• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Did Linux dominate at Black Hat?

Linux users comprised 35 percent of the total.

Installing Linux on a 386 laptop

Windows for Linux users, Part 1

I’m making a best effort to turn my Windows XP box at work into a usable system. I’m tired of lugging the laptop to the office, and I have neither desk space nor a network connection for it. I’ve run CCleaner and Defraggler. I used the freeware version of Revo Uninstaller to clear out a lot of applications I no longer needed and couldn’t otherwise get rid of.

Kernel Space

• AMD Fusion A8-3850 APU “Llano” On Linux

Applications

• Top 5 MPlayer Skins for your Ubuntu Desktop

  We have recently started bringing out more eyecandy stuff as we really think that Linux has to shed its “old command only interface for geeks” image to make it appealing to more people and as you know there is strength in numbers. Yeah we know Ubuntu has changed that a lot!! but hey allow us to speed up the process. Here is our take on some of the most appealing themes to juice up your Mplayer experience.

• MPlayer2 Is Still Alive & Kicking

  Back in March I reported on the MPlayer2 fork of the popular MPlayer multi-media application. MPlayer2 came as a result of one of the MPlayer developers being denounced from the group and from there the developer and others took to implementing their own desired features and functionality from a fork of the open-source code-base. But how’s the MPlayer2 project now doing?

• Top 5 Music Notation Apps

  LilyPond is one of the best-known open-source sheet-music notation programs in the world. Created by two Dutch musicians (Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen), LilyPond utilizes a powerful yet simple scripting language that includes support for notes, chords, lyrics, orchestral parts, and much more. You can also add the
  composer and lyricist, majors/minors, clefs, and much more. You can then export everything to LaTeX, HTML, or (with a plugin) OpenOffice.org.

  To install LilyPond, use the lilypond package in the universe repository.

• Proprietary

  • Adobe Flash 11 Beta 2 Is More Stable, Faster On Linux

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Software RAID in Linux – a small tutorial

  • I made an awesome Linux cheat sheet

• Games

  • Cardinal Quest

Desktop Environments

• Xfce 4 vs. GNOME 3

  Today, we’ll take a look at how the less popular lightweight desktop environment stacks up against the somewhat contentious GNOME 3 desktop.

• Faenza Icon Theme 1.0 Released

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • One year of KDE sprints

  • Board Business

    Tonight, the new board of directors of KDE e.V. went out for dinner, generously (!) treated by our constituency.

Distributions

• Gentoo Family

  • I installed sabayon 6 what now?

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Linux makes musical friends with the Apple iPhone

        Linux and Apple’s iPhones, iPods, and iPads usually get along about as well as cats and dogs. Oh sure, you can root a jailbroken iPhone to boot Linux, but that’s just a stunt. And, if you don’t mind living dangerously, you can use the popular Linux music application Banshee to manage your music collection on iPhones or iPods. Generally speaking, though, when you try to bring Linux and Apple devices together, the fur flies. Until now. Today, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux introduced an iPhone streaming music app that lets you stream music from the Ubuntu One cloud to iPhones and iPod.

      • [Screenshots and Video] New Improved Unity Interface Lands in Ubuntu 11.10

        Unity Interface has just received a massive overhaul and the dash looks better than ever. Applications and Files Lenses on the launcher have been removed and are now integrated into the dash only. A new Music Lens has also been introduced for quickly searching and browsing your favorite artists.

        The Ubuntu Button on top left corner has been removed and a new big Ubuntu orb on the launcher now activates the main dash menu. Active blur option for the dash is turned on by default now giving it a really sleek and polished look. Application title, window controls and app menu on top panel now show all the way to the left.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Ultimate Edition 3.0 “Gamers” Released

          On one of the slowest news days of the year came the welcomed announcement of Ultimate Edition 3.0 “Gamers.” The Ultimate Edition, once dubbed Ubuntu Ultimate, is based or derived from Lubuntu, but the “Gamers” Edition takes it to another level by offering an environment suitable for gaming as well as dozens of pre-installed games and emulators.

          Since the Gamers Edition is built on the “Lite” version, regular software is somewhat less than one might find on the full version, but it certainly seems like Ultimate Lite brings more than most other’s full. You’ll find applications such as Firefox, Sylpheed, Amarok, Brasero, Pidgin, and VLC. This sits on Linux 2.6.38-8, Xorg X Server 1.10.1, and GCC 4.4.5 is installable. The list of games is quite extensive, but suffice to say that just about every cool game you can think of that’s freely available for Linux is included. Wine, Winetricks, and PlayOnLinux are also thrown in for good measure.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ screens revealed

      Two tech blogs have obtained information and images regarding Google’s upcoming “Ice Cream Sandwich” version of Android, apparently from a common source. The release will feature a new, blue-themed user interface, a revised launcher for applications and widgets, and a panorama mode for cameras, among other new features mentioned by Android Police and RootzWiki.

    • Is there really room for a third mobile OS?

      I wrote before that I thought there was no room for four mobile OSs. I felt one between Windows and BlackBerry was not going to make it. Considering Nokia is behind Windows, and the strength of Microsoft, I was betting on Windows to be #3.

      Now I am wondering if there will ever be a #3. I mean, one with significant market share. The way this graph looks, knowing that a Nokia with Windows is not going to be here in Q3 (therefore, this graph is going to look even worse for Q3), considering that the bottom of the market could be taken eventually by BADA, one would conclude there will be two mega players (iOS and Android) and there will just be crumbs for the rest (e.g. below 10%).

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Acer releases seven-inch Android 3.2 tablet for $330

    Acer announced a seven-inch tablet that runs Android 3.2 (“Honeycomb”) on a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. The $330 Iconia Tab A100 offers 1024 x 600-pixel resolution, 8GB or 16GB of flash storage, dual cameras, plus a microSD slot as well as micro-HDMI and micro-USB ports.

Guest Post: How eBay Leveraged Open Source to Streamline Transaction Processing

Event Controversy

• Regarding the MySQL Conference and Expo 2012

  Percona organized MySQL related conferences and seminars before, and from what I’ve heard, with considerable success and to satisfaction of its attendees, and there’s one coming up in London in October 2011. But arguably, last week’s announcement is quite different from the prior Percona conferences. It’s different, because it seeks to replace the annual O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo.

• The MySQL conference is back for 2012, courtesy of Percona

• Santa Clara MySQL Conference 2012: Unity or division?

  Since 2005, April has been the month for MySQL users to meet in Silicon Valley, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Traditionally, the conferences ended with an announcement of the dates for the following year. That was a good tradition.

• Announcing Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012

• Call for disclosure on MySQL Conference 2012

  Percona has announced Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012. Kudos for their vision and entrepreneurship. I have seen comments praising their commitment to the community and their willingness to filling a void. I have to dot a few i’s and cross some t’s on this matter.

• Disclosure: Truth About MySQL 2012 Conference Planning

Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo Planned for April 10-12, 2012

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Netscape Must Be Spinning In Its Grave

    Remember the browser wars when M$ crushed Netscape by all means fair and foul because the Netscape web browser brought us Javascript which M$ saw as a threat to the monopoly?

    Google is beta-testing a native client that can run C in Chrome. This means web applications will be able to run on the client natively, several times faster than Javascript…

    This changes everything:

    * better-performing web applications,
    * a new API, totally familiar to millions of developers,
    * less need for native applications on the client,
    * less need for that other OS if applications essentially can be ported to whatever OS is under the browser as long as the C-code will run on the hardware, and
    * possible new ways for malware to operate…

• Mozilla

  • Number Of Firefox Users Selecting ‘Do Not Track’ Has Quadrupled

    How do you dramatically increase the number of people using a privacy feature in just a few months? Apparently, just by putting it somewhere they can find it. A new study shows that more than 6 percent of users of the newest version of Firefox are now selecting the “Do Not Track” privacy option, probably because it’s much easier to find than on the previous version.

    Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, was the first browser company to install a “Do Not Track” option in its software. Just a few months ago, the company’s privacy chief said that of the 160 million people using Firefox, the rate of Do Not Track (DNT) users was between 1 and 2 percent.

  • Firefox 6 Next Tuesday?

    If they’re aren’t a new batch of bugs discovered between this weekend and Tuesday, the 16th of August, Firefox fans and users alike can expect a new version of the browser to be available.

Semi-Open Source

• Jaspersoft Offers New BI Knowledge Center for Open Source Community

  Jaspersoft, maker of the world’s most widely used business intelligence (BI) software, today announced Self-Service Express, a new subscription service available to open source community members that want premium, professional-grade BI documentation and knowledge base articles. Requested by over 80 percent of the JasperForge community in a 2011 annual survey, Self-Service Express provides access to Jaspersoft’s entire commercial customer portal and will make tens of thousands of Jaspersoft community members more productive as they create reports and dashboards and do analysis using Jaspersoft open source BI products.

Funding

• NoSQL Leader Couchbase Announces $14 Million Series C Funding

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Resources for learning GNU Octave

  flattr this!

  GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted language, primarily intended for numerical computations. That is exactly how it is described on its official web site http://www.octave.org. Unofficially it is also described as a “MatLab clone” although it only aspires to be compatible with MatLab. It is also free software.

Licensing

• Westinghouse Sanctioned in Case Over Open Source

  Open-source software developers convinced a federal judge to impose sanctions on Westinghouse Digital LLC, which was found to have violated an injunction against using free programming code for commercial gain.

  In 1999, programmer Erik Andersen developed software and contributed it to an open-source computer program known as BusyBox. Open-source software can be freely distributed, as long as it is not sold commercially.

Openness/Sharing

• Lucasfilm and Sony Pictures Imageworks Release Alembic 1.0

  Alembic 1.0, the open source project jointly developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks and Lucasfilm Ltd., was released to the public today. The release was announced at ACM SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Health/Nutrition

• Florida Governor Scott Reduces Choice and Competition in Health Care

  As he was gearing up to run for governor of Florida, Republican Rick Scott emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of what he and others began referring to as “Obamacare.”

  Scott created, chaired and bankrolled a group called Conservatives for Patients Rights that spent millions of dollars on TV commercials attacking health care reform, especially a proposal calling for the federal government to create a public health insurance option to compete with private insurers.

Security

• Cartoon makes better password point than many security experts

• Dell SecureWorks: Inside the APT Threat

  Stewart explains that he uses a Linux environment while all the malware is Windows executables. As such he noted that there is very little chance for contamination. In his research, Stewart has found that there are lots of different APT families, but they all tend to share some common characteristics.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Privatised police arrive on the street

  Aradical change in the way we police Britain has sneaked in below the radar over the past 18 months. In a series of Home Office initiatives designed to add manpower with particular skills or knowledge to the regular police force, six new groups of privately sponsored police have been introduced into the Met and are being deployed in a number of the provincial forces.

• Britain’s prime minister only makes things worse

  To many looking from the outside, the recent unrest in Britain may have come as something of a surprise. Recent months have seen repeated protests, occupations, strikes and huge trade union marches, but street protests with seemingly no rhyme or reason were surely out of the question. With unfortunate timing, one British commentator, Nick Cohen, wrote a piece earlier this month titled “No riots here. Just quiet, ever-deeper misery,” arguing that “the wider public remains resigned rather than enraged; indifferent rather than incandescent.” The student protests of November and December last year were limited outbursts, no more, many agreed; the establishment consensus was that most people would grumpily carry on even in the face of huge cuts to public services, massive unemployment and more severe austerity measures to come.

• Study: CIA drones strikes have killed 168 children

  Based on international and Pakistani news reports and research on the ground, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has issued a new study on civilians killed by American drones, concluding that at least 385 civilians have been killed in the past seven years, including at least 168 children.

Finance

• SEC Probes Goldman Over Libya Deals

  The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday on the filing, which was made late Tuesday. Goldman said in the filing that a probe of the company’s “compliance with the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act” was among the string of investigations and regulatory reviews it faced in the past quarter.

• The Top 1%

• Job Creation and Entrepreneurship

  Economists generally agree that our persistent high unemployment rate, – the longest such period since the Great Depression, – is primarily caused by a fundamental reshaping of the economy. The US economy is undergoing structural changes driven to a large extent, by advances in information technologies, which have led to a resurgence in US labor productivity as well as to an increasingly integrated global economy.
  Companies are able to do their present work with fewer people, as a result of advances in IT-based productivity. Moreover, many of these companies are truly global, doing business all over the world. They are cutting jobs in the US and other countries where demand is weak, while adding jobs in the booming emerging markets. Furthermore, they are optimizing their supply chains and shifting work around the world to cut costs. This is a what you would expect the private sector to do given our current global market environment.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Britain’s High-Tech Riots

  Social media and other emerging internet technologies have played key roles in Great Britain’s devastating riots, reportedly sparked by the August 4 fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, a man alleged to have had ties to London gangs, while he was in the custody of Scotland Yard. As it has in other recent uprisings, Twitter played a role in the coordination of England’s riots, but the preferred tool of Britain’s young looters and arsonists was Research in Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry Messenger instant messaging service (BBM). Thirty seven percent of UK teens use BBM, a free service that makes it particularly easy to send messages to groups. BBM’s proprietary encryption also makes messages more private and difficult to trace, another characteristic that made the service popular among perpetrators of England’s extensive chaos, arson and looting. Some point to BBM as the primary planning tool for vandals. Some have even called it the London rioter’s best weapon.

  RIM issued a statement pledging to cooperate with law enforcement and regulatory officials working to squelch the riots and seek justice their aftermath, but the company hasn’t said directly whether it plans to turn over chat logs or other identifying information about its subscribers to law enforcement. RIM’s pledge of cooperation, though, was enough to trigger a group of hackers who call themselves “Teampoison” to post an online threat to RIM warning the company not to cooperate with police. Teampoison claims to have access to RIM’s databases and said if the company turned private information over to police, they would make the names, addresses and phone numbers of RIM’s employees available to rioters. It is unclear whether RIM can un-encrypt messages sent over its BBM messaging system, but the company can shut down the entire service. David Lammy, a member of Parliament from Tottenham, where the worst of the riots started, is urging RIM to do just that. Police are also uploading photos, taken by London’s some 1.5 million closed circuit TV cameras, onto Flickr and asking the public to identify anyone they may recognize. A Google Group even formed in the days following the riots called “London Riots Facial Recognition;” the group’s subscribers are trying to find a way to apply facial recognition technology to identify looters in photos posted on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

• For all you need to know about Rupert Murdoch, look at his lawyers

  Americans are extremely interested in Rupert Murdoch’s unfolding scandal in the UK. As I wrote a few weeks ago, it has striking parallels with Watergate, an observation I offer based on personal knowledge and experience. (I am sure I speak for many Americans when I shout out a thank you to the Guardian, whose journalism on the Murdoch story is every bit as good, and in many instances better, than the legendary work of the Washington Post during Watergate.) Many Americans wonder if this scandal will leap the Atlantic or remain “contained” in Britain. Because of Watergate, I have some familiarity with containment – when it works and when it does not.

DRM

• High-calibre ebook management

  One of the delights of free software are the applications that do everything I can ever imagine in their general category. Sometimes I may long for leaner or simpler apps, but I know, for example, that K3B will give me everything I need for burning DVDs, or digiKam for managing and editing photos. Now, as I start getting into ebooks, I’m looking at calibre as potentially another of these ultimate apps, destined to be to ebooks what Amarok is to digital music.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Monsanto – the black stain on the biotech industry

  The Monsanto company does not have a Facebook page. They are well aware that if they did, it would just become a wall of constant protest. There’s good reason for the resentment, too: a long, complicated history including everything from poisoning public waterways to manufacturing Agent Orange, bovine growth hormones, and DDT pesticides. They’ve become the black stain on the biotech industry to anyone with a CSA subscription and a reusable bag.

• Of Patent Cartels and a Rising Africa

  It’s nigh impossible for any company starting life to navigate the patent offices to ascertain what belongs to who. In the meantime, we have these giants applying for as many patents as they can, some so vague as to mean almost nothing. The aim, to rake in licensing fees from competitors. Will the cartel kill creativity with time? Can a rising African tech scene navigate the almost treacherous sea of patent wolves? I guess only time will determine that.

• Copyrights

  • Fox News Tells AP Not To Use Clips From GOP Debate; AP Apparently Unfamiliar With Fair Use

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Does linux Need Defrag ?

I’d actually strongly suggest not defraging … the reason behind this? Even on windows most defraggers have 2 options, 1 Defragment, 2 Compact … sometimes called something different, but the end result’s the same.

Linux Distros: When It Absolutely, Positively Has to Be Secure

From a security perspective of Linux reliability, most attacks occur at the kernel level.

Desktop

• CompuLab Trim Slice H mini computer – small but powerful

  If you’re interested, there is a couple of choices to pick from – the Trim Slice H Diskless that lets you include your own hard drive or SSD for $279, but if you think that you can afford to fork out $319 for the H250, then taking that route will let you enjoy Linux pre-installed on a 250GB hard drive.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 415

Kernel Space

• [Linus Torvalds view of Kernel 'Voodoo']

  We shouldn’t do voodoo stuff. Or rather, I’m perfectly ok if you guys all do your little wax figures of me in the privacy of your own homes – freedom of religion and all that – but please don’t do it in the kernel.

• XtreemFS 1.3.0 release candidate arrives with new licence

  The developers of the open source distributed and replicated file system, XtreemFS, have announced, after almost a year of development, the first release candidate for version 1.3. The new version offers cross-site replication with auto-failover as its major new feature, allowing it to work in potentially unreliable cloud environments.

Applications

• Stellarium – A free planetarium software for star gazing in Ubuntu

  Stellarium is an open-source planetarium program that has gained a considerable popularity together with other free and open-source astronomical programs such as Celestia and KStars. What makes Stellarium a standout among a plethora of other contenders is its balance of features and the simplicity it offers for a novice user while maintaining a high scientific accuracy

• FreeCAD – Free 3d CAD application for Linux

  FreeCAD is an Open Source CAx RAD based on OpenCasCade, Qt and Python. It features some key concepts like macro recording, workbenches, ability to run as a server and dynamically loadable application extensions and it is designed to be platform independent.

• LogMeIn launches VPN.net

• An Overview of the Node Package Manager

  NPM is a package management and distribution system for Node. It has become the de-facto standard for distributing modules (packages) for use with Node. Conceptually it’s similar to tools like apt-get (Debian), rpm/yum (Redhat/Fedora), MacPorts (Mac OS X), CPAN (Perl), or PEAR (PHP). It’s purpose is publishing and distributing Node packages over the Internet using a simple command-line interface. With npm you can quickly find packages to serve specific purposes, download them, install them, and manage packages you’ve already installed. npm defines a package format for Node largely based on the CommonJS Package spec.

• Review: RawTherapee 3.0 on Linux

  The open source raw photo editor RawTherapee released version 3.0 at the end of July, with a revamped interface and a new palette of photo tools. RawTherapee is noteworthy for several reasons, including the fact that builds are available for Mac OS X and Windows, in addition to Linux. But this release also marks the first major update to the program since it was made free software. Let’s take a look.

  In the two years since developer Gabor Horvath switched from a proprietary licensing system to the GPLv3, a small team of contributors has grown up around the RawTherapee code. Many are users of non-Linux OSes, which is good for the outreach side of promoting open source. On the RawTherapee downloads page, you can grab installers for Windows and Mac machines, as well as 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the application packaged for the Ubuntu and Gentoo distributions. A separate page lists build for other distros, including Fedora.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Interactive SVG Mockups with Inkscape & Javascript

    After some failed attempts to embed JQuery into SVG (if you’ve achieved this or know it to be a nutty proposition, please school me!) I got really frustrated and signed up for a free-as-in-beer and proprietary site to see what was possible. http://mocksup.com lets you upload flat PNG mockups and then drag out clickable areas. Per clickable area, you can define what mockup to load next via a dropdown of all uploaded mockups. It also lets you add people to the project to collaborate and modify your screen flows, and it has a comment and notes system.

  • Changing From Microsoft Windows To Linux Mint 11

  • You’re Already Using Dependency Injection

  • Shell-fm – Console based player for last.fm radio streams

  • How to Play MP3s From The Linux Command Line

  • Fixing Permalinks With Mod_Rewrite

  • How to Create Realistic Ice

  • [Tips And Tricks]: iOS Natural Scrolling On Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

  • Integrating Pidgin and Gnome 3

  • Sed Explained—Part 2: Data Structures and Operators

    Continuing from last month’s article on the subject, we now proceed to Sed data structures and operators.

    Sed has a few powerful data structures and operators, which enable you to perform complex text-manipulation operations. Let’s look at some of them.

• Games

  • [Gaming] Helena The 3rd Video Review and Updates

    Hello everyone and welcome to my first post! If you don’t know me my name is Jake but better known as jakejw93 to the Linux community for my Youtube channel. Nitesh was kind enough to invite me to contribute to his website so expect a bit more gaming news and maybe some Ubuntu news if I feel up to the challenge!

  • Humble Indie Bundle: DRM-free, pay what you want, and help good causes

  • Charity games bundle makes $2.1m

Desktop Environments

• A foundation for the desktop – one apple, two ideas

  The story of the free software desktop is littered with what-ifs and might-have-beens. The desktop has been ‘good enough’ for years, and can boast some considerable success stories, but has yet to make a significant breakthrough.

  On the face of it, the free software desktop should be an easy choice. The average GNU/Linux desktop costs little, looks good and performs well, and offers a real opportunity to break the upgrade cycle. Cost, security, scalability and versatility are persuasive arguments for the free desktop, but other factors have worked against the uptake of Linux at the corporate level.

  Inertia among users is usually given as the reason and users are made to take the blame, but perhaps there are simpler explanations. The desktop has been left in the hands of the Linux companies, and the Linux companies are many and small. Many have come with grand ambitions and some with high ideals, but few have stayed the course.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KMyMoney 4.6.0 adds CSV import

  • Kate Turning 10 Years Old

    We almost missed it, but 10 years ago Kate was included in KDE’s CVS repository and shipped the first time with KDE 2.2.

  • Plasma Active, the stage is yours

    Thanks a lot to Intel for passing around the ExoPC at the AppUp workshop yesterday. Its kind of nice hardware to start developing for Intel based tablets, whereas for normal use, the battery life and weight is kind of problematic. I really like the idea to be able to write nice and shiny Qt applications which run both on MeeGo and Windows and the AppUp store is really open in respect to allowing distribute open source software.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Rocks 5.4.3 Now Available

  • ConnochaetOS 0.9.0 Released to Replace DeLi Linux

    When I first saw that ConnochaetOS 0.9.0 had been released, I thought a new distribution had appeared. But alas, upon close inspection it turns out that ConnochaetOS is the predecessor of DeLi Linux. Because it seemed like years since I last heard anything about DeLi, I figured I’d take a look this new submission.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS service supports Java EE 6

    Open source technology provider Red Hat has enhanced its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, with support for Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 6.

  • Fedora

    • Thursday in Fedora

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Unity Update Part 2: Music Lens, Indicator Changes And More

        Further to our look earlier today at the design changes that Unity 2D in Ubuntu 11.10 is sporting, here is short burst of screen shots and tid-bits on changes to Ubuntu proper.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Latest Updates Revealed The New LightDM Login Theme | Video Preview

        Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 development release comes with the default LightDM display manager login theme, but after installing recently available updates for Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Oneiric Ocelot! it has a new polished theme as we have seen earlier in this post.

      • Bad to worse? New ubuntu unity design ignites heated arguments

        The unity shell and the top panel was always a design headache for those who behind the development. The design in its current form itself was criticized by many and was one of the reasons why many people hated unity. The daily builds of the unity 2D had a new iteration of the design apparently trying to solve some of the issues associated with the desktop shell. The new design now is now causing far more criticism than the current version.

      • Get Set for Thunderbird Email, Other Changes, in Ubuntu 11.10

        The next major release of Ubuntu is imminent, and it will bring with it some significant improvements and big changes. While some users are still getting to know Natty Narwhal, version 11.04, Ubuntu 11.10, dubbed “Oneiric Ocelot,” is due on October 13th. Several alpha versions of Ocelot have appeared already, but now the new version has had a feature freeze, according to the Ubuntu wiki. Here are some of the changes you can expect in Ubuntu version 11.10.

      • Natty Narwhal netbook: The ultimate network administrator toolkit

        You can be the coolest and best-equipped network administrator on the block with Ubuntu Natty Narwhal Linux on a netbook. Netbooks are lightweight and portable, have long battery life, and bright sharp screens — and, thanks to Linux and open source, you can outfit your netbook with all the software network troubleshooting and fixit utilities you’ll ever need.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android Ice Cream Sandwich Coming, Images Leaked

      arking the end of so-called fragmentation, Android Ice Cream Sandwich is getting ready for the prime-time. According to reports there are couple of screenshots of the development version of Ice Cream Sandwich making their rounds on the Internet.

      We have gather reports from different source and present you will the picture. Looking at these rumored reports, there is no doubt that iOS 5 will be left far behind and no surprises if Apple will blatantly copy some of these features.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Despite critics, Chromebooks prove their business mettle

    But as I evaluate recent product announcements and business growth for Chromebooks, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Google has a winner with the Chromebook.

Programming, creativity and open source

There are people who think software development is devoid of creativity. Of course, anyone who has even a passing interest in development, or, say, has ever found him- or herself having a late night chat in a disreputable Sydney pub with a Drupal/Node.js developer, knows that this is untrue.

It’s not just the programming process itself — breaking down a problem into its component parts and figuring out how to solve it in the most efficient (or least dangerous!) way possible — that involves creativity

Twitter runs open source for developer website

Twitter to open source streaming data analyzer

Open Source Phone System with Twilio OpenVBX

OpenVBX comes packaged with Twilio Client, allowing users to make calls directly from the browser and if their status is set to available, they will be able to receive calls right in the browser.

Events

• Linux marking 20 years in Vancouver

  Linux is celebrating its 20th birthday this year—and the party’s officially coming to Vancouver.

• Session on future directions of FOSS held

  The International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) held a consultation session on ‘Future directions of FOSS in India’ at Technopark here on Tuesday in order to establish future directions for the use and promotion of free and open source software in the country.
  The consultation session is first of a series of similar sessions.

SaaS

• Nebula Cloud Project Gets Buzz, But Will Proprietary Players Taint It?

  In case you’ve missed it, Nebula, a new startup from former NASA CTO Chris Kemp, which is focused on open source technology for large private cloud deployments, is generating a lot of hubbub. Nebula is billed as a way for many companies and organizations to leverage the kind of muscle in the cloud that Google and Facebook do, at a fraction of the cost. Simon Phipps has noted that at OSCON, luminaries such as Bill Joy and Al Gore waxed rhapsodic in a video about Nebula. Here is more on what Nebula is all about, including some concerns about whether proprietary players might taint its open source focus.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Portable 3.4.2 (complete office suite) Released

Funding

• NoSQL, Yes Funding! Couchbase Raises $14 Million

  The financing round was led by Ignition Partners with participation from the company’s existing backers Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, and North Bridge Venture Partners.

Public Services/Government

• UK Digital Future to Fail Without Government Focus

  The Government needs to invest in training developers in open source platforms if the country is to stand a chance of competing with its American and European counterparts in digital development.

  Open source software is extremely valuable for web companies in the UK but many are experiencing skills shortages that are stalling their growth.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Willow Garage Announces Availability of New PR2 Robot for $200,000

    The combination of PR2 and the open source Robot Operating System (ROS) means that researchers benefit from immediate time to innovation. Right out of the box, the PR2 and ROS provide a complete, integrated hardware and software platform for research and development in the personal robotics field.

Solving Microsoft’s hard problem

Microsoft has a problem to solve. On the one hand, open source is not going away – its distributed, modular and iterative approach clearly has many advantages compared to traditional top-down development techniques when it comes to writing and maintaining complex code. On the other hand, Microsoft has spent over a decade propagating variegated FUD against it (although it’s true that it has adopted a more accommodating stance in recent years, what with the release of odd bits of code under open source licences, and various attempts to snuggle up to some open source projects).

Still, Microsoft’s basic stance remains the same: free software is OK for certain, limited situations, but for serious, enterprise-y stuff you need honest-to-goodness closed source. Given that, how can it begin to tap into the power of open source for its major projects without seeming to admit it got it all wrong, and that open source is actually a better approach?

Rupert Murdoch endorses Carey as next in line

Rupert Murdoch acknowledged publicly for the first time that his son James is not the preferred choice to succeed him as News Corp. CEO, at least in the near-term.

Generation F*cked

The UN’s first ever report on the state of childhood in the industrialized West made unpleasant reading for many of the world’s richest nations. But none found it quite so hard to swallow as the Brits, who, old jokes about English cooking aside, discovered that they were eating their own young.

According to the Unicef report, which measured 40 indicators of quality of life – including the strength of relationships with friends and family, educational achievements and personal aspirations, and exposure to drinking, drug taking and other risky behavior – British children have the most miserable upbringing in the developed world. American children come next, second from the bottom.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Aggression during G20 rally ‘perpetrated by police,’ judge rules

  A Toronto judge has ruled that “adrenalized” police officers acted as aggressors at a peaceful political rally that led to dozens of arrests during last year’s G20 summit.

  “The only organized or collective physical aggression at that location that evening was perpetrated by police each time they advanced on demonstrators,” Justice Melvyn Green ruled on Thursday. He was referring to a demonstration at Queen St. and Spadina Ave. on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

• The Patriot Act and the End of the Rule of Law

  Since 9/11, we are living in a political state where personal privacy, free flow of information and freedom of association have been diminished as a result of the Patriot Act, which weakens the rights of individuals while increasing the military and police power of the state and federal governments. The executive branch has undermined the rule of law by eroding rights established in the Constitution. One example is the Bush administration’s use of offshore torture and rendition. Another is the failure to ask Congress for a Declaration of War before invading Iraq and other aggressive military expeditions. Another is the selected assassination of leaders like Osama Bin Laden.

• London’s Rioters Are Thatcher’s Grandchildren: Pankaj Mishra

  I am often asked, when in the U.S. or Europe, whether I feel frightened while traveling through such obviously dangerous places as Afghanistan and Kashmir.
  It’s hard for me to explain, and so I never confess, that I feel more insecure on the streets of Tower Hamlets, a London borough just south of Tottenham and Hackney, the epicenters of London’s riots.
  Tower Hamlets, where I often go to work in a friend’s apartment, has among the highest rates of poverty, unemployment, overcrowding and crime in Britain. But it is not a ghetto. Segregation is more insidious, and inequality has shrewd disguises, in what is also one of London’s most diverse boroughs.

• The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom

  I cannot accept that this is the case. Indeed, I believe that the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society. The last two decades have seen a terrifying decline in standards among the British governing elite. It has become acceptable for our politicians to lie and to cheat. An almost universal culture of selfishness and greed has grown up.

• Riot-smashed comic-shop window in Birmingham makes for inadvertent summation of England’s Current Situation

  Joe from Forbidden Planet sez, “A couple of our comics stores in Manchester and Birmingham got damaged during the awful riots this week (what sort of numpty attacks their local comics store?!) – luckily they didn’t get into the stores, it was just the frontage took some bruises and staff are all fine. One of our colleagues at our much loved Nostalgia & Comics store in Birmingham, David, sent us this photo which just seemed to sum things up rather nicely.”

• The Debt Crisis and the War Economy: Pentagon Purchases $23 Billion Worth Of Global Hawk Drones

  With $14 trillion in the hole and a slew of wars seemingly no one wants America to be in, what better way for the United States to spend their money by putting $23 billion into spy planes?

• Attacking the messenger: how the CIA tried to undermine drone study

  The US Central Intelligence Agency and unnamed ‘US officials’ are attempting to undermine the Bureau’s investigation into US drone strikes in Pakistan, it was revealed today. The attack is two-pronged.

• Police monitor beaten in back of police van

  Independent police monitor punched and kicked to the head and legs in back of police van, while monitoring policing of disturbances. The Network for Police Monitoring will make a complaint to the Metropolitan police after one of its volunteers was arrested and beaten by police while monitoring the policing of disturbances in Enfield on the night of Sunday 7th August. Along with two others, Taherali Gulamhussein was stopped and searched by police under section 60 powers, which gives them the right to search for weapons.

• China Gleefully Uses UK Desire For Censorship To Validate Its Own Censorship

  We’ve talked repeatedly of the blatant hypocrisy of many Western nations talking about the importance of internet freedom and condemning China (and others) for their internet censorship… while still wanting to censor at home. As we’ve warned, such efforts only give repressive regimes who censor the “cover” they need to continue. And, of course, with UK politicians looking to censor the internet to try to stop the riots, China has quickly used this as validation for its Great Firewall censorship:

Cablegate/Leaks

• This week in WikiLeaks Press: 1-7 August

• Thomas Drake; ‘Yes’ Would do it Again

• Executive Order Responding to WikiLeaks Due Shortly

  The Obama Administration is putting the finishing touches on a new executive order that is intended to improve the security of classified information in government computer networks as part of the government’s response to WikiLeaks.

  The order is supposed to reduce the feasibility and the likelihood of the sort of unauthorized releases of classified U.S. government information that have been published by WikiLeaks in the past year.

• Under the long arm of Indonesian intelligence

  IT WOULD seem an unremarkable venture – a group of American tourists visiting a cultural centre in the Papuan town of Abepura. But to one observer the event (lasting, as he later reported, precisely 35 minutes) was laden with potential significance.

  The man in the shadows as the visitors watched a traditional dance was an informant for Indonesia’s elite special forces unit, Kopassus. In a subsequent report, he noted that, while the visit had been ”safe and smooth”, there was no room for complacency. It was a point heartily endorsed by his Kopassus contact, Second Lieutenant Muhammad Zainollah, who alluded, in a report to his own commander, to the risk of foreign tourists ”influencing conditions of Papuan society”.

  ”Politically, there needs to be a deeper detection of the existence hidden behind it all,” he warned, ”because of the possibility of a process of deception … such as meetings with pro-independence groups.”

• Realigning the Public Perceptions of Anonymous and Wikileaks.

  Proponents of Wikileaks identify Julian Assange as an international hero and liken him to the Founding Fathers of the United States. Critics cast Wikileaks as a nefarious syndicate deserving the label of foreign terrorist organization. Some go even further by demanding Julian Assange be given the death penalty or summary execution. In either case, the situation and stakes are clear. We are living in the age of the information revolution. The invention of the personal computer and internet connected us all. It also produced participatory democracy—on an unprecedented scale—that caught the international power elite completely off guard. Now we observe these power brokers frantically scrambling to return the naïveté of the public back to the levels prior to globalization in the wake of this technological empowerment.

  This should not come as a surprise. Authority figures rarely want to cede power to others. Nevertheless business leaders, government officials, and IGOs need to realize that there is no turning back. The technology is here to stay. The only question remaining is: where do we go from here? The consensus from these entities seems to be to target Wikileaks in order to cut the head off the proverbial snake. However, those who propose this measure fail to comprehend the size and scope of this lofty idea.

  The cyber security giant H.B. Gary realized this when it started testing the waters in defense of Bank of America. In anticipation of a presumably embarrassing document dump by Wikileaks, Bank of America retained H.B. Gary Federal—by recommendation of the U.S. Department of Justice—as a security consultant. Everything seemed okay and out of the public eye until the CEO of H.B. Gary, Aaron Barr, began antagonizing the internet activist group known as Anonymous, which operates in tandem with Wikileaks’ transparency efforts worldwide as a guard dog. In both private correspondences and public statements, Barr boasted of having information that would cripple the infrastructure of the group and render them ineffective.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Shell fights spill near North Sea oil platform

  Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has said it is working to stop a leak at one of its North Sea oil platforms.

  The leak was found near the Gannett Alpha platform, 180 km (113 miles) from Aberdeen, Scotland.

  The company would not say how much oil may have been spilt so far, though it said it had “stemmed the leak significantly”.

Finance

• Italy turns on the ‘parasites on society’ in tax clampdown

  Italy has launched a hard-hitting television campaign against the country’s endemic tax evasion as Silvio Berlusconi’s government tries frantically to reassure Europe and the markets that it can reduce its massive public debt and avoid a Greek-style meltdown.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Freedom House calls for withdrawal of Hungary’s new church law

  Washington-based lobby group Freedom House has called on the Hungarian government to withdraw the country’s recent church law, the international human rights watchdog said on its website on Thursday.

• Russia youths seek ‘social lift’ at Kremlin political camp

Civil Rights

• 8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

  Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

• London Is the Surveillance Society’s Biggest

  london fullness.jpgFor several years now, the British media have been telling us that theirs is a surveillance society. “It could be the 4 million closed-circuit television cameras, or maybe the spy drones hovering overhead, but one way or another Britons know they are being watched. All the time. Everywhere,” Luke Baker wrote in a representative Reuters article published in 2007, going on to note that “Britain is now the most intensely monitored country in the world, according to surveillance experts, with 4.2 million CCTV cameras installed, equivalent to one for every 14 people.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Judgment Day

It is clear to me that retail outlets in North America tend to comply with M$’s wishes when it comes to allowing real competition in operating systems on retail shelves. Here are some compelling evidences:

1. The standard argument is that retailers should supply what their customers want. Why is it that Walmart.com‘s customers want 70 books on Linux but only 2 PCs, and then only very low-end devices? That other OS finds 470 books and 426 computers. If 7:1 is the ratio of interest, should there not be 60 GNU/Linux PCs on those shelves?
2. If a customer wants Linux and searches BestBuy’s site they are given M$’s and Apple’s products to install their operating systems and nothing Linux-like at all.

Desktop

• Community to HeliOS – We’re Burnin’ for You

  What we don’t have is the time to get the Linux live cd’s burned. Looks like we are going to need upwards of 50 for our immediate needs.

  If you have time and the resources to help us burn these disks, we need to have these disks on hand within the next couple of weeks.

Kernel Space

• Does it matter what Linus uses?

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Puts Out An OpenGL 4.2 Linux Driver

    While Mesa won’t have OpenGL 4.2 support for some time, NVIDIA released an OpenGL 4.2 preview driver on Monday as soon as the Khronos Group had published the new specification. AMD yesterday has now released a beta Linux driver (of their Catalyst blob, nothing to do with open-source) that provides OpenGL 4.2 support.

  • What Mesa Has Left With OpenGL 3, OpenGL 4

    With the release this week of the OpenGL 4.2 specification (and accompanying GL Shading Language 4.20 revision), the TODO list for the open-source Mesa developers just got a bit longer. Mesa / Gallium3D still lacks full support for OpenGL 3.0 and all of the revisions since that 2008 specification release.

    The OpenGL 3.0 support in this open-source OpenGL library is slowly coming together (see the many Phoronix articles), but the GL Shading Language 1.30 support is incomplete along with other key areas. Some of the functionality is also limited “out of the box” due to patent / IP restrictions.

Applications

• Xournal: A Fun Note-taking / pdf Annotating App

  Here is a really fun, kid-friendly application that is not only great for taking notes in class, but it’s also an easy pdf annotator for filling out those fancy forms (college or employment applications) that expect you to fill in tiny little spaces with legible writing. Now when the teacher draws a diagram on the chalkboard and you need to copy it down, you can do it on your laptop or netbook instead of a piece of paper that can blow away when you drop your books (I’m clumsy and lose alot of stuff that way, lol) or get lost among all the other stuff you have to carry around in your backpack.

• Longomatch a sports video analysis tool

• Tux Paint Kids Summer Drawing Contest!

  Here’s a chance to show off your talent using a great drawing program made especially for kids. Tux Paint is an award-winning drawing program you can download to your computer. Tux Paint was recently awarded SourceForge.net Project of the Month. It will run on all versions of Windows (including Tablet PC), Mac OS X 10.4 and up, Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. And it’s FREE!

• Instructionals/Technical

  • The Perfect Server – Debian Squeeze (Debian 6.0) With BIND & Dovecot [ISPConfig 3]

  • Ubuntu 11.10 Will Use Thunderbird as Default Mail Client

Desktop Environments

• Some notes from Desktop Summit 2011

  As usual, Desktop Summit 2011 has been a lot of fun. I’ve been to most of the GUADEC and aKademy free desktop events in the past few years, but this was the first time I didn’t give a talk. Even that way, it was definitely worth spending a week in Berlin.

• Desktop Summit 2011 Thoughts

• Joining the Game at the Desktop Summit

  Desktop Summit 2011 continues. On Tuesday, GNOME and KDE had their annual meetings, with KDE e.V. managing to finish in time for lunch. However, many members came back after lunch to continue discussion in a BoF about challenges and opportunities for KDE. Over the past few days, the University has been busy with four tracks of BoFs, workshops and meetings – enough to keep most attendees checking their schedules and the building maps.

• Branding stupidity

  One of the last talks I attended on Desktop Summit was “Swimming upstream or downstream? Both!”. Announced as speaker was Vincent Untz, but he didnt the talk alone, there was also Allison Randal, Harald Sitter and our own Jaroslav Řezník.In this talk came up the problem with the branding.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Joining the Game at the Desktop Summit

    Desktop Summit 2011 continues. On Tuesday, GNOME and KDE had their annual meetings, with KDE e.V. managing to finish in time for lunch. However, many members came back after lunch to continue discussion in a BoF about challenges and opportunities for KDE. Over the past few days, the University has been busy with four tracks of BoFs, workshops and meetings – enough to keep most attendees checking their schedules and the building maps.

  • KDE Commit Digest for 31 July 2011

    In this week’s KDE Commit-Digest Artem Serebriyskiy introduces the new Nepomuk Web Extractor in a featured article. The list of changes include:

    * Desktop layout control moves from pager to KWin
    * OwnCloud gets instant search and sees many smaller commits which bring minor new features and work on the user interface
    * An asynchronous Nepomuk resource retriever is implemented in KDE PIM to improve performance
    * Rekonq receives a synchronisation feature
    * Early version of Dolphin 2.0 comitted
    * OpenVPN configuration import/export is now possible in Network Management
    * Kate now supports local folding
    * In Calligra there is work on caching and multiple bugfixes, Krita gets an update of undo support.

  • collect.kde.org

    I am about to leave Berlin to go back home for almost an entire week before heading off agian to Taiwan. While visiting wiht my good friends Marco and Sebas over beer I finished installing Synchrotron on the server the amazing (and award winning!) KDE sys admin team allocated it for.

  • KWin at Desktop Summit

    Wow, what a week! It’s just great to be at Desktop Summit again and meeting all those KDE people again and also the GNOME people which gives the event a different and pleasant touch.

Distributions

• Tails: One more distro for the privacy-conscious

  A couple of weeks ago I posted some information about the Department of Defense releasing its Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) Linux distribution aimed at giving remote workers a more secure way to access government networks — but also available to the public for anyone’s use who wants a little extra security.

• New Releases

  • Network Security Toolkit (NST v2.15.0)

  • Berry 1.11

  • [Redo] Stable Version: 1.0.1

  • Linux Deepin 11.06.1 发布了

  • Ultimate Edition 3.0 Lite

    Well ladies and gents we now have Ultimate Edition 3.0 Lite. Please do not make this into what it is not. This is a lite edition made for computers with low resources. It is in no way even close to what the non lite Ultimate Edition 3.0 will be. This is specifically designed for computers with low resources IE notbooks etc. You can read more about that here.

  • ConnochaetOS 0.9.0 released

    I am pleased to announce the release of ConnochaetOS 0.9.0. After one year of development and after three years after the last release of it’s predecessor DeLi Linux, this the first stable release of ConnochaetOS.

• Red Hat Family

  • PGA Tour partners with Red Hat, CDW on Linux media asset system

    Linux is a godsend for many, including those obsessed about the professional breakup of Tiger Woods and former caddie Steve Williams.

    [...]

    Gredenhag said reliability and suppot for XFS were key factors for selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It was implemented on RHEL 5, which does not incorporate XFS per se, but Red Hat offered support for it as an option and CDW did the implementation of the feature. XFS — which is very fast file system for very large video files, such as 40 gigabyte files — is now in Red Hat Linux 6 and will eventually be implemented by PGA Tour, said Gredenhag.

  • PGA Tour partners with Red Hat, CDW on Linux media asset system

  • CentOS 6 review

    CentOS, Community ENTerprise Operating System, is a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not many would consider it a desktop distribution, but it could be configured as one, though it requires a bit more tweaking than other well known desktop distributions to just work. The latest stable version, CentOS 6, was released on July 10, 2011.

    [...]

    This was just an excursion to determine whether CentOS 6 could be a good candidate as a desktop distribution for non-experts, or new users. The verdict: Unless you do not mind getting digital grease on your hands, there are better RPM-based distributions available. Fedora or any Fedora Spin, makes a better desktop distribution than CentOS 6.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Pioneering live-boot distro gets Chromium and LibreOffice

      Klaus Knopper has released version 6.7 of his Debian-based live-CD Linux distro. Again employing the LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment), it is also said to include version 3.3.3 of the LibreOffice suite, the Chromium 12 web browser, and a new version of ADRIANE (Audio Desktoop Reference Implementation And Network Environment) for partially-sighted users.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Pint-Size PPA Primer

        Package management in Linux is great, but unfortunately, it comes with a few cons. Granted, most distributions keep all your software, not just system software like Apple and Microsoft, updated. The downside is that software packages aren’t always the latest versions. Whatever is in the repository is what you get. Another frustration is when the software you want to install isn’t in the distribution repositories at all.

      • Bad to worse? New ubuntu unity design ignites heated arguments

        The unity shell and the top panel was always a design headache for those who behind the development. The design in its current form itself was criticized by many and was one of the reasons why many people hated unity. The daily builds of the unity 2D had a new iteration of the design apparently trying to solve some of the issues associated with the desktop shell. The new design now is now causing far more criticism than the current version.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot’ Gains Linux 3.0 and Thunderbird

        After all the controversy that followed the release of Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal,” it’s hard not to anticipate with at least some anxiety the upcoming debut of version 11.10, also known as “Oneiric Ocelot.”

      • Mark Shuttleworth on patents, tablets and the future of Ubuntu

        Mark Shuttleworth: The patent system is often misunderstood. It’s sold as a way of giving the little guy an opportunity to create something big … when in fact patents don’t really work that way at all.

        What they do very well is keep the big guys entrenched and the little guys out. For example, it’s very common in established industries for all of the majors to buy up or file as many patents as they can covering a particular area. They know and accept that the other majors are all in the same industry and essentially cross-license each other to keep the peace within that defined market. But they use that arsenal to stop new entrants coming in and disrupting the market.

      • Ubuntu 11.04 vs Windows 7 vs OS X 10.7 (Lion)

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android keeps growing in U.S. — especially in the south and west

      ComScore’s second-quarter U.S. smartphone study shows that Android went up two percent in June to 40.1 percent share, while Apple’s iOS remained steady at 26.6 percent. Meanwhile, Jumptap released a study comparing usage state-by-state, showing iOS’ strength in New England and the upper Midwest and Android’s greater popularity in the South and West.

    • Android mobile ref platform targets vertical markets

      Elektrobit Corp. (EB) announced a Android reference platform for vertical-market smartphones and tablets. The EB Specialized Device Platform is available now with a Texas Instruments OMAP3 processor — an OMAP4 version is coming next year — and a 4.0- or 4.3-inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen, plus a wide variety of wireless and sensor options including 4G LTE.

    • Google Wallet, NFC smartphones spur contactless PoS terminals

      Google Wallet and other mobile payment providers, coupled with Near Field Communcation-enabled smartphones, are stimulating the production of contactless technology in cash registers, says ABI Research. Some 85 percent of Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminals that ship in 2016 will be “contactless-enabled,” up from 10 percent in 2010, says the research firm.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Getting Plasma Active on your tablet

Report Cites Lack of Open Source Skills As a Barrier in Enterprises

As we’ve reported, free training and documentation resources for open source projects have proliferated in recent years. Likewise, organizations like The Linux Foundation and commercial open source companies such as Red Hat offer substantial training resources, many of them free. Still, InfoWorld cites niche security applications in conjunction with a lack of in-house skills at many companies, and this is a good point.

Open Source Awards 2011 Now Live

Last year I was acting as a judge for the e-commerce application category, while this time I’ll be part of the Open Source Business Applications jury.

Nominate your favourite free software project for Packt’s 2011 Open Source Awards

The great guys at Packt Publishing just released the details for theirs 2011 Open Source awards.

Research reveals value of gender diversity in open source communities

Open source research often paints the community as a homogeneous landscape. I have collected stories from open source contributors to begin constructing a new narrative of diverse experience. These contributors are 20 women and men, living in seven countries.

Dedicated people have enacted some impressive initiatives, but a deep gender gap still exists. You may have heard recent conference sessions about increasing diversity in open source, seen the anti-harassment policies, or noticed the women’s groups in large open source projects.

Open Source is Ready for Prime Time

Welcome to another edition of Take Five. In today’s edition I talk open source software development in today’s enterprise world with Clay Loveless, currently founder at Jexy and formerly of Mashery (where he was a co-founder).

Stephen Wellman (SW): Hello, Clay, welcome to Take Five, a new feature on the SourceForge blog where we discuss the pressing issues facing today’s IT professionals. It’s a pleasure to have with us. As someone who works with developers, how has the role of open source software development changed in today’s business world? Are larger businesses more amendable to open source now than they were a few years ago?

NHS Scotland Open Desktop Initiative

…like the Javascript Version (pyjs), the “Desktop Version” (pyjd) is actually available for multiple platforms as well: Windows (all versions dating back even to Windows 2000), Apple (tablets as well as laptops and desktops), Android (all versions), GNU/Linux (all versions), GNU/FreeBSD (all versions) – about the only modern platforms the Desktop version isn’t available for is for Blackberry OS and Symbian, because they’re proprietary.

Events

• What’s Coming Up For LinuxCon NA 2011

  While the Berlin Desktop Summit is still happening this week, happening next week in Vancouver, Canada is the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon North America 2011 event. This event is special, in particular, for it being the 20th anniversary of Linux.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Unleashes Native Client Into Chrome, Next-Gen Web Apps To Follow?

    For well over a year now, Google has been hyping up something called Native Client. It’s an open source technology that allows a web browser to run compiled native code. In other words, it’s a potential missing link between native apps and web apps. And now it’s finally getting baked into Chrome.

  • Google’s Chrome operating system gets a much needed update

    I quite like Google’s Chrome operating system (OS)–a Linux variant that use the Chrome Web browser as its interface–but as it’s being shipping today, Chrome OS has problems. Fortunately, in the latest Chrome OS stable channel release, Google is finally addressing some of these rough spots.

    To put it to the test, I installed the new Chrome OS, Chrome version 13.0.782.108, to my Samsung Chromebook. It took a while to install-not the installation itself, that took about a minute-but to get it going. I had to click the update button several times to get things going. I’m not the only one who found that to be the case.

Funding

• Open-source PaaS startup gets $8 million in funding

  Cloud-based PHP “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) vendor AppFog on Thursday announced an $8 million round of venture funding.

• Economy up or down, can open source come out on top?

  We’ve written about how a bad economy is indeed good for open source software. We’ve also recognized that with open source software’s maturity and place at the enterprise software table, a bad economy can be a double-edged sword for open source since the failure or fade of large enterprise customers, say big banks, hurts open source vendors right alongside traditional software providers.

  What is interesting is that after a couple of years of economic rebuilding, we’ve seen recently how open source is being driven by innovation, particularly in cloud computing, where open source is prevalent and disruptive, and also mobile computing, which continues to be impacted by openness.

Project Releases

• Samba 3.6 now available

• Getting Plasma Active on your tablet

  This is to announce diffutils-3.1, a stable, bug-fix release. There have been more than 50 build, test and portability-related changes in diffutils proper, as well as over 2100 in gnulib. In spite of all that, there have been only a few bug fixes, and only one that was worthy of a NEWS entry (below).

Public Services/Government

• Bristol Council open source: the allegations in full

  Bristol City Council’s failure to deliver on its open source strategy is beginning to make the coalition government’s manifesto commitment on open source look incontinent.

  The council’s own open source strategy is looking ineffectual. Bristol Council cabinet committed to an open source infrastructure a year ago – as long as it was doable. It ordered a pilot but that was discredited by an allegation that it had been fixed. Now the council has refused to release the suspect pilot reports under Freedom of Information, it is time to look at those allegations in full.

  Mark Taylor, CEO of Sirius, told MPs in May how, left to establishment suppliers Capgemini and Computacenter, the open source strategy got caught in a thicket of indifference and vested interests.

  Bristol set an original deadline for its open source strategy to be costed and risked by November 2010. They told Capgemini to get on with it, said Taylor, but Capgemini did nothing. Bristol told Capg to work with Sirius, who were experienced implementing open source infrastructures for companies like SpecSavers. They ignored Surius, said Taylor in a letter to MPs on the Parliamentary Administration Select Committee (PASC).

  The council meanwhile tendered for an open source infrastructure using the £6bn Buying Solutions Framework for Commodity IT Hardware and Software (CHITS). Thus it would be ready to roll when the pilot produced its recommendations.

Licensing

• When Your Open Source Code No Longer Belongs to You

  Unfortunately, the way to answer this question is to follow the money. Most companies have coders sign intellectual property-focused and Fair Use-focused agreements that make clear that code produced while working for (and being paid by) the company belongs to the company. If the coder was being paid a salary while contributing to an open source project, the company almost always has the right to claim ownership of the code.

Standards/Consortia

• ODF Plugfest, Berlin

  I attended the 6th ODF Plugfest took place in Berlin a few weeks ago, hosted by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) and the Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi). It followed the pattern of previous events, a two-day event, with the first day dedicated to technical interop activities among implementors, followed by a day of public presentations.

• Gnumeric 1.10.17 aka “TBD” is now available.

  The Gnumeric Team is pleased to announce the availability of Gnumeric version 1.10.17. This should be used together with the concurrently released goffice 0.8.17. This is most likely the last release in the stable 1.10.x series.

• One-to-One VP8 Video Calling Now Supported in Skype

  Our friends at Skype have added support for one-to-one VP8 video calling in Skype 5.5 for Windows. If both users in a Skype video call are using Skype 5.5, the call will use VP8 to encode the video streams for optimum transmission across the Internet. Skype also uses VP8 for group video calling.

• Amazon Escapes the App Trap Too

  Apple’s inflexibility and greed has forced Amazon to release an HTML 5 Kindle that you’ll love.

• Amazon’s Answer To Apple’s Terms: A Web-Based Kindle Cloud Reader — Brilliant On PC, Better On iPad

“8″ Headed South

“8″ has not even been released yet, but Phoney “7″ which has and is the model for “8″ has lost two thirds of its share of the smart phone market.

Health/Nutrition

• Drug Companies Conduct Fake Studies as Marketing Tools

  Pharmaceutical companies are carrying out fake, pseudo-studies on humans as a marketing devices to get doctors familiar with new drugs. In such studies, called “seeding trials,” drug companies invite hundreds of doctors to take part in a research study by asking them to recruit patients to serve as subjects.

• Doctors Warn Of U.S. Cancer Drug Shortage

• Censorship?

  They consider banning the sale of cigarettes a form of censorship, and they hide themselves behind the legality of the product.

Security

• State Department Spent $1.2 Billion On An Asset Monitoring System… That Ignores All Non-Windows Equipment

  We just wrote about a GAO report showing how the Defense Department is somewhat incompetent at dealing with online threats. Of course, it’s not clear that anyone else in the government is any better. The GAO is back with yet another report, dinging the State Department for its dreadful computer security monitoring program. In this case, it’s talking about threats to the State Department’s network, rather than to third parties. And while the State Department spent a whopping $1.2 billion of taxpayer money on a fancy computer system, called iPost, to monitor everything, it turns out that it only works on Windows machines:

  But the iPost service only covers computers that use Microsoft’s Windows operating system, not other assets such as the roughly 5,000 routers and switches along State’s network, non-Windows operating systems, firewalls, mainframes, databases and intrusion detection devices, GAO auditors said.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• London riots: Lidl water thief jailed for six months

  Nicolas Robinson, 23, of Borough, south-east London, carried out the “opportunistic” theft at a Lidl supermarket in Brixton as he walked home from his girlfriend’s house.

  Robinson threw away the water and ran when he was confronted by police but was arrested and quickly admitted what he had done.

• How America turned poverty into a crime

  Media attention has focused, understandably enough, on the “nouveau poor” — formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed it, but the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s.

  In 2008 and 2009, for example, blue-collar unemployment was increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment, and African American and Latino workers were three times as likely to be unemployed as white workers. Low-wage blue-collar workers, like the people I worked with in this book, were especially hard hit for the simple reason that they had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappeared.

  How have the already-poor attempted to cope with their worsening economic situation? One obvious way is to cut back on health care. The New York Times reported in 2009 that one-third of Americans could no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions and that there had been a sizable drop in the use of medical care. Others, including members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance.

  Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled.” In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.

• Police allow public to hit protesters

  London Metropolitan police has allowed the public to use weapons against suspected rioters and looters if households or businesses “honestly” believe they pose a threat.

  In a document sent to businesses in the British capital, the Scotland Yard authorized the use of what is known as “reasonable force” saying people can defend themselves in their homes or businesses by weapons if they believe they could be attacked.

• Rich Executives Spend Millions For Bodyguards To Guard Them From Populist Anger

  Perez and his partner Mike Gomez, a bodyguard resembling The Sopranos’ Silvio, finally track down their client at a Barnes & Noble. Two of the countersurveillance guys go back to scouting for menaces, while Perez and Gomez, both of whom are trained sharpshooters and martial-arts experts, step in as the Primary’s “close protection” team. Shoppers stare at the entourage, straining to recognize someone famous.

• Aggression during G20 rally ‘perpetrated by police,’ judge rules

  A Toronto judge has ruled that “adrenalized” police officers acted as aggressors at a peaceful political rally that led to dozens of arrests during last year’s G20 summit.

  “The only organized or collective physical aggression at that location that evening was perpetrated by police each time they advanced on demonstrators,” Justice Melvyn Green ruled on Thursday. He was referring to a demonstration at Queen St. and Spadina Ave. on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

  Green stated police criminalized political demonstration, which is “vital” to maintain a “viable democracy.”

• Tories on riot policing: too few, too slow, too timid

  David Cameron is on a collision course with the police after the government used an emergency Commons debate on the English riots to issue a point-by-point dissection of the police’s “insufficient” tactics during the week.

• Big Brother isn’t watching you

  The only question I can legitimately ask is: why is this happening? Mark Duggan’s death has been badly handled but no one is contesting that is a reason for these conflagrations beyond the initial flash of activity in Tottenham. I’ve heard Theresa May and the Old Etonians whose hols have been curtailed (many would say they’re the real victims) saying the behaviour is “unjustifiable” and “unacceptable”. Wow! Thanks guys! What a wonderful use of the planet’s fast-depleting oxygen resources. Now that’s been dealt with can we move on to more taxing matters such as whether or not Jack The Ripper was a ladies’ man. And what the hell do bears get up to in those woods?

  However “unacceptable” and “unjustifiable” it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can’t justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.

• Police tell of life during riots: fatigue and hunger under hail of missiles

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Arctic Ice Thinning 4 Times Faster Than Predicted by IPCC Models, Semi-Stunning M.I.T. Study Finds

  According to new research from MIT, the most recent global climate report fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends….

  After comparing IPCC models with actual data, [lead author Pierre] Rampal and his collaborators concluded that the forecasts were significantly off: Arctic sea ice is thinning, on average, four times faster than the models say, and it’s drifting twice as quickly.

Finance

• Rising Up Against Brutal Austerity

  The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Nonpartisan “Truthtelling” at ALEC

  A “radical, possibly deranged, truthteller” will be the 2012 GOP presidential candidate, said political commentator Tucker Carlson at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in New Orleans. Speaking between workshops on the benefits of carbon emissions and task force meetings where corporations and politicians vote on “model bills,” Carlson joined right-wing leaders who sang the praises of the Tea Party and “sticking to your guns,” cursed Obama and other “big government liberals,” and praised the same “cut, cap, and balance” agenda manifest in the ALEC bills and pushed by national politicians in Washington D.C.

• Top Companies Claim To Fight Global Warming, But Sponsor ALEC’s Climate Denial

  The fight against global warming pollution requires the investment of everyone, including the world’s multinational corporate giants. Many companies have taken official stances on climate pollution, pledging to reduce their greenhouse footprint in order to reduce the threat of a destabilized climate.

• ALEC Exposed: Warming Up to Climate Change

• 3 Tips on Exposing ALEC’s Influence in Your State

• Big Business Woos ALEC Legislators in the Big Easy

• Journalist Kicked out of ALEC Conference, Threatened With Arrest

• Protesters Spotlight Corporate Influence in State Politics at ALEC Annual Meeting

• What is ALEC Hiding? CMD Reporter Kicked Out of ALEC Hotel

• Diageo’s New Hispanic Strategy Includes Big Buy on Univision

  Seeking to boost Hispanic consumption, liquor giant Diageo is turning to TV, making a major upfront buy on Univision Communication’s Galavision cable network as well as on every owned and operated Univision station.

  The year-long deal represents the first time a liquor company has bought upfront time — the period in which marketers buy up available commercial inventory from networks before the fall season — on every Univision station, Univision told Ad Age. The piecemeal purchase was necessary because Univision does not accept national liquor buys on the network.

• D.C. firm inks lucrative public-relations contract with Bahrain

  Bahrain is in the news again, this time for what appears to be the comically evil persecution of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders.

  So, naturally, the ruling monarchy of the Gulf nation has hired a top Washington public relations firm to burnish (or attempt to salvage) its image, according to a new foreign agent registration filing. Qorvis Communications will be paid $40,000 per month, plus expenses, for the public relations work, according to a contract submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Censorship

• Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online

  Take a moment and let that sink in. Randi Zuckerberg doesn’t just think that you should be using your real name on Facebook or Google+ or LinkedIn — she thinks pseudonyms have no place on the Internet at all. And why should we take the radical step of stripping all Internet users of the right to speak anonymously? Because of the Greater Internet F***wad Theory, or the “civility argument,” which states: If you allow people to speak anonymously online, they will froth at the mouth, go rabid, bully and stalk one another. Therefore, requiring people to use their real names online should decrease stalking and bullying and generally raise the level of discourse.

• Oppose Attempts to Censor the British Public

• British Prime Minister Does a 180 on Internet Censorship

  After several days of destructive riots throughout the UK, British Prime Minister David Cameron is practically tripping over himself in his eagerness to sacrifice liberty for security.

• Google’s Chrome operating system gets a much needed update

  Here’s another one for our lists of government-less Internets: MondoNet. According to the MondoNet website: “The purpose of this project is to study the technological, social and regulatory feasibility of developing a peer-to-peer mesh networking protocol.”

  MondoNet was founded by academics at Rutgers University, and the university is supporting the team’s research. The project is close to being able to test its mesh networking protocol in actual, real-life communities.

Civil Rights

• Prime Minister’S Attack On Social Media Unwarranted

  Some people have called for temporary suspension of services; David Cameron appeared to suggest suspension of Facebook and Twitter in some circumstances (TBC). We do not believe this should be given any serious consideration. Clearly, a service will be used by people for legitimate activities, some of which will in fact be to mitigate or deal with the problem encountered. In any case, innocent people should not be punished for the actions of others.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Geeks Without Frontiers Pursues Wi-Fi for Everyone

DRM

• Linux users can now read Kindle ebooks on their desktop with Amazon Cloud Reader

  If you are a Kindle user disappointed by the lack of a dedicated desktop application for Linux, there’s good news for you. Amazon.com has just launched their new HTML5-powered cloud-based web app called Amazon Cloud Reader. The webapp runs flawlessly on Linux with support for offline reading and much much more. Here’s what it has to offer.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Trade Committee operates like Navy Seals

  The European Parliament Trade Committee operates as secretive as Navy Seals. In the last year, the Committee commissioned a study and requested a Legal Service opinion on ACTA. While these were official decisions the Committee made, there is no record on this at all. The Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) seems to make a distinction between public minutes and non public coordinators’ notes. The Register maintains everything is published. See our letter to the Parliament’s Register.

  It may seem silly to compare the work of a parliamentary committee to Navy Seals operations. Of course, it is silly. The EU foreign intellectual property policy is much more deadly.

• Does IP slow down growth by throttling innovation?

  The fantasy depends on unlimited energy and the Star Trek replicator which produces an unlimited supply of whatever goods are desired. The dream becomes a nightmare when intellectual property is introduced, followed by lawyers, and bureaucrats to enforce these rights.

  The fantasy originated in Peter Frase’s blog, where he writes, “In the process of trying to pull together some thoughts on intellectual property, zero marginal-cost goods, immaterial labor, and the incipient transition to a rentier form of capitalism, I’ve been working out a thought experiment: a possible future society I call anti-Star Trek. Consider this a stab at a theory of posterity.”

• Drug prices to plummet in wave of expiring patents

• Federal Circuit: Isolated Human DNA Molecules are Patentable

  In a much anticipated decision, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has rejected the Southern District of New York’s court’s holding that could have rendered invalid all patents claiming isolated forms of naturally occurring DNA molecules. However, the decision is somewhat nuanced and will be appealed.

• Monsanto to be prosecuted for biopiracy

  In an unprecedented, though much delayed, decision, the National Biodiversity Authority of India (NBA) has decided to initiate legal action against M/s Mahyco/Monsanto and their collaborators for accessing and using local brinjal varieties in developing Bt Brinjal without prior approval of the competent authorities. The official resolution giving effect to this decision was taken in the NBA’s meeting of 20th June 2011, the minutes of which were released only on 11 August 2011.

  http://www.nbaindia.org/meetings/meeting.htm

  The decision of the NBA reads as follows:

  “A background note besides legal opinion on Bt brinjal on the alleged violation by the M/s. Mahyco/M/s Monsanto, and their collaborators for accessing and using the local brinjal varieties for development of Bt brinjal with out prior approval of the competent authorities was discussed and it was decided that the NBA may proceed legally against M/s. Mahyco/ M/s Monsanto, and all others concerned to take the issue to its logical conclusion.” (Emphasis supplied)

• Copyrights

  • Despite What So-Called Legal Experts Tell You, Copyright Protects IDEAS As Well As Expression

    Rhianna and Def Jam Music must stand trial for being inspired by David LaChappelle’s ideas regarding photographic images.

    They didn’t copy a damned thing. They were only inspired by someone else’s work which influenced they way in which they created a new work – the same way all creation happens on some level.

  • Copyright and Me

    Canadian copyright law prevents me from posting examples of my ‘published’ work, that is to say, produced television episodes that I wrote, on my own web page on the Internet.

    Because I don’t control the copyright.

    The same holds true for all the other creative professionals whose creative input went into the work, because a corporate entity holds the rights to all of our combined creativity. As near as I can tell, the corporation owns these rights by virtue of picking up the tab.

  • Medvedev to make internet copyright proposals ‘soon’

    Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday he would soon submit his proposals on intellectual property rights and copyright regulation on the Internet.

    “I have commented on intellectual property right issues more than once recently,” he said at a media briefing at the RIA Novosti newsroom.

    At the G8 summit in France last month and the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last week, Medvedev said the advent of the Internet means that traditional approaches toward intellectual property rights need to be changed.

  • ACTA

    • Trade Committee not interested in fundamental rights

      The European Parliament Committee on International Trade requested the Parliament’s Legal Service an opinion on ACTA (pdf). Compared with the request US Senator Wyden made, and seen the European academics Opinion on ACTA, the questions are very narrow. The questions seem carefully designed to minimize damage to ACTA.

      Senator Wyden has asked in an October 8, 2010 letter that the American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress undertake and provide to Congress: “a written, independent determination of whether the commitments put forward in the agreement diverge from our domestic laws or would impeded legislative efforts that are currently underway. I ask the Division pay particular attention to the provisions relating to injunctions, damages, and intermediary liability.” It is an open question and includes whether ACTA would impeded legislative efforts that are currently underway. This is important for finding a solution for access to orphaned copyrighted works and patent reform.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

A Visit from the Ghost of Linux Future

“I see Linux going into a smaller, simpler OS, with a good base of apps integrated to the web,” predicted Mobile Raptor blogger Roberto Lim. “The standard for ease of use won’t be how close it is to MS Windows and Office, but how similar it is to the iPhone or Android.” The home desktop is “soon to be extinct,” Lim concluded. “So, Linux in a decade: ‘Android’ on a laptop. Somewhere between Chrome OS and Windows.”

Is Linux becoming insignificant?

You may remember that Google recently added “badges” to Google News. While some blogs poked fun at that (“We Don’t Need No Stinking Google News Badges”), these things are probably just part of Google’s “Reputation” efforts.

[...]

* Google: 326
* Apple: 220
* Android: 173

Top 10 Things Linux Users Don’t Understand

Audiocasts/Shows

• FLOSS Weekly 177: Delta3D

  We chat about Delta3D, a giant simulation engine that’s used by the military but is available to civilians as well.

Kernel Space

• XtreemFS: A Distributed & Replicated File-System

  While EXT4 and Btrfs are the most talked about file-systems on Phoronix, there are certainly many more out there, especially when it comes to distributed file-systems and those largely only targeting enterprise environments. One example is XtreemFS, which is an open-source file-system that is distributed with support for clients and servers from any location and connected together using the Internet. This GPLv2-licensed file-system is also meant to easily replicate data across data-centers to reduce latency and network traffic.

Applications

• Is Glark a Better Grep?

• Try collectl for System Monitoring

  Most Linux system administrators are familiar with sar for collecting system status data. However, there’s a few ways that sar shows its age and doesn’t quite live up to expectations. If you’re looking for a newer utility that also handles NFS, Slab data and sub-second intervals, collectl may better fit the bill.

• Dragonplayer – Simple video player

  Dragon Player is a multimedia player where the focus is on simplicity, instead of features. Dragon Player does one thing, and only one thing, which is playing multimedia files. It’s simple interface is designed not to get in your way and instead empower you to simply play multimedia files.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to create a Google Chrome Extension – For Beginners – Basics [Part 2]

  • Advanced Layering Techniques on Linux with GIMP

  • How to compile a new Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) kernel

  • Installing Linux on a USB drive

  • Copying the contents of a file to the clipboard in Nautilus

  • Learn Linux, 302 (Mixed environments): Print services

  • DesktopNova – Automatically Change Wallpapers On Ubuntu 11.04 (With Classic Gnome)

  • Cracking WEP/WPA/2 networks with Aircrack-ng [Linux]

  • Printing in Scribus

  • Install Software Packages in Arch Linux

  • Installing X Sever on Arch Linux

  • How To Create First User On Arch Linux

  • Create Bootable USB of Arch Linux

  • Talking over Internet using Ekiga softphone in Ubuntu

  • Micromax USB Modem in Archlinux

  • Dual Booting Android 3.2 and Ubuntu 11.04 on an Asus Transformer

  • SNMP Monitoring with Bash

  • How To Upgrade To Ubuntu Version 11.04

  • Reduce load of backup scripts with nice and ionice

• Wine

  • Wineskin 2.4 has been released

    Wineskin 2.4 update is available. You should see it available in Wineskin Winery, as well as the manual install version at the MediaFire download location

• Games

  • 3 Level Snake Game Made By Me Using Pygame API

  • Atom Zombie Smasher now available on the Ubuntu Software Center

    Following Atom Zombie Smasher’s inclusion in the Humble Indie Bundle #3 and recent selection for thePAX 10 indie showcase,

  • BEEP-Game Review and Gameolith

    First off, i’d like to award BEEP the prestigious award of “The only game that I haven’t had to go digging for dependencies and that works right off the bat”. After downloading the game from Gameolith (more on that later), BEEP ran flawlessly, and rather smoothly on my laptop also. This being said, the graphics are totally 2D, and theres no complexity to them either, but in a good way.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • It works: Plasma now looks up missing components through PackageKit!

    Sorry, I haven’t blogged for a while, but rest assured that I’m still alive and coding. I passed the midterm evaluation, and the final evaluation is approaching. So what do we have in the store?

  • Plasma Active & Contour Demo

    MeegoExperts has done an interview here at the Desktop Summit in Berlin with Fania and Marco. The video explains concepts and user experience in Plasma Active‘s Contour Shell. Have a look yourself to learn about this next-generation user experience for consumer devices, based on our beloved Free Software stack.

• GNOME Desktop

  • gnome 3

    the adjustment wasn’t as painful as i imagined. i used xfce for a while before jumping into gnome 3. i even toyed around with fluxbox as an alternative. in the end, i gave it a shot. i mean, c’mon! it’s not like it’s kde or os x.

  • Linux 3.x Matures as GNOME Fork Calls ‘Grow’

Distributions

• Gentoo Family

  • Migrating Gentoo laptop install to SSD using LVM and LUKS

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora not to switch to Btrfs in version 16

    • Wednesday in Fedora

      * Improved my spam filtering in Thunderbird, saves me quite a bit of time
      * More research into Fedora branded keyboard possibilities
      * Finished xmedcon review (bz714328)

• Debian Family

  • Debian lets me do what I need to do

  • Debian looking at a June 2012 freeze for Debian Wheezy

    This means that the current Debian Testing release, which is Wheezy, is set to be frozen at that time (no new versions of packages, just bug fixes) in preparation for the next stable release.

  • Debian to offer MultiArch support with Debian Wheezy 7 in 2013

    Debian finally takes the plunge to offer multi architecture support with its to-be release Wheezy. This means that Debian users can now run the software of theirchoice, in a machine and version of their choice. This is a feature that is already supported by most open source distros and there is high expectation from what Wheezy can offer. However, since it is most likely to be released only by 2013, doubts of its relevance then are being raised.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Wood Theme For Your Ubuntu PC

      • Revamped Dash Design Shown Off for Ubuntu 11.10

        Changes to the way the Unity Dash looks and behaves in Ubuntu 11.10 are on the way. In the Unity 2D development branch some of the reworking is already available to see.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Samsung features Tegra 2 processor in Galaxy R smartphone

      Samsung announced its first Android smartphone based on the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. Available now in Sweden and heading for Europe and Asia “soon,” the 4.2-inch Samsung Galaxy R offers Android 2.3, the TouchWiz UI, 8GB of flash storage, and both five- and two-megapixel cameras.

    • Protect Your Android Phone From Your Wife

Open Sesame With Your Source

The trend toward open source software has many benefits when creating applications. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for example retains the benefits of enterprise application level components such as security and web services without the prohibitive license costs.

Open source solutions gaining acceptance in enterprise projects

A new survey says open source solutions are being considered for the majority of enterprise IT projects. The survey, by FuseSource Corp., an open source integration firm, outlines deciding factors leading organizations to chose and open source solution.

10 things people get wrong about open source (images)

Twitter to open source Storm in September

Twitter has announced that it will be open sourcing Storm, its stream processing framework, in September, at the Strange Loop conference. Storm was developed by BackType, a company that Twitter acquired in July. At the time, Nathan Marz, BackType’s lead engineer, said that the company’s plans to open source the technology had not changed. Now Twitter has put a date on those plans in a blog posting.

Mozilla

• HTTPS Everywhere Firefox extension goes 1.0

  The Firefox extension HTTPS Everywhere, designed to automatically navigate users to HTTPS-secured versions of sites by rewriting requests, has reached version 1.0. The project was started in June 2010 with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and The Tor Project collaborating on creating the extension which has been refined and tuned over the past year with an improved UI and better performance.

• The “App Model” and the Web

  Mozilla’s mission is to bring openness, interoperability and user sovereignty to Internet life. We should do this in the apps world. We should embrace some aspects of the current app model as a complement to the browser model. We should also provide an alternative to aspects of the current app model that aren’t so open to interoperability and user sovereignty.

SaaS

• Ensemble meets Hadoop on the cloud

  So you wanted to play with hadoop to crunch on some big-data problems, except that, well getting a hadoop cluster up and running in not exactly a one minute thing! Let me show you how to make it “a one minute thing” using Ensemble! Since Ensemble now has formulas for creating hadoop master and slave nodes, thanks to the great work of Juan Negron. Spinning up a hadoop cluster could not be easier! Check this video out

• Hadoop cluster with Ubuntu server and Ensemble

• Hadoop, Big Data and Small Businesses

  Distributed infrastructures for enterprise search and indexing are becoming the norm, but what can small businesses do?

  Hadoop, HDFS and the MapReduce algorithm are becoming as popular as searching for celebrity gossip, and this surge in interest says a lot about the changing nature of enterprise infrastructure and data and application requirements.

  We all know that search engines and databases have completely different requirements. With most databases, you have a single persistent copy of the data that is backed up and can be restored. With search engines – Google’s MapReduce technology is the basis of Hadoop – much of the data is often transient and can be re-collected.

Databases

• Percona announces MySQL conference

  Percona, a MySQL consulting and support company, has announced that it will run a MySQL conference in the traditional location, Santa Clara, and at the traditional time, 10-12 April 2012. There had been a lack of clarity, according to Percona, as to whether anyone was planning a MySQL conference, so, after several months of planning, it has announced the “Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo”.

BSD

• BSDanywhere: time machine

  I have already written about BSD-based systems several times. I reviewed FreeSBIE and PCBSD.

  They were system based on XFCE and KDE. These are more or less modern looking operating systems. Could I imaging myself back into 1990s when I was downloading another BSD-based system?

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• A selection of photographs from some of RMS’s past events

  Here are photos taken at some of the many speeches Richard Stallman has given this year.

Project Releases

• QEMU 0.15 Released

Public Services/Government

• Cough up the hairball and make NHS technology open

  The NHS technology environment could be described as a giant hairball – a Gordian knot of past policies, established practices, new initiatives and government objectives and an ever changing landscape of opportunity from new technology.* Openness, in all its many forms, offers a way to escape from the hairball.

  Openness comes in many forms: open source, open standards, open data, open publishing – the list goes on. Openness is growing. Open source and open standards are in the ICT strategy documents of the Cabinet Office, the Welsh Government and in some form in the NHS IT Strategy too.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Cancer Data: It Just Got Personal

    Coincidentally, a few days before my dad’s diagnosis, I published a study which found that cancer datasets are less likely to be widely available for further research than similar datasets outside cancer.

Programming

• Testing JavaScript Code with Jasmine

  Server-side developers have long experienced the benefits of automated testing solutions, taking advantage of testing frameworks such as RSpec for Ruby, PHPUnit for PHP, and JUnit for Java. If you fall into this crowd but are starting to spend more time with JavaScript, chances are you’re fretting over how to apply similar techniques on the client (or or server!) side. Not to worry, as several interesting JavaScript testing frameworks exist, perhaps chief among them Jasmine, a popular open source behavior-driven development framework.

• Using Images in the GUI

Standards/Consortia

• HTML5 Seems To Be Gaining Momentum

  With Google, Pandora, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Vudu, and even Microsoft embracing HTML5, these are exciting times for vendors, developers and consumers

Apple named in e-book price-fixing lawsuit

Apple and a group of book publishers were accused in a lawsuit today of illegally fixing e-book prices to “boost profits and force e-book rival Amazon to abandon its pro-consumer discount pricing.”

The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed today in U.S. District Court in Northern California, alleges Apple, HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster “colluded to increase prices” on popular books. (Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS. CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)

Wallpapers from… heaven?

Science

• Portable, super-high-resolution 3-D imaging

  By combining a clever physical interface with computer-vision algorithms, researchers in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have created a simple, portable imaging system that can achieve resolutions previously possible only with large and expensive lab equipment. The device could provide manufacturers with a way to inspect products too large to fit under a microscope and could also have applications in medicine, forensics and biometrics.

  The heart of the system, dubbed GelSight, is a slab of transparent, synthetic rubber, one of whose sides is coated with a paint containing tiny flecks of metal. When pressed against the surface of an object, the paint-coated side of the slab deforms. Cameras mounted on the other side of the slab photograph the results, and computer-vision algorithms analyze the images.

Security

• Storage Security, the Last Line of Defense

• Most SSL Sites Vulnerable

• Expert says Adobe omits mention of 400 Flash Player

  Officially, Adobe’s current update for Flash Player has closed only 13 holes, but unofficially it is said to have closed several hundred. Security specialist Tavis Ormandy, who works for Google, claims that he discovered 400 holes and notified Adobe of them. The specialist has now complained that, while the holes have been closed, they haven’t been mentioned in the official advisory, and he hasn’t been given credit for their discovery.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Dear Wikipedia: The Death of Mark Duggan is Notable

  I hate broken links, so I try to avoid linking to The Globe and Mail, for instance, because they started locking older articles behind a paywall. That deliberately breaks links that work when I post the article [unless the reader pays ransom].

  I am quite certain that I’ve linked to Wikipedia more than any other website, and so I worry because deleted Wikipedia articles will result in broken links.

  Broken links are bad for blogs, and while online news outlets often don’t understand this, Wikipedia ought to. As a blogger, when I link to something, I expect it to stay there. As an Internet user, it is annoying to follow a link to get more information, only to discover that the original article has been removed. The only time any Wikipedia entry should be deleted is if it is fraudulent.

  The Wikipedia page Death of Mark Duggan is flagged for deletion. There is a huge argument raging about whether or not Mark Duggan’s death is notable.

Cablegate

• Haiti: WikiLeaks Cables Expose How U.S. Blocked Aristide’s Return After 2004 Coup

Censorship

• EFF tells Cisco to help curb abuses in China

  The group is reacting to the networking firm’s earlier announcement that it would help the Chinese government build up an extensive camera surveillance network in Chongqing. This, as well as its assistance in building the Great Firewall of China, should give it enough leverage to convince its new friend to stop abusing its citizens’ human rights.

  “This is the same company that sold equipment to China to build the Great Firewall, which prevents Chinese Internet users from accessing much of the Internet, including online references to the Tiananmen Square protests, information on China’s human rights abuses, and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter,” wrote the EFF’s Jillian York in a blog post.

Privacy

• Indian MPs To Give Critical Data To Apple, America?

  One of the two houses of the Indian Parliament, Rajya Sabha, has decided go for the paperless office. The house is adopting tablet PCs instead of papers. The members will be using either the iPad 2 or the Samsung Galaxy Tab, according to reports.

  Should Indian parliament even consider Apple’s iPad? No. Apple is an American company and the iPad uses proprietary technologies to which Indians will not have any access. The ministers will have to use Apple’s iTunes software to transfer data to the iPad – which means Apple will have access to all the ministerial and governmental data, without informing the Indian government.

  Chances are that these ministers may also use the iCloud, and as we know since Apple is an American company, all the data on the cloud will be accessible by the US authorities. Apple will hand over that data if the US government demands so.

DRM

• The Danger of E-books: Richard Stallman

  In an age where business dominates our governments and writes our laws, every technological advance offers business an opportunity to impose new restrictions on the public. Technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

.exe file on Linux

Computer: How far is it to the next good interface?

Does Linux Certification cut the mustard?

For those pursuing a Linux career, is Linux certification a must have or an indication that you lack the real world experience that employers demand?

In the ever fast-paced and dynamic context of information technology, IT professionals need to be on their toes, constantly staying abreast of changes in the technology platforms on which they work. Operating systems are refined and improved in newer versions of technology, mandating systems administrators to constantly be on a learning curve to keep up with the changes.

Desktop

• Will Linux miss its big desktop shot?

Server

• Linux on mainframe, alive, kicking and doing rather well

  CA Technologies has responded to what the company says is a growing market for Linux-based mainframe applications with the release of a new mainframe Linux management portfolio named CA VM: Manager Suite.

  Naysayers who belittle the importance of mainframe technologies in 2011 should perhaps remember that since the start of the decade, IBM, Unisys, BMC, Centrify and CA itself have all made significant augmentations to their mainframe technology propositions.

Kernel Space

• Broadcom, Dell, Linux 3.0

  I get it Broadcom, you hate Linux Users, and I’ve always been able to hate you by installing akmod-wl, while giving you the middle-finger, but apparently even that doesn’t seem to work on 2.6.40, which means I have to hate you loudly now.

• The Linux Foundation Announces Linux Training Scholarship Recipients

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the recipients of its 2011 Linux Training Scholarship Program.

  This is the first year of the program, which awards five scholarships to computer science students and Linux developers who show incredible promise for helping to shape the future of Linux but do not otherwise have the ability to attend Linux Foundation training courses.

Applications

• PiTiVi: A Solid B-Lister of a Movie-Maker

  PiTiVi may not have quite the same variety of features and functions found in certain other open video editing applications. However, more complex video apps can be downright intimidating to use, and PiTiVi’s interface is simple enough for newbies to handle. The application’s motto of “anything in/anything out” is a good clue to the degree of flexibility this film editor provides.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Super Collision At Studio Dave: The New World Of SuperCollider3, Part 2

  • Hack Windows passwords using the Linux application chntpw

  • How to Profile Applications under Linux – perf

  • How to undelete files from ext3/ext4

  • Scanning with The GIMP and QuiteInsane

  • Eyecandy and 3D effects in XFCE

  • Change Case with sed

  • Devede – a DVD Authoring software for Linux

  • Installing and configuring Trac and Subversion on squeeze

  • My awkward introduction to EFI.

  • Announcing my first e-book “Awk One-Liners Explained”

  • Installing Subversion And Configuring Access Through Different Protocols On Debian Squeeze

  • Measure tomcat Performance with JMeter

  • Using Apache2 Content Negotiation To Serve Different Languages

  • How To Completely Customize Your KDE Wallpaper [Linux]

  • Nmap : The Pentester’s One Step Shop to Network Domination

  • Change Hard-to-Find Ubuntu Settings Easily With Ubuntu Tweak [Linux]

    Tweak the way Ubuntu behaves, easily. Whether you want to stop Ubuntu from locking your screen or change your 3D desktop settings, Ubuntu Tweak is the easy way to access the Ubuntu settings that are otherwise buried in hard-to-reach places. We profiled Ubuntu Tweak back in 2008, but a lot has changed since then. Ubuntu is over three years older, and even sports a new user interface now called Unity.

• Games

  • Color It By Numbers – Flowers, Released !

    A while ago I’ve posted about the Color It By Numbers Series, recently it got a new addition – Color It By Numbers – Flowers.

    Imagine a flower garden that is home to the most beautiful, fragrant flowers in the world. You walk around this garden, admiring their splendor and inhaling the subtle fragrances of lilies of the valley, roses, tulips and violets. This splendor covers your heart with a sensation of warmth and harmony. It is as if summer has come knocking on your window…

  • Let’s do the Time Warp… Again! [Achron]

    Anyone pre-ordered Achron? The real-time strategy game with time-travel mechanics is due to drop soon, and version 0.9.5.0 has been released for pre-ordering customers.

  • Atom Zombie Smasher is Now Available in Ubuntu Software Center

    Indie strategy game Atom Zombie Smasher developed by Blendo Games is now available in Ubuntu Software Center. The game had received critical acclaim and was a part of recently concluded Humble Indie Bundle 3. The game was also selected into PAX 10 Indie games list.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME & KDE Developers Meet Over Beer In Berlin

  The 2011 Desktop Summit is coming to a close at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. This was the second time that GNOME and KDE developers joined to host a Linux desktop summit of around 1,000 participants.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Desktop Summit Thoughts

    I’ve been to the Desktop Summit in Berlin for the past few days, we’re now around the middle of the event, after the conference, before the workshop and BoF sessions, so I thought I might share some thoughts I’ve gathered in idle moments in the past few days.

  • Toasters and Pants at Day Three of Desktop Summit 2011

    The third and final ‘traditional’ conference day began with Mirko Boehm, Claudia Rauch, Stormy Peters, Karen Sandler and Cornelius Schumacher meeting with members of the Berlin City authorities. The city officials wanted to get acquainted with the free and open source leaders involved in the Desktop Summit, because open technology is important to the local government (more below).

  • Using a single database for KDE programs

Distributions

• The 2011 Top 7 Best Linux Distributions for You

  As Linux continues to re-define its role in the mobile and cloud sectors, there is still demand for using the operating system on “traditional” platforms like the personal desktop, the enterprise server, and even laptop devices. With so many Linux distributions available, which one is the best for each of these varied platforms?

  Because of these platform differences, there never can be one best Linux distribution for everyone. Also, the needs of each user are unique. Telling someone who’s looking for a good introductory distribution to try Gentoo, for instance, would be a mistake because for all its positive qualities, Gentoo is decidedly not a beginner’s distro.

• Red Hat Family

  • 09 Aug 2011: Red Hat’s Most Serious Flaw Types for 2010

  • Red Hat Warns Government About Cloud Lock-In

    In an open letter of sorts, Red Hat is warning U.S. policy makers and government leaders about so-called cloud lock-in — the use of proprietary APIs (application programming interfaces) and other techniques to keep customers from switching cloud providers. The open letter, in the form of a blog entry from Red Hat VP Mark Bohannon, contains thinly veiled criticism of Microsoft and other companies that are launching their own public clouds.

  • Red Hat is First to Deliver Java EE 6 via Platform-as-a-Service with OpenShift

    OpenShift is a free PaaS for developers who leverage open source. Developers looking for a faster on-ramp to the cloud with built-in management and auto-scaling capabilities can use OpenShift so they can focus on coding mobile, social and enterprise applications while leaving stack setup, maintenance and operational concerns to a trusted hosted service. First announced at the Red Hat Summit in May 2011, OpenShift redefined the PaaS space by offering a broad choice of supported languages, frameworks, databases and clouds, including Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Java EE, Spring, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, MemBase and Memcache, all open source, helping developers avoid getting locked into any particular technology or platform.

  • Red Hat Brings Java EE 6 to OpenShift Cloud

    Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) sees opportunity in providing an integrated platform as a service (PaaS) offering for the cloud that enables Java developers. To that end, Red Hat today announced that its JBoss Application Server 7 is now integrated with the OpenShift PaaS, providing an easy on-ramp to the cloud for Java.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Linux Mint Debian – Perils of Rolling Distributions

      I am a big fan of the Linux Mint Debian distributions, both the “original” Gnome version and the newer Xfce version. I have had LMDE loaded on several of my laptops and netbooks since it was first released at the end of last year, and it has been the distribution that I use most often for six months or so now. But there is another key factor about it, and my use of it – I have kept it updated since I first installed it. I have recently wanted to install or re-install it on a couple of other netbooks, and the experience has been disappointing.

      The advantage of “rolling distributions” is that they send out updates frequently, both major and minor updates to the operating system itself and to the packages installed on it. That means no waiting around for the next periodic distribution cycle to get a new version of the Linux kernel, or Firefox, or whatever. The disadvantage is that these updates accumulate pretty rapidly, so before long you end up in a situation where doing a fresh installation actually requires a lot of updates. Add to that the fact that rolling distributions often don’t update their base all that often, and the total number of updates required after doing a fresh installation can be quite large.

    • Revisited: CrunchBang (“#!”) Linux 10 “Statler” Xfce r20110207

      When I’ve reviewed #! before, I’ve always stuck with the Openbox edition, because when #! started, it only had an Openbox edition. It wasn’t until version 10 “Statler” that it gained an Xfce edition as well, but I always wanted to review just “the original” #! anyway. Fast forward to the last few days, and I haven’t really been able to think of much to write. Then, I realized I had never checked out the Xfce edition, so I did so.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Inclusive membership

        We have a strong preference for inclusivity in the way we structure the Ubuntu community. We recognise a very diverse range of contributions, and we go to some lengths to recognise leaders in many areas so that we can delegate the evaluation process to those who know best.

        For example, we have governance structures for different social forums (IRC, the Forums) and for various technical fields (development, translation). We quite pointedly see development and packaging as one facet of a multi-faceted project, and I think Ubuntu is much stronger for that approach.

      • Canonical Store Adds Ubuntu-Branded Laptop Sleeve

      • [Oneiric Updates] New LightDM Login Theme Finally Made Default

        Few days back we reported that a new login theme for Ubuntu 11.10 has landed in repositories. The Unity Greeter theme for LightDM has been finally made default. It looks almost same as in the video below but sound menu has been removed.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Joli OS 1.2 Linux by Jolicloud

          With the launch of the Chromebook, a new breed of cut-price laptop running Google’s Chrome OS software, the interest in so-called ‘cloud computing’ has never been higher. It’s easy to forget, however, that before Google came along, there were other companies offering remarkably similar software packages that can be installed – for free, even – on existing hardware.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android e-reader tablets sell for under $180

      Pandigital began selling a $170, seven-inch Android tablet called the Nova Digital Reader, a lighter spinoff of its previous Novel color e-reader. This follows a similar, $180 “Planet” device the company launched two weeks ago, with both tablets featuring seven-inch, 800 x 600 touchscreens, 802.11n, and front- and rear-facing cameras.

    • Android-based wearable device platform targets 1.4-inch screen

      WIMM Labs announced an Android-based wearable device reference platform and open SDK designed for applications including sports and health monitoring wristwatches. The tiny WIMM One Module features a 1.4-inch capacitive touchscreen, up to 32GB memory, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and motion tracking capability, and will be made available with a WIMM One Developer Preview Kit in the third quarter.

    • Five-inch Android 2.3 tablet pumps out 1080p via HDMI

      Latte has begun shipping a five-inch, Android 2.3 portable media player (PMP) tablet for $190. The Latte Ice Smart uses a Telechips 8903 ARM11 processor to deliver 1080p video to an HDTV via a mini-HDMI port, and offers Wi-Fi and a USB On-the-Go (OTG) port, says the company.

    • Sprint tips $100 4G phone from Samsung

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Pierre Cardin ships designer Android tablet

    Pierre Cardin is shipping a seven-inch Android 2.2 tablet billed as “the … first designer tablet.” The Pierre Cardin Tablet PC offers a 1GHz Samsung “Hummingbird” processor, a front-facing webcam, Wi-Fi, and a tailored carrying case, and sells for 275 U.K. Pounds ($449).

Open source develops the future of downtown Raleigh

Can you revitalize a city and attract businesses using open source principles? David Diaz, president and CEO of the Downtown Raleigh Alliance thinks so. In fact, I got a chance to sit down with David to discuss how economic development organizations are interacting with their local and state government, citizens, businesses, and landlords. Diaz and his organization apply the principles of transparency, participation, and sharing to their economic development programs.

Four Steps Toward a Successful Open Source Project

There’s a lot to like about open source software. It can help your business by cutting costs and producing better software. It’s open, auditable, and customizable, and free of the restrictive, invasive licenses and EULAs that infest proprietary software. You can build a community around an open source project, one that incorporates contributions from both staff and outside developers. If you’re wondering how to start up and manage a genuine open source project, here are four fundamental tasks to get you started: start small, build trust and social capital, start smart, and build for the future.

Events

• But wait, there’s more

  Ohio Linux Fest: There’s some big to-do up in Vancouver next week, something about twenty years of a widely used operating system that puts Windows to shame, a guy named Linus who doesn’t like GNOME 3 and other luminaries in the Linux constellation of stars, blah blah blah. But for those who can’t make that, you might want to head to Columbus, Ohio, to discover the Ohio Linux Fest next month. The event runs from Sept. 9-11 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus. The keynoters are Cathy Malmrose, of ZaReason fame, and Bradley Kuhn, of Software Freedom Conservancy fame. As this is the last big event of the year now that Utah Open Source Conference is in mothballs this year until next spring, it might be a good chance to get in a show before the year’s out.

Web Browsers

• On WebKit and WebKit2

  Ever heard of WebKit2 and wondering what it means from a Qt perspective? Here’s an attempt to explain QtWebKit and QtWebKit2 in simple terms. I make no attempt to be completely technically correct, it’s meant to be able to explain terminology to the WebKit uninitiated.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla shrinks Firefox’s memory appetite by 20%-30%

    Mozilla’s Firefox 7, slated to ship in late September, will be significantly faster because of work done plugging the browser’s memory leaks, a company developer says.

    Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote credited the “MemShrink” project for closing memory bugs in the browser and producing a faster Firefox.

SaaS

• Freedom in the “cloud”?

  It’s come to the point that I was asked to explain what I consider necessary prerequisites for an open, free, sustainable approach towards what is often called “The Cloud” or also “Software as a Service” (SaaS).

  To be honest, it took some time for me to make up my mind on the matter, and I considered many of the inputs that I’ve seen so far, in particular the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services to be good enough for some time.

  Clearly I’m sympathetic to the fundamental ideas behind Diaspora, ownCloud and so on. In fact, I myself am currently dedicating my life to the creation of a solution that should empower users to take control over some of their most central data – email, calendar, address books, tasks, see “The Kolab Story” – and thus to provide one puzzle piece to this picture.

Databases

• [Firebird] Past and Present

  As you may know, in July 2000, Borland Software Corp. (formerly known as Inprise) released the beta version of InterBase 6.0 as open source. The community of waiting developers and users preferred to establish itself as an independent, self-regulating team rather than submit to the risks, conditions and restrictions that the company proposed for community participation in open source development. A core of developers quickly formed a project and installed its own source tree on SourceForge. They liked the Phoenix logo which was to have been ISC’s brandmark and adopted the name “Firebird” for the project.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 3.4.2 is “enterprise ready”

Public Services/Government

• Swiss proprietary companies block government open source release

  Reports from Switzerland say that proprietary software companies are complaining about government plans to release open source solutions it has developed on the grounds of cross subsidy. A report from OSOR.EU says the issue emerged early in July as the IT department of the Swiss federal court was planning to release OpenJustitia.

  In 2007, the Swiss federal court began development of its own internal document management system, OpenJustitia, designed to make it more efficient to search through court decisions. In 2009, the court’s IT department announced it would release the system as open source under the GPLv3. This summer, it was expected that OpenJustitia would be released to allow other courts to make use of it.

Openness/Sharing

• New Crowdfunding Platform Dedicated to Free Software Launches in Brazil

  A new platform designed to help software developers find money and resources for their projects has been launched in Brazil. The makeITopen site is Brazil’s first and only crowdfunding platform aimed at helping those involved in the development of free software.

Programming

• Everything is a Compiler

  With multiple new Perl books in progress as well as some fiction and other books, I’ve spent a lot of time lately working on our publishing process. Part of that is building better tools to build better books, but part of that process is improving the formatting based on what those books want and need to do.

  It’s a good thing I know how compilers work.

Privacy

• Google also passes on European data to US authorities

  US laws such as the Patriot Act require companies based in the country to make even data that is stored abroad accessible to the US authorities. In June, Microsoft had already admitted passing on European customer data from its Office 365 cloud service to US government departments.

• Size does matter: cloud providers generate new trend on the logging market

• EFF Warns Congress: Data Retention Would Endanger Privacy, Gain Little

  EFF has joined civil liberties and consumer organizations in publicly opposing H.R. 1981, a bill that would threaten online privacy and anonymous speech by requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to retain logs of customer-identifying information that can be tied to the web sites that you read and the content that you post online.

• Don’t Let Congress Order Internet Companies to Spy on You: Oppose the Data Retention Bill

  The U.S. House of Representatives is currently considering H.R. 1981, a bill that would order our online service providers to keep new logs about our online activities, logs to help the government identify the web sites we visit and the content we post online. This sweeping new “mandatory data retention” proposal treats every Internet user like a potential criminal and represents a clear and present danger to the online free speech and privacy rights of millions of innocent Americans.

Civil Rights

• Ending domestic violence, NNEDV, and Tor

  I was invited to speak at the annual technical conference of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, http://nnedv.org/. Over the past few years, I’ve been personally involved with helping victims and survivors of abuse. In many cases, it has been education and helping them understand what’s possible on the Internet, methods to protect their privacy, and methods to control what data trails they leave behind. I’ve been deeply disturbed after meeting survivors of sexual slavery, human trafficking, and child abuse. The realities of life for these people while they were being abused, and the systematic failures of the systems set up to protect and help them, is shocking. The law enforcement officers and those offering services and direct support to these victims often suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Everyone involved with the results of abuse seems to need help all around.

DRM

• Let Barnes & Noble know that the Nook is defective by design

  American book retailer Barnes & Noble have launched the third model of their Nook ebook reader. We’ve previously written about the Nook, but until recently the Nook did not get much attention due to the limited options available.

  Things have changed and now the Nook represents a real threat to users because of its invasive DRM, close relationship with DRM champions Adobe, and because of its use of the Android operating system — which might lead many to think the Nook is not defective by design.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

“GNU/Linux – An Introduction”

TLWIR 11: Old PCs, Patent Wars and The Humble Bundle

Desktop

• GNU/Linux Desktop: Not Dead. Thriving.

  Of course a kernel was not created to compete with an operating system. Free Software, as defined by RMS was intended to compete with non-free software and it does very well.

• Counting Linux Users

  My point is the Humble Indie Bundle, that provides a bundle of DRM free Indie games for Windows Mac and Linux, and publishs some data about the distribution of Total Payments by Platform.

Kernel Space

• How to ruin Linus’s vacation

  Linus was all set to release the final 3.0 kernel when Hugh Dickins showed up on the list with a little problem: occasionally a full copy of the kernel source tree fails because one of the files found therein vanishes temporarily. What followed was a determined bug-chasing exercise which demonstrates how subtle and tricky some of our core code has become. The problem has been found and squashed, but there may be more.

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa 7.11 Brings Much-Needed Linux Graphics Driver Improvements

  • Gallium3D XvMC For Nouveau Working, Again

Applications

• Twidge: twitter from the CLI

  Twidge is a neat little shell application that lets you read and write twitter status updates, messages and also lets you do a few extra tricks.

• 5 Open Source 3D Modelling & Rendering Apps for Linux

  We have discussed a lot about real world applications of 3D modelling and rendering tools like Blender before, but not really about the choice of tools itself. What are the best, free and open source, 3D modelling and rendering apps available for Linux? Let’s find out.

• SpiderOak: Cloud 9

  For this illustration I installed SpiderOak onto a fresh install of Bodhi Linux 1.1.0 in Virtual Box 4.0, but these directions should be applicable to any .deb based Linux system. Other variants are supported by SpiderOak but are not discussed here.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Install Camfrog Server Advanced 6.0 Linux On Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

  • So you want to use Backtrack 5? [With Pictures/Windows/Mac/Linux]

  • Linux command Types (Internal and External)

  • How to Install KDE SC 4.7 on Ubuntu 11.04

  • Substitution with sed

  • Bisigi Themes Natty PPA Updated, Install 15 Great Themes in Just 3 Steps!

  • Script to enable disable panels auto hide

  • Using Cat Command in Linux To Create,Display,Append and Concatenate files

  • Monitoring ESX/ESXi Servers

  • Ripping CDs to MP3s Using Asunder in Ubuntu Linux

  • Sync Xen 4.1.2-rc(X) on Ubuntu 11.10 with tip of xen-4.1-testing.hg

  • Use SSH for more secure browsing in public networks

  • Compress your files using tar and gzip utility

  • Qemu and openvpn: Secure and convenient remote access to virtual servers

  • How Bash Shell interprets a command ??

  • Weekend Project: Get to Know GNU Sed

• Wine

  • Use Wine to run Windows software on Linux

  • Wineskin Pro is now compatible with PaulTheTall game wrappers

• Games

  • Helena the 3rd (Is the end nearly here?)

    In our previous article we wrote about Helena reaching the final stages of production and we went into what we were going to be working on to wrap up production. This time around I wish to tell you guys what our successes and failures have been over the past few weeks.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Plop Linux 4.1.2 released

  • Monomaxos 6.0

  • Vine Linux 6 をリリース

  • Zorin 5 (Educational Lite)

  • TurnKey 11.2, free micro instances, EBS backed cloud servers

  • Poseidon 4.0

  • Release published (0.7.106)

    A new release (0.7.106) is out, which is a refresh of the basesystem and includes new versions of busybox, lm_sensors, mprime, smartmontools, memtester, netperf, ramspeed (added ramsmp) and y-cruncher.

  • Open Xange 2011.07 (Server)

• Devices/Embedded

  • Summer Hacking

    To my joy, the PICkit II is now supported on Linux by Microchip (the makers of the PIC processors). The tools are supplied “as-is,” and do not expect to be popular in the support department for not following the main road, but still, it is better than nothing. Also, they are free, but only as in free beer. To download the tool, look for PK2CMD for Linux (simply search for Linux) on the PICkit II page.

  • Wind River’s Genivi-compliant IVI platform adds ARM support

    Wind River announced a new version of Wind River Platform for Infotainment, its Genivi-compliant automotive stack designed for building Linux-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. The new version adds support for ARM processors, as well as Apple iPhone and iPod integration, Wind River Hypervisor support for multi-OS virtualization, and a new application and GUI framework, says the company.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android testing platform mimics human UI interaction

        Mentor Graphics has repackaged its embedded Linux and Android development platforms and services into an “integrated enablement program” for hardware companies. The Mentor Embedded Hardware Enablement Program provides services and training for embedded Android and Linux platforms, as well as Sourcery open source tools, Inflexion UI creation tools, and vertical market solutions, says the company.

      • Huawei serves up a curvy Gingerbread phone

        Huawei announced a 3.7-inch smartphone that offers Android 2.3, a curved unibody design, and a new 3D user interface. Billed as Hauawei’s “sexiest” phone yet, the Vision runs on a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, offers a five-megapixel camera, and measures just 0.39 inches at its thinnest point, says the company.

      • 5 Great Android apps for Book Lovers

      • The open card in the mobile game

        We believed there was a fairly prominent place for open source software, open source operating systems and general openness in mobile software when we wrote our report, Mobility Matters three years ago, but we would have never guessed that the openness of this software would be so significant in two respects: defense from patent and other intellectual property attacks; the market power of open source, which draws in not only developers, but manufacturers and other third-parties. We’ve seen the speed and strength at which a project and community such as Android can grow. Will we now begin to see other alternatives that are even more open emerge as top choices among developers, hardware companies, wireless players and consumers? Never before have those alternatives really existed in the mobile software world, so it’s good at least to see the possibility is there.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Tablet Stats

      In Q2 2010, iPad had 94% of the global tablet market. A year later, iPad is down to 60% thanks to Android/Linux and the host of manufacturers and retailers pushing Android/Linux. At this rate, Apple’s monopoly on tablets will be gone before the end of 2011. iSuppli predicted that would happen a year later, the end of 2012.

    • Phones and tablets will take over from single-purpose gadgets, iSuppli says

    • Dell’s Honeycomb tablet launches in China

      Dell launched its long awaited 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet — but only in China, with no date yet given for a U.S. appearance. The Dell Streak 10 Pro runs Android 3.1, offers the usual Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and other Honeycomb features, measures 0.51 inches (12.95mm) thick, and weighs 1.6 pounds, says the company.

    • 1GHz Gingerbread tablet debuts at $259

      Hong Kong based Marvel-Digital announced a Android 2.3-based TBT-10C 7″ Mercury Pad Tablet for $259, featuring a 1GHz Samsung “Hummingbird” Cortex-A8 processor and a seven-inch, capacitive multitouch display. Meanwhile, a detailed comparative review between the iPad 2 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 has given the edge to the Android tablet for its greater flexibility.

    • Oak Trail tablet will boot Windows, Android, or MeeGo, reports say

Vendor-led community projects? Don’t forget your hat

Brian Proffitt asked an interesting question last week with regards to the OpenStack project: ‘can a commercial vendor lead a project as openly as a foundation?’

It’s an interesting question, and one that is particularly prescient given the observed re-balancing of control and community.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Android testing platform mimics human UI interaction

    Wind River announced the Wind River UX Test Development Kit, an Eclipse-based Android software testing platform that aims to reproduce human interaction with user interfaces. Wind River also updated the related Wind River Framework for Automated Software Testing (FAST) for Android to version 1.6, adding a benchmarking index, and new configuration, monitoring, and testing tools.

  • Preview And Images: The Next Firefox UI

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Hurd

  GNU’s Hurd kernel is shaping up. It may never have much of a role on the desktop because Linux has such a lead and wide acceptance but, on servers, there is little to keep Hurd out. Virtual machines usually offer only a few virtual devices after all so Hurd does not need a lot of drivers to run in one. Many servers are virtual these days so Hurd might fly there. Real NICs are cheap and plentiful, too. A real server could just change NICs if need be. Hurd has glue-code to allow use of drivers from Linux. Depending on how well that works, Hurd may run nicely. If Debian is interested in it Hurd must be at least stomping its hooves.

• GNU Xnee 3.10 (‘Heron’) released

  We are pleased to announce the availability of GNU Xnee 3.10

• Caribou Week Who Is Paying Attention Anyway – We Need a New Maintainer

  After making a non-binding resolution to report my Caribou progress on a weekly basis, I flaked. Of course. But luckily Nohemi has picked up the slack and have kept you all up to date about the libcaribou powered GNOME Shell keyboard in her more binding GSoC reports. So no more architecture diagrams are needed, you all get the idea. But if you didn’t, let me make it clear: The goal of Caribou is to make it easy to implement new on screen keyboards where you would only need to provide the view, and libcaribou will be your model and controller.

• [GNU Psychosynth] Master’s thesis and new release!

  As previous posts announce, latest developments were driven by my Master’s Thesis held in the University of Granada. Last week I defended it and now I am, officially, a software engineer The document is written in English; it is the best description available of all the new core refactoring and an interesting read if you want to contribute to the project.

Project Releases

• [Midor] Cleanup, Adblock speed-ups and crash dialog love

  Time for a major release. The leading motto is cleanup and as we jump to Midori 0.4.0 we increase minimum requirements to WebKitGTK+ 1.1.17 and Vala 0.10 (Vala used to be optional). This allows us to say goodbye to several portions of backwards-comaptibility code. Anybody who has some familiarity with the code knows Midori used to try very hard to run on older systems, some may say too hard. Midori 0.3.6 will remain available for anyone who can’t upgrade yet. This benefits users insofar as more time is available for new features instead of looking at old code.

• PLplot Release 5.9.8

  This is a development release of PLplot. It represents the ongoing efforts of the community to improve the PLplot plotting package. Development releases in the 5.9.x series will be available every few months. The next full release will be 5.10.0.

Public Services/Government

• Three out of four rootkit infections are on Windows XP

  The House of Commons has reviewed the government of the UK’s actions with respect to implementing IT and found numerous faults and made recommendations for improvement.

Standards/Consortia

• A Gentle Introduction to OpenCL

  Writing and running your first app with code executing on the CPU and the GPU

  OpenCL provides many benefits in the field of high-performance computing, and one of the most important is portability. OpenCL-coded routines, called kernels, can execute on GPUs and CPUs from such popular manufacturers as Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and IBM. New OpenCL-capable devices appear regularly, and efforts are underway to port OpenCL to embedded devices, digital signal processors, and field-programmable gate arrays.

Chomsky: Public Education Under Massive Corporate Assault — What’s Next?

Right after that I happened to go to California, maybe the richest place in the world. I was giving talks at the universities there. In California, the main universities — Berkeley and UCLA — they’re essentially Ivy League private universities — colossal tuition, tens of thousands of dollars, huge endowment. General assumption is they are pretty soon going to be privatized, and the rest of the system will be, which was a very good system — best public system in the world — that’s probably going to be reduced to technical training or something like that. The privatization, of course, means privatization for the rich [and a] lower level of mostly technical training for the rest. And that is happening across the country. Next year, for the first time ever, the California system, which was a really great system, best anywhere, is getting more funding from tuition than from the state of California. And that is happening across the country. In most states, tuition covers more than half of the college budget. It’s also most of the public research universities. Pretty soon only the community colleges — you know, the lowest level of the system — will be state-financed in any serious sense. And even they’re under attack. And analysts generally agree, I’m quoting, “The era of affordable four-year public universities heavily subsidized by the state may be over.”

Science

• Interview: Gaël Varoquaux

  I was fortunate enough to get Gaël Varoquaux to accept a written interview. He is a very, very busy man. He was recently heavily involved in SciPy 2011 where he gave a presentation entitled Python for Brain Mining: (Neuro)science with State of the Art Machine Learning and Data Visualization. I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did!

Security

• Three out of four rootkit infections are on Windows XP

  FREEMIUM antivirus vendor Avast warns that unpatched Windows XP machines continue to pose a serious threat to the internet ecosystem by harbouring three quarters of all rootkit infections.

  The company has an unique insight into the threat landscape thanks to over 130 million active Avast! antivirus installations worldwide that send it malware telemetry. According to a recent analysis performed by the firm’s researchers, 74 per cent of 630,000 rootkit samples found in the wild originated from Windows XP machines.

• Lies and Statistics

  I prefer more openness in IT. That’s why I use Debian GNU/Linux, a cooperative product of the world working for us and not against us. Debian publishes all its known bugs and reports for the world to see so you can know the bugs that are out there before you install the software. A search using Google for “remote code execution” on bugs.debian.org reveals 157 hits for all open bugs, not just this year’s and for all the thousands of packages available. Using Debian’s index one can travel back in time to bug #50004 from 1999.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• detention: source

  Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, whose disappearance in April caused an international outcry, endured intense psychological pressure during 81 days in secretive detention and still faces the threat of prison for alleged subversion, a source familiar with the events told Reuters.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Obsolete Expertise and the US Economy’s Energy Problem

  If you came of age in the twenty years leading up to the millennium, it’s likely you will treat energy as a non-limiting input to the US economy. As a journalist, policy maker, or economist, you are far more likely to produce political explanations when faced with economic dilemmas. The Great Recession has offered the perfect occasion to witness the phenomenon, a financial crisis which specifically kicked off amidst 150 dollar oil in 2008. Instead of advising the President that the country faced debt-deflation, with a nasty overlay of high commodity costs, the White House economic team has drawn from the post-war playbook which holds that if you stimulate the economy generally then the system will magically reorganize itself. Well, that hasn’t happened and it’s not going to happen.

Finance

• Revolving Door at S.E.C. Is Hurdle to Crisis Cleanup

  A senior lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission recently took center stage in a major case involving a controversial mortgage security sold by Goldman Sachs.

  There was just one slight twist in the legal proceedings. The S.E.C. lawyer was not the prosecutor taking the deposition. He was the witness.

• Insight: Debt relief replaced with recession fear

  In a matter of days, investor relief that the United States avoided default has been replaced by fears Europe’s debt crisis is deepening and the world’s biggest economy may be slipping back into recession.

• Goldman Sachs Model at Risk as Dodd-Frank Pares Trading in Dark

• Goldman Sachs As Part of the “Predator State”

• U.S. Subsidies to Systemically Dangerous Institutions Violate WTO Principles

  This article makes the policy case that U.S. subsidies to its systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) violate World Trade Organization (WTO) principles. The WTO describes its central mission as creating “a system of rules dedicated to open, fair and undistorted competition.” There is a broad consensus among economists that the systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) receive large governmental subsidies that make “open, fair, and undistorted competition” impossible. To date, WTO is infamous for its hostility to efforts by nation states to regulate banks effectively. At best, the result is a classic example of the catastrophic damage cause by the “intended consequences” of the SDIs’ unholy war against regulation.

• BOMBSHELL REPORT: Goldman Sachs Got Billions From Taxpayers Thru AIG For Its OWN Account, Crisis Panel Finds; Contradicting SWORN Testimony From Execs

• Confessions Of A Wall St. Nihilist: Forget About Goldman Sachs, Our Entire Economy Is Built On Fraud

  There was a strange moment last week during President Obama’s speech at Cooper Union. There he was, groveling before a cast of Wall Street villains including Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein, begging them to “Look into your heart!” like John Turturro’s character in Miller’s Crossing…when out of the blue, the POTUS dropped this bombshell: “The only people who ought to fear the kind of oversight and transparency that we’re proposing are those whose conduct will fail this scrutiny.”

  The Big Secret, of course, is that every living creature within a 100-mile radius of Cooper Union would fail “this scrutiny”—or that scrutiny, or any scrutiny, period. Not just in a 100-mile radius, but wherever there are still signs of economic life beating in these 50 United States, the mere whiff of scrutiny would work like nerve gas on what’s left of the economy. Because in the 21st century, fraud is as American as baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet Volts—fraud’s all we got left, Doc. Scare off the fraud with Obama’s “scrutiny,” and the entire pyramid scheme collapses in a heap of smoldering savings accounts.

• Why are the big banks getting off scot-free?

  For most citizens, one of the mysteries of life after the crisis is why such a massive act of looting has gone unpunished. We’ve had hearings, investigations, and numerous journalistic and academic post mortems. We’ve also had promises to put people in jail by prosecutors like Iowa’s attorney general Tom Miller walked back virtually as soon as they were made.

  Yet there is undeniable evidence of institutionalized fraud, such as widespread document fabrication in foreclosures (mentioned in the motion filed by New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman opposing the $8.5 billion Bank of America settlement with investors) and the embedding of impermissible charges (known as junk fees and pyramiding fees) in servicing software, so that someone who misses a mortgage payment or two is almost certain to see it escalate into a foreclosure. And these come on top of a long list of runup-to-the-crisis abuses, including mortgage bonds having more dodgy loans in them than they were supposed to, banks selling synthetic or largely synthetic collateralized debt obligations as being just the same as ones made of real bonds when the synthetics were created for the purpose of making bets against the subprime market and selling BBB risk at largely AAA prices, and of course, phony accounting at the banks themselves.

• Total Employment in the US Falls Again

  Total employment in the United States fell in July by 38,000 people, from 139.334 to 139.296 million. This was a much smaller loss than the previous month. However, once again the average number of total employed for the current year is in decline. My forecast is that by next year, after revisions and the complete data, 2011′s average—currently at 139.55 million–will fall below 2010′s average of 139.07 million. | see: United States Total Employment in Millions (seasonally adjusted) 2001-2011.

Civil Rights

• Private companies own your DNA – again

  Many scientists cheered last year when a federal judge ruled that human genes couldn’t be patented. The case involved Myriad Genetics, which holds the patent rights on two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, that are associated with increased risks for breast and ovarian cancer. Thanks to these patents, you can’t look these genes in your own body without paying a fee to Myriad. Sounds ridiculous, right? Well, that was the state of gene patents until last May, when judge Robert Sweet ruled that the Myriad’s patents were invalid.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Does Loving Linux Make Us Dislike Windows?

Today I’m a full-time desktop Linux enthusiast, who is familiar with dozens of popular distributions. I’d consider myself very comfortable with Linux on the desktop. What’s interesting though, is the change in how I view Windows.

These days, I avoid Windows as much as possible since I feel much more limited with it. Perhaps this is what Windows users trying Linux feel when stepping outside of their regular computing routine?

Samsung Remove Ubuntu Logo From Galaxy Ad [Updated with video]

Seeing the Ubuntu logo sailing alongside hundreds of Android App icons in a TV spot for Samsung’s Galaxy S II was a strange, but not unwarranted, sight to begin with.

Answering readers and critics on Linux configuration anarchy

Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 159

Desktop

• Seven Concerns on the Linux Desktop

  Instead, the major desktops seem to be responding to the pressures around them rather than taking charge of their direction. Some of these pressures are self-created, while others are historical or common to all modern desktops, free and proprietary alike. Some are barely articulated, although they operate no less powerfully for that.

  Whatever their origins, here are seven concerns that are shaping the Linux desktop today:

Audiocasts/Shows

• Episode 165: Vertigo

• Linux Outlaws 222 – Don’t Be Harshin’ Our Mellow

  Met Police asks who is the real Topiary?, Google is shutting down their Labs, Emacs violates the GPL, flying drone snoops your wifi and GSM, CentOS wants to re-implement ksplice and Dan finally reviews Gnome 3 on Fedora 15.

Kernel Space

• Kernel Log: First release candidate for Linux 3.1

  Expected to be released in about two months, the next kernel version will offer optimised virtualisation, add bad block management components to the software RAID code and include an extended Nouveau driver for NVIDIA’s Fermi graphics chips. Several developers have been criticised for their clumsy use of Git in this development cycle.

  Linus Torvalds has issued the first release candidate of Linux 3.1, closing the merge window of this version, whose final release is expected in late September or early October, 17 days after the release of Linux 3.0. Therefore, the first phase in the Linux development cycle was three days longer than usual. This was caused by the diving holiday Torvalds is currently taking in Hawaii; he is providing an impression of his trip on Google Plus.

• Linux 3.1-rc1 Kernel: A “Pretty Normal Release”

• How to piss off a Linux kernel subsystem maintainer – part 6

  There’s nothing like waking up and receiving in your inbox, a few scant hours after the merge window has opened up again, a plea for why you haven’t already reviewed and applied all 117+ patches that the author sent to you a few weeks ago, back when they well knew you could not apply them due to the merge window being closed.

  Oh, and to top it all off, as the message was sent in HTML format, it didn’t hit the mailing lists, I was the only one who received it. Because of that, I figured it was better if I just ignored it as well, just like the vger.kernel.org filters did.

• Graphics Stack

  • Ryan Gordon Criticizes Open-Source Drivers Again

    There’s just one and a half days left to the Humble Indie Bundle #3, but in less than two weeks the game offering has already grossed nearly $1.9M USD. Recently the developers behind these indie games had allowed the community to ask them questions on Reddit about their work. Ryan “Icculus” Gordon was one of the developers responding and he had provided some interesting comments.

  • Charlies Games original Bullet Candy comes to linux!

    As we retweeted via twitter on the day and as now other awesome sites have picked up, Charlies Games have ported over the original Bullet Candy to Linux.

    It will cost you a measly $1 + if you are feeling nice anything more you wish to donate.

  • Mesa GLSL-To-TGSI Is Merged To Master

Applications

• 3 Linux Apps for Converting Videos

  PC and mobile users often need video conversion tools because of the restrictions placed on various devices. While one device may play H.264 perfectly well, another may insist on MPEG2. These limitations are not insurmountable. With the proper video conversion tools, you can make videos that play everywhere from YouTube to your Blu-ray player.

• Minitube 1.5 to the rescue

• 8 Best CAD Apps for Linux

  Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer technology for the process of design and design-documentation. But are there any good free CAD apps for Linux? Strangely, that is one of the questions we often receive in our mail. We will try to list not just the free CAD apps here, but also the non-free ones that works well under Linux(in no particular order).

• New DRM-Free, “Designed On Linux” Comic Book

  Specifically the great adventures. I’m a huge fan of the classic Sci-Fi heroes like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Average guys (well… mostly average), put into seemingly impossible situations — to save the girl and, often, save the entire planet.

• 10 small Linux apps to take note of

  Day in and day out, there are small (or smallish) applications I have come to completely rely upon. Without these tools, my job and/or my sanity would become precarious. These tools range from entertainment to administration (and all points in between). So I thought I would share my short list with my loyal readers. Check out these apps, then pick and choose those that belong on your must-have list.

• The best file encryption software in open source – group test

  While LUKS isn’t just a means of encrypting a file system, that’s certainly its most common usage. Developed as a reference implementation of the TKS1 standard for secure key setup created by Clemens Fruhwirth, it’s possibly the most commonly used whole-disk encryption system around for Linux distributions.

• 5 Free Open Source Security Tools

  Network and server security can be expensive, but not having good security is even more expensive. Fortunately, you can have the best of both worlds thanks to the many free and open source security solutions that are available to web hosting professionals and system administrators. The following are five that will help lock down your server and keep you informed when evildoers strike.

• Download of the Week: Coherence Plugin for Rhythmbox

  To mix things up, this episode of Download of the Week will not feature an application or a game, but rather a plugin: rhythmbox-plugin-coherence.

  After many years of being a member of the bandwagon to unseat Rhythmbox in favor of Banshee as the default, I end up getting a PS3 and regretting my choice in media player due to the one small gem that is the Coherence plugin for Rhythmbox.

• 6 Alternatives to Google Earth

• Happy birthday Dancer!

• Proprietary

  • TRAUMA Has Been Released !

    About two years ago I’ve posted about the Flash Based Point-and-Click Adventure game named TRAUMA.
    Now it’s been finally released !

  • Adobe Flash Player 11 Linux Performance

    In the middle of July, Adobe released the first Flash Player 11 beta, which had updated the Linux version too. The Flash Player 11 release notably incorporated native 64-bit support, once again, after the earlier “Square” 64-bit beta had lagged behind in terms of updates. Shortly following the Flash Player 11 Beta 1 release I had carried out some Linux benchmarks, but those results never seemed to make it out the door. Here are those results for anyone interested in seeing how the CPU usage and system power consumption differ between Flash 11 with and without VDPAU rendering and then against the open-source Gnash Flash Player.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • [How To] Create A Minimal-looking Narwhal Desktop

  • How to add contrib and non-free repository in Debian GNU/Linux

  • Linux Mint: An updating tip

  • [Alpha version] Now it is simple to install rpm packages on other pc which don’t have internet connection.

  • XO-1 Laptop Triage: 5 Quick OLPC Repair Tips

  • Git Archive Master vs Subversion Export

  • Rotating you Gnome 3 Background images

  • Laptop Mode Tools – Laptop power saving package for Linux systems

  • Use the Focal Length Analyzer Script with digiKam

  • 15 Linux Bash History Expansion Examples You Should Know

  • sgv, StarDraw 2.0 examples with text ?

  • Setting Up Unison File Synchronization Between Two Servers On Debian Squeeze

  • Hack Windows passwords using the Linux application chntpw

  • Super Collision At Studio Dave: The New World Of SuperCollider3, Part 2

  • Rotating your Gnome 3 Background images

  • First Steps Of Running Linux Via Terminal Instead Of Desktop

  • How to install the Pronet Wifi Adapter on Ubuntu

  • Set up Spice-Gtk-0.7 on Ubuntu 11.10

  • Using A File As A Storage Device

  • The Perfect Server – CentOS 6.0 x86_64 [ISPConfig 3]

  • An Introduction To Linux Command Line Part-1

  • Installing rsnapshot On CentOS

  • How To Create an Ebook with OpenOffice.org

  • Wi-Fi File Sharing between Blackberry Playbook and Linux

  • Enabling Compiz Fusion On Linux Mint 11

  • Using Emacs Text Editor – Part 1

  • A Surprisingly Easy Tip for Upgrading Ubuntu

    Some versions of Ubuntu don’t automatically give you the option to upgrade to the latest version. In this week’s Ubuntu is Easy segment, I show you the easy way to upgrade Ubuntu to the latest release, which as of when this video was released is 11.04, Natty Narwhal!

  • Mixing Debian testing and unstable packages

    I installed Debian testing (wheezy) on my workstation about a month ago. Recently I wanted to install some packages, but they were not in the testing repository because they were blocked by the automatic rules that make a package transition from unstable to testing. For example, the arduino package was held down by gcc-avr and avr-libc packages. The situation of the arduino package can be checked on its page on Debian Package Tracking System.

  • The Python Standard Library by Example: A Review

    Stop! If you are just beginning to learn the Python programming language, do not buy this book! This book was written for intermediate to advanced Python programmers who want to be able to put their hands on the Python standard library of modules (which is why I’d recommend buying the hard copy if you meet the qualifications). This is not a book that will teach you the first steps in programming in Python.

    Another thing. Although the transition to Python 3 is coming along nicely, like the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, the future isn’t here yet. This book was written showcasing the Python 2.7 library and this version of Python will likely be with us for some time. If you’re looking for a Python 3 library resource, this book isn’t for you.

• Wine

  • Help support Wine-Review

  • Wine 1.3.26 Released

• Games

  • 3D Puzzle Game ‘Cubosphere’ Beta Released for Linux

    3D puzzle platform game Cuboshpere has reached the first beta stage. The game is inspired by classic PlayStation game Kula World where you control a rolling 3D sphere to complete objectives and collect keys and other items.

  • Unique 2D game ‘In The Dark’ Seeks Kickstarter Funds

    Novacut’s recent success on Kickstarter has kickstarted an raft of Linux-based projects contacting us for coverage of their money-drives on the unique social funding service.

  • Helena the 3rd Demo

  • QUAKEKHAAAAAAN

  • Bullet Candy For GNU/Linux Released !

    Charlies Games the developer of many space shooters has finally ported to GNU/Linux one of his first games, Bullet Candy

  • Open Source in Humble Indie Bundle #3: Haaf’s Game Engine (HGE)

    Bundle #3 is soon over and the *nix port of the Windows-only zlib-licensed engine HGE has been now released as open source as well. It is the engine used by Hammerfight from the Bundle. Visit the pages: hge, hge-unix.

  • Linux Users Continue To Spend More On Humble Indie Bundle

  • Developers and Fans Benefit From Humble Indie Bundle Pay-What-You-Want Model

    By now, we’ve all heard the traditional content industries complain about how technology hurts their business model. But, of course, the story does not end there. While the record labels, movie studios, and video game producers have not figured out a way to compete with free, others have. And this is good news for the rest of us, because it reduces the influence of the traditional gatekeepers who formerly operated an ironclad monopoly on what content we could experience and at what costs, and also because it allows developers and artists without major deals to widely distribute their work and to find new ways to get paid.

  • Humble Indie Bundle #3 Does More Than Two Million Dollars

    With still twelve hours to go in the two-week sale of a collection of DRM-free multi-platform games, the third Humble Indie Bundle has pulled in more than two million US dollars. As of right now, the gross amount is $2,038,931.51 from 351,251 transactions, which is a new record for the project.

  • Want to win a copy of Humble Indie Bundle 3?

    Okay guys so because this bundle is just that awesome i have a copy of the bundle up for grabs for one lucky winner. It includes everything as the price was set as such to make sure it includes the second bundle too!

  • QuakeCon 2011 – John Carmack Keynote

  • Humble Indie Bundle 3 Adds 6 More Games Taking Total Count to 11!

  • Play DotA clone Heroes of Newerth on Linux Natively For Free

    Heroes of Newerth (commonly known as HoN) is a free-to-play action/real-time strategy game based on DotA. The developer S2 Games announced last Friday that HoN is now free-to-play. HoN is heavily inspired by the popular Warcraft 3 mod, Defense of the Ancients (DotA), but with vast improvements in graphics and gameplay. In HoN, two teams of up to five players each take on the role of special Hero units. With the assistance of AI-controlled armies, each team sets out with the sole objective of destroying the other team’s base. As a match progresses, players can earn experience and gold which can be used to upgrade skills or purchase items to make their character more powerful.The game is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Desktop Environments

• Open Source: Pondering the Linux GUI

  First we had the KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.0 debacle. A release numbering scheme by the KDE folk that differed from what is considered the norm ended up with alpha level code being pushed out in most major desktop distributions of Linux. Many people were so upset about radical and broken changes to KDE during this period they left KDE, swearing never to return. It does not matter if KDE is “okay” now. Some of these people will probably not return to KDE.

  Some of the disenchanted former KDE using folk moved to Gnome and liked what Gnome was at the time. These people got comfortable with Gnome 2.x and enjoyed the features it has. Now we have the strangeness that is Gnome 3. Once again, many people are not happy with the changes in Gnome 3. Especially upsetting to some is the loss of functionality they took for granted and an extreme change in the look and feel of Gnome.

• Five Linux Desktops That Aren’t Unity or GNOME 3

  GNOME 3, however, has turned out to be just as controversial, and if any evidence were required, none other than the father of Linux himself–Linus Torvalds–recently provided it by condemning the desktop environment and switching to Xfce instead.

• Linus Hates GNOME 3 and I Don’t

  My editor at LinuxPro, Joe Casad, asked me if I wanted to write an article covering the differences between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3, but I declined (I was already working on something else). The reason for his request was this piece by my colleague, Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, where Steven that talks about Linus Torvalds’ intense dislike for GNOME 3. In the article, Linux suggests that a fork of GNOME 3 is in order.

• Does Linus Run Linux Mint?

  Earlier he mentioned some of the other distributions he has used. In 2007 he told apcmag.com, “So right now I happen to run Fedora on my machines. Before Fedora had PowerPC support, I ran YDL for a while, and before that I had SuSE. Funnily enough, the only distributions I tend to refuse to touch are the “technical” ones, so I’ve never run Debian, because as far as I’m concerned, the whole and only point of a distribution is to make it easy to install.” He even took a swipe at Gentoo or LFS I think when he added, “so Debian or one of the “compile everything by hand” ones simply weren’t interesting to me.”

• What Would Linus Do About GNOME 3? Why, Use Xfce

• 9 Most Useful Compiz Plugins

  Last time we wrote about all the useless plugins in Compiz. This time, we won’t be bashing your favorite compositing window manager. Today, we’ll be listing the most useful plugins Compiz can boast of.

  So, without much ado, here’s a list of the most useful and popular Compiz plugins out there (in no particular order):

• Desktop Summit 2011 Berlin, Aftermath

  I am sad to leave already, but tomorrow I’ll start my internship at the Mayflower office in Munich. I had a really good time in Berlin and enjoyed the talks at the Desktop Summit.

• Keynotes and Sandals – Day Two at Desktop Summit 2011

  For the second full day at the Desktop Summit, the organizers played a little trick on us by starting talks at 9:00 a.m. Those who were awake enough after the dinners and chat of the previous night were treated to talks on Calligra (the KDE creativity and productivity suite), suggestions about blending the web and the desktop, color management and the build process for GNOME. Those who were still in bed will have to wait for the videos and slides to be posted online in the next few days.

  The hallways and courtyard were again busy with small, lively discussions. As the morning went on the attendance at talks increased noticeably. Sunday was also the day of the press conference, where key figures from GNOME, KDE and the cross-community organizing team met with the press to answer their questions about the event and the future of free software.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Control The Music Your Way With Amarok [Linux]

  • World domination

    KDE dominates the Desktop Summit, they even convinced the design shop opposite the venue to decorate with an big K.

  • Get the branding: Unofficial KDE abbreviations list

    Sometime last year I expressed my thoughts on the kde-promo mailing list that one of the reasons for lacking support of the KDE rebranding initiative from 2009 was the lack of official abbreviations – after all, “KDE 4.7” is easier to write than “KDE Plasma Desktop 4.7”. I got no responses but for the last months I didn’t really care a lot.

    After yesterday’s announcement of KDE Frameworks 5.0 I’ve seen talk about “KDE 5.0” on several web sites. But as anyone into KDE knows, there is no KDE5. Reading the mailing lists and other Planet KDE posts, it seems to me that the Plasma Workspaces won’t necessarily jump to the next major version once Frameworks 5.0 are released.

  • Keynotes and Sandals – Day Two at Desktop Summit 2011

    For the second full day at the Desktop Summit, the organizers played a little trick on us by starting talks at 9:00 a.m. Those who were awake enough after the dinners and chat of the previous night were treated to talks on Calligra (the KDE creativity and productivity suite), suggestions about blending the web and the desktop, color management and the build process for GNOME. Those who were still in bed will have to wait for the videos and slides to be posted online in the next few days.

    The hallways and courtyard were again busy with small, lively discussions. As the morning went on the attendance at talks increased noticeably. Sunday was also the day of the press conference, where key figures from GNOME, KDE and the cross-community organizing team met with the press to answer their questions about the event and the future of free software.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Five awesome new themes for your gnome shell

    The gnome shell extensions are getting more and more cool by the day. With high quality themes gnome shell really becomes the most pleasant Linux desktop to use. This is a list of five wonderful shell themes. You could use it on your gnome shell theme in ubuntu, fedora or any other distro.

  • Transparent voting: why I like the idea even though I think it would be useless

    Transparent voting is an idea that is ideally really useful but also completely useless in GNOME.

    Some people in GNOME have been asking for transparent votes. When the board votes, they would like to know who voted which way. I totally agree with them – it’s important to know how different board members think so that you can make educated choices. However, I also agree with the people that say that it would be totally useless.

  • GNOME Shell Multi-Touch Support State

    On the third day of the Berlin Desktop Summit there wasn’t any major announcements like the previous two days when we found out the KDE plans for Wayland, basic plans for KDE 5.0, and initial thoughts concerning GTK4. One of the talks that I attended on Monday that was of closest interest to that of Phoronix content is the work being done towards making a multi-touch GNOME Shell.

Distributions

• Linux Distro: Tails – You Can Never Be Too Paranoid

  Tails takes the form of a bootable live image that can be used from a CD ROM, a USB stick or via a network boot. Once booted, it executes from RAM, taking care not to make use of a swap partition. The desktop is Gnome 2.0 and the applications are a fairly standard selection. The web browser is an old, but usable, version of Iceweasel 3.5 (Debian Firefox). There are other applications to handle graphics work, audio editing, media playback, text editing, instant messaging and a email client – basically, everything you need when you’re on the run from enemy agents. Extra software can be added via the Synaptic package manager which pulls directly from the Debian repositories. So far, so similar to most other live desktop distros. Security and limited footprint on the the host machine are the areas in which the distro differs from the run of the mill.

• Reviews: Here’s looking at Linvo, kid

  Since I got into the Linvo trial to try out their atomic updates, I’d like to talk some more on the subject. Though I haven’t had a chance to install it yet there is another project out there with a surprisingly similar objective to Linvo. This other project is called NixOS. NixOS is a small distribution built on top of the Nix package manager, which is designed to make updates atomic and to insure the operating system is always in a usable state. As with Linvo’s stated goals, NixOS is said to support multiple users installing different versions of software. Nix also has a roll-back feature. The result is supposed to be a system without global program directories (/usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, etc), instead each version of each package gets its own directory. NixOS is a research project and isn’t targeted at home or business users. However, for people who are interested in trying out something different you can learn more from the project’s website.

• The Six Best Linux Community Server Distributions

  One question we get a lot: What are the best community server distributions? That question isn’t as simple as it sounds. What makes a distro “the best”? Why community distributions, specifically? It’s not a simple question — but read on and we’ll point you to six distros that will help you reach a satisfying answer.

• Browser Linux – An Extremely Lightweight & Fast OS For Older x86 Computers [Linux]

  Unless you’re a web developer or programmer, you most likely don’t really need a whole lot of applications aside from a web browser, perhaps a media player, file manager/viewer and text editor. Maybe that’s why a lot more people nowadays own smartphones, tablets, Chromebooks, etc, and can get away with not using their main computers or laptops for light web browsing. If you wish to have an equally lightweight operating system with just the tools you need but on your actual laptop, you can use Google Chrome OS or Jolicloud.

• Tiny Linux distro gets dependency fetching and simpler USB install

  Team Tiny Core announced a new version of its small-footprint, in-memory Linux desktop distro. Tiny Core 3.8 includes faster shutdown, updates to the BusyBox tool collection, improved searching, and the ability to re-download non-installed extensions, among other enhancements.

• New Releases

  • Tiny Core 3.8 Has Been Released | Changelog | Download

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo Releases 11.2 LiveDVD to Crickets

    Ah, Gentoo. Gentoo was once one of the most popular distributions going. But somewhere along the line it declined. It’s become a fringe distro that even with dedicated developers and loyal users can’t seem to get its mojo back. I used Gentoo for several years and perhaps the reasons I moved on might be the same others did as well.

    In 2002 Gentoo was sitting at number three on the Distrowatch Page Hit Ranking. It’s been falling down that list every year since. This year it’s at 18. Version 11.0 was released in March and I don’t think anyone reviewed it. The Rolling Programmer tried, but “hit a brick wall.” Regardless, I don’t think it’s not-so-ease-of-use that took Gentoo down. I lay the blame at Moore’s Law.

  • Installing Gentoo on a Notebook in 2011

    The first time I installed Gentoo, back in late 2004, I used an at-the-time brand-new Dell Inspiron (5150 if I recall) notebook as the victim. At that time, Gentoo was a new world to me, and a confusing one. It took me about a half-week’s worth of actual work to get it installed, but it happened, and it was one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had with a PC.

    There was a problem, though. As Gentoo is hugely a do-it-yourself Linux distribution, there are many things that are just not done for you without your explicit consent. Things have become a little easier over the years, especially with the very informative guides and major improvements made to Gentoo’s own software, but even today it’s still an amazing challenge to get it installed onto a PC and configured correctly (the latter being the more difficult part).

    [...]

    I am glad I decided to give Gentoo another shot on a notebook, and I can’t see me moving off it anytime soon.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat to Present a Cloud Technology Update via Live Webcast on August 10

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that members of the Red Hat executive team will host a press conference that will be broadcast live via webcast at 12pm ET on Wednesday, August 10.

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

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

  • Fedora

    • No Btrfs by default in Fedora 16

      BTRFS WILL NOT BE THE DEFAULT FILE SYSTEM FOR F16

    • Feature preview of Fedora 16 installer

      Fedora 16 is more than two months away from final, stable release, but pre-Alpha installation ISO images have been floating around. News from the Fedora camp have already indicated that btrfs will be the default file system on Fedora 16, joining the ranks of MeeGo, the first (Linux) distribution to use btrfs as the default file system.

      With several articles already published about Fedora and btrfs (see the latest here), I downloaded a pre-Alpha image just to see what the new partitioning scheme will be on Anaconda, the Fedora system installation program, with btrfs. If btrfs is to be the default, a file system with a built-in volume management system, what will happen to LVM?

    • Monday in Fedora

      I suppose this is a sort of a test. I’m going to keep a little log of everything I do during the day related to Fedora. We’ll see how far I get.

    • Fedora 16 Alpha Release Candidate 2 (RC2) Available Now!

      As per the Fedora 16 schedule [1], Fedora 16 Alpha Release Candidate 2 (RC2) is now available for testing. Please see the following pages for download links and testing instructions. In general, official live images arrive a few hours after the install images: see the links below for updates. When they appear, the download directory should be the same as that for install images, except with the trailing “/Fedora/” replaced by “/Live/”.

    • Btrfs Switch Postponed To Fedora 17

      While it originally appeared that Fedora 16 would be the first major distribution (besides possibly counting MeeGo) to switch to Btrfs as the default Linux file-system, that’s not going to happen. Fedora 16 will continue defaulting to EXT4 and it will not be until Fedora 17 now that Btrfs will be the Fedora file-system default.

• Debian Family

  • Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on production

    During the last few weeks I had to work through some of the limitations that were holding me back, such automated driver load and FUSE. I was lucky enough that other people filled the missing pieces I wanted, such as NFS client support and a GRUB bugfix that broke booting from Mirrored pools.

    [...]

    If you have installed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, was it meant for production or just a “toy machine”? If you considered using it on production, did it succeed at satisfying your needs, or did something hold you back? Leave your comment!

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Membership

        The Ubuntu project accepts many kinds of contributions from people all over the world. After time, many contributors develop a sense of belonging and ownership of the project. When someone has been with the project for a long time and have made significant contributions to the project, then they may apply for membership. When you become an Ubuntu member, you become an official part of the project. You become a representative. You get an @ubuntu.com email address, an Ubuntu cloak on Freenode. You even get to vote on who serves on the Ubuntu Community Council, the top-level community governance committee in Ubuntu. For people who are serious about Ubuntu, membership is a big deal. Many people consider Ubuntu membership one of their biggest achievements.

      • Canonical Working to Put Ubuntu on the ‘App Development Map’

        Ubuntu may be marketed as “Linux for human beings,” but Canonical is working hard to make it the open source platform of choice for app developers as well. And it’s now calling on those who fall into the latter category to offer feedback on how Ubuntu can better meet their needs. Read on for details.

        I’ve always interpreted Ubuntu’s “Linux for human beings” mantra to mean that the operating system was built first and foremost to be friendly for non-geeks. To a remarkable extent, Ubuntu has succeeded in that vein, distinguishing itself as the most popular and one of the simplest Linux distributions for desktop users.

      • [Screenshots and Video] First Look at All New Ubuntu Software Center Tech Preview

        Ubuntu Software Center is getting a complete makeover in its GTK3 avatar and first tech preview of this whole new look landed today in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot.

        Being just a tech preview as of now, the current Software Center is still there by default. However, the demo can be launched by running the command software-center-gtk3 from the terminal.

      • Is Canonical Weighing Other E-Mail Options with Thunderbird?

        Few people are as passionate about their e-mail clients as they are about, say, browsers or phones. But that certainly doesn’t mean all mail apps were created equal, as Canonical showed recently when it commissioned a comparison of the open source clients Thunderbird and Evolution. Here’s a look at some of the findings.

        The Thunderbird standalone e-mail client enjoys relatively wide popularity. Developed by Mozilla, it runs on pretty much every modern operating system out there, and has been around for nearly a decade.

      • Amazon issues with EBS affect Ubuntu images in the EU-WEST region

      • Top 5 Ubuntu Alternatives

        The following article will list five of the best alternative operating systems to the popular Ubuntu OS, personally selected by the author.

        We’ve written this article to help some of our readers in finding a good alternative to the current release of the Ubuntu operating system, because of the Unity interface.

        Personally, I use Ubuntu 11.04 everyday and I have no problem with it. When Unity was about to be born, I was like “no way I am using that,” but I got used to it, and I’ve even managed to customize it the way I like it.

      • Ubuntu: The desktop Linux with the cloud inside

        Things can get really confusing when you start working with cloud-computing but we can all agree that having cloud file-storage is a good thing. It’s just so much easier to keep files in a universal storage box in the sky than worrying about whether you put the right USB drive in your laptop bag when you left for work. At this time though only one mainstream desktop operating system comes with the cloud built-in: Ubuntu.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Has Firefox 6 and Thunderbird 6

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Free app brings easy penetration testing to Android

      Zimperium will soon release a penetration-testing app called Android Network Toolkit (Anti), ready to sniff our Wi-Fi vulnerabilities for good or evil, says Forbes. The software was shown at the DefCon hacking conference in Las Vegas, following a Black Hat security conference that featured presentations on a new DARPA Cyber-Fast Track project, the Shady RAT cyber-attack, and Facebook facial-recognition tools.

    • HTC releases OpenSense SDK for tapping 3D, stylus features

      HTC released a software developer kit for its Sense UI skin for Android. The OpenSense SDK offers APIs that let developers harness the GUI’s look and feel, as well as a stereoscopic 3D display (available on the Evo 3D 4G smartphone) and a stylus pen (available with the HTC Flyer and Evo View 4G tablets).

    • Android ‘smartwatch’ acts as Bluetooth extension to smartphones

      Blue Sky has begun taking pre-orders for the “I’mWatch,” an Android 1.6-based gadget that offers a 1.5-inch screen and audio jack, interacting with smartphones via Bluetooth to display alerts. The device follows last week’s WIMM One wearable Android watch, as well as an Android-based watch platform from Motorola called the MotoActive that popped up recently on the web.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Motorola Xoom gets Android 3.1

    Motorola has released a UK Android 3.1 update for the Motorola Xoom, activating long-awaited features for early adopters.

    The patch brings users up to speed with Honeycomb’s improved multi-tasking, resizable home screen widgets and keyboard and mouse compatibility, as well as a host of support for other USB or Bluetooth devices.

  • Lenovo ThinkPad Tablets: A Closer Look From Inside Lenovo

    The wait is over. Here at Lenovo, we have introduced our new Android-based ThinkPad tablet — taking the brand full circle. You can read the press release here. It’s hard to believe that the first ThinkPad, introduced back in 1992, was a pen-based tablet, but it was. The iconic ThinkPad 700c ushered in the familiar notebook form factor later. I once wrote a blog that goes deeper into the ThinkPad tablet history lesson for those who are curious. Nearly 20 years later, could our new ThinkPad tablet be the weapon of choice for business success? I think so.

  • Seven-inch Sharp Galapagos tablet runs Android 3.2

    Sharp announced a seven-inch, 1024 x 600-pixel “Galapagos A01SH” tablet running Android 3.2 on an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor — and its FCC approval suggests it’s eventually destined for the U.S.. Meanwhile, the Toshiba Thrive “Honeycomb” tablet has received a sleep-and-resume bug fix, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 got a “magazine-like” TouchWiz UI update.

  • Pandigital launches $159 Android tablet with Cortex-A9 processor

    Just a few days after Pandigital began selling a $170 Nova and $180 Planet tablet at BestBuy and Amazon, respectively, it introduced a third seven-inch Android tablet called the Star, for $160. What’s more, the company disclosed that all three tablets include ARM Cortex-A9 processors, representing a price breakthrough for products based on the technology.

Events

• OSCON Round-up

  Reading some stories recently, it would be easy to conclude that there was some sort of a decline in open source. I’ll not pretend to have new and objective data on the subject, but having just returned from OSCON in the USA I have to say rumours of the death of open source are premature.

• Ohio LinuxFest Registration is Open for Business

• ESC Boston features giveaways, tackles embedded security

  Keynotes and tracks were announced for the ESC (Embedded Systems Conference) Boston, set for Sept. 26-29, including keynotes on embedded security and medical devices. ESC Boston offers a Linux/Android track, featuring a session on Android’s Open Accessory Kit, as well as giveaways to “All Access” users of a BeagleBoard-xM board and a Texas Instruments programmable, wireless-enabled eZ430-Chronos sports watch.

Web Browsers

• Google, Mozilla Team Up to Create a Smarter, Action-Based Web

  Google has announced a new set of APIs for its Chrome web browser, which are designed to connect applications and sites across the web. Web Intents, as Google is calling its new meta-website API, allows websites to pass data between each other — for example, to edit a photograph or share a URL with friends.

  Developers at Mozilla have been working on a similar framework for Firefox, and now Google says it will work with Mozilla to develop a single API that works in both web browsers.

• Mozilla

  • The Mozilla Interview: Why Firefox Matters

    Mozilla’s Firefox experienced a pretty rapid turn of fortunes last year and is still dealing with the effects of a changing browser landscape today. The rise of Chrome, a more competitive Microsoft, an increasingly loyal Apple user base, the often-delayed release of Firefox 4, created a perfect storm against Mozilla that is affecting its market share and credibility. Johnathan Nightingale agreed to spend some time with us to talk about the current state of Firefox and its immediate future in a very competitive environment.

  • Firefox Extension for Anonymous Browsing Hits Version 1.0

    There are lots of valid reasons why many people around the globe want to be able to use the web and messaging systems anonymously, despite the fact that some people want to end Internet anonymity altogether. In many parts of the world, opressive government regulations threaten free speech, and worse, which has produced an extensive list of technologies that people around the world use to beat the Internet censors. Among these, Tor, from the Tor Project, is one of the most powerful and flexible open source solutions for online anonymity. Last summer, we covered one of these solutions, a Firefox extension called HTPPS Everywhere, which leverages Tor for browsing anonymity. Now, there is an official version 1.0 available.

  • Creating Firefox web apps that look like native apps

Databases

• MariaDB Crash Course released

  I am happy to announce that the first MariaDB book is released!

  The book is called MariaDB Crash Course and is written by Ben Forta, who also wrote the MySQL Crash Course book.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice.org: Showdown for Best Open Source Office Suite

  With the release of a new version of LibreOffice this month, it’s a good time to look at the two major open source office suites, LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org, to see what advantages each offers, and which is a better bet for end users.

  Both products are suites of office applications, comprising word process, spreadsheet, presentation graphics, database, drawing, and math tools. Both also spring from the same code base. OpenOffice.org was created by a German company called Star Division, which Sun Microsystems bought in 1999. Originally the suite was called StarOffice, and it was popular in the European market as an alternative to Microsoft Office. After picking it up, Sun changed the name of the product to OpenOffice.org and released its code as open source. The product retained some popularity in the enterprise, partly because of its cross-platform capabilities and no-cost license.

• TLWIR 12: Libreoffice 3.4.2, NASA, and the Asus X101

Openness/Sharing

• Moto: From Dining To Open-Source Software

  Two months ago there was a mention of Moto on Phoronix as being a place for a wonderful (and tasty) high-tech dinner. At the time it was mentioned just for their use of interesting technologies to make wonderful dishes, and partnerships with NASA and other organizations to conduct food research. Come to find out, my favorite American restaurant is also entering the open-source software business. The restaurant is working on some interesting open-source code… In particular, they’re hoping to revolutionize restaurant management software with this project they have been working on, dubbed Moto Matrix.

• Open Source Effort Will Deliver Low-Cost Wi-Fi for All

  One of the great things about open source software is that it doesn’t just bring a wealth of benefits to businesses. Rather, by making low-cost, high-quality software widely available to everyone, it also has the potential to change lives around the world.

• A new way of measuring Openness, from Android to WebKit: The Open Governance Index

  [Much has been said about open source projects – and open source platforms are now powering an ever-increasing share of the mobile market. But what is “open” and how can you measure openness? As part of our new research report (free download), VisionMobile Research Partner Liz Laffan introduces the Open Governance Index – a new approach to measuring the “openness” of software projects, from Android to WebKit]

Standards/Consortia

• OpenGL 4.2 Specification Published With GLSL 4.20

  The good news: Khronos has published version 4.2 of the OpenGL specification in conjunction with the GL Shading Language version 4.20 specification. The bad news? The open-source Linux graphics drivers are falling hopelessly behind in keeping up-to-date with the latest upstream OpenGL releases and what is supported by the proprietary drivers and those for other operating systems.

  The release of OpenGL 4.2 isn’t much of a surprise, it’s coming just around one year after the OpenGL 4.1 specification. The occasion for this release is the SIGGRAPH conference taking place this week in Vancouver, Canada. “The OpenGL 4.2 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.20 update to the OpenGL Shading Language. The OpenGL 4.2 specification contains new features that extend functionality available to developers and enables increased application performance.”

Amazon, Microsoft Data Centers Go Down Without Much Fanfare

It finally happened. We had a fairly significant cloud outage the other day and we didn’t have a lot of hand-wringing about the perils of cloud computing. Could it be that we have finally reached a point where we don’t have to defend the future of cloud computing each time a data center has problems, or is it just that everyone is on vacation in August and nobody was paying attention?

Microsoft gives BPOS customers credit note for latest crash

This is the latest in a series of embarrassing cloud outages for Redmond after a summer of interruptions began in May, but differs from other incidents in that an “Act of God” was responsible for knocking out the service.

Security

• HTTPS Everywhere – no substitute for common sense

• Who Do You Trust with SSL?

Civil Rights

• Secret Identities Online and Defamation

  The Internet has given rise to thousands of online chat forums, where participants can sound off on the issues of the day often shielded by the cloak of anonymity. Anonymous speech can be empowering — whistleblowers depend upon it to safeguard their identity and political participants in some countries face severe repercussions if they speak out publicly — but it also carries the danger of posts that cross the line into defamation without appropriate accountability.

  Striking the balance between protecting anonymous free speech on the one hand and applying defamation laws on the other sits at the heart of a new Ontario Superior Court decision released last week. The case involved postings about Phyllis Morris, the former mayor of Aurora.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

NPC to offer GNU/Linux class this fall

It’s been called the Universal Operating System that can be securely customized to perform any computing task. And this fall, Northland Pioneer College will again be offering classes on the GNU/Linux Operating System using a revised, up-to-date curriculum on Thursday afternoons, 1 to 5 p.m., Aug. 25 through Dec. 8, in the Learning Center, room 133, at the Show Low – White Mountain Campus.

“Learning GNU/Linux gives people options and choices when it comes to using operating systems,” commented instructor Eric Bishop, who also heads NPC Information Services Division. “Linux is a free, open source operating system that is very stable, secure and efficient, with thousands of free programs associated with it. Learning to use Linux also lets you learn more about how computers and operating systems work ‘under the hood,’ in a general sense.”

The wonders of the shell

For those of you too young to know things weren’t all windows and clicks. There used to be a time when you used to control the computer using just the keyboard.

And a great time that was indeed… if you wanted to copy all the .jpg files from a folder you need only but type in a command and it would be done! Now? After you press about a million clicks, do a 2 million drags and watch 10 million internet cats you get to finish the task you set your mind to. Some say it’s easier this way, it makes more sense to the normal user to drag a picture symbolizing a file from one box to another in order to copy/move it and indeed it is easier, but what if you have 10.000 files scattered around a 100.000 file folder?

Loving and Hating Linux

The first reason (and possibly primary reason) is that it is still an operating system that you are using. No operating system has ever worked on all hardware, with all software, or without bugs. This means that at some point you are going to be infuriated or at least disappointed. In my experience, Linux fowls up a lot less often than do Winders or OSX, and as such I use it. I am sure that we have all experienced Xorg issues. This happens more to me now than ever before due to Xorg trying to automagically configure itself. I am also sure that we have all had issues with ALSA at some point. My latest was an issue with HDMI audio conflicting with an onboard audio chip. It was easily solved, but annoying none the less. There are also those times when you have a dependency issue. You might have one version of a library that is required for foo, and then a different version of the same library required for bar, and for some reason the system won’t allow you to have both… annoying, but it can be worked around.

Disney to Produce Penguin Film… Called ‘Tux’.

The film is to be an adaptation of “gritty” Japanese graphic novel ‘Tuxedo Gin’, the storyline of which sees a young street fighter “fall into a coma and learns that he …only has enough karma points to be reincarnated as an animal 15 pounds or less.”

Ignore the speculation, Linux is far from dead

Usually I try not to overdo the Linux evangelism. I’d rather Linux succeeded on its own merits than from the fumbling insights that come from the mouths of believers.

But last month I read an article and it left me feeling a little down. It was titled Is Linux Finished? and the author outlined what he thought were the reasons for the distinct lack of success Linux has had on the desktop.

A lot of it had to do with Apple stealing its niche, the lack of a decent user experience and the confusion that comes with distro fragmentation. It was a good article and each of these points is valid.

Desktop

• Recycle’s Friend, Reuse

  Recycling is something we all deal with, or at least should deal with, when it comes to technology. Old computers, monitors, motherboards and their ilk are full of toxic chemicals that must be disposed of properly. Thankfully, “Being Green” is a trend that hasn’t really lost any steam. As technologists, we understand the need to use less power, recycle old technology and make wise purchasing decisions when it comes to hardware. And, we shouldn’t forget recycle’s buddies reduce and reuse either.

  With modern virtualization, it’s possible to reduce the number of servers we need to buy. Add to that the reduction in power usage with low-power CPUs, and it’s relatively easy to reduce the amount of waste in our server rooms. Unfortunately, it doesn’t eliminate the problem completely. That’s where reuse comes into play. In the photo, you’ll see a clock I received as a Christmas gift. It’s simply the circuit board from some sort of router that has “clock guts” added to it. Geeky yes, but if it’s stuck on my wall, it’s one fewer piece of computer scrap in a landfill.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 3 Episode 15

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 414

• Podcast 90 Interview with Jane Trembath

  Today I am proud to bring you an interview with Jane Trembath from South Africa. Jane is a captain on the Airbus 340 – the first woman pilot in South Africa to command long-range international flights.

• Linux Outlaws 221 – My Internal DNS

• CAOS Theory Podcast 2011.08.05

• Going Linux Aug 05: #146 Listener Feedback

Kernel Space

• RapidDisk, A New Linux RAM Disk Kernel Module

  Released last month was RapidDisk 1.0, which is a Linux kernel module that up to this point has received little attention on the Internet. RapidDisk is a new Linux RAM disk kernel module like the brd and zram modules, but with a different feature-set.

• Linux 3.0.1

• Linux File System Monitoring

  A lot of the embedded systems I work on lately run Linux. I enjoy that, because I’m a long-time UNIX user and I run nothing but Linux on my personal computers and servers these days (well, assuming you count Android as a form of Linux, which I do).

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org Server 1.11 RC2 Is Released

    Keith Packard has tagged X.Org Server 1.11 RC2. The X.Org Server 1.11 release is imminent and the RC2 marks the end of development except for critical fixes.

  • Nouveau GeForce 400/500 Fermi On Linux 3.1

    Besides boosting the Intel Sandy Bridge performance, the Linux 3.1 kernel is also great for open-source graphics in that it has improved support for NVIDIA GeForce 400/500 “Fermi” graphics cards via the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. The Linux kernel has already supported kernel mode-setting for these GPUs and then more recently there was 2D/X-Video acceleration as well as 3D acceleration when paired with the Nouveau Gallium3D “NVC0″ driver. The accelerated support though has required manually extracting the graphics processor’s microcode after the GPU was initialized by the proprietary driver. With the Linux 3.1 kernel, Nouveau can generate its own “FUC” microcode to circumvent this problem. In other words, there is now “out of the box” open-source support for NVIDIA GeForce 400/500 graphics cards.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Display current location on your web page using the SPOT GPS tracker

  • Marble – An Open Source Alternative To Google Earth [Linux]

  • Spreadsheet Awesome: Check Mark Totals

  • Make Google Music Manager work in F15

  • How to use xmacro on Ubuntu

  • From LibreOffice to ePub

  • What is DHCP and how to configure DHCP server in Linux

  • How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?

  • How To Cut Your Linux PC’s Boot Time in Half With E4rat

  • Merging Video Files

  • Ubuntu 11.04 remove new overlay scroll bar and get fat scroll bar back

  • Check Disk Usage From The Command Line

  • Script of the Week: Cleaning Up Text with sed

  • How to see system services are enable or disable in ubuntu 11.04(Natty Narwhal)

  • Firefox Profile Data Storage: How to Hack it

  • How to Conduct a Linux Server Security Audit

  • Bash, special parameters by examples

• Games

  • Some random FPS engine news

    Fast games for slow summer news weeks… but actually some of these news are a bit older already also :p

    To start out… yes RedEclipse got a (smaller) new release a few days ago, codenamed Supernova (Version 1.1). The release notes can be found in our/their forums, but it plays as great as before (except for the annoying hit sound :p ). Edit: game-play video from one of our forum users.

  • Forget Duke Nuke ‘Em. Look at THIS.

    My wife is a pretty amazing English teach in an amazingly deprived high school. I try and do what I can to help out when I can. I make things for school plays. I’ve painted backgrounds for show choirs. I’ve talked at career days. The thing that never fails to stun me with the students I interact with is the profane lack of technology in their education. When I talk to people who know about such things, it seems that schools either are flush with technology (eg students are issued laptops annually) or they are suffering through school with a War Games tech stack.

    While I was at Southeast Linux Fest a few months ago, I saw two separate talks that led me to come up with the idea that might just help a little with this problem. The first talk was by Leslie Hawthorne about Humanitarian FOSS. One of the people at the talk mentioned a project she’d worked on with the girl scouts where each girl in the class was given a thumb drive with a a live Linux distribution on it. They would boot off of the USB drives, save their work to the USB stick, and when it was done they would take it with them.

  • id Software’s Rage May Not Be Coming To Linux Soon

    The good news out of John Carmack’s QuakeCon 2011 keynote is that the Doom 3 source-code will be released this year following the release of id Software’s Rage game based upon their shiny new id Tech 5 engine. The bad news? The Linux client for the Rage game has an uncertain future.

  • Doom 3 Source-Code To Be Released This Year

    Just as suspected: the source-code to id Software’s Doom 3 game will be publicly released this year!

    This morning I wrote about What Should Linux Gamers Expect From QuakeCon 2011? In there, I mentioned the id Tech 4 engine source release was likely based upon past QuakeCon traditions and John Carmack previously promising the code’s released upon the release of the RAGE game with id Tech 5.

  • The Magnificent Seven (Humble Indie Bundle)

  • Cubosphere: First Beta

    The game reminds of irrlamb and Neverball but is in fact a tile-based puzzle, rather than a free-physics/precision game. It has a simple level editor and 18 visual/audible styles to chose from. Some features of the 200+ levels are lasers, frying blocks, teleporters, switches, elevators and enemies.

  • HGE comes to Mac and Linux (guest post from Ryan Gordon)

    We’ve also seen great improvements, optimizations, and enhancements to all the opened games, across hundreds of patches from dozens of contributors.

  • Linux Game Publishing Is Hitting A Bumpy Road Again

    Linux Game Publishing, the UK-based company that’s ported a number of game clients to Linux but last year had a pretty quiet time (nearly going the way of Loki Software) after their only server went kaput and was offline for months. Earlier this year, LGP said they were working on a new Linux game port, but they failed to comment further.

Desktop Environments

• Approaching the desktop summit

  It’s only one day left until the global KDE and GNOME communities meet at Berlin for the second desktop summit. Hundreds of free software contributors from all over the world, the core of the free desktop community is meeting at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in the middle of the German capital from August 6th to 12th.

• The Linus effect

  On July 26th Linus said he switched to Xfce because he doesn’t like GNOME 3. Guess what happens when someone picked up the news yesterday:

• What is the difference between GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE?

  In Linux, there are so many choices, and this includes the desktop environments and window managers. Four of the most popular desktop environments in Linux are GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE. All four offer sophisticated point-and-click graphical user interfaces (GUI) which are on par with the desktop environments found in Windows and Mac OS X.

• KDE Draws Up Plans For Wayland In 2012

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Top 5 Plasma Widgets for the KDE Desktop

    With KDE 4.7, the KDE team has managed to create one of the most beautiful desktops out there, and to be honest, it’s even more appealing than Windows 7 or Mac OS X. On the usability front, KDE doesn’t seem to cut corners. Trademark features like Activities and Plasmoids (widgets) are polished to near perfection. Also, since the initial KDE 4 release, a lot of quality community-created widgets and plugins have sprung up, making the KDE workspace more than just an alternative to GNOME 3 or Unity. So, if you’ve just installed KDE on your computer, here are some of the best widgets you can drop on to your desktop and make your friends jealous.

  • RAW image processing with digikam

  • Donations

  • The Plans For KDE Frameworks 5.0 Were Just Announced

  • KDE 5.0 roadmap announced

    Most eyes in the Linux desktop world are on the Berlin Desktop Summit this week, as members of the GNOME and KDE camps come together for a joint technical conference running from August 6-12 at Humboldt University in Berlin. Currently, KDE seems to be making the most strides in the joint event, with the surprise announcement of the KDE 5.0 roadmap, which was revealed by KDE developer Aaron Seigo in his blog Sunday.

  • Important Announcement Coming Today at Desktop Summit

    Today at 17:30 there is a panel presentation here at Berlin Desktop Summit that is unfortunately titled “KDE Platform 4 Roadmap” and the schedule says I’m presenting it. This was submitted prior to the Platform 11 meeting in Randa so it could make the speaking schedule here at the Desktop Summit. At the time I didn’t know what precisely we’d decide on at Platform 11 .. and the title reflects that.

    What I did know was that we would want to communicate the results (whatever they would be) from Platform 11. That is in fact what we will be doing. Better yet, I will be joined by David Faure, Kevin Ottens and Stephen Kelly in doing so.

    Interestingly, however, the presentation will not be about KDE Platform 4. It will be about KDE Frameworks 5.0.

  • Dragon Player 3

  • KDE Having Fun at Desktop Summit 2011

    Friday, 10:00, August 5, 2011. A big group of people was standing a bit lost in the cloakroom of the Humboldt University at Unter den Linden, Berlin. They were the volunteers for the Desktop Summit 2011 – but without guidance and leadership, they were just nervously looking around and talking to each other.

    But at 11:00, Mirko Boehm came in, gathered everyone together and told them what to do! Tables got moved, tape stuck to floors, posters hung up.

  • King of KDistros (Poll Results)

    Alright, thanks to mobile technology, I was able to put together a very quick note to let you know how the King of KDE distros went.

• GNOME Desktop

  • As Linus was saying . . . .

    Until recently, I had several of my lab machines using GNOME — until my hardware and I were relegated to second-class status by being only able to use the GNOME 3 Fallback Mode while the rest of the world went on its merry way using GNOME 3. But in the grand scheme of things, that’s OK: Regular readers of this blog also know that in the recent past I have taken both GNOME 3 and Unity to task for bailing on already experienced users in an effort to dumb down the desktop for those who are new to Linux.

    Of course, the woe I documented in past blogs about it is nothing compared to the choice words Linus Torvalds has for GNOME 3.

  • Testing Gnome 3

  • You’re Living in the Past, Dude!

    At the 2000 Usenix Technical Conference (which was the primary “generalist” conference for Free Software developers in those days), I met Miguel De Icaza for the third time in my life. In those days, he’d just started Helix Code (anyone else remember what Ximian used to be called?) and was still president of the GNOME Foundation. To give you some context: Bonobo was a centerpiece of new and active GNOME development then.

    Out of curiosity and a little excitement about GNOME, I asked Miguel if he could show me how to get the GNOME 1.2 running on my laptop. Miguel agreed to help, quickly taking control of the keyboard and frantically typing and editing my sources.list.

  • Top 10 GNOME Wallpapers

    Wallpapers!! What would we do without them? Here is the ist of top rated Gnome wallpapers which captured the attention of the users of gnome-look.org. What would we do without them??

  • Karen Sandler: Freedom from my heart to the desktop

    This is Karen Sandler, the Gnome Foundation’s new Executive Director, delivering her keynote speech at OSCon 2011. It is by far and away the best explanation of why software freedom matters that I’ve heard in a very long time.

  • So much to do, so little time

    Well, my time here with GNOME is coming to a close. This, of course, doesn’t mean I won’t be contributing to future projects (or maybe even enhancing this one), but it does mean college is on the horizon and my time will be greatly limited by it.

  • Premature bad taste becomes the norm

  • The Earliest Talk About The GTK4 Tool-Kit

  • Dear Gnome: Please listen to your users

    When Gnome 3 was released I pretty much immediately took the plunge and upgraded to it. I initially used the default Gnome Shell for a bit. There were some really big regressions right away. You can’t change your fonts, icon theme, GTK theme… I found a tool called gnome-tweak-tool that does allow changing those things, but I find it annoying that I can’t do it via the default system-settings tool.

Distributions

• The best Linux distro of 2011!

  Fedora, Mint, Arch, Ubuntu, Debian and OpenSUSE go head-to-head – we’ve dropped the six most popular Linux distributions of the day into a cage fight for your affections. Read on to discover which distro comes up top for installation ease, customisation, performance, security and more. Which flavour of Linux gets the gold medal? You might very well be surprised, so read on for all the juicy details…

  In the beginning, Linus created the kernel. The kernel worked (sort of) and was good. Then, in an ever-spiralling Babelesque explosion of code, the world got umpty-ump different Linux distributions, some of which seem to differ from each other only in the colour of their desktop screens.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • August 2011 issue of The PCLinuxOS released

    The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the August 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Meemaw and Andrew Strick. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

  • Mandriva 2011 with kernel 3.0

    We prepared unofficial image for Mandriva 2011 RC2 with kernel 3.0 by MIB group. Note: because it is unofficial distro, it destined only for testing purposes. Mandriva 2011 will be with kernel 2.6.38.7, and later, after some period of testing, we will update kernel to 3.0. You may get Mandriva 2011 with 3.0 kernel from here.

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo Linux releases 11.2 LiveDVD

    Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new LiveDVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below.

• Red Hat Family

  • Top 10 Reasons Why Larry Ellison Dislikes Red Hat

  • Red Hat Certifies 400 Virtualization Professionals

    Red Hat‘s virtualization strategy is gaining momentum. One key indicator: The open source software company has trained 400 professionals on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). But that’s not all. Roger Egan (pictured), VP of North American Channels, has revealed several other milestones to The VAR Guy — including plans for a Cloud Partner Symposium. Here’s the update.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 Features With Desktop, Virtualization, Etc

      Fedora 16 (codenamed Verne) is set to be released at the end of October while the software string freeze and alpha change deadline just passed this week, with the only alpha release being scheduled to take place in mid-August. Fedora 16 is set to continue in Red Hat’s tradition of contributing real innovations to the Linux stack, with some of the new Verne features being talked about in this posting.

      As talked about already, Fedora 16 may use the Btrfs file-system by default, but according to the feature list Wiki page its status is currently at 0%. Other features include automatic multi-seat support, Chrony becoming the default NTP client, firewalld will be the default network firewall solution, and Fedora will finally switch to using the GRUB2 boot-loader rather than legacy GRUB. Also going out the door in Fedora will finally be the HAL daemon with everything being migrated over to UDisks, UPOwer, the UDEV library, etc. Fedora 15 switched over to systemd and with Fedora 16 they will finish up migrating SysVinit scripts over to systemd files.

    • My view of Fedora®

    • Fedora 15 Sometimes Really Suck

• Debian Family

  • People behind Debian: Margarita Manterola, Debian Women member

    When I think about Margarita, I always remember her as a friendly and welcoming person. Like most of the Debian Women members by the way. But she likes to spread some love and organized a Debian Appreciation Day for example.

    I think I met her in real life for the first time at Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec (Mexico). She deeply cares about Debian in general. She has proven it multiple times with her DPL candidacy and by giving talks like Making Debian rule again.

  • Derivatives

    • KNOPPIX 6.7.0 Delivers a Few Surprises

      Once upon a time KNOPPIX was the king of hardware detection and an innovator in live CD technology. Well, time passed and more distribution developers began concentrating on live images and pretty soon remaster applications let anybody with an idea release their own Linux distribution. The Linux kernel itself took most of the hardware detection and configuration burden off developers. KNOPPIX then began declining in popularity and for a while seemed to be morphing into a specialty distribution. Well, I lost track of it about then and didn’t think of it again until yesterday when I heard 6.7.0 was available. I figured I might take a look and see what it’s been up to lately.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Shuttleworth: All your rights are belong to us

        Before I open palm — make that palms — and insert face, let me say that the Ubuntu community’s general mantra of “haters gonna hate” never really works as a valid argument when someone disagrees with what the self-appointed Ubuntu/Canonical leader/founder/Grand Poobah, or any other Ubuntu/Canonical leader, says. It’s a profoundly weak argument that first and foremost makes you sound shallow and stupid. It also makes you sound like you don’t have a reasonable response, as well as sounding like you’re incapable of responding.

      • Making mountains out of molehills

        The DMB grants both Ubuntu Membership and upload rights to (portions of) the Ubuntu archive. Both are assessed rather differently (one community and one somewhat more technical). Most of the current argument is about Membership (the only person the DMB deferred for upload rights was correctly so; it was a Per-Package Uploader application for packages which were not in the archive yet)

      • A Formal Introduction to The Ubuntu Orchestra Project

        Today’s post by Matthew East, coupled with several discussions in IRC and the Mailing Lists have made me realize that we’ve not communicated the Ubuntu Orchestra Project clearly enough to some parts of the Ubuntu Community. Within Ubuntu Server developer circles, I think the project’s goals, design, and implementation are quite well understood. But I now recognize that our community stretches both far and wide, and our messages about Orchestra have not yet reached all corners of the Ubuntu world Here’s an attempt at that now!

      • Ubuntu Membership and Contributions to Upstream Projects

        There has been a lot (perhaps too much) discussion on the ubuntu-devel mailing list about (among other things) to what extent contributions to an upstream project should be taken into account when assessing whether a person’s application for Ubuntu membership should be granted.

        Jonathan Carter has very properly added it to the agenda for discussion by the Community Council at their next meeting.

      • Should Upstream Contributions Count?

        The Ubuntu Community Council will be deciding in a week or so whether upstream or external contributions count for Ubuntu membership & commit privileges. I always thought that all contributions that were for the good of Ubuntu counted.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Released – Changes and Screenshots

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Review | Oneiric Ocelot

        Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Oneiric Ocelot development release is out and available to download, check release notes, download options and what’s new in Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Here.

        With each release of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot coming out we see a highly impressive development work most of it discussed at Ubuntu UDS from Ubuntu developers and community members that could make the final release of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot is one of the best distribution will be available at the moment.

      • Ubuntu Photography Guidelines

        The Ubuntu Brand has released guidelines for photography related to Ubuntu and Canonical. You can find the PDF at the bottom of the Ubuntu Brand Guidelines page titled “download the Ubuntu photography guidelines”. The PDF offers some simple Ubuntu style techniques for emphasizing the subject. These photo tips help reflect the Ubuntu brand values of freedom, collaboration, reliability and precision. Download the PDF and check it out!

      • Contributions of Non-Technical People

        In fact, if you run and love Kubuntu, we want and need your creativity, your testing, your bug reports, your corrections on the wiki, your help on artwork, documentation, promotion (like this blog!), your helpful voice in IRC, identica, twitter, Google+ — the sky is the limit! Community work is as important as the code, because people create the love, create the community, create the software.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • A newbie’s report on Kubuntu

          I’ve to confess that I was never fond of KDE. If you ask me ‘why’, then I’ve to tell that may be I’ve started my Linux life with Gnome and it was like ‘love at first sight’! I was introduced with Ubuntu at 2007 and to be frankly, I liked it so much that I never felt to try other distros to give a serious run. I’ve tested Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora – but I’ve not taken them seriously. As a result I became a solely Ubuntu guy. My laptop still runs Ubuntu 10.04 (and I am quite happy with Lucid). This solely Ubuntu-only-background makes me a total newbie in the world of Kubuntu! But why I am using Kubuntu now? Well… after buying the new desktop, I thought to taste Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu, because (in my opinion) unity in Ubuntu is still in its early stage and I do not wanted to install Lucid in my desktop. So I choose Kubuntu Natty Narwhal to give a try. The result? I am an one-month old Kubuntu user!

        • Linux Mint XFCE: Gnome’s heir?

          Regular readers know I’ve switched away from Ubuntu and onto Linux Mint. I think the move away from the standard desktop interface and toward things like Unity and Gnome Shell is a mistake. Linux Mint is still using Gnome 2.32, a smooth and mature interface that suits me fine. But nobody’s doing any more work on the Gnome 2.x environment; the Gnome project is moving in a different direction now, and unless someone forks Gnome 2.32 – someone with deep pockets, to give it credibility and legs – then sooner or later the Gnome-based traditional desktop will have nowhere to go. I don’t know how much longer distros like Mint can hold out and still use Gnome 2.x; I give it a year, 18 months at the outside. So I continue to seek alternatives for when the time comes.

        • Linux Mint: This didn’t go to 11

          Regular readers will remember that I’d moved everything to Linux Mint. Most of the desktop boxes were running Mint 11, but I kept the laptops on Mint 10 because of a power regression in the kernel. It’s not such a big deal if desktop processors burn a little more power, but on a laptop it means short battery life and heat problems.

          Well, the power regression has been solved – or at least there’s a workaround – so I decided to go ahead and move my main laptop to Mint 11.

          I think I left it that way for about two days before moving back to Mint 10.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Embedded: An alternative way to build embedded Linux distributions

  As embedded processors have grown more powerful and feature-rich, the popularity of the Linux operating system in embedded applications has grown in leaps and bounds. Although the fact that Linux is open source and free of licensing fees is one major driver of its popularity, another key driver is the wealth of application software and drivers available as a result of Linux’s widespread usage in the desktop and server arenas.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • $199 Asus X101 targets Linux tablet alternative

    Though bearing some of the hallmarks of a Netbook, the Asus Eee PC X101 will be offered as an alternative to that category of small laptops, according to an Asus blog post.

    Asus spelled out today that the X101 is a departure from the Netbook as we know it. First of all, it’s even thinner and lighter than a traditional Netbook (which is already pretty light and thin to begin with) at 0.69-inches and two pounds, respectively.

Seven Signs that You Have Been Brainwashed by Microsoft

Considering the last events I’ve been able to observe, as well as Mechatotoro’s contributions, I compiled this short list of manifestations of a Microsoft-only mentality, just for fun.

1. You think free/libre software is unreliable and dangerous, but then you download cracked versions of programs and feel proud about it.

2. If your Windows system breaks down, you are able to do all your computing off a Linux live CD, but then you look for a (pirated?) Windows copy and install it.

Despite successes, FLOSS still misunderstood, villianized

Despite increasing evidence that corporations are turning to open source more than ever, there’s also countering evidence that people have a long ways to go before they “get” open source.

The notion that innovation is driving open source adoption now is a theme that’s been woven heavily in my conversations with open source community members these past couple of weeks. More and more I am getting notes about organizations that have never used open source as a methodology before, now starting to deploy it in their in-house development departments or joining in existing FLOSS projects.

Commercial Gains Mean Growing Pains for Open Source Community

Recent conversations at OSCON, which I’ve attended since 2004, as well as observations through talks with vendors, users and developers in open source all indicate a common theme: With commercial successes for open source software come some community growing pains.

This was also illustrated to some extent by the attendance, content and vibe at this year’s OSCON, a good annual check on where commercial open source software stands in its ongoing maturation, evolution and disruption.

Open Source Meets Systems Management

Does open source need corporate backing to succeed?

Much of Android’s success down to Google’s backing, says researcher

Android is one of the most successful projects in the open-source world, but that’s mostly because of Google’s “muscle”, according to one researcher.

Liz Laffan, an analyst at VisionMobile, has attempted to measure the “openness” of several open-source software platforms – ranking Google’s OS in last place.

The transition from “them” to “we”

While a lot of large Free Software projects do have some sort of formal “membership” structure (e.g. for GNOME there is the foundation), in reality being part of a project is more about your mindset. It’s easy for anyone to complain from the outside about something – and then the project is “they”.

NZ Open Source Society elects new president

Egressive owner and open source advocate Dave Lane has been elected president of the New Zealand Open Source Society.

The president, vice president Peter Harrison and other committee members were confirmed at the Society’s annual general meeting late last week.

Linux Australia readies conference code of conduct

Expands anti-harassment policy with Ada Initiative.

Linux Australia has announced plans to introduce a conference code of conduct following a controversial keynote presentation at linux.conf.au (LCA) in January.

A number of conference attendees complained about futurist Mark Pesce’s use of sexual images in his presentation, in breach of LCA’s anti-harassment policy.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Extending our Reach: Many Layers of User Sovereignty

    Today we access the Internet in many ways, with phones and tablets and new devices becoming more prevalent. These devices have new operating systems, new business models, and new opportunities. They also bring new challenges to interoperability and user-sovereignty. How should Mozilla respond? Should Firefox and Gecko be our only tools? Or should we develop other tools?

Public Services/Government

• BR: Government signs up to develop OpenOffice and LibreOffice

  On 1 July 2011, the Brazilian Government signed a letter of intent to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the Office Suite platforms maintained by both communities.

Licensing

• A Guide to Open Source Licensing

  If you’re working on or launching an open source project, one of the most basic decisions you must make is which license the project will be released under, and choosing the perfect license is more complex than ever. Over the years, we’ve provided many free guidelines on this topic, but it’s a moving target. In this post, you’ll find our updeated collection of all the things you need to know to make an informed open source license decision.

Programming

• In Search Of… A Few Good Developers

• Rugged Individualism, Community, and Templating Systems

  Consider this: I have at various times in my career written a templating system, an object model, and a test framework. I no longer use nor maintain those projects, and you will not find them in anything other than the Internet’s vast elephant graveyard (if they even exist there).

  These projects are long gone in part because other projects are (now) obviously better and I have exceedingly good taste in predicting the future, but (more seriously) because the value of those projects to the community was far less than the value of competing projects.

  I have the right to publish a new templating system to the CPAN, but without a staggeringly compelling reason to do so (such as that it uses a different technical approach or that it provides the most useful subset of features of an existing system with far fewer requirements or much better resource usage), the community is probably better off if I refrain from doing so.

• Announcing our Code of Conduct and Community Contributed Docs

141 nice fonts of popular Movies, games and Brands

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Police use Flickr to identify London riot

  London has been the scene of utter chaos over the past few days, and last night it hit a new peak when it seemed many parts of the UK capital were under siege, from north to south.

Finance

• The Personality of Goldman Sachs or What’s in the Gold Sack?

• Republican Leaders Are Receiving Greatly Increased Contributions From Wall Street Firms

  Republican consultant Eddie Mahe said he had “no doubt” Wall Street has been betting that the House Republican majority would lead the effort to “repeal or at least modify” the revised financial regulations enacted last year.

• Goldman Sachs ready to bail out California

  Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo are the lead lenders and will pony up $1.5-billion each. The consortium also includes Citigroup, Barclays, JPMorgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and US Bank.

• BofA, Goldman Sachs Find State Mortgage Cases Hard to Shake

  A Washington state judge in Seattle said in rulings over the past two months that Bank of America, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and other underwriters can’t cite faulty data from appraisers or expired statutes of limitation to avoid Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle’s claims that there was false information in offering documents for at least $3.9 billion in securities it bought.

• Goldman Sachs rates desk hemorrhages traders

  More than a dozen traders have quit Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s (NYSE:GS – News) North American government bonds and derivatives trading desk in New York in recent months as the bank takes fewer risks and big bonuses for ambitious traders dry up.

  Goldman has been handing out promotions and better pay to its salespeople rather than the traders who manage the bank’s inventory of securities and derivatives, people familiar with the bank’s operations said.

Civil Rights

• ‘U’ team aims to expand digital freedom through Telex program

  According to Wustrow, Telex is a two-part system where users download software that allows Telex stations to act as a proxy site outside of the restricted country. He noted that one major difference between a typical proxy website and Telex is that proxy websites often have only one IP address that needs to be blocked, but Telex will have multiple addresses, making censorship very difficult.

  Wustrow added there are only a handful of undersea cables to China, but Telex stations would be sufficient for the program to work there. Nonetheless, there are still several hurdles to the implementation of this program.

  For example, Wustrow said there is no definitive price, but each Telex station could cost thousands of dollars and the stations would have to be incentivized for Internet Service Providers to install them. He added that in return for installing Telex stations, ISPs could sell the service to users to subsidize costs or the U.S. government could sponsor efforts toward increased Internet freedom.