03.31.09

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Linux, It Does a Body Good: Approachable Promotion Efforts

  The Linux Dairy Council hopes to be something different from LUGs or the Linux Foundation. It’s not distribution-specific, it’s not there to necessarily provide support or govern, organize or standardize the Linux world. It’s there to promote it in a friendly, unassuming, accessible way for the average computer user. These potential new users will probably never opt to develop open source software, but there are other ways they can contribute — actively, or simply by telling friends and contacts they use it regularly.

• OpSource, [Linux-powered] Akamai Unite to Score a Slice of $56B Cloud Market Pie

  Cloud-services platform provider OpSource and content-distribution kingpin Akamai today are announcing some details about strategic partnership that’s now a few months old.

• Zend Technologies Readies a New PHP Application Server

  Gutmans sees that consistency as important when 75 percent of Zend’s customers develop on Windows boxes — but 95 percent of them go on to deploy on Linux.

• Gauteng Linux users to expand activities

  More than 12 years after it first started, one of South Africa’s largest Linux user groups is regrouping to broaden and increase its advocacy activities. The Gauteng Linux Users Group (Glug) earlier this month elected a new committee and is already planning series of events over the coming months to promote both Glug and Linux and free software.

• GhostNet is a wakeup call to switch to Linux

  It’s compromised over 1,000 machines in 103 countries, with targets including the Dalai Lama and government departments. It’s called GhostNet, it’s a spy network, and it wouldn’t exist if government departments and other public bodies used Linux.

  The scale of GhostNet is staggering, but at heart it’s no more complicated than a script kiddie attack.

• Mac, Linux skills grab higher salaries than Windows

  Microsoft likes to tout the cost savings that derive from paying Windows-skilled employees less money.

• Enable (Some) Multi-Touch Gestures in Linux

  As the author notes, three-finger tapping for a right-click is kind of hit-and-miss, and many users may not want any kind of tap-to-click powers at all. Luckily, it’s easy to remove the last line or two from the config file posted to disable it—or, in systems like Ubuntu, simply disable tap-to-click from the Mouse configuration.

• ParaScale cloud storage software hits general availability

  Storage start-up ParaScale is heading into general availability with software that aggregates disk storage on standard Linux servers to create pools of storage that can be used by cloud services providers and to build private clouds.

• Swisscom Taps into New Mobile Internet and Mobile Broadband Revenues with 724 Solutions

  The solution is available on commodity x86 based blade hardware running Linux, which further extends the total cost of ownership advantages available to operators.

• The key to Linux’s mainstream success

  Our esteemed editor, Tim Danton, recently ran a thought piece wondering whether Linux would ever hit the mainstream, his ten cents worth clattering down on the side that says “probably not.”

  His conclusion was an interesting one, principally because I haven’t heard it before. To paraphrase Tim, Linux will remain niche because open-source vendors don’t have the inclination to push it that extra mile, to front up for “the hassle-free” experience that users expect in their operating system. Not when they have a devoted, tech-savy user base already to hand.

• Hunch in Beta: Good For Some Questions, Not for Others

  For example, I asked Hunch if switching to Linux was a good idea for me. Hunch then asked me if I was familiar with computers, if I used free software, where I planned to run Linux, if I was interested in gaming and so on before rendering its decision.

• Tempe Computer Company Announces Free Linux Installation

  RedSeven Computer Company is kicking off it’s birthday month by offering a free installation of Linux on April first at their Tempe location, on the southeast corner of Guadalupe and McClintock.

• Review: From Windows To Linux In A Flash

  Perhaps the biggest hurdle preventing some IT pros used to running Windows shops from deploying Linux desktops is the learning curve involved for both their staffs and their end users.

  Or maybe it’s because the seemingly unlimited number of Linux distributions out there can make choosing the appropriate one for a business a daunting task.

  [...]

  Yet, Pendrivelinux2008, as the other three flash-drive bootable Linux offerings, impressed us. Booting Linux from a USB is free, generates little to no headaches and requires no additional equipment.

• Startups and the choice of Linux Distributions

  It’s a general notion amongst people who have used Windows say for years that switching to Linux isn’t beneficial and easy. But the ones who did so have fallen in love with this OS. If you are a start-up or possess an ubiquitous desire to save some money, GNU/Linux is the obvious choice for Linux is free, licensed under GNU General Public License (GPL). Various packaged versions of Linux kernel along with applications result in the so called Linux distributions where each distribution is fundamentally different from each other in the way they’re packaged, they appeal they have and the size of course. Assortment of various software and hardware management tools along with different desktop environments add a flavor to the selection. However, most Linux distributions run on the same Linux kernel for the core.

  [...]

  Startups, who would like to work on free and open source technologies should consider driving their servers and workstations on Linux.

• Kernel Space

  • From ext3 to ext4: An Interview with Theodore Ts’o

    While you can read the on-line documentation and articles about ext4, you can gain some important perspective by going directly to the horse’s mouth. Jeff Layton talks with Theodore Ts’o to talk about designing ext4, painless migration and the work still to do.

• Applications

  • 10 Must-Have Linux Applications

    9. Pidgin

    While I work hard not to spend my days in instant messenger, the fact remains that I do conduct a fair amount of business in my favorite IM. And that IM of choice is known as Pidgin.

    Unlike other IM clients, Pidgin is cross platform, open source, and best of all, highly extensible. Just look at the list of add-ons you can bring to the party here!

    What makes this a must-have application?

    Pidgin can provide protocol support to just about anything. Not just AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo. No, Pidgin also can use add-ons to provide support for Twitter updates and Facebook chat, amongst other new ways of communicating.

    10. KINO

    Not my only choice for handling the needs of video editing, but definitely what I use to extract video off of my DV camera without using CLI and DVGrab.

    KINO also is a great means for a fast edit without needing to bother with more complex video editing programs. Visual effects are provided, and despite it being a little strange to work with at first, the code is very stable to use.

    What makes this a must-have application?

    Simplicity and speed. I love alternatives like Cinelerra. But for most people, this is too much. And unlike Kdenlive, which spends more time crashing than working, KINO gives anyone the ability to edit video easily and without worrying about their application crashing.

  • Ardour 2.8 released – Install with One Click on Ubuntu

    A more than a month ago, Ardour project lose his major sponsor SAE (SAE Institute originally the School of Audio Engineering) but we are happy to announce that development is going strong and the 3.0 version will follow in near feature. Development is now supported mainly by donations and everybody is invited to donate to this very important and powerful, free open source professional music software for Linux and MacOS.

• KDE4

  • more plasma screencastiness

    Ok, so .. Plasma screencast! I demonstrate a couple of cute little features we’ve put into 4.3: a nicer moving desktop toolbox that performs little tricks when you click on it, a KRunner that is self-documenting (huzzah for discoverability) and a new KRunner results layout. As you watch it, you may also want to marvel at the speed of it: KRunner is feeling a lot faster in current trunk/. Wilder, David Faure and I have the blisters to prove we earned it.

  • decision trees

    The patch that Dave submitted in this case provides a “fake” translucency for panels that shows the “desktop wallpaper” (a concept that doesn’t actually exist in that form in Plasma) not unlike what we had in kicker in KDE3.

  • Review: Dolphin 1.2.1 File Manager

    Since my main system is Debian Lenny (KDE3) I must say I did not have much time to test KDE4 (although lately I spent some time with Kubuntu Jaunty Beta), but I was impressed in a pleasant way by Dolphin. What I’ve read before was mostly how crappy of a file manager it is, how limited it is and so on. Although I prefer Konqueror, I must say this isn’t true: Dolphin is actually pretty feature-complete and easy to use.

• Distributions

  • 8 Rocking Linux Distros

    Defining the best Linux distros is like defining the best car–one does not exist; instead, the best cars are the ones that meet your needs, and your needs may vary wildly from the needs of another person. Just as an F150 might be the best vehicle for you and a Civic for me, Ubuntu might be what you need from Linux while I’ll be fine with DSL.

  • Puppy 4.2 ScreenShots

    This is the first time I ever used Puppy Linux and the interface is really impressive. The install was not as simple as I expected it to be. ( But then again, the Ubuntu based Distro’s have spoiled me, what can i say??? ). Also this is the first time I used JWM ( Joe Window manager ). What really grasped me about Puppy Linux was how fast the applications launched. Also Puppy Linux reminded me of Slax on how fast the applications loaded, which is a good thing.

  • Gentoo

    • Using Gentoo Linux in K-12 School’s Computer Lab

      GHCA recently updated all their computers to run the Gentoo distribution of the Linux operating system. This video interviews system administrator Michael Surran, exploring the details as to why the school switched to Gentoo and how Gentoo is used to improve productivity and functionality. Of particular interest is the use of distributed compiled computing (distcc) among the 20 Athlon computers to greatly speed the software building process. …

    • Gentoo releases, my point of view

      Reading the article and the comments it looks like PR and advertising are the main issues. I couldn’t agree more. When a distro comes out with a new version, popular sites (slashdot, distrowatch…) write an article, popular bloggers try the distro and write their opinion, other bloggers publish screenshots… A lot of buzz is generated, and people are aware that the new distro is out.

  • Red Hat

    • Fedora releases version 11 beta

      A couple of hours ago the Fedora team rolled out Fedora 11 Beta, the first test release of its latest open source release. As well as a truck-load of desktop enhancements and the latest desktop environments, including Gnome 2.26, KDE 4.2.1 and Xfce 4.6.0, Fedora 11 Beta also includes the ext4 filesystem as the default as well a experimental Btrfs support.

    • Ubuntu 9.04 Beta vs. Fedora 11 Beta Performance

      Last week marked the release of the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta and this week there is the planned release of the Fedora 11 Beta. Both distributions are similar in the respect they will be upgrading several common packages like GNOME 2.26, but in Fedora 11 are more upstream (and experimental) bits like kernel mode-setting, the EXT4 file-system by default, and various other features. Being the Linux benchmarking fanatics that we are, we set out to run a few performance tests comparing the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta to the latest Rawhide packages that will make up today’s Fedora 11 Beta release.

    • Red Hat Q4 Earnings Call Transcript

  • Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 9.04 Beta Preview

      So in closing, this version really is the next great thing. While not revolutionary, it is definitely evolutionary. Its features just work with very little futzing around with the settings or even opening the terminal. The attention to detail continues to be top-notch and when Windows 7 comes out, I think that Ubuntu 9.04 is an excellent alternative – and if you are running a system a little bit older, a great replacement for Windows XP.

    • Upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 Beta

      If you’re interested in trying out this beta release, remember that it’s intended for testing and not mission-critical systems. The release candidate is coming on April 16, and the final on April 23. Use the Bittorrent downloads to get your disk ISO the fastest!

• Devices/Embedded

  • Embedded network server gets Linux SDK

    The MatchPort AR is the first Lantronix networking product to support Linux, and the beginning of a company-wide switch to Linux as its “base platform,” says the company. Like many of its other products, the network server also runs the company’s own “Evolution OS” device-server oriented operating system. Lantronix products include devices that remotely connect and control electronic equipment via the Internet, provide secure remote access to firewall-protected equipment, and enable remote management of IT equipment, says the company.

  • Ubicom(R) Provides Flexible, High-Performance Processor Platform With Release of Linux BSP

    EMBEDDED SYSTEMS CONFERENCE — Ubicom(R), Inc., a leading provider of networking and multimedia processors, today announced the release of a Linux Board Support Package (BSP) with a complete implementation of the Linux 2.6.28 SMP kernel, device drivers, GNU tool suite and documentation for rapid development of networking and multimedia products.

  • Linux support for Altera’s Nios II

    Wind River has announced the availability of Linux support for Altera’s Nios II embedded processor. Embedded developers deploying products based on the Nios II processor can use this Linux solution across Altera’s entire portfolio of FPGAs and HardCopy ASICs.

  • LynuxWorks’ BlueCat(R) 5.6 Supports Portwell’s PEB-2737 Embedded Computer Board

    LynuxWorks(TM), Inc., a world leader in the embedded software market, and American Portwell Technology, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Portwell, Inc., a world-leading innovator in the embedded computing market, today announced that BlueCat 5.6 Linux operating system now supports Portwell’s commercial off the shelf (COTS) PEB-2737 embedded computer board.

  • McObject – LynuxWorks Partnership Targets Real-Time Medical Systems

    McObject®, developer of the eXtremeDB™ embedded database product family, and LynuxWorks, a world leader in the embedded software market, today announced a technology alliance in which McObject has ported its eXtremeDB Kernel Mode (KM) embedded database to LynuxWorks’ BlueCat Embedded Linux 5.6 operating system. The companies will jointly target the medical technology market with this software combination, which accelerates development of Linux-based time- and safety-critical applications ranging from personal carry-along medical devices to larger-scale clinical systems.

  • RadiSys rolls out ATCA single-board computer for 4G, IMS applications

    Software support includes Wind River’s Carrier Grade Linux platform. The board will also support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 and MontaVista CGE 4.0 and 5.0 to cover RadiSys’ entire customer base. Certification is also planned with VMware ESX 3.5.

  • CompactFlash computer gains more flexible mobo

    C Data Solutions has developed a new motherboard for its customizable CompactFlash (CF)-based Compact Computer (CoCo). Designed for use in an upcoming data acquisitions system, the tiny motherboard offers a databus via the FPGA built into its uClinux- and 500MHz Blackfin-based CoCo processor module.

  • Linux POS Solutions 2009: Volante POS Systems Enhances Revenues Through Innovation

    The world of Linux POS technology has come a long way in recent years. Today’s restaurant & hospitality operators are much more tech savvy than they’ve ever been, and the POS industry is slowly responding to this fact.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • Verizon to ape AT&T with netbook sales

      Google’s Willy Wonka insists that subsidized netbooks will one day bring Linux to the Joe Consumer promised land. “[Netbooks] today are not completely done. Things are missing,” Eric Schmidt told an analyst conference last month. “It’s perfectly possible that operating systems that are Linux-based will become a significant player in that space, whereas they have historically not been a significant player in the PC space.”

Free Software/Open Source

• 25 highly anticipated open-source releases coming this year

  When big companies release new software, they launch it with lots of hoopla: press tours, technical conferences, free T-shirts. Open-source projects, even the well-known ones, generally release their major new versions with a lot less fanfare. The FOSS (free and open-source software) community is often too busy coding and testing to bother with marketing, even when the new “point release” of the software is really remarkable.

  And there are plenty of remarkable open-source applications on the way this year. Quite a few projects are quietly (or not so quietly) working on major releases or significant upgrades that they aim to make available sometime during 2009. I’ve rounded up 25 of the most notable here.

• ES: Cenatic joins campaign against unlicensed software

  Cenatic, Spain’s national resource centre for open source software, this Wednesday will join other organisations in a campaign meant to reduce the use of unlicensed copies of software. “Free and open source software provide a legitimate alternative that respect the rights of its creators”, the organisation said in a statement.

• Happy Birthday, Mozilla

  On this day, eleven years ago, 31st March 1998, the Mozilla codebase was unleashed on the world with the simple command “Come and get it”. And, since then, people have – at least 865 million times.

• Open Source vs Closed Source — Its about investing in People

  2. Open Source is an investment in People instead of Vendors

  When an IT executive chooses a Closed Source solution such as the Windows product line of Data center software solutions, they are choosing to invest a large portion of their budget in a vendor, in this case Microsoft. When selecting an Open Source solution, to maximize the return on that investment, the IT executives must invest in People. Open Source provides the user with access to the source code, the user in this case is the business. This is an incredibly powerful feature if it is managed properly, as you can fully support yourself with the source code.

• Sun

  • Multiplatform OpenOffice.org 3.0 Benchmark

    Which OpenOffice.org edition is fastest? All OpenOffice.org editions and both operating systems performed well, and it’s not possible to identify a single champion. Go-oo’s tweaks often (but not always) gave it an advantage over Sun Microsystem’s Vanilla edition, but OpenOffice.org PPA’s system libraries gained the most substantial advantage.

    OpenOffice.org 3.1 is just around the corner, and the rumor is the new performance improvements make is fast. I hope to see Go-oo and OxygenOffice fix the automation bugs, so they can be better represented in the next showdown. (I’d even more hope they would upstream all their patches despite the political drama, but that’s another story.)

• Open (But No Source Code)

  • Cornell Librarians Protest Bill Closing Access to NIH Research

    The letter suggests that open access does not deter the publishing of academic work: “to our knowledge … no publisher has refused to publish an article because of the existence of a prior non-exclusive license to NIH. Indeed, hundreds of publishers are actively collaborating with NIH on the implementation of the system.”

  • Trailing Clouds of Openness

    Notice that this talks of “open collaboration”, but only “standards” – that is, it does not require *open* standards. Moreover, despite the fine words about “the potential pitfalls of proprietary technologies that can lead to lock-in and limited choice” mentioned above, I can find no commitment to use open source either.

• Programming

  • GNU Automake tops reuse survey

    That explains why GNU Automake is so popular: It automatically generates Make files for compilation of a software project. In a world where Linux is not the standard and not everyone who compiles binaries is a programmer, GNU Automake can simplify builds for end users. GNU Automake is written in Perl.

  • Open Source Study Reveals High Level of Code Reuse

    An analysis of 1,311 open source projects revealed that open source developers reused code from those projects in other projects more than 365,000 times, saving the open source community over 316,000 staff years and tens of billions of dollars in development costs. The study conducted by Black Duck Software, a provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software (OSS), points to the dramatic efficiencies and cost savings of open source code reuse.

  • Shedding new light on No Java SE 7 JSR

    There is a direct connection between the ‘Sun vs Apache Harmony’ dispute and the lack of a Java SE 7 platform JSR. Using newly available evidence I hope to shed new light on what that link is.

• ODF

  • TextMaker Viewer 2009 [Beta 2] for free

    Just send them the link to TextMaker and they can download, open, view, and print documents created with Microsoft Word, TextMaker as well as OpenDocument and other common office file formats.

  • ThinkFree Office Live to Provide Free Online Productivity Suite and Real-time Document Collaboration Offering

    This includes Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), OpenOffice Open Document Format (ODF), all Microsoft Office file types as well as exotic varieties such as the Korean Hangul Word Processor format (HWP). Uni Paper is an open viewer which can also be embedded in blog posts and Web pages to allow for fast viewing of publicly shared documents without the need to download them.

Leftovers

• EA ‘dumps DRM’ for next Sims game

  Electronic Arts have confirmed that the next version of The Sims will be free of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

• Hal Halpin to game pubs: disclose DRM and standardize EULAs

  Hal Halpin is fighting the good fight for consumers, and the Entertainment Consumer Association has told the FTC it wants two things: full disclosure, on the box, of included DRM, as well as a standardized End-User Licensing Agreement. What’s crazy? They might get it. Ars speaks to the man who wants you to have a voice in the gaming industry.

• The ACTA Timeline (or Everything You Need To Know About ACTA But Your Government Won’t Tell You)

  October 2007 – The United States, European Union, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Canada announce plans to negotiate ACTA.

  November 2007 – April 2008 – Governments conduct initial consultations on ACTA. Australia consults in November 2007 on whether to participate. The U.S. consults in February 2008. Canada consults in April 2008.

  The results of the Canadian consultation are not released to the public but an Access to Information request uncovers a report on the results that note that “individual Canadian citizens were generally critical of Canada’s role in the formal negotiation of ACTA.” Individual responses cited the lack of transparency associated with the process, the absence of evidence that a new treaty is needed, the exclusion of developing countries from the negotiations, and the concern that ACTA might undermine Canadian law.

• Censorship/Web Abuse

  • Western internet censorship: The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning?

    Shortly after 9pm on Tuesday March 24, Wikileaks related buildings in Dresden and Jena, were raided by 11 plain clothes German police.

    Why?

    Over the last two years, Wikileaks has exposed detailed secret government censorship lists or plans for over eight countries, including Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and Germany.

    Although Wikileaks’ main site has been censored by the Chinese Public Security Bureau since early 2007, last week saw the site placed onto a secret list of sites “forbidden” by the Australian Media and Communications Authority, or ACMA.

• Copyrights

  • Open Clip Art Library Release 0.19 Announcement and OCAL10K Goal Exceeeded

    Release 0.19 of Open Clip Art Library (http://www.openclipart.org), containing over 12,000 high quality scalable vector graphics (SVG) files released into the public domain by over a 1000 artists, is now available for download and use. In celebration of this accomplishment, since OCAL’s last release happened in 2005, and March being 5th anniversary of the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL), the OCAL community set a goal to achieve 10,000 uploaded pieces of vector graphics. The project achieved this with the 10,000th submission from user Boobaloo who uploaded a graphic of an onion. The project congratulates Boobaloo for uploading the 10,000th upload. Also, project congratulates all artists who have uploaded in this anniversary OCAL10K sprint.

  • EU Rejects Copyright Extension… For Now

    Following the recent debates on copyright extension, there’s a bit of good news. It appears that the Council of the European Union rejected yet another attempt to extend the copyright on sound recordings from 50 to 95 years. Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like this is (by any means) the end of such proposals.

  • The Pirate Bay punts BitTorrent cloaking device

    The Pirate Bay’s swashbuckling Swedes have launched their very own VPN service, hoping to combat a new Swedish law that would force ISPs to cough up the personal details of suspected copyright infringers.

  • MPAA Negotiates With ISPs to Disconnect or Penalize Copyright Offenders

    Hollywood studios are negotiating with broadband providers to take action against customers caught downloading movies repeatedly. Penalties range from redirecting infringers’ browsers to an anti-piracy message and disconnecting them entirely, a movie industry source familiar with the talks said Friday.

  • RIAA, MPAA Copyright Warnings: Facts and Fiction

    This week several scary stories surfaced about how the MPAA and RIAA are negotiating with ISPs on how to deal with copyright infringers. Even though it was often presented as news, those who look deeper will realize that this is nothing new at all, just the same old threats dressed up in a new jacket.

  • South Korea prepares to nuke its technological competitiveness with a three-strikes copyright rule

    Joe sez, “South Korea is arguably one of the world’s most internet-connected countries. Regrettably, the corrupt dinosaurs in the Korean National Assembly have just passed a bill in-committee to use a “three strikes” law against ISP connections there. The law awaits approval by the legislature.

  • The Vanishing YouTube Videos and a Look Behind the Scenes

    Would you like to take a leisurely day trip with me, instead, so I can show you what’s been happening in the Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation? There’s been a hearing on a motion to compel discovery with some humorous elements to share with you, among other tidbits, that will show you a really effective lawyer at work educating the judge, who admits she’s not a techie, on what might work well technically in resolving issues.