to show you 2 month old numbers from Italo Vignoli’s blog. On March the 15th, there were ~360 people contributing to LibreOffice and ~21 at Apache OpenOffice.
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Education
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Policy makers, industry and many teachers are eager that pupils should learn more about computing. This includes learning how to write computer programs, but also “computational thinking”, a transferable way of solving problems and exploring situations, which has wide applications across and beyond the curriculum. In short, as pupils learn to program computers and the principles of computer science they start to bring the unique insights of algorithms, abstraction and the like to other fields. The same is true for teachers – ideas from computing can dramatically change the way we think about our work, and one of these, agile development, is what I’d like to explore here.
According to many A-level specifications, students are taught that software projects follow the “waterfall” methodology, starting with agreeing requirements, designing and implementing the software, testing it and then keeping things ticking over when it’s deployed to clients.
In other words, the sort of approach that has characterised public sector IT projects like the NHS database. Hmm… This doesn’t sound that far removed from how we’ve designed curricula: a top down list of things “children should be taught”, schemes of work, implementation in the classroom, plenty of testing, and the “service pack” of INSET as and when needed.
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Business
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One of the ironies of the channel these days is that many of the data centers and network operations centers (NOCs) built by solution providers are based on open source technologies. Almost invariably, these platforms are being used to support commercial software and systems that have been deployed at any number of customer locations.
That may sound a bit hypocritical. But in truth it just reflects an economic reality. Many solution providers have plenty of expertise available to them. What they are often short on is funding. When faced with the choice of throwing labor at a solution versus parting with cash to acquire commercial technologies, the decision is almost always to “sweat” the labor investment.
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Opsview has around 19,900 customers using its free open source offering and a further 100 customers paying for all the bells and whistles as well as a support package in the shape of the Enterprise version.
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Imagine what “Risk Factors” a hypothetical Open Source Incorporated would put into the regulatory filings that corporations file every year. The process could well provide insight into what the communities of Open Source should be prepared for.
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First a look at the numbers: Nuxeo reported global customer growth of 40 percent adding new customers that included Electronic Arts and InterContinental Hotel Group. It was North America where Nuxeo really took off, as North America became the company’s biggest market with revenue doubling there. Meanwhile, the community also grew. Nuxeo reported that the number of downloads tripled.
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Funding
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Bocoup incubates Web startups, fosters open-source community [...] Web app and open-source consulting company that also provides space and funding for startups.
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Project Releases
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A new version of Lightspark has been released yesterday. You can give it a try by getting the source code from launchpad. Ubuntu packages should be available shortly from our PPA
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Apache has dished out another serving of Cassandra, the open source NoSQL database popular for handling big data. The improvements speak to a maturing NoSQL database that’s well-suited for big data deployments. This time around, Cassandra has improvements to its query language, and tuning improvements that will help companies trying to boost performance with a mixture of magnetic media and solid state drives (SSD). Its continued development helps maintain open-source dominance in the big data/NoSQL market.
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Public Services/Government
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Ottawa-based open-source community group says proprietary software is wasteful and not conducive to transparency in government
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The UK government has finally unveiled the second iteration of its Cloudstore after a number of delays, and has reneged on its pledge to make version 2.0 open source.
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The government of Aragon, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, is increasing its support for open source, by making it easier for companies to get assistance to create, acquire and deploy this type of applications. It will link public administrations and other enterprises with open source specialists.
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The FDA sits some of the largest datasets in the world on drugs and other regulated products, and the agency’s recently appointed IT chief plans to push for more of those data to become available to outsiders via open source projects. During an appearance in Boston this morning, Eric Perakslis, the FDA’s chief information officer, presented part of his vision for transforming IT that supports regulation of products that comprise more than a fifth of U.S. commerce.
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French government spending on services based on open source software has reached 15% of the public administration IT budget, and continues to grow at 30% per year.
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It maybe says something about the impact of much of the vendor messaging about the Cloud that the European Union felt moved to fund the creation of a formal organisation to promote what really should be blindingly obvious – that regardless of how many sub-divisions of Cloud the vendor community try to introduce for marketing purposes, Hybrid Clouds are the obvious route for business users to follow.
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Openness/Sharing
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Tube is an open-source animated film based on “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” the ancient poem from Mesopotamia. Its collaborative animators seek funding through Kickstarter for the film’s completion and release.
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Researchers at a US energy department lab have released an open source tool to detect malicious cyber activity within an enterprise, Government Computer News reports.
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Open source drug discovery might yield results of several scientists who are toiling to find a cure for the poor man’s diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, say experts. Where traditional drug research by profit-driven companies fail, open source holds a lot of promise of succeeding because of its multi-institutional approach as well as the possibilities of collective work. In a world where a person dies of tuberculosis every 10 minutes, open source drug discovery might provide the answer soon.
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A decade ago, the biopharma industry was nowhere near as open as it is today to joining forces with outsiders to advance research and development. And several efforts in biomedicine have made progress recently with strategies and structures that borrow heavily from the open source movement in software development, IT World reports.
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People interested in donating their own genomic data to science should check out a new standard informed consent form that will let them route some or all of their genetic information to researchers. The goal of the Portable Legal Consent is to create a shared, open-source repository of that data.
The ability to give such gene data to science at large has been a subject of debate lately. Often a person’s medical data is used for one specific research purpose but is off limits for anything else. In this big data era where there are more tools to sort and analyse huge amounts of information, the accessibility of a big genomic data pool for many projects could be a boon to researchers looking to cure diseases or just better understand human biology.
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Western Australia’s Murdoch University has pioneered an open source project designed to build drag-and-drop style web-based user interfaces suitable for supercomputers.
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Real-time information is now a commuter’s fingertips after TransLink rolled out the latest iteration of its Next Bus mobile site.
The new features allow people to find out exactly where their bus is (on an interactive real-time map or through text) and its estimated arrival time.
“The difference is now people will be able to know exactly when their bus is going to be there, as opposed to the scheduled time,” said TransLink spokesperson Drew Snider. “It takes away the uncertainty of not knowing whether the bus left early or is running late. It will also show whether the bus has been cancelled for any reason.”
The real-time tracking system, found at m.translink.ca, is modeled after similar projects in New York, Boston, Chicago and Portland.
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Open Data
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I really think this is one of the shrewdest things that Microsoft is doing at the moment (along with some pretty stupid stuff like fighting true open standards in the UK.) Location is going to become one of the key areas for future applications, as our position is used to modulate the information and services we receive on our main computing devices – smartphones. By supporting OpenStreetMap in this way, Microsoft is ensuring that Google does not end up in the centre of this particular spider’s web. Call it payback for the damage inflicted by Google on Microsoft through its support for open source software.
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But Berkowitz, a web designer, saw the problem as something he could potentially hack. A new breed of technologist increasingly interested in getting government to work more efficiently and transparently, Berkowitz co-created SeeClickFix, a location-based web platform allows residents to document neighborhood concerns and suggest improvements.
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Open Access/Content
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The University of Minnesota bookstore has one of the largest textbook departments in the country, with rows of shelves piled high with titles — everything from Algebra One to Nuclear Physics.
Students can buy Shakespeare’s books for less than $10, but that’s only because the literary rights have long ago expired. The average price of the store’s books is about $50 and some titles fetch as much as $225 — another sign of the rising price of college education.
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Academic publishing in the UK has conventionally been channelled through by a small number of companies who maintain high fees for journal subscriptions. But as open source software continues to provide high quality free alternatives for autodidacts and beyond, the lifespan of this model is increasingly being called into question. The ‘Academic Spring’ is gathering momentum but what does this mean for the future of the peer-review system?
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It’s a major bugaboo in life sciences R&D: Biopharma researchers waste lots of time and resources doing experiments that have already been done, in part because scientists in one lab aren’t sharing results with their counterparts in another lab. Now Australian researchers argue that open source rules for clinical trials could nix the replication and stymied progress which result from keeping data from studies under wraps.
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The open source software movement can serve as a model for freeing up access to, and connecting up, clinical trial data
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Open Hardware
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Open-source software has long since become a key part of government IT programs. One day, open-source hardware might join it in importance.
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The Open Compute Project is ready to shake up the world of data center racks. The open source hardware project today outlined plans for Open Rack, which will seek to set a new standard for rack design for hyperscale data center environments.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe) is helping a Slovakian business fined for failing to use that other OS and IE for filing taxation information. It will be interesting to see whether or not the courts can order the Slovakian government to do IT the right way, with open standards for communication protocols and file formats.
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The Open Source Initiative agreed what made a standard open back in 2006 and today collaborated with the Free Software Foundation on a press statement about it.
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Digital media playback in Windows 8 has fallen casualty to the savage economics of the PC industry and changing tastes in consumer viewing.
We knew Windows Media Center would be sold at extra cost in Windows 8, but Microsoft now says you won’t be able to play DVDs on Windows Media Player in Windows 8.
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Hardware
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In a BYOD world, this approach is compelling. By hosting the desktop, IT owns a virtualized generic hardware environment yet can supply that environment to a variety of hardware devices-smartphones, tablets, Linux PCs and even smart TVs, which could be used more readily for high-end, off-site conferences in rented facilities or as a cheaper alternative to more expensive conference room solutions.
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Health/Nutrition
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Cigarette-makers had man on the inside of key fire-safety group
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Security
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Finance
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The Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee’s report on the financial crisis is an important document. It is an exhaustive look at certain main aspects of the financial crisis, a report which heavily criticizes Washington Mutual, the now-defunct Office of Thrift Supervision, the credit ratings agencies, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.
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Thousands of nurses from around the world descended upon Daley Plaza, in the heart of Chicago on May 18, to demand that the richest nations in the world put an end to austerity politics and start asking the people who collapsed the global economy to do more to “heal the world.”
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Censorship
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The High Court said on Monday that Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media would have to block access to The Pirate Bay (TPB), following an earlier ruling in February over the role of the site in copyright infringement.
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For years, the non-profit Tor Project has offered Internet users the world’s most secure tool for dodging censorship and surveillance, used by tens of millions of people around the world. Now two of the project’s researchers aim to help users to not only bypass what they call the “filternet”–the choked, distorted and censored subset of the Internet–but to understand it and map it out, the better to eradicate its restrictions.
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Send this to a friend
05.19.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I spent some free time today getting caught up on the large backlog of phonon-gstreamer bugs. Towards the end, I started to have delusions of grandeur: Imagine a phonon-gstreamer codebase that doesn’t require supporting a zillion different audio frameworks, and instead belays that task to something that I don’t have to maintain.
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Desktop
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Just read another “forget desktop Linux” piece by a writer trying to cover Free software on a sight ostensibly doing the same. This is exactly the sort of thing I wrote about in a recent blog entry, and it’s sad to see it continue.
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The argument goes something to the affect that “since there is a movement towards enabling more devices at work and schools, the desktop no longer really matters.”
I understand my colleague Andrea’s passion for mobile devices and social media, but her conclusions seem seriously flawed. The reason I am writing this article is to ensure people understand the great value of Linux on the Desktop.
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In it Maria Korolov trots out a long list of “problems” with GNU/linux for large businesses. Here’s an example: “a typical organization will have one application for every 10 users, and, today, about half of those applications require the Windows operating system”
That makes no sense at all. It means businesses, money-making organizations, are foolishly paying for far too many applications. The largest organizations on the planet are governments and as we saw in Munich, it is worthwhile to shed unnecessary applications and rationalize the rest.
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I did some very simple timing of several different Linux distributions on this system before I changed the disk drive, and found that they all took about one minute from the GRUB menu to a ready.-to-use desktop. I repeated those tests with the SSD, and found that the average boot time had been cut to 30 seconds or less! The overall impression of using the system is faster with the SSD as well.
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Clearly, GNU/Linux works for them. It’s just silly that some commentators here cling to the idea that nothing can be done without that other OS. There is clear evidence to the contrary.
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Server
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nginx saw its 9th consecutive month of increased market share, gaining 894k hostnames and increasing its share to 5.48%, more than double the value it held a year ago. Apache fared the worst this month, losing 17.5M hostnames. However, it remains far ahead of the competition with two out of every three hostnames being served using Apache.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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After David Airlie brought up the new DDX driver API for the X.Org Server, a new discussion was born concerning the lack of patch review taking place for the X.Org Server.
David Airlie commented on the developers’ mailing list about the lack of patch review for the new API patches, he wonders how he’s “going to get the next 50 patches in at this rate some time this year.” Alan Coopersmith then responded with how there seems to be a harder time overall in getting patch reviews done. Coopersmith says, “I’ve got no ideas how to fix this quickly, but we need to get it fixed.”
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The new driver API for the X.Org Server that would finally allow for the X.Org stack to better compete with modern desktop drivers on Windows and Mac OS X, may actually see the light of day, prior to the Wayland push.
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Applications
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File compression is still the best way to send a huge bunch of photos to your dearest friend. It is one of the most important operations on almost every operating system, and is, therefore, inundated with a barrage of apps concerning it. On Windows too, file compression comes built-in, and so does on Linux. That said, the default compression method isn’t always the best one, and even if it is, there are people who are looking to trying out new tools for the same operation.
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Scalado Album correctly classifies images based on location and date, it provides only a placeholder, rather than a thumbnail, for some images. That was a disappointment. Images shot with app HDR Camera, for example, showed as a placeholder in the album, while images shot with the stock camera and others, including Vignette, showed successfully as thumbnails.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Wildfire Games has released the tenth alpha version of 0 A.D., an open source, historical real-time strategy game which features excellent graphics and sound. The new alpha brings Hellenic factions, basic technologies, civilization phases, click-and-drag wall building functionality, healing and more.
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Desktop Environments
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The Xfce 4 desktop offers a vast array of customization options that will leave your desktop looking nothing like the default. Take advantage of all the excellent graphical user interfaces offered for all of your options, settings, and preferences.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Video editing is one of the few areas where GNU/Linux is behind Windows and Macs. There are no professional grade video editing software for Linux. However, there are many honest attempts to bring quality video editing to the Linux platform. Kdenlive is one such project.
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Dave Edmunson, one of the lead developers behind KDE LightDM recently published an UPDATE describing some of the features (and shortcomings) already part of the first KDE LightDM release, as well as explaining a bit of what´s coming along in the next few months for the 0.2 release. Dave explained how some KDM features are still missing in KDE LightDM-0.1, but in turn, some of the screenshots he´s sharing look very promising. Among others, the benefits of using LightDM is, as its name rightly points out, its relatively low weight when compared with GDM or KDM. On top of that, there are obvious gains in terms of looks and flexibility. To give an example, changing the login screen wallpaper and/or welcome image will be very simple. Along the same lines, things like having the login screen and KSplash incorporating the same wallpaper the user has in her/his desktop should be easier. Inconsistencies between login screen and KSplash in terms of resolution and things of the like should also be out of the way thanks to the common QML thread. Here´s a picture of the Login screen control module, as it looks today. Note these are early days for this piece of functionality, so chances it may not look exactly like this come future releases:
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I’m pleased to announce our Kolab 2.4 product series can now be labeled 2.4.1!
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GNOME Desktop
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John Stowers has announced yesterday, May 14th, the release of GNOME Tweak Tool 3.4, an utility popular among users of the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
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You may have heard of ROSA before, but you may not be sure where. Almost 9 months ago, I reviewed Mandriva 2011 “Hydrogen”, and that version of Mandriva was developed in conjunction with ROSA Labs, a Russian Linux development group. Since then, Mandriva seen quite a roller-coaster ride and is now essentially on life support. It is all but certain that there will be no new releases of a distribution with the name “Mandriva” (or “Mandrake” for that matter). One fork appeared over a year ago, and that is called Mageia; that aimed to replicate and build upon the traditional KDE desktop that Mandriva used before the year 2011. The other fork is ROSA, and it is essentially a continuation of the novel desktop introduced in Mandriva 2011 “Hydrogen”. It seems like ROSA will become the haven for all Mandriva users that had not already gone to Mageia.
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A new version of the Parted Magic open source, Linux-based, multi-platform partitioning tool has been released. Labelled “2012_05_14″, the update is based on the 3.3.6 Linux kernel and includes version 1.12.1 of X Server.
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Linux is the operating system of choice for those who decide to go their own way. The open source model means the building blocks are there for you if you decide that you need your very own operating system.
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New Releases
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The latest version of Rocks cluster distribution – an open source toolkit for real and virtual clusters – has been released.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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In a blog post today Mandriva COO Jean-Manuel Croset announced that the new strategy going forward will be to let “the distribution evolve in and under the caring responsibility of the community.” Mandriva SA will, of course, be a part of this entity.
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After months of prevarication, and announcements that sounded as though they were emanating from a publication like Pravda, the company now says it will turn over development of the distribution to the community.
The man who made the announcement, chief executive Jean-Manuel Croset, appears to have a poor memory. The horse bolted some time ago – a goodly portion of the development community, fed up with the company’s dithering, forked the distribution in 2010 and created the Mageia GNU/Linux distribution.
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Mageia is a Linux distribution forked from Mandriva Desktop. Mageia 2 is the upcoming release, which is slated to be made available for public download just four days from today.
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Jean-Manuel Croset, CEO of Mandriva SA, announced last evening, May 17th, in a blog post, that the company decided to cease the Mandriva Linux operating system and transfer the responsibility to an independent entity.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fast forward one day, it seems like trying Fedora 16 Live was a failure: he gets a wallpaper and a mouse cursor, nothing else. I am showing a random screenshot from the web, trying to understand if he has a normal GNOME Shell empty desktop or is a deeper problem and this drives me to a large explanation on what GNOME, Unity, KDE, Xfce, LXDE are (and a statement of my desktop preference). I am asked again about my phone number and ignore the question. Then he wants to give Ubuntu a try, I don’t have a problem with that but he has: the same empty desktop with no panel, no right-click menus, no nothing. If is not the display, then it may be video drivers (ATI), so I recommend either a newer Fedora (F17 RC1 is online) or VESA parameters for boot (me blaming AMD).
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The Fedora Project has pushed back the release of the Fedora 17 Linux distribution by a week, from 22 May to 29 May. The main reason is that the project wants to take care of four bugs classified as blockers in the current release candidates; if possible, the developers will also use the extra time to fix a dozen other problems.
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Debian Family
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In my continued look at out of the ordinary Linux distributions, I installed Crunchbang Linux. Crunchbang’s main version is a distribution based on Debian’s stable branch (known as “squeeze”). This review is based on the 32-bit version of Crunchbang Linux. At this time, Crunchbang offers a regular version and one with backports installed (for the new kernel, among other things). I chose to use the regular version, R20120207 “Statler”.
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The move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 resulted in varied emotions with many people liking the much needed change and for many, lets just say that they felt devastated.
The Linux Mint team, after waiting out the initial change with Mint 11, released Mint 12 with Gnome 3 and now they have their work cutout with the Gnome 2 fork MATE and the Cinnamon Shell.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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FXI’s Cotton Candy, A $200 USB stick size PC running Ubuntu and Android 4.0 will start shipping at the end of this month to anyone who has pre-ordered the device in back in February.
These devices were supposed to ship in March but a number of new changes had delayed the manufacturing process. New features include a more durable casing, a micro USB port and improved Android 4.0 support.
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This is a guest post by Tom Slominski, a 15 year old Ubuntu user who ‘loves Linux, open source and web development with a tad of alternative rock sprinkled on top.’
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Are you looking for a job? Well, if you’re a good designer, live in London, UK, and you want a job at Canonical, now it’s the right time to apply for one of the many positions offered by the company behind the popular Ubuntu operating system.
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Flavours and Variants
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LinuxMint13 RC is available for testing, this release comes with 2 versions in a separated dvd`s: Mate and Cinnamon. For LinuxMint13 Cinnamon, apart of being very light offers some customization and integration of new applets, extensions and themes that can be found on the official website of Cinnamon. for Linux Mint13 Mate, also offers a version with the desktop environment that brings the user experience of Gnome Gtk 2 +3, this version is stable, fast and well integrated with Gnome 3.
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Xubuntu is a community-developed Xfce-flavored version of Ubuntu. It is supposed to be elegant, lightweight and easy to use. Reading my previous reviews of Xubuntu Karmic and Natty, you will find my experience to differ from the supposed mission statement. In the best case, Xubuntu was adequate but nothing more. Not quite the replacement for Gnome as some would claim.
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In my talk at Linux Fest Northwest — and I say this often to anyone who will listen — I mentioned that there is a “digital Darwinism” at play in the FOSS paradigm. That is, distros and FOSS programs rise and fall depending on the quality of the software and the community that gathers around them. Good distros and programs — the “fittest” — survive, and the others, well, not so much.
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Linux Mint 13 has jumped straight to a release candidate, hot on the heels of Ubuntu 12.04s release, and with a controversial switch to Yahoo search…
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The World at Work is powered by GE. This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place.
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Phones
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Android
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FXI’s Cotton Candy created a market for Android powered USB PC. FXI is selling its Cotton Candy for US $200, and now there is a competitor.
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If you thought the Raspberry Pi was the only tiny, ultra-inexpensive, pocketable computer running an open source operating system, think again. Not only is the OLPC effort showing signs of new life, but a number of Chinese web sites are now offering Android-based MK802 computers in thumbdrive-style form factors (shown here) for under $75. The prices even earn you free shipping if you happen to live in one of several Asian countries. Is there a market for these?
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Google plans to take another shot at direct sales for its line of Nexus phones — Android smartphones that offer an unadulterated strain of the mobile OS. The plan would cut carriers out of the distribution loop, and it’s similar to something Google tried years ago. That plan flopped. This time, Google will have more manufacturers as partners and more devices, but will consumers accept unsubsidized prices?
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According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Google wants to work more closely with smartphone manufacturers for the next version of Android – believed to be code-named “Jelly Bean”. The report says that up to five manufacturers will receive early access to the new mobile operating system in order to be able to launch phones carrying Google’s Nexus branding. The phones could be available in shops as early as late November this year. Google also wants to reverse its recent policy of selling largely through phone network channels, and to once again focus on selling Nexus phones directly; the newspaper cites sources familiar with the matter.
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As if the current share were not large enough, HTC and FaceBook are rumoured to be getting together on a smart phone to be released in time for Christmas. FaceBook has a huge opportunity for advertising the new gadget. Rumour has it that it will run Android/Linux. Between all the OEMs making Android/Linux smart phones, service providers promoting them and “Big Brothers” like Samsung, Google and now FaceBook promoting them globally, no consumer will be able to hide from Android/Linux smart phones. Share of shipments now is well over 50%. The only question is how large the share will become. There does not seem to be any limit yet. At the present rate of growth everyone on the planet could have one within a few years. Will people ever have a need for two?
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It’s mid-May — do you know where your Ice Cream Sandwich update is? Six months after Android 4.0 made its debut on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, millions of owners of legacy Android devices are still anxiously awaiting the day the new firmware gets downloaded on their own electronic real estate. At least the scene today is much more pleasant than it was just a few months ago, as ICS is finally rolling out to several popular devices. But if you’re shopping for a phone or tablet, how can you possibly keep track of which device has what version?
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After years of trying and failing to discourage manufacturers from adding user interface (UI) layers to Android, Google appeared destined for success with the visually refined Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”). Despite predictions that ICS would kill off the “skins” for good, however, HTC’s Sense and Samsung’s TouchWiz have not only arrived in new Android 4.0 versions, but they have met with positive reviews.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Retail outfit ZaReason has built a reputation over the years for offering quality Ubuntu-powered desktops and laptops at reasonable prices. It’s a bit of a surprise, then, to see that their latest offering — the ZaTab — is going to ship with Android pre-installed instead.
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Recently, it appears that the program offering paradigm is the virtual store front so to speak. Google’s play or Apples App store, to name the two most well known ones for mobile devices. Linux distributions have always had a form of application store where they are commonly known as repositories. In essence these ‘stores’ all work the same way. A single access point to all programs available for that operating system.
Shall we play a game? Just imagine you have written the program to end all programs and want to get this program into an application store for XYZ operating system. Which one do you think is the hardest to get into?
For your program to get into a Linux distribution it has to be already popular enough for someone to decide to do the work necessary so it can be included in the official repository. That someone can be you so I would say it is very easy for your program be become part of an official distribution.
I think we can discount windows for this exercise as it does not have an application store as such. Although there are rumours that they are working towards creating one.
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There are a lot of excellent reasons to get involved with an open source project. You can learn a new language, improve your existing skills, be challenged by a community that is at the top of their field or even get better at managing complex distributed projects. There are also dozens of ways to participate. Open up a project’s bug tracker and find an issue that needs to be fixed. Write a useful new extension or plugin. Even if you don’t code, just about every open source project out there could use more testing, more documentation and tutorials and help handling the load on their support forums and mailing lists. If you are a heavy user of open source software it feels great to give something back to the community that has contributed so much.
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There has never been a better time to be interested in digital photography. Not only do inexpensive digital cameras offer great high-resolution photos, but they come with very advanced feature sets. Over the years on OStatic, we’ve also covered a huge number of open source applications that can make editing, organizing and adding effects to digital photos much easier. If you’re under the impression that you must have Photoshop to be a top-notch photo editor, think again. The open source applications that are available are beyond robust. Here is our updated collection of great tools for the digital
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The OpenFlow open source protocol for software defined networking (SDN) took a big step forward today with the approval of the OpenFlow 1.3.0 specification.
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In the metaphorical space between the two worlds, there were opportunities to play with Lego bricks, try a Chaos Machine, listen to nerd comedy, and talk zombies. You could learn about Camp Luminous, which arguably teaches open source principles, or learn to build a TARDIS from open plans.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has introduced a new feature into the Firefox 13 betas called Reset Firefox which allows users to reset browser settings while retaining personal data.
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SaaS
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The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is going to stop active participation in the open-source infrastructure cloud project OpenStack – something the agency’s employees were deeply involved in creating.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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“I wouldn’t count OO out just yet simply because of ONE reason… the license,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “It’s common knowledge that NOBODY in business will go near GPL after the V3 debacle. Apache on the other hand is MUCH more business-friendly, and the Apache server is used all across the business landscape, so I can see businesses getting behind OO for that reason alone.”
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Donald Harbinson, Program Director for Open Standards/Open Source at IBM, noted the official beginning of the transition on the [ooo-devel] mailing list on Tuesday.
“A few minutes ago, I submitted the IBM Software Grant Agreement and Corporate Contributor License Agreement for IBM Lotus Symphony contribution. This action means infra can begin to prepare to receive the ‘Contribution’ into svn when they’re ready,” Harbinson wrote.
The move was hardly unexpected, since IBM announced last January that the last release of Symphony, 3.0.1, would be the final one for IBM’s version of the OpenOffice.org suite.
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On the 7th of May 2012 The Document Foundation has announced its first certification program. This certification is aimed at professionals who are interested in having their skillset certified in order to provide professional services to their customers. The program is currently being rolled out, in fact the first official certification meeting will take place at the LinuxTag next week. I would like to explain what we are trying to achieve in a bit more details by shedding some light on the reasons such a program came into existence.
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IBM has begun the process of contributing code from Symphony, its office automation suite, to the Apache OpenOffice project, saying: “This ends the Symphony fork here with Apache OpenOffice”. Earlier in the year, the company announced its intention to make the contribution, as it plans to move customers to Apache OpenOffice. Historically, Symphony has been based on a combination of Eclipse Rich Client Platform and OpenOffice.org code that was acquired when the OpenOffice.org code was under a dual-licence which allowed IBM to use the code and not release its changes.
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Funding
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In April 1982, exactly 30 years ago, the European Internet was launched by the Dutch researcher Teus Hagen, at a European Unix User Group conference in Paris. EUnet was the very first European Internet backbone. NLnet Foundation subsequently took the lead of this initiative, and not only helped shape the European Internet, but was fundamental in establishing the currently biggest Internet exchange on the planet, and also built out a market leadership. In September 1997, so 15 years ago, it was acquired by UUnet, now Verizon. All money was put in a fund with the sole purpose to make the Internet better.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Darned if one of the in-laws hasn’t figured out how to lose weight… So, now “the little woman” is on my case to eat right. In the North I did eat right because I had only lean meat, fruits, vegetables and cereal to eat, you know, nutritious, filling stuff.
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Public Services/Government
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A few Members of the European Parliament started a Written Declaration for open and collaborative government. Gianni Pittella, Rodi Kratsa-Tsagaropoulou, Marisa Matias, Katarína Neveďalová, Marietje Schaake. Written Declarations are documents which could get co-signed by other Members of Parliament. They get adopted when they reach a majority. Written Declarations could be perceived as petitions within the European Parliament and civil society groups often pressure MEPs to sign a Written Declaration that suits their interests. Here it would be rather difficult to get them to endorse the document WD 0019/2012. The reason is simple: instead of “unrestricted” they drafted “current”. That single phrase makes the declaration appear like a Trojan horse.
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Licensing
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At the end of April, I wrote about the idea that usage of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is declining and concluded that although new, commercially initiated open source projects were indeed tending to adopt other licenses, the use of the GPL itself is still growing — especially among projects in its core community of GNU platform development. This article explores why commercial projects pick particular open source licenses and what might happen in the future.
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Programming
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Asked on the developers’ mailing list last week was whether LLVM could be used for a decompiler, which an independent developer is working to construct.
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Finance
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After a winter lull, food stamp participation in Los Angeles County picked up again in March, to rise to a new all time high of 1,036,078 persons. Other economic data points to weakness in the nation’s largest state economy, as well. Indeed, falling tax collections are largely behind the recent budget deficit blowout of 16 billion dollars. And to think: many thought the years of California’s “budget crisis” were behind us. | see: Los Angeles County SNAP Users vs. Price of Oil 2007-2012.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Merrill Lynch & Co. employees discussed helping naked short-sales by market-maker clients in e-mails the banks sought to keep secret, including one in which a Merrill official told another to ignore compliance rules, Overstock.com Inc. (OSTK) said in a court filing.
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It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes God smiles on us. Last week, he smiled on investigative reporters everywhere, when the lawyers for Goldman, Sachs slipped on one whopper of a legal banana peel, inadvertently delivering some of the bank’s darker secrets into the hands of the public.
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Pundits and Wall Street reforming politicians are crowing: Wowie! Jamie D has fought for weak regulations, especially a weak Volcker rule, but now Wall Street’s goose is cooked! We’re going to get a strong Volcker rule!
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Privacy
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What a surprise: the U.K. government was forced to reveal under Freedom of Information laws more than 1,000 civil servants have ’snooped’ on British citizens’ private data.
Don’t worry about hackers illegally accessing government systems. It turns out government workers and civil servants who are trusted with private citizen data are more likely to access your data illegally.
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DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Geek TV star uses Ubuntu 12.04 download as example of legal BitTorrent use.
Wheaton, actor on Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Big Bang Theory, and Eureka, is deep into the geek life and has been blogging for years. He may be the most prominent geek advocate in Hollywood, which he says gets him in trouble when he argues in favor of network neutrality and against ill-considered piracy crackdowns, like ignoring legal uses of BitTorrent.
Using his download of Ubuntu 12.04 as an example, Wheaton argues that BitTorrent saves time and resources. The direct download would take an hour, but the torrent feed did the job in six minutes. Piracy legislation that would shut down or hobble BitTorrent protocol traffic would not stop file sharing, but would ruin a good protocol.
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ACTA
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There is a major problem with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that has little to do with IP or the internet: how does international law get made—by the President alone, or with Congress’s involvement? ACTA’s key problem in the United States is a Constitutional question that turns on the separation of powers. The President, or an office of the executive branch like USTR, can negotiate treaties that fall within presidential powers. But for topics that fall within Congressional powers, like IP law, the Constitution requires that Congress be involved in the process.
The most obvious and difficult way to involve Congress is through Article II of the Constitution. Under Article II, a treaty negotiated by the executive branch is presented to the Senate for ratification. The process is notoriously difficult, because it requires two-thirds of the Senate to approve. So USTR, almost understandably, wants to avoid the Article II process if at all possible.
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Send this to a friend
05.17.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Now is as good a time as any to say goodbye to Linux on the desktop as a focus, and to emphasize the power and ROI gained from using Linux and Open Source solutions on devices.
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Thanks to ongoing advances in multi-seat Linux development, manufacturer Plugable was able to base its machines on Fedora, rather than proprietary software, though it also works with Windows Multipoint Server. By doing away with licensing costs, Plugable founder Bernie Thompson says the company can ensure an attractive price. The Kickstarter effort is in place to help the company realize “economies of scale” necessary to drive the cost down.
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Server
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HP has unveiled its first public cloud services in a late answer to rivals Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft and Verizon’s Terramark.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Following up on the performance comparison earlier this month of comparing Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics between Windows and Linux, up today are the results of a comparison of Windows 7 to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when using a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 “Kepler” graphics card.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Skype’s presence on Linux has never been really all that accepted… many in the community resented its proprietary nature, and only grudgingly installed it if they had to. As Michael Larabel recently pointed out on Phoronix, the Free Software Foundation is trying to shepherd free-software Skype replacement projects, but with little success thus far.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Thus, in direct practical terms, this development can do both harm and good. It might encourage GNU/Linux users to install these games, and it might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux. My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm. But there is also an indirect effect: what does the use of these games teach people in our community?
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Desktop Environments
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Newly released Ubuntu based distribution Hybryde allows you to switch between desktop environments without even logging out, and comes with Unity, KDE, and LXDE by default
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Version 0.9 of the Kdenlive open source video editor has been released, bringing usability enhancements and improvements to the effects workflow. According to its developers, the effect stack has been completely rewritten and now allows users to adjust parameters for multiple effects at the same time. These can then be grouped and the groups can be saved for use on other video clips.
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GNOME Desktop
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The GNOME Shell Window Buttons extension has been updated for GNOME Shell 3.4 and is now available in the WebUpd8 GNOME 3 PPA.
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New Releases
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Today we are pleased to announce the general availability of the 32 bit and 64 bit releases of OS4 Workstation 12.1.1. In this release we include a host of security and bug fixes as well as application updates.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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With the x32 ABI for Linux finally coming together, Ubuntu developers are making plans to support this interesting ABI in the future.
The Linux x32 ABI is intended for x86_64 hardware, but rather than simply targeting x86_64, it attempts to blend the best of IA32 and x86_64. With x32 there is a 32-bit pointer size rather than 64-bit, which drops the memory usage and could yield performance improvements, while still allowing the x32-compiled code to take advantage of 64-bit registers, a larger register file, and other x86_64 features.
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Mark Shuttleworth is the founder and former CEO of Canonical, the commercial company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Today he holds the position “Lead Product Design”, a role in which he shapes desktop and cloud product strategy. I spoke with him recently by phone about the increasing role of Linux in the enterprise, and the shift from traditional enterprise computing to cloud computing.
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Customizability has always been one of Linux’s best defining features, and the newly released Ubuntu Linux 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” is no exception.
I’ve already written about a few different ways to tweak Ubuntu’s Unity desktop generally, and last week one of those tools–Ubuntu Tweak–was updated to support the latest iteration of Canonical’s popular Linux distribution.
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Hands up if you have used Linux in one of its various incarnations for the desktop. Well if you are reading this blog, chances are you have done that. Like many other geeks and aspiring geeks I have dabbled with using Linux specifically Ubuntu and I must say after the initial novelty of using something other than Windows, or Mac OS for that matter, I have been rather casual about it.
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It is hard to estimate how many Linux boxes are out there -speaking about Desktop. Statistics shows 1%-5% of all computers run Linux. An average would be 3%. This can be true, this can be false, but it doesn’t really matter a lot as it is low number anyway. What really matters is the growth of Linux.
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It’s not very easy to find Ubuntu pre-installed PCs as Microsoft still dictates the traditional PC market.
System76 is one such company which offers Ubuntu only PCs. The company has launched two new laptops pre-loaded with Ubuntu 12.04 — 14.1″ Lemur Ultra and 15.6″ Pangolin Performance.
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With the release of Ubuntu Linux 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” less than a week ago, there’s still plenty of excitement and discussion about this latest iteration of Canonical’s popular Linux distribution.
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Move forward to April 2012 and Ubuntu 12.04 – codenamed Precise Pangolin – has been released. As we noted in our post detailing the new features themselves, there are lots of them. And, quite frankly, they have worked incredibly well. That’s not to say it’s perfect, as such, but it’s a vast improvement, which is what I like to see.
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Smartphones and the technology that powers them continue to evolve at an incredible rate. Year after year, phones have continued to close the power gap that separates them with their traditional PC counterparts. Taking advantage of the latest in mobile processors, Canonical is set to release Ubuntu for Android. The OS effectively turns your phone into a full Ubuntu desktop computer when docked and connected to a monitor, meaning the day your smartphone could act as your primary computer is drawing nearer.
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Having just launched Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical is bullish about its future, with Chris Kenyon, its VP of sales and business development forecasting that the firm’s operating system will ship on 18 million machines in 2013. According to Phoronix, Kenyon claimed that will amount to five per cent of worldwide PC shipments.
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Linux has the tendency to get no love from the major video game publishers. Well today we get news that the Free to Play games Lord of Ultima and Command and Conquer Tiberium Alliances are coming to the Ubuntu Software Center. The titles run in your default browser and installing the games through the Software Center adds handy Dash launchers in the Dash and Unity Launcher.
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The easiest way to install Ubuntu is to use the Wubi installer from within Windows. You won’t have to partition your hard disk and it can be easily removed if you change your mind.
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Six months have passed since the last release of Ubuntu, and that means it’s time for a new version – complete with a new smarty-pants zoological codename (the “Precise Pangolin” this time, better known as a scaly anteater).
This release is more significant than most. As the “LTS” indicates, this is a long-term support release, meaning it will receive updates and patches for a full five years, while more experimental releases continue to appear to a biannual timetable. The idea is to encourage businesses to install Ubuntu without fear that it will quickly become obsolete – indeed, this version ups the ante on that front, as previous LTS releases offered only three years of support on the desktop.
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One of the big advantages of Wubi is that it is much easier to remove Ubuntu installed in this way than it is if it was installed with the traditional partitioning of disks.
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Ubuntu is a very popular operating system and a Linux distribution. A large percentage of the Linux user base across the globe use Ubuntu. And many of the power users of a computer use Ubuntu as their primary operating system, including me and many of my friends. The freedom you get when you are using Ubuntu and the speed of the operating system, the ability for you to customize it the way you want, all of these factors add up to the fact that it is one of the best Linux distro there is. And support from the Ubuntu community is simply awesome.
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When Canonical launched its Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix back in February, it was based on Ubuntu Linux 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot,” which was then the most current stable version of the free and open source operating system.
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Flavours and Variants
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Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, uploaded a few minutes ago, May 16, the Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux Mint 13 operating system.
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A Raspberry Pi enthusiast has managed to get Windows 7 on the cheap Linux computer using Citrix XenDesktop, a sign that the device could bring savings to businesses, according to the foundation behind the device.
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Phones
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He noted how Linux is running beneath the shiny apps and interfaces of just about every smart phone and how, therefore, every vulnerability found in Linux has direct implications for the “computers in our pockets.”
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OpenMobile says it is looking for device manufacturers to add its proprietary software to their future Tizen devices so they can run Android applications. The company showed Facebook and Guitar Hero running on an Exo PC at the recent CTIA conference, though not apparently under a Tizen UI. A video of the apps running was recorded by The Handheld Blog.
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Android
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It was all the way back in August when Google announced plans for its biggest acquisition ever, agreeing to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Since then, shareholders and regulators around the world have signed off on the arrangement, but China has remained the sticking point for Google to move ahead with the final deal. One thing that every analyst agrees on once the deal goes through is that it will kick Google’s true, long-term strategy surrounding the Android mobile OS into high gear. Now, there are reports coming in that imply that Google’s long-term Android strategy may include some surprises.
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For the third year in a row, mobile open source software projects have more than doubled in number, with the current count at around 18,000, up from around 8,000 in 2010. The rise of mobile computing in the enterprise, coupled with the Android’s rapid adoption worldwide, contributes to the trend as developers race to be the first to market with mobile innovations.
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Of the trio of Huawei’s Diamond-class smartphones announced at Mobile World Congress in February, the dual-core Ascend D1 got the least amount of buzz.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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At about $125 or less, the Zenithink C71 is already one of the cheapest tablets available that can run Google Android 4.0. But today Pandawill is selling the tablet for even less.
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Given time and the efforts of some very bright and altruistic people, an open source solution can be highly competitive. The good news for Sugar and its customers is that they have been down the curve with their open source solution. As open source rises in prominence, established players face painful changes, but for new entrants like Sugar, there is little or no transition.
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FuseSource advanced its “Integration Everywhere” strategy with Fuse ESB Enterprise 7.0 and Fuse MQ Enterprise 7.0, two new open-source integration and messaging platforms announced at its CamelOne 2012 conference.
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For many, the name Apache is synonymous with the most successful open source project of all time – the Apache HTTP Web Server. The Apache Web Server has dominated the web server landscape for the majority of the Internet Era, even as rivals (open source and otherwise) have attempted to make in-roads.
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The Apache Software Foundation has declared the first quarter of 2012 a quarter of “unprecedented growth” – it now has 104 current top-level projects (TLP) and 51 projects in the incubator, the largest number for either count. Jim Jagielski, the ASF’s president, said the “success can be attributed to Apache’s longstanding commitment to providing exceptional Open Source products, each with a stable codebase and an active community”.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google plans to give multiple mobile-device makers early access to new releases of Android and to sell those devices directly to consumers, said people familiar with the matter. That is a shift from Google’s previous practice, when it joined with with only one hardware maker at a time to produce “lead devices,” before releasing the software to other device makers. Those lead devices were then sold to consumers through wireless carriers or retailers.
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Mozilla
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Clearly, loyalty for Firefox is obviously high among Linux users–which I suspect is why there’s been so much vocal opposition to Mozilla’s plan.
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SaaS
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As part of our ongoing focus on open source cloud, we talked with Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos about the commoditization of hypervisors, what’s driving his company’s growth and its plans to release Eucalyptus 3.1 soon, marking the company’s shift to a much more open development model. The interview is presented in two parts. Yesterday’s post covered the open cloud, the role of APIs and where open source cloud computing is headed.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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On announcing the release of GIMP 2.8 the developers claimed that the update introduced ‘important changes to the user interface’. Is this the case or are there still issues to be found? 2.8 is available on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, making it widely available and it is of course still completely free and open source. The new release has been in development for three years, meaning GIMP 2.8 boasts 36 notable improvements to it’s interface and a number of updates beneath the surface supporting these. At times I have avoided using GIMP because it was cumbersome and disorganised, so I am interested to find out if my opinion will change with the new release.
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Programming
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Nvidia has continued its series of almost consecutive product announcements and updates this week by announcing the Nsight Eclipse Edition IDE for programmers. Nvidia is looking to develop GPU-accelerated applications on Linux- and Mac OS X-based systems.
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05.16.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux Warehouse, the premier distributor of enterprise open source software for southern Africa, today announced the appointment of its new Managing Director, Jan-Jan van der Vyver.
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Desktop
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During the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) that took place in Oakland, USA, Thomas Bushnell from Google talked about how Ubuntu is used by Google developers.
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Is the Linux desktop catching up on Windows? TechRepublic’s Jack Wallen takes a look a the newest versions of Linux and tells why they’re moving in the right direction.
Whether or not you like GNOME 3 and Ubuntu Unity, who could deny the real innovation that the developers behind those desktops have brought to bear? If you then take desktops such as Enlightenment (above) and Xfce, you can make a very strong case for more innovation going on with the Linux desktop than in any other area.
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Server
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StrandVision Digital Signage recently announced that it is offering a preconfigured Linux digital signage player appliance that supports playback of digital signage content. The graphics-optimized unit is able to operate independently while automatically receiving content updates over the Internet.
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IBM announced boosts for its Linux support, including expert integrated systems and Linux-specific PowerLinux servers. While the IBM-Linux relationship is long-standing (Big Blue has provided Linux support since 1999), these developments underline a growing trend toward open source support by major IT vendors.
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I said last year that this would happen sometime in the first half of this year, but for some reason my colleagues and clients have kept asking me exactly when we would see a real ARM server running a real OS. How about now?
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The proven KePlast i5000 platform is KEBA’s high-end solution for the efficient control of all types of injection moulding machines, regardless of whether they are hydraulic, electric or hybrid.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The Linux community is one of the biggest and most prominent examples of open source software collaboration. Increasingly the community is gaining more recognition, particularly from the UK government, which has made a commitment to the open source movement in its ICT Futures agenda.
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These days, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva and a few other distributions use the systemd init tool for system starts. It includes its own tools for configuration and diagnosis, and the tricks it needs when the system doesn’t start are different from sysvinit’s.
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The Linux Foundation, in honor of Linux’s 21st birthday is having another t-shirt competition. So, if you really love Linux, can make cool t-shirt designs (That leaves me right out), then this contest is for you!
This year the theme is “Inspired by Linux” and calls on people from around the world to create a design with that in mind.
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Applications
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Over the years Barry by NetDirect has been my go to solution for using my BlackBerry with Linux. It was worth it just for charging your BlackBerry at a faster rate. Now it seems like there is another alternative called LinBerry that I am guessing is based off Barry but makes things a little bit easier to get off the ground. Michelle @CrackBerry noticed that the LinBerry project has come out of beta since its alpha launch in 2010 and allows you to perform a backup of your device and allowing you to do things live view, edit, and delete contacts. It also extracts cod files and performs other functions.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Like many nerds around the world this evening I am prepping for what, odds are, will be the first of many all-nighters involving Blizzard’s soon-to-be-released Diablo III (which releases tonight at midnight!). If you have been by my blog before then odds are you will know that I prefer to do as much of my gaming as possible on my operating system of choice: Linux. Something else you may or may not know is that I am also a large fan of the company Code Weavers that produces the commercial Wine software Crossover.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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With Krita 2.4 happily released, the Krita team is working hard on what will become Krita 2.5. Krita 2.5 should be released some time in July already, but that doesn’t mean that it will be a boring release! Here’s a short overview to whet your appetite:
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome users have a gripe that there is no pure Gnome flavour of Ubuntu which they can simply download and install without having to add PPAs or install extra packages. I have been a long time Gnome user (recently switched to KDE due to Unity) and have been looking for a pure Gnome-based version of Ubuntu. I dabbled with Gnome Shell Ubuntu Remix and liked it.
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The GNOME developers behind the Nautilus project, the graphical file manager for the GNOME desktop environment that makes it easy to manage your files and browse your filesystem, announced version 3.4.2.
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I’ve gotten a couple requests to review this distribution, and I’ve wanted to do it, but for a while all that was being released consisted of beta versions and release candidates. Now, however, version 1 “Eveline” has been released in its final form, so I am reviewing that now.
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ROSALabs, Mandriva’s partner on their last desktop, has been working on their own Linux distribution and have recently announced their latest release. If you liked Mandriva 2011, then you’ll probably like ROSA Marathon 2012. In fact, to the casual observer, it looks like ROSA 2012 is Mandriva 2011.
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The latest current version of Puppy Linux is 5.3.1, and it was released on the 25th of October 2011. This is the Puppy Slacko version, which tells you that the roots of this Puppy are in Slackware. I believe this is different from Puppy I have used before, because it was previously based on Lucid Lynx version of Ubuntu, hence it was named Lucid Puppy.
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Before the general hysteria of a new Ubuntu release starts, I wanted to slip in a note about one other distribution. There have been some comments recently, from @zdnetuk among others, about Linux distributions getting “bloated” because they are becoming too large to fit on a CD. In fact I have made the same observation myself to some extent, because I used to partition my disks in 4GB sections, and have plenty of room to load any Linux distribution I wanted into one of those, but there are a lot which will not fit in that amount of space these days.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Today marks the tenth anniversary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and many people who have followed the rise of the RHEL platform may be surprised that it is so young. Released while the burning embers of the dot-com boom were still smoldering, it–along with Red Hat’s comprehensive support for an open source platform–appealed to many businesses who wanted a low-cost way to facilitate useful workplace applications without massive IT headaches. And, as Red Hat itself notes, RHEL has also found a home in government installations.
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Red Hat held a press conference today to predict its ascendancy as the top dog in the cloud era, driven by its open source subscription model, open source community driven development model and cloud technologies.
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When Red Hat had its IPO in 1999, there was no such thing as Enterprise Linux. Back then there was just Red Hat Linux, a fast moving distribution that had new releases every 6 months. That all changed with the introduction of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) model that debuted 10 years ago.
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The developers of the Rocks Cluster Distribution have released versions 5.5 and 6.0 of their Linux distribution designed for creating high-performance computing clusters. The release, which is code-named “Mamba”, includes several new features such as support for the standard CentOS yum repositories and a common code base for the two versions of the distribution.
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Fedora
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While FreeBSD 10 is preparing to fully switch to LLVM’s Clang compiler and deprecate GCC, don’t expect such a compiler change to happen in the Fedora camp in the foreseeable future. Fedora engineers have issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to GCC and stance on “alternative compilers” within this Red Hat distribution.
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Debian Family
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The Debian project proudly announced a couple of days ago, May 12th, the immediate availability for download of the fifth maintenance release of the Debian 6 Linux operating system.
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Derivatives
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CrunchBang is a Linux-based operating system designed for speedy performance. It has a simple user interface based on Openbox and a core that’s based on Debian Linux.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu’s greatest successes are arguably among home PC users and developers who use it in test environments. But there can be little doubt that Canonical remains committed to making Ubuntu the open source desktop of choice for businesses as well. Its latest move in this vein was the recent release of an updated version of Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix. Read on for details, and what they reveal about Canonical’s long-term strategy in the world of the enterprise.
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Have you ever think of baking your own cloud within 5 Minutes? Have you ever think of Elastic Compute (Nova-Compute) within 5 Minutes? Have you ever think of Elastic Storage (Nova-Volumes) within 5 minutes? Have you ever think of your hands on Open Stack Dash Board (Horizon) within 5 Minutes? Now you should think of it. With release of Ubuntu 12.04, It’s time for Ubuntu Cloud Live 12.04. My friend Ante Karamati? has released Ubuntu Cloud Live 12.04, Hybrid Image, Burn on your DVD , CD or USB Stick, you can say Cloud On DVD, Cloud on Stick, Yes, it’s as easy as you reading this.
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In the Ubuntu world we have some common values that are not just focused on freedom, but also in how we build Ubuntu. Values such as cadence, design, quality and precision help guide us in building the best Ubuntu that we can.
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This time around, the Pangolin experience was a little rougher than before. However, in a weird sort of way, you could say it wasn’t the distro’s fault per se, although average users will not care where the problems stem from. But if suggestions can be offered, then a switch to kill with fire the open-source driver, and an ability to choose which version of Nvidia drivers to install, not only the latest ones, as sometimes regressions happen.
Anyhow, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin works well on this machine. All in all, it doesn’t offer any revolutionary advantages over Lucid Lynx, but perhaps that’s what long-term releases should be, a small improvement if that. There’s a bit of an aftertaste because of all the graphics card issues, which I’ve really not expected, but then the resolution was quick and simple. Well, I’ll keep you updated as I freshly test new things. Stay tuned.
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As a company, Inktank, one of the open source ecosystem’s newest commercial enterprises, is only days old. But it has already made a determined foray into the Linux server market with the announcement this week of integration of the Ceph distributed file system into Ubuntu 12.04. Here’s the scoop, and what it says about both Inktank and Ubuntu.
Launched earlier this month, Inktank is the creation of the Ceph development team, led by Sage Weil. Weil started writing the Ceph code in 2004 as part of his Ph.D. dissertation at USC Santa Cruz and continued to develop it after graduating in 2007.
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Having boldly gone where no-one had gone before, it was no surprise to learn that actor Wil Wheaton is concerned about the erosion of ’Net Neutrality‘ – the principle that all web traffic, users and means of access should be treated fairly and without favour.
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As the One Laptop Per Child initiative goes from strength to strength around the world, there are signs that Pakistan may be getting the message too, after the Punjab government began handing out 125,000 free Ubuntu-based laptops to college and university freshers.
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Flavours and Variants
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GNU/Linux and FOSS in general has changed the way in which we interact with Computers and with the World. It has opened gateways that none of us could’ve imagined. GNU/Linux contributes to the world in many ways but one contribution that I highly appreciate is that in the field of Education.
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My shiny tiny new Raspberry Pi arrived last month, bringing with it a lot of hoopla and renewed enthusiasm for computing. Now that my first task of getting Slackware ARM installed to it, and configuring it to run “headless” (network only, no video or keyboard connected), it’s time to turn my attention to some hardware hacking. I decided to try out some basic cooling systems for it, to see if they make any appreciable difference in the RPi performance.
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If you haven’t heard of the open platform-friendly, inexpensive Linux-powered computing platform known as Raspberry Pi by now, you will be for years to come. Just as the Altair hailed the era of the personal computer, the Raspberry Pi is ushering in a new era of powerful, stunningly low-cost PCs on a board not much larger than an Arduino Uno. Think of a traditional PC motherboard with integrated graphics, network, and keyboard/mouse (USB) IO shrunken down to the size and slightly higher cost of an Arduino, and you’ll get the idea of what the Raspberry Pi is all about.
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Here’s the thing about cloud storage for business: It’s not as cheap as you think. Pogoplug says small and medium businesses can do better by using existing hardware and still get the sort of shared storage and file access that have made Dropbox such a great success in the consumer realm.
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Phones
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Android
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MoboTap‘s popular Dolphin Browser has racked up over 16 million downloads worldwide, but that hasn’t stopped them from taking steps to expand internationally.
The company announced earlier this morning that they have entered into a new agreement with Japanese wireless carrier KDDI that will see their browser pre-loaded on a number of new Android handsets going forward.
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The firm’s latest research showed that Android picked up strong market share gains in most of the seven major nations around the world, including the United States, Australia, the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The gains were measured over a 12-week period up until mid April.
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The company’s Korean Samsung Tomorrow Web site (English translation) today published an upgrade guide confirming and explaining the path from Android 2.3 to Android 4.0.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Source code from Google and Samsung suggest that the two companies are on track to produce a Nexus tablet — a slate running a plain-vanilla version of Android. However, “it still appears that Android just doesn’t have what it takes to compete with the iPad,” Retrevo’s Andrew Eisner said. “Amazon’s Kindles had a competitive price, and that seems to have run its course.”
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This screenshot tour was created to accompany an upcoming in-depth review of Samsung’s new 7-inch Android tablet, the $249 Galaxy Tab 2 7.0. The tour comprises more than 300 screenshots, which showcase numerous aspects of the Android 4.0-based tablet’s user inteface, home screens, customization, and applications.
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Arista is one of the most useful open source transcoders. It comes with presets for your devices which makes it extremely easy to trancode videos for your devices. We interviewed Daniel G. Taylor, the creator of Arista to understand what drove him to create an open source project.
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At Interop 2012, there was one theme that dominated all others – Software Defined Networking (SDN). At the center of the SDN revolution is OpenFlow and the center of that is the Open Networking Foundation. I got the chance to catch up with Dan Pitt, Exec Chair of the ONF at Interop, where there was a high-activity OpenFlow lab.
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Events
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Two years ago, the first PyCon Australia, a conference devoted to the Python programming language, was held in Sydney because the local developer community saw the need for a targeted conference.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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While Mozilla is a leading light in the open source community, every so often I’m reminded that the same isn’t always true in the Linux community.
There has been an ongoing thread over the course of the last week about Mozilla’s lack of initial support for the Web Apps Marketplace on Linux.
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For those of you keeping score in the open source browser numbering acceleration, Google is now out with Chrome 19. As always, lots of security fixes, but what Google chose to highlight in their announcement blog post is a feature many of us have enjoyed for some time now – tab syncing across machines.
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According to a bug report filed against Mozilla’s web application Marketplace on the company’s bug tracker, the software will not support Linux at launch. The same bug report is being used by contributors to work on the problem and a first patch has also been submitted.
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This year’s CTIA Wireless conference in New Orleans is surprisingly short on major new smartphones. But at last night’s MobileFocus press event, I happened across a fascinating, one-of-a-kind handset which I hadn’t seen in person yet: Mozilla’s alpha version of a phone running Boot to Gecko, its project to turn the web technologies behind Firefox into a stand-alone mobile operating system.
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SaaS
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Individuals and firms can now build business around the open source office suite LibreOffice. The Document Foundation has announced the LibreOffice Certification Program, to foster the provision of professional services around LibreOffice and help the growth of the ecosystem of LibreOffice.
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LibreOffice has had a very successful time after its fork from the OpenOffice.org project last year, and Michael Meeks wants you to know it.
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It used to be that OpenOffice.org was the leading open source alternative to proprietary productivity suites like Microsoft Office, and it was included in pretty much all the major Linux distributions.
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CMS
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Healthcare
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ViSolve Healthcare IT team has extensive experience with OpenEMR. As a prominent member of OpenEMR Board, ViSolve team has contributed significantly towards Meaningful Use Compliance and helped attain ONC Certification successfully.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Open source Java will be brought to the PowerPC architecture for Linux and IBM’s AIX OS under a proposal floated this week that could eventually benefit the different Linux distributors.
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In ‘The Movie Vanishes’ short animation film by Pixar, Oren Jacob and Galyn Susman tell how a big part of Toy Story 2 was almost deleted because of an accidental Linux command ‘rm’ and poor backup system.
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Health/Nutrition
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A downer cow at a California dairy was recently found to be infected with an “atypical” strain of “bovine spongiform encephalopathy” (BSE), or “mad cow” disease. There has been some significant media coverage of the case, and the USDA wants the media to know they are not pleased.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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An online gun retailer has been criticized for promoting an advertisement for shooting targets that resemble 17-year old shooting victim Trayvon Martin. The target depicted a hooded figure holding skittles and tea with crosshairs on his chest. Martin was reportedly holding skittles and tea when he was shot dead — in the chest — by George Zimmerman in Florida in February 2012. The horrific shooting of the unarmed youth led to a national conversation about the NRA-crafted Stand Your Ground/Shoot to Kill law and the role the American Legislative Exchange Council played in spreading the Florida law across the nation.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Environmental activists at Greenpeace took their campaign to pressure cloud computing providers on energy to Apple’s headquarters today.
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Finance
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NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta, the most prominent corporate figure indicted in a U.S. crackdown on insider trading, has asked a judge to throw out more than two dozen phone conversations that the government has sought to present as evidence at his trial.
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Company documents show traders led by Michael J. Swenson sought to encourage a “short squeeze” by putting artificially low prices on derivatives that would gain in value as mortgage securities fell, according to the report yesterday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The idea, abandoned after market conditions worsened, was to drive holders of such credit-default swaps to sell and help Goldman Sachs traders buy at reduced prices, according to the report.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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ALEC announced it was dropping that task force in the wake of the controversy over the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin and so-called “Stand Your Ground” (SYG) laws. However, the co-leader of that task force, Rep. Jerry Madden (R-TX), revealed ALEC’s announcement to be a PR maneuver when he reassured The Christian Post that his task force’s work would continue through other ALEC task forces.
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Censorship
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The long and sordid Psystar saga creaked to its anti-climactic close on Monday: the US Supreme Court has refused to hear the hackintosher’s request to review an appeals court’s September 2011 decision not to overturn a December 2009 permanent injunction preventing the Florida company from selling Mac OS X–based clones.
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MP3tunes, a music locker service that has spent years locked in litigation with major record labels, announced last week that it was closing up shop. The startup scored a partial victory in court last year, helping to establish the legality of cloud music services in the process. But founder Michael Robertson says that “four and a half years of legal torment” forced his company to file for bankruptcy on April 27.
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Back in November, we wrote about one of a series of cases we had seen where trademark holders were going to court with a list of domain names that they insisted were selling counterfeit goods and getting the courts to issue injunctions that appeared to be quite similar to what SOPA would have allowed had it passed. That is, basically upon request, a trademark holder was able to get domain registrars to kill domain names, while forcing search engines and social networks to put in place blockades barring such sites from being listed. It appears that more trademark holders are taking notice. Jeff Roberts has the story of (regular IP extremist) Louis Vuitton trying the same thing.
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The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that are sweeping the United States are in a heap of trouble. After a Florida judge ruled that an IP-address is not a person, a Californian colleague has gone even further in protecting the First Amendment rights of BitTorrent users. The judge in question points out that geolocation tools are far from accurate and that it’s therefore uncertain that his court has jurisdiction over cases involving alleged BitTorrent pirates. As a result, 15 of these mass-BitTorrent lawsuits were dismissed.
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Earlier this month, the world lost a music pioneer when Adam Yauch, a.k.a “MCA” of the Beastie Boys, succumbed to cancer at the age of 47. A founding member of the Beastie Boys, Yauch expanded upon his success in the music industry to exert his considerable influence and contributions outside music. He had a strong interest in film, which resulted in him directing several of the Boys’ music videos and in 2008 led to him founding Oscilloscope Studios, which produces and promotes independent films. In the 1990s, Yauch adopted Buddhism and began getting involved socially and politically in a variety of charities and activism.
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ACTA
Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.15.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Scott came to my attention when I saw a great interview he did with Linus Torvalds for TechCrunch. I was very excited Scott agreed to share his setup, and as you read it, you’ll see some sharp commentary. Like Scott, I find myself doing less and less customization. Scott attributes it to the work it takes to restore personalizations, but I wonder if it’s because interfaces like Unity and GNOME 3 are getting better and because more and more work takes place in the browser, with both factors diminishing the need to mess with the desktop too much. As you read through, you’ll see a number of interesting points from Scott.
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In which we debunk the silly canard that Linux does not innovate, but merely imitates. And as a free bonus, suggest meaningful ways to contribute other than cranking out yet more Ubuntu respins.
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While it’s improved a lot recently, in the past setting up a multi-seat computer has been a pain in the ass with a lot of manual configurations needed and other peculiar steps to get the hardware/software combination working right. What if the process were a lot simpler? What if new seats could be added to a computer at a very low cost and the setup was effectively “out of the box” to the point that it’s truly plug-and-play? Well, we are now effectively at that point on the Linux desktop and there is a new Kickstarter effort to help in that initiative.
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Server
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At the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit, manufacturer Calxeda unveiled a rack-mountable unit powered by the company’s EnergyCore chips. Calxeda is developing ARM-based SoCs (Systems-on-a-Chip) that are designed to run energy-efficient servers.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Tux Linus Torvalds says “things have really calmed down” in the email that accompanies the release of the seventh release candidate (RC7) of Linux 3.4. He says he had considered making a release over the weekend “but felt that another week wouldn’t hurt”.
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The truth is that in the world of embedded systems applications range from electric toothbrushes and greeting cards to massive weapon systems. Linux is well-suited for some of these; a traditional RTOS is the right choice for others.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Popular Linux distributions make it pretty easy to encrypt your home folder or even entire partitions if you’d like, without many issues. This is a great option to have if you’re someone who needs their data, whether it’s the home folder or entire partitions, that need to be encrypted. In most cases, all you need to do is select a check mark, and it’ll take care of the rest.
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Games
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“Having another developer make games for Linux is always a good thing, but one developer will not make Linux a gaming platform,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Roberto Lim. “Left 4 Dead 2, the first game Valve plans for the Linux platform, is over two years old now. … The casual gamer on Linux will be happy to have a new game on Linux; those truly inclined for gaming will not be looking at a platform that gets games more than two years after its release.”
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Desktop Environments
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In years past, we’ve offered comparisons of KDE vs GNOME, along with comparisons of other desktop environments. But what about two desktop environments based on the GNOME shell?
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Version 0.11 of the Tails Linux distribution designed to protect user privacy and anonymity has been released. Tails, an acronym for “The Amnesic Incognito Live System”, is a Debian-based live system which includes a number of applications, such as a web browser, email client and instant messaging client, that have been pre-configured with security in mind. All of these programs are set up to use the Tor network, thus ensuring that all outgoing connections are anonymised by bouncing internet traffic between multiple nodes.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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While waiting for the Mandriva management to decide the future direction of the distribution, the community is taking matters into their own hands and beginning the planning stages for the next release, assumed to be Mandriva Linux 2012.
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Red Hat Family
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This week on Federal Tech Talk, Gunnar Hellekson of Red Hat joins host John Gilroy to talk about how to make the transition to open source sofware.
Hellekson is the chief technology strategist who helps to promote open source through an organization called the Open Source for America. This is a website that provides case studies on how open source software is the most economical way to make the key transition to the cloud.
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Red Hat has released a version of its Enterprise Linux 5 operating system that is capable of running various types of software platforms thanks to a built-in, kernel-based virtual machine hypervisor. Developed to run on IBM servers, the updated version of Linux is also certified to meet internationally recognized security standards.
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Fedora
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Fedora 16, thanks in large part to GNOME 3.2, was an awful Linux distribution. With this new version, and GNOME 3.4, Fedora 17 is back to being a useful Linux distribution.
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Debian Family
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The initial download images for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.5 were made available over the weekend. This is a “rollup” release, it forms a new installation base for the Debian 6.0 “squeeze” stable branch, it does not add major new functionality or features. If you have Debian 6.0.x already installed, it is not necessary to reinstall, you only need to install all the latest updates from your nearest mirror site.
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It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to publish another interview with the people behind Debian Edu and Skolelinux. This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor details get right before release.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is the latest Ubuntu release. Officially named as Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’, this operating system is by far the most advanced Ubuntu version. Currently its in Beta version, by has already surprised a great percentage of people with its features.
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Although I’m mostly writing about Slackware and Arch Linux related distributions I’ve got nothing against Ubuntu. I used it back with 5.10 ‘Breezy’ and was quite impressed. It even detected and configured all multimedia keys on the cordless Logitech keyboard, including the volume wheel, no mean feat at the time. That was when Debian Sarge was too old to be useful and X burped on my hardware, and I did not know enough to run Testing or Unstable branches.
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Ubuntu’s latest release called Precise Pangolin has managed to please its many admirers and silence the naysayers. Unity, the most contentious part of Ubuntu so far has turned out to be a dark horse in Canonical’s race for desktop domination. With new features like the HUD, video lens and more, Ubuntu 12.04 has even had the BBC waxing eloquent about its charm. That said, not everyone is happy with the latest release. There are, as always, some criticisms regarding the lack of a new icon theme and the absence of any major game-changing feature. Of course, the overall outlook towards Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’ is positive and there is absolutely no doubt that this is the best release by Canonical so far.
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The weeklong Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” wrapped up on Friday in Oakland, California. There was a lot of interesting notes shared on Phoronix from the UDS-Q event, so here’s a summary of the most prominent happenings last week as the future of Ubuntu Linux was plotted.
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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Oakland (California), Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s Vice President of OEM Services, has predicted that Ubuntu will be running on five per cent of all PCs sold next year. According to Softpedia, Phoronix and other publications, Kenyon said in his talk that Ubuntu was shipped pre-installed on eight to ten million computers worldwide last year. Canonical expects this to increase to eighteen million next year, which they calculate to be five per cent of the total market.
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Azul Systems announced that its Zing 5.2 Java virtual machine now features support for the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
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The Tizen project has announced that it is releasing source code and a version 1.0 SDK, code-named Larkspur. The Tizen project emerged as a replacement for the Meego project at the Linux Foundation after Nokia withdrew from active participation. Tizen involves Intel and Samsung, among others, who are creating a web application based phone with supporting native applications. This is in contrast to Mozilla’s B2G project which is implementing all of a smartphone’s functionality in a web browser view. The source code for Tizen 1.0 is described as providing a “solid baseline for device vendors and developers” and should provide all the technologies needed to create Tizen-based smartphones and tablets.
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Phones
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Android
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Smartphone announcements were limited, but they signal the steady adoption of Android ICS.
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Company scores 29.1 percent of the worldwide smartphone market last quarter and easily outpaces Apple’s 24.2 percent market share, IDC says.
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Samsung has announced the much hyped Android smartphone GALAXY S III. The phone lived up to its hype other in every department besides design and display.
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Open-source staple VLC has reached over a billion downloads, the VideoLAN Organization announced Sunday.
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Free software. In many ways it is an unfortunate term to describe what most people today know as open source software. Although the term is intended to convey the idea of freedom, it is often misunderstood as meaning ‘free of cost’. And while most open software is indeed available free of charge, there are still costs associated with implementing any software in a business. Open source software’s real value is not that it is cheaper than other alternatives, though that is more often than not the reality, it is that it offers a set of values that proprietary does not.
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One year ago, the new Swedish framework agreement for the procurement of open source became active. Five suppliers were contracted to provide software and services. Central government, the public educational sector, all twenty county councils, and 225 out of the 290 Swedish municipalities are participating. They call off mini competitions for contracts the suppliers then have to battle for. This model differs from the recommendations made in the European ‘Guideline on public procurement of Open Source Software’, aiming to overcome current barriers and increase the use of open source.
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Twitter, Facebook, the Library of Congress — all of these institutions have mind-numbing amounts of structured and unstructured data that must be indexed and searched quickly. In Twitter’s case, that’s about 300 million new pieces of information to index every day.
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The Linux Foundation announced that the OpenMAMA project has announced version 2.1 of the technology–the first release of open-source Middleware Agnostic Messaging API, or MAMA.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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By now, it should be easy to pick a browser. Most of you probably settled on a favorite ages ago, and it’s going to take some seriously cool new features — or a whole lot of crashing — to make you switch at this point. But even if you’re in love with your default you might be wondering if you’re running the right channel.
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While Mozilla is a leading light in the open source community, every so often I’m reminded that the same isn’t always true in the Linux community.
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Databases
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The PostGIS database project made its long-awaited 2.0.0 release in April, marking the culmination of more than two years of development. PostGIS is an industrial-strength geographical database that serves as the storage system for a wide range of geo-data processing systems, from map servers to analysis tools.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice is a comprehensive, professional-quality productivity suite that you can download and install for free. Works on all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Suse, etc.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Talend has updated all the applications that run on its Open Studio unified platform to version 5.1.0. Talend’s Open Studio is an Eclipse-based environment that hosts the company’s Data Integration, Big Data, Data Quality, MDM (Master Data Management) and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) products. The system allows a user to, using the Data Integration as an example, use a GUI to define processes that can extract data from the web, databases, files or other resources, process that data, and feed it on to other systems. The resulting definition can then be compiled into a production application.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Free software and GNU Linux icon Richard Stallman was taken ill at a weekend conference in Spain, reportedly being taken to hospital suffering from the symptoms of high blood pressure.
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The premier open source image manipulation tool has been upgraded with some new and updated features. Was it worth the development time?
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The GNU MediaGoblin project was announced just a year ago. The project, to build a decentralized, free software media sharing tool, has been going great guns ever since. To get an idea where the project stands today, we talked with lead developer Chris Webber. Here we share Webber’s comments on the history and future of MediaGoblin, new features, and the switch away from MongoDB to SQL.
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Project Releases
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The recently released PulseAudio 2.0 offers improved support for the jack detection feature that is available in modern sound hardware. If a user is running Linux kernels from version 3.3 and connects, for example, a second set of stereo speakers, the audio framework will detect this and offer separate volume controls along with other features. The PulseAudio developers plan to add further improvements in the future, for example to simplify the configuration of multi-channel environments.
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Public Services/Government
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In the statement, presidential candidate François Hollande also expressed his support for open source software. He agrees with Sarkozy that open source and open standards should be cultivated, especially in government and small and medium enterprises. Hollande is also strongly opposed to software patents and said that he “will ensure that the implementation of the Community patent is not an opportunity to legitimize software patents, mathematical methods and business methods.” President Sarkozy, on the other hand, is in favour of software patents.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Just as retro ideas from a bygone era can inspire modern fashion, film, and TV trends, today’s researchers are being empowered by the revival of an innovative technology concept from the past: open-source hardware.
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Programming
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Adrian Holovaty, co-founder and developer of the Python-based web application framework Django, has announced that Django will be using GitHub for collaboration from now on. Correspondingly, the project has switched its internal source code management from Subversion to Git.
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Security
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On its May Patch Tuesday, Microsoft plans to release a total of seven bulletins to close 23 holes. The company has also announced that those responsible for releasing the Microsoft demo exploit have been found and excluded from the partner programme.
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Privacy
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I was expecting the usual. More crap that nobody asked for. More anti-competitive Microsoft tie-ins. More lock-in with Microsoft services. More EULA mess. More spyware. I found pretty much all of this.
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05.14.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In April 2012, IQnection announced an agreement with Linux Online Inc. (owners of the Linux.org domain name) to create a new community oriented website, publish/maintain content and host the Linux.org site.
The Linux.org community was started in 1994. It quickly grew in size and popularity to become the Internet’s leading resource for Linux information. Unfortunately, Linux.org went offline in March of 2011.
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Desktop
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So, eventually the user was without their PC for long enough and I had to revert back to Windows XP, just to get things working for now. The PC had been brought to me because it was full of the usual Windows malware, and he wanted to switch to GNU/Linux to put an end to this. I am pretty sure that if I had more time, I could have fiddled with it and gotten things to work properly. But, it was requiring a lot of tweaking as I mentioned in a previous post about Fedora 16. I could have set up the PC to dual boot, however I decided not to get into this scenario right now as the user is a heavy gamer and it would result in booting frequently to both Linux and Windows, which I think is more hassle than it is worth. However, at some point we made a mutual agreement to try GNU/Linux again in a year or so, once different games and versions are out. Another application that is used frequently in this case during the gaming is TeamSpeak which has a Linux version available. Unfortunately, I never got that far to try and install it, but I’m sure it would have worked since there is a native Linux version available, unlike a lot of the popular games which are Windows/Mac only.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Yorba software group announced the new lightweight email client for Gnome desktop called “Geary”. It comes with a simple and organized user interface to ease the way you browse/read your emails. Also it’s written in Vala programing language.
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xplanetFX is realistic maps wallpapers and a sophisticated graphics handling produce nearly photo realistic images of our mothership. It’s GTK GUI makes it really easy to use and provides a lot of settings and a user friendly access to xplanetFX. And even the templating capabilities give xplanetFX an individual and stylish touch.
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For those of you who don’t already know about FAUmachine (FAU), it’s a virtual machine that allows you to install full operating systems and run them as if they were independent computers. FAUmachine is similar to VirtualBox, QEMU, and other full virtualization technologies. It is a project sponsored by the Friedrich Alexander University Computer Science Department in Germany (Erlangen-Nuremberg*). FAU is a computer simulator that is an independent virtual machine project. The CPU is based on the virtual CPU in QEMU.
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I work at a public library with 28 Linux stations made publicly available in four separate rooms. The room in which I spend most of my time has 10 computers, and elementary and middle school students stop by daily after school to use them. About 90 percent of the children use the computers for games, and about 10 percent use them for doing homework. Very few use the computer for creative graphics applications. I’m bent on changing that.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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OpenMW is a free and open source engine for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. It aims to be a fully playable and improved implementation of the game’s engine and functionality.
OpenMW is released under the GNU General Public License version 3, and all source code has been written completely from scratch. It also builds on various other open source tools, most notably OGRE for graphics, and Bullet for collision (and possibly physics).
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UFO: Alien Invasion is a free and open source strategy game featuring turn-based tactical combat against hostile alien forces (human or computer controlled) which are infiltrating earth at this very moment. The game is heavily influenced by the X-COM series (mostly by UFO: Enemy Unknown).
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Being present at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), Electronic Arts announced the immediate availability for download of two games in Ubuntu Software Center.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE is a free and open-source advanced desktop environment. It provides a Plasma workspaces and variety of applications for different cross-platforms. Now the latest KDE plasma and applications version 4.8.3 is available to update for Kubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin and for Ubuntu Precise derivatives as well.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome 3 developer Allan day blogged about some interesting new design concepts for future Gnome 3 releases.
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With GNOME Shell Extensions Updater, you can update all the extensions installed from extensions.gnome.org with a single click. This extension checks for updated extensions every 5 days and displays a notification in the GNOME Shell Message Tray with all the available updates:
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Democracy always wins!! It took almost two years for GNOME Developers to release that the majority of users were unhappy with the Suspend option instead of the standard Power Off.
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When Linus Torvalds sneezes the Linux world gets a cold. The father of Linux has praised Google Chrombooks for being more useful than Gnome 3 Shell.
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We interviewed Frederic Peters, the new Gnome Release Manager, to understand the future plans for Gnome 3.x, his opinion about Unity and Cinnamon and much more.
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Chakra is a desktop Linux distribution forked from Arch Linux. It is a “pure” KDE-based distribution, with a facility to run GTK applications through a Bundle System. The latest edition is Chakra Archimedes, and being a semi-rolling or half-rolling release distribution, Chakra does not need to be reinstalled when new updates become available.
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An uninformed comment on a Linux community blog has led to questions over the stability and finances of the Slackware GNU/Linux project, but its founder assures iTWire that the project is alive and kicking.
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New Releases
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Barry Kauler announced a couple of days ago, May 5th, the immediate availability for download of the Puppy “Slacko” 5.3.3 Linux distribution, based on the Slackware Linux 13.37 operating system.
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Ikey Doherty proudly announced a couple of hours ago, May 9th, the immediate availability for download of the first and stable version of the SolusOS operating system.
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Salix MATE 13.37 is now officially released! Available in both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, this release introduces the MATE Desktop Environment. For anyone not familiar with MATE, it’s a GNOME2 fork, that continues development of the GNOME 2.x branch. MATE uses the traditional desktop metaphor that was abandoned for newer GNOME 3.x releases. All of the GNOME parts that have been forked have been renamed, so that they don’t conflict with GNOME 3.x applications, but otherwise the functionality and behavior is exactly the same as it was in GNOME 2.32.x. For example, the Nautilus file manager is now named Caja in MATE, the Evince document viewer is now Atril and the File-Roller archive manager is now Engrampa. These forked applications will probably play a much bigger part in future Salix versions, for other editions as well, especially if Slackware doesn’t decide to move to GTK+3.
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Robert Shingledecker announced earlier today, May 10th, the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core 4.5.2 Linux operating system, including the Tiny Core Plus edition.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The French Mandriva GNU/Linux company has been given another lease of life it would appear from the company’s blog.
Chief operating officer Jean-Manuel Croset said in a post yesterday that a direction for the company would be announced in the third week of May.
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Red Hat Family
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When Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) recently announced its long-term strategy for OpenShift, I began to think about potential implications for cloud-focused application developers and emerging cloud consultants. Already, cloud developers are seeking to understand cloud platforms like OpenStack, CloudStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and VMware Cloud Foundry. Amid all that noise, can Red Hat attract developers to OpenShift? And equally important: Can cloud consultants explain OpenShift and its alternatives to business customers?
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Red Hat declined to provide specifics on the number of employees working in the centers.
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Its new agreement with Red Hat (RHT) is aimed at the enterprise market, specifically the telecommunications and security markets Red Hat has yet to crash but where Dell has a big presence.
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In an exclusive interview with Muktware Bryan Che, Senior Director (Product Management and Marketing for the Cloud Business Unit), Red Hat, explains what OpenShift is all about. We also talked about Red Hat’s cloud strategy.
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Fedora
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The final version of Fedora 17 does not arrive until May 22nd, 2012. I have installed the final Beta version, and it is the best version of the Fedora operating system that I have ever used. In TLWIR 37, I will look under the hood of Fedora 17, and let you know what you can look forward to in the “Beefy Miracle”.
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Debian Family
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The next version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, version 7 or Wheezy, will include software that allows users to easily set up their own cloud offerings using free software.
A media release from the project said people were increasingly storing data in the cloud, a term that refers to software as a service offerings.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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There’s no doubt about it, Apple hardware is hot these days. It seems like everywhere you look, someone is using an iPhone, iPad or Macbook. Apple is now the top computer maker in the world, outselling giants like HP and Dell. They also have some of the best consumer satisfaction ratings in the industry. Simply put, Apple is currently making the most reliable, desirable and fashionable computer hardware on the market. Some people, however, have issues with Apple’s OS X operating system and Apple’s ever growing control over the software that runs on their devices.
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Canonical announced at UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) that they plan to create a truly embedded rootfs builder, in order to make an absolute minimal filesystem to make Ubuntu run on hardware with extremely limited diskspace.
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I had written an article in beta days. I want to revisit the topic. No operating system is perfect, so to consider Ubuntu to be bug free is just like saying software does not have bugs. The reality is software always has bugs. Its the amount and severity of bugs that gives a good metrics of how usable a system is.
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There was a very interesting session at UDS by Google developer Thomas Bushnell. He talked about how Ubuntu, its derivatives and Goobuntu (Google’s customized Ubuntu based distro) are used by Google developers.
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In the final day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.10 that took place in Oakland, USA, the Ubuntu developers talked about a possible GNOME flavor of the Ubuntu operating system.
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Question: Referring to this bug about Microsoft market share, assigned to you in Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 With the number of other devices in the marketplace doing what desktop pc’s did in 2004, should this still be a critical bug?
Mark: Interesting question. I think the world is a much more balanced place now with iOS and Android so, perhaps we can consider that one fixed.
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A company that markets its own Java-compatible JVM, which is optimised for GNU/Linux, has extended its support to cover the Ubuntu distribution.
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Flavours and Variants
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So I’m in the live environment for Xubuntu 12.04, which aside from the ugly wallpaper (including every alternative wallpaper on the ISO image) is a great-looking and -working Xfce 4.8 desktop.
My main mission in running the live distro from a USB flash drive: Checking networked-filesystem support in the Thunar file manager.
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Today we share with you an interview with Dr. Leon Brin, professor, mathematician and maintainer of Mathbuntu a set of scripts that enhances an Ubuntu based distribution with mathematical software. Leon tells us the story behind Mathbuntu and how you can help the project. Enjoy!
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MagPI is a new dedicated magazine for Raspberry PI will be released monthly for free. This magazine aimed to provide a variety of tutorials, articles, how to setup your Raspberry PI and much more. It has been written by many volunteers with many levels in mind. Check more information about the first issue of MagPI down below.
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Phones
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Android
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A text editor is software used for editing plain text files. This type of software has many different uses such as modifying configuration files, writing programming language source code, jotting down thoughts, or even making a grocery list. Given that editors can be used for such a diverse range of activities, it is worth spending the time finding an editor that best suites your preferences.
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The way we travel has evolved a lot over the years. In the early days, people used to walk around with giant folded maps, asking for directions to random strangers. Not that anything is wrong with that, it was just that those methods weren’t as great as the ones we have now. For example, not only is using GPS devices more convenient than carrying maps and guides, it’s also much more time saving.
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Reddit is a popular content sharing platform where registered users submit content to the site in the form of links. The links typically point to news and blog articles, videos and pictures. Users have the ability to vote on these submissions, with the collective votes determining what content is considered good and what is regarded as junk. This voting mechanism enables submissions to be ranked on reddit’s various pages. As such, this social news site is an ideal place to find the latest news on a wide spectrum of subjects, and to share what interests you with others. Reddit receives in excess of 1 billion pageviews per month, which is testament to the power of social news websites.
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Chinese handset maker ZTE wants to get in on some of the emerging phone/tablet hybrid market that Samsung seems to own with the Galaxy Note. Speaking with reporters, ZTE’s head of handset strategy, Lv Qianhao, recently indicated that they would be looking to the combination experience for a pair future products.
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One screen good, two screens better. That seems to be the thinking behind one of Samsung’s latest awarded patent filings, spotted in the USPTO by Forbes. The patent shows a clamshell design not dissimilar to the Sony Tablet P, but using a larger, flatter form factor that’s more like a traditional laptop in shape. Also of note is a removable controller/pointer that slides into a slot along the hinge.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Some of my colleagues were keen on broader access to AT4AM, the amendment template software of the European Parliament. It is used by Members of the European parliament to draft amendments to legal text.
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In the process of achieving world domination, the philosophizing was largely factored out of the community. I mentioned a few individuals in the “founding philosophers” entry, and I think it is interesting to examine what happened with them.
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It’s often associated that open-source is referred to Linux and FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software). But as equally as important is the community. And what I want to touch base on is not only the open-source community, but how “open” the development community is as opposed to the development community of Microsoft Windows. And particularly at a corporate and managerial level.
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Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world with many gender, educational, and digital divides. Yet it is gradually being transformed by open source and digital technology. There’s little question that as Nepal seeks to help its citizens become a part of the global digital economy, it faces a series of challenges: political instability, remote physical access, poor infrastructure, and rural poverty. In April 2012, the World Economic Forum released a report that identified Nepal as one of the least networked countries in the world, at the bottom of world rankings.
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I put on my open source hat and asked myself these question:
1. Do I have the skills and know how to put on a good explanatory talk about Twitter?
2. Do I know how to record such a talk to video?
3. Do I know how to edit that video and upload it to the web?
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Events
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[ Author's note: In contrast to my usual style, the following article is a largely non-technical account. Future articles will focus on the configuration and use of particular pieces from the Linux audio applications stack. Meanwhile I hope you enjoy this report, my first for LWN.net. ]
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I found the conference very interesting, with speakers from around the world that have described several open source products and best practices on monitoring but also on configuration and management tools. A big surprise for me has been the strong push for alternatives softwares to Nagios for monitoring in particular Shinken and Icinga have received many praise.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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I’ve been using Google Chrome for Linux since it was first made available. I use Gmail, Google Docs (now Drive), Google Plus, Google Adsense, Google Analytics, Google Music, and many more. I am the original owner of an original CR-48 Chromebook, having received mine way back in Dec. 2010. I promote Google services at work and have worked hard to point my business’ compass towards their entire suite of offerings. I use a Samsung Nexus S with an official build of Android 4.04 and I’m only interested in official devices moving forward.
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Mozilla
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Back in the fall of 2011, we took a targeted look at Firefox responsiveness issues. We identified a number of short term projects that together could achieve significant responsiveness improvements in day-to-day Firefox usage. Project Snappy kicked off at the end of the year with the goal of improving Firefox responsiveness.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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After an intense week, I decided to forget about work this weekend and have some time for my hobby, software testing. So, I downloaded Mageia 2 RC, LibreOffice 3.4.5, and a Linux distro that I had never heard of: Liberté 2012.1.
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CMS
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This interview with Catalyst’s Director Mike O’Connor sheds light on how enterprise scaling of Lamp and use of CMS including DRUPAL and MOODLE can dramatically benefit companies.
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Hippo joined the growing parade of open source content management systems that are reporting big growth numbers.
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BSD
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For the first three months of the 2012 calendar year, the FreeBSD project achieved a lot when it came to advancing their open operating system. Here’s some of the interesting highlights from their quarterly status report.
The FreeBSD Q1’2012 quarterly status report can be read in full here, while below are some of the most interesting tid-bits.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Gimpshop is based on Gimp, but looks like Photoshop, and those who are used to working in Photoshop can use Gimpshop.
I knew that though Gimp and Gimpshop were excellent free programs, there were some features he offered his customers that were not available in Gimpshop. He said he would change normal pictures to sepia or black and white or add vintage effects.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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It is difficult to imagine the Federal government moving in one well-coordinated direction on any matter, and so it has been with the adoption of open source software. Some agencies were early adopters, especially the academic and research communities. As it did in universities, open source adoption in the US government originated in research settings, where sharing and collaboration were already part of the culture of pedagogy. In this way, the government had been using and creating open source software even before it was called “open source.” Other agencies and departments have been more conservative, for a variety of reasons, and are only just now bringing open source software into their operations. With this in mind, the history of open source in the US government is best understood as a series of individual stories that have collectively led to the pervasive adoption of open source we see today.
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Openness/Sharing
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The exploration of open government and civic participation in Kansas City has already begun. This weekend, a new chapter begins. A chapter that will include open source, open data, citizen engagement, a Bike Walk hackathon, and more. In fact, it might materialize into several chapters that could start with rapid-fire lighting talks and end with dueling mayors who are innovating beyond borders. And what would a CityCamp be without an unconference? That’s a whole chapter by itself.
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Standards/Consortia
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Recently, “cloud”-based music services, from big names like Amazon, Google and Apple, have been getting attention in the press. These services allow you to store your music on a corporate server and access it through your own Internet-connected device anytime you like. It’s easy to see the appeal of these services. This is the kind of thing the Internet is for, right?
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Finance
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Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he’d dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. “These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history,” the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. “In history.”
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Since the 2008 market crash, banking interests and economists have clashed over how much of their operations banks should fund with equity as opposed to debt. Bankers and others often say that, “equity is expensive.” By contrast, a recent paper, coauthored by three faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, argues that this conventional wisdom is incorrect, and that, “Quite simply, bank equity is not expensive from a social perspective, and high leverage is not required in order for banks to perform all their socially valuable functions.”
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Privacy
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CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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During the recent Civil Liberties Committee meeting (8 may) Pedro Velasco-Martins (Commission DG Trade) claimed that ACTA only targets WTO members as participating nations. I do not read that from the text of the agreement where it says prospecting nations. I do not see any provision which says that only WTO members are eligible to join.
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(de facto crony capitalism brushed over with “democracy”)
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