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01.26.12

Links 26/1/2012: Btrfs in Oracle Linux, Linux Mint 13 Chatter, ODF Toolkit

Posted in News Roundup at 7:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Govt agencies fatten Linux, Unix server environments

      The Federal Government has revealed a 6.4 percent increase in the use of *nix servers among agencies that spend over $2 million a year on IT.

      The increase occurred exclusively in larger agencies between 2008-9 and 2009-10, according to an iTnews’ analysis of figures [xls] contained in a new benchmarking study [pdf].

      The study involved a mix of undisclosed large and medium-sized agencies.

      By the end of 2009-10, surveyed agencies were using a total of 3039 physical machines running *nix software, including Unix, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD “and related platforms”.

      Large agencies deployed 996 new *nix servers between 2008-9 and 2009-10, while medium-sized agencies retired at least 45 *nix units over the same period.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux turns 20

      In August 1991, a Finnish student announced on Usenet that he was developing a free operating system for Intel’s 386 processor. That same month, Tim Berners-Lee released the first code for what he called the World Wide Web, also on Usenet. Twenty years later and both projects have taken over the world: one very visibly – the Web – and one almost invisibly: Linux.

    • Linux vendors urgently patch a security flaw

      OPEN SOURCE Linux distributors are quickly patching a security flaw recently found in the Linux kernel.

    • Btrfs To Go Production-Ready In Oracle Linux

      Btrfs, the quite promising next-generation Linux file-system that’s been in-development for years by Chris Mason and others, is about to take on a big role within Oracle’s Enterprise Linux distribution.

    • Linux Foundation: How to contribute to open source projects

      The Linux Foundation has published a paper titled “Upstreaming: Strengthening Open Source Development “. In the ten-page PDF document, the two authors explain, among other things, why it is in the best interest of everyone involved that in-house improvements to open source software be submitted back to the original authors of that software (upstream) for inclusion in the next version. The document, which can be accessed after registering, also touches on how best to go about this process.

    • Kernel Log: Coming in 3.3 (Part 1) – Networking

      Version 3.3 of the Linux kernel offers another way to team multiple Ethernet devices. Support for “Open vSwitch”, a virtual network switch that was specifically developed for virtualised environments, has also been added. Byte Queue Limits are designed to reduce the latencies that cause the much-discussed “buffer bloat”.

    • More Systemd Fun: The Blame Game And Stopping Services With Prejudice

      Systemd, Lennart Poettering’s new init system that is taking the Linux world by storm, is all full of little tricks and treats. Today we will play the slow-boot blame game, and learn to how stop services so completely the poor things will never ever run again.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mesa Beginning To Need Application Workarounds
      • Nouveau For A $10 NVIDIA Graphics Card?

        In this article is a look at the state of the open-source Nouveau Gallium3D driver on low-end NVIDIA GeForce graphics hardware. In particular, a $10 USD NVIDIA retail graphics card is being tested under Ubuntu Linux on both Nouveau and the proprietary NVIDIA driver and is then compared to a wide range of other low and mid-range offerings from NVIDIA’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon graphics card line-up with a plethora of OpenGL benchmarks.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • Arch Linux: Only the Hardcore Need Apply

      In search of a different distro (term of endearment for Linux distributions) to try, I decided to try installing probably one of the harder distros to install, Arch Linux over the weekend. I thought I would gather some thoughts into a post and share what I think of this interesting distro that doesn’t get the press that Ubuntu does.

    • New Releases

    • Debian Family

      • Answering questions of Debian users on various support channels

        It’s not always an easy task. Some users are more skilled than others and there might be difficulties related to the language, English is not always the native language of a user who asks a question in English.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Developer Week for 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” announced

            The Ubuntu development team has announced that the Ubuntu Developer Week for the 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” cycle will take place from 31 January to 2 February 2012. Over the course of the three days, contributors and members of the Ubuntu community will present various online workshops including tutorials and hands-on sessions focused on Ubuntu development.

          • Linux users cautiously optimistic about Ubuntu’s Head-Up Display desktop
          • Ubuntu plans shift to mobile

            Ubuntu has embarked on a shift in strategy that recognizes the growing use of smartphones and other non-PC devices for access to data and services.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 will bypass menus via predictive search

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Sublime Text on Linux Mint 12

              What particularly draws me to this swift, polished, accomplished, customisable and truly delectable editor is that it is cross platform. And as I’m still in the front end dev contracting game, this is a real boon: Mac, Windows or my own Minority Linux, I can have the same text editor across the board. Delight.

            • Linux Mint 13 gets back to desktop basics

              Bucking the trend of increasingly experimental desktop interfaces, the developers behind the Linux Mint are adopting a simpler desktop for the next version of the open-source Linux distribution.

              Linux Mint 13 will feature an entirely new user interface, called Cinnamon. Earlier this week, the Linux Mint developers released a version of the shell. Previous editions of Linux Mint used a standard version of the Gnome environment.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • FOSS’ Factious Gender Divide

    “For every ‘geeker girl’ there are probably 100,000 that only want to use a PC long enough to get the job done and get away from the stupid thing,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. In the end, “as long as there is a decent workplace so if little Sally wants to be a programmer she can, that should be all that matters. You will NEVER get a 50/50 ratio of women to men in that profession … .”

  • Don’t Do It Yourself – Learning to Trust Open Source

    It’s scary that people don’t know enough about open source and how development in Java is done to rely on well-known and trusted libraries. The runtime library is kept small on purpose. It gives us the most flexibility and power to do what’s best.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • CMS

    • NYSE Takes Stock of Open Source CMS

      Few global organizations can match the size, scale and importance of NYSE Euronext. (NYX). The leading global operator of financial markets, NYSE Euronext’s markets represent fully one third of the entire world’s equities trading-and the company is a major player in derivatives and technology services. NYSE Euronext is in the S&P 500 index and Fortune 500.

    • Joomla gets search, database reinforcements

      The newly released edition of the Joomla open source content management system now comes with a new search engine, and can use Microsoft SQL Server or PostGreSQL, in addition to MySQL.

  • Education

    • Stevens Institute of Technology Moves Financial Systems to Open Source Kuali

      New Jersey’s Stevens Institute of Technology has transitioned its financial systems to an open source platform. To replace its 30-year-old legacy system, Stevens adopted the Kuali Financial System, a tool developed and maintained by a partnership of higher education institutions and private companies.

      The Kuali Foundation is an open source organization for education institutions and other organizations dedicated to developing open source tools for higher education. The Kuali Financial System is Kuali’s flagship project. Based originally on Indiana University’s Financial Information System, KFS is a modular, enterprise-level financial system comprising accounts receivable, general ledger, purchasing/accounts payable, budget construction, and other major financial functions.

  • Healthcare

  • Business

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Debugger update brings Python scripting improvements

      The GNU Project Debugger team has announced the arrival of version 7.4 of the GNU Debugger (GDB). The open source debugger is the standard debugger for the GNU software system, and supports a number of programming languages including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Free Pascal, Fortran and Java.

  • Licensing

    • A Very Short Rant About “Copyrighted” Code

      This morning I was reading a site that regularly covers free and open source software. To protect the guilty party (because I suspect the error was one of rushed writing rather than ignorance), I’ll leave out the publication and author. However, I do want to surface the error. The author wrote about making sure that “copyrighted code” doesn’t get into the Linux kernel. What?

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Build software or community with the Mobility Lab

      Are you fascinated by transportation and passionate about using technology to help people? The Mobility Lab Transit Tech initiative is looking for Software Development Fellows and an Open Source Community Manager to help create innovative technology tools around transportation and foster open source collaboration.

    • Open source research techniques can revolutionize medicine

      What happens when Facebook meets medicine? And I’m not talking about poking your doctor when you want an appointment. What happens if all of a sudden, instead of pharmaceutical companies hiding their recipes behind closed doors and keeping their active compounds a closely guarded secret, they were to share?

      This is exactly what Jay Bradner, a researcher at Harvard and the Dana Farber Institute in Boston, did. When his lab discovered a compound that showed promise against pancreatic cancer and other solid tumors, he asked himself the question: “What would a pharmaceutical company do at this point?” And he did the opposite. Instead of keeping it a secret, he sent the compound out to researchers around the world, who sent back their findings. Instead of keeping his success in house, as a secret until he could patent a product, he created the most competitive research environment possible for his lab.

    • Open Data

      • Graph database Neo4J heads to the cloud

        Version 1.6 of Neo4J, the NoSQL graph database, has been released and includes a beta of Neo4J for the Heroku cloud, an improved query language, and web admin with a full shell. The developers say they are taking a careful approach in their cloud plans, and the beta of Neo4J for Heroku offers the ability to access Neo4j servers through their REST interface. Details of the cloud support are available in the Heroku Dev Center.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Elsevier — my part in its downfall

        The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Combinatorics, Historia Mathematica, Journal of Algebra, Journal of Approximation Theory, Journal of Combinatorics Series A, Journal of Functional Analysis, Journal of Geometry and Physics, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, Journal of Number Theory, Topology, and Topology and its Applications. For many years, it has also been heavily criticized for its business practices. Let me briefly summarize these criticisms.

      • Goodbye Elsevier, Goodbye Tet Lett etc

        Over the last few years my interest in open science has grown, and inevitably I’ve had to confront the power of open access literature, which is a necessary condition for open science if we are to avoid the absurdity of research conducted in the open disappearing behind a subscription once it’s done. My doubts about contributing to a system of closed access journals, which totally dominate organic chemistry, were becoming overwhelming when Tim Gowers’ post came along about the need to declare publicly that we would no longer support the system.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open source controller framework lets you add the finishing touch

        There are plenty of off-the-shelf controllers out there, but what if you fancy something a little more… you? How about fully customized, with a good seasoning of affordability and style? Design student Alex S has built a framework to help you build just that. The units shown above are for DJ-based programs, but you can create interfaces for any software that takes HID or MIDI input, and as they’re modular, create endless ultra-custom set-ups. Keen to dismantle any technical barriers, Alex created a step-by-step Instructable, but you’ll still need to get your hands dirty with Arduino and some circuitry. The whole project is open source, and while it’s a step up from Lego, until we can just print these things,

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • [Neelie Kroes] I’ll be Tweet-chatting next Monday, 30 January
  • Opportunities Lost

    The score: In a decade of error,

    * 10 billion person-years of computing was lost,
    * $100 billion in profits was lost by M$ alone,
    * billions were kept in poverty years longer than they should have,
    * Earth was polluted/raped by the material wasted/used in PCs replaced every few years, and
    * the world spent $billions more fighting the malware and bloat and re-re-reboots of that other OS.

  • Finance

    • Stress Testing Tim Geithner

      Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, in the State of the Union this week President Obama struck some of his most populist themes yet. He wants to tax millionaires, bring back manufacturing and prosecute the big banks. He touted his Wall Street reforms saying the big banks are “no longer allowed to make risky bets with customers deposits” and “the rest of us aren’t bailing you out ever again.”

      But are we safe from the next big bank bailout? Many experts are dubious and Wednesday the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen decided to test the theory in the most direct way possible. They used the administrative law process to formally petition the nation’s top bank regulators to move swiftly to break up Bank of America (BofA) asserting in their petition: “The bank poses a grave threat to U.S. financial stability by any reasonable definition of that phrase.”

    • Goldman Sachs a key player in managing Romney’s wealth

      Romney’s tax returns show portions of his family fortune in an elite division of Goldman open only to clients with more than $10 million to invest and another in bank-run hedge funds.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • How the government will monitor your cell phones

      In general, mobile phone penetration is extremely high in Canada. 78% of Canadian households had a mobile phone in 2010, and in young households 50% exclusively have mobiles. In addition to owning mobile phones, we carry them with us most of the time.

      While many Canadians think of mobile phones as convenient tools to communicate with each other, we tend to not really think of mobiles as surveillance systems that are stuck in our pockets and purses.

  • Civil Rights

    • FBI seeks to track Social Media en masse

      There’s a brand new job alert out there this week, engineers and developers, and you should hop right on it if you want to help the FBI work on a tool which will provide them with an “Open Source and social media alert, mapping, and analysis application solution.” What I want to do right now is, in a very basic way, debunk how this situation will almost certainly be blown out of proportion by the same crew of people that ultimately (and thankfully) took down the SOPA and PIPA bills. This tool, if I’m to trust the job offer I’m reading here from the Federal Business Opportunities website, is not going to be hacking into your personal or secured information in any way. Instead it will be a mass organization and search tool for the FBI to keep track of all social and open source sites on the internet at all times.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • It Ain’t Over: ‘Ireland’s SOPA’ To Pass Without Parliamentary Vote

        Ireland is soon to have a law similar to SOPA passed that would give music and movie companies the power to force Irish ISPs to block access to sites suspected of having copyright infringing material on them.

      • After Years Of Near Obscurity, Atari Turns To Copyright Trolling

        A long, long time ago, Atari was king of the gaming world. It was the manufacturer of the first mainstream home video game console and was making a ton of money. That was until the video game crash of the 80s. Even though Atari was king of the world, it was not able to manage the prospect of home gaming very well and the market became saturated with terrible games that were extremely overpriced. The inability for Atari to rectify the problem ended up with gaming lying on its death bed. While the rest of the gaming world moved on after the video game renaissance, Atari was not able to keep pace with the new generation of consoles and games. After several failed consoles, it fell into obscurity.

      • Once More, With Feeling: It Wasn’t Silicon Valley Or Google That Stopped SOPA/PIPA, It Was The Internet

        Over the last week, after SOPA and PIPA were put on life support, we’ve noticed an incredibly tone deaf response from the supporters of these bills, lashing out at the wrong parties and trying to figure out where to place the blame. The usual target has been “the tech industry,” by which they usually mean “Google.” That’s why the MPAA’s Chris Dodd wants to sit down with “tech companies” at the White House to discuss this. It’s why the head of the movie theaters’ lobbying group, NATO, brushes this whole thing off as Google “flexing” its muscles. As we’ve said all along, that not only misses the point, and is totally tone deaf to what happened, but it pretty much guarantees the wrong response from supporters of the bill.

      • From Deadwood to Opportunity: CRIA Changes Its Tune on the Canadian Online Music Market

        For many years, the most prominent critic of the Canadian online music market has been the industry itself. The Canadian Recording Industry Association (now known as Music Canada) has consistently argued that few would want to invest in Canada due to the state of our copyright laws. For example, in 2009, CRIA President Graham Henderson published an op-ed that said our trading partners were racing ahead of Canada, which he argued was a product of Canadian copyright law. A year later, Universal Music Canada appeared before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and told MPs the legal uncertainty meant that the investment was going to other countries.

      • Seven Lessons from SOPA/PIPA/Megaupload and Four Proposals on Where We Go From Here
      • Bill C-11: copyright, the movie
      • Weak Copyright Laws? Recording Industry Files Massive Lawsuit Against isoHunt

        As the debate over Canada’s copyright reform legislation, Bill C-32, continues to rage before a legislative committee, one of the most frequently heard claims is that tough reforms are needed to counter Canada’s reputation as a “piracy haven”. The presence of several well-known BitTorrent sites, most notably B.C.-based isoHunt, is cited as evidence for Canada’s supposedly lax laws that the industry says leaves it powerless.

      • The SOPA War: A Frantic Call, an Aborted Summit, and Dramatic New Details on How Hollywood Lost
      • Who Really Stopped SOPA, and Why?

        I split my time these days between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill, and last week was a very good week to be in Washington. In the fall, I witnessed the beginnings of a unique revolt over proposed legislation that would have dramatically changed the Internet’s business landscape. Last week, that revolt achieved a stunning victory, sending Congress into a tailspin of retreat from bills that seemed certain, only months ago, to pass with little notice or resistance.

      • ACTA

        • MEP quits ACTA ‘charade’ in protest at EU signing

          A French MEP has quit the process of scrutinising ACTA for the European Parliament, calling the treaty’s passage through the EU legislative system a masquerade.

          In a statement on Thursday, Kader Arif denounced the signing of ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) by the EU and 22 member states earlier in the day. He said the European Parliament was being undermined and the process was a “charade” in which he would no longer participate.

        • European Parliament Official In Charge Of ACTA Quits, And Denounces The ‘Masquerade’ Behind ACTA
        • ACTA rapporteur denounces ACTA mascarade
        • People In Poland Come Out To Protest ACTA In Large Numbers; Polish Gov’t Calls It ‘Blackmail’

          Wow. We’ve noted that the folks who got revved up around SOPA weren’t just focused on that one bill, but have remained active and interested in related issues — with ACTA being an important one, especially given the effort by the government in Poland to sign on. Following on the big anti-SOPA protests, it seems that a bunch of folks in Warsaw decided to take to the streets in protest of ACTA… and it looks like an awful lot of people showed up, despite this being about a copyright trade agreement and the fact that it was below freezing temperatures outside. There are some photos on the site linked above that show a very large group gathering. This is really fantastic. Just a month ago, you would have never expected over a thousand people to show up in the freezing cold in Warsaw to protest a bad trade agreement about copyright issues. But it shows just how badly the entertainment industry is miscalculating on these things. The further and further the entertainment industry pushes, all it’s doing is educating and activating a large and growing group of folks who are sick of bad copyright laws interfering with their own basic rights and civil liberties.

        • Poland is not lost – could challenge ACTA at the ECJ
        • EU Commission propaganda on ACTA

          The European Commission published a document in defense of ACTA, “10 Myths about ACTA“. It is pure propaganda. The document is widely distributed by polish authorities.

Links 26/1/2012: Toorox 01.2012, Red Hat’s MRG Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 10:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 75 Open Source Apps That Could Improve Your Life

    ‘Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions. But if you’re like many Americans you may have already fallen off the wagon. One study by psychologists at the University of Scranton found that 36 percent of the people who made New Year’s resolutions had already broken them by the end of January, and less than half (44 percent) were still going strong in July.

  • Events

    • LCA 2012 Bruce Perens on Status of Open Source and James Applebaum on Anonymity
    • LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

      Bruce Perens wore a suit and tie for his linux.conf.au 2012 keynote for a reason, he said: it reflects our community’s need to think more about how it appears to the rest of the world. Despite our many successes, he said, we have failed to achieve the goals that our community set for itself many years ago. We have failed to engage and educate our users, and are finding ourselves pulled into an increasingly constrained world. To get out of this mess, we will have to make some changes – and expand our scope beyond software and culture.
      The open source (he always used that term) movement’s goal, he said, was once to help a population that increasingly does everything – from entertainment to finances and voting – through computers. We wanted to enable people to do, not to be done to. But we find ourselves in a world where people are increasingly slaves to their tools. Yes, he said, tools like the iPhone empower their users, but they also constrain those users. They are designed not to allow their users to do things that might reduce the profits of their makers or of a number of related industries.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Solution Finds A Problem

        Google has expressed surprise that Chromebooks are popular with schools. I’m not surprised.

  • CMS

  • Funding

    • The Taxman Cometh for Kickstarter

      It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new business model, recently acquiring financial success, must be in want of taxation. So it appears to be for Kickstarter, as I discovered, now that the first business tax filing deadlines are approaching me.

      It turns out that the taxman is not very pleased with “exchanges that are a mix of commerce and patronage” — he’d really prefer these to be clearly distinct activities. Because gift income or patronage may generally be treated as non-taxable, while commerce is subject to taxes at multiple levels — both as income and as sales.

      Several questions are relatively difficult to determine: is the money you receive in a Kickstart to be interpreted as a payment for delivery of a product (i.e. the reward)? Or is the money a donation (gift) with the reward being a nominal acknowledgment.

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Tiny server offers modular design

  • Finance

    • Merkel aims to solve Europe’s debt crisis as Davos leaders say Western capitalism has widened income gap

      German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed determination Wednesday to solve Europe’s debt crisis through greater political unity, but dashed hopes of a big injection of money for the region’s bailout fund.

      Urging the European Union to act more like a central government for the region, she acknowledged that the countries that share the euro don’t have the “political structures” to make the common currency work properly.

      She spoke at the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where members of the global business and political elite are looking to Germany to prevent a breakup of the euro, which could hurt the economy worldwide. Many participants said they see increasing evidence that Merkel will do so.

  • Copyrights

    • Global failure: No Global e-book library

      While waiting in my doctor’s office with nothing to read, I picked up a copy of the Washington Lawyer, the journal of the DC bar. It had a long piece on the “March Toward a National Digital Library” by Sarah Kellogg that I think worth reading. And pondering. It is online here .

      A lot has been happening, but it remains slow going as the lawyers and the interest groups continue to try to find a workable deal on the remaining issues. Still the author is hopeful. But she also notes that we have had the technology to digitize print matter since 1971 when Project Gutenberg published it first e-book. Forty years. Think about that.

    • New Righthaven To Offer ‘Hosting With A Backbone’; Will Avoid Unnecessary Takedowns

      Last week, some folks here pointed out that the new Righthaven.com — bought during the asset auction of Righthaven’s domain for $3,300, as part of the effort to fulfill Righthaven’s obligation to pay legal fees for one of its (many) bogus lawsuits — had put up a page joining the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests. That certainly seemed encouraging, and suggested that (not all that surprisingly, really), the domain had been bought by someone who took a dim view on copyright maximalism.

    • State Of The Union Address Highlights The Dirty Trick Of Hiding More Draconian IP Rules In ‘Trade Agreements’

      As we’ve been discussing, it’s great that the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests have awakened many to the horrors of ACTA. It seems that this may also help people finally learn about the nefarious practice of industry trade groups and governments to sneak bad IP legislation through “international agreements.” With President Obama mentioning the importance of trade agreements and dealing with infringement in his State of the Union address, many people were wondering if it was a signal about SOPA/PIPA.

    • Once Again, If You’re Trying To Save The $200 Million Movie, Perhaps You’re Asking The Wrong Questions

      I’m a bit behind on this (the SOPA/PIPA stuff took up a lot of time), but filmmaker/actor/director/writer Ed Burns, who came to fame a couple decades ago with the massively successful indie film The Brothers McMullen, likely had every opportunity to follow the path of plenty of successful indie moviemakers: go mainstream. He could have hooked up with a big studio and been filming the latest of those $200 million bubble-gum flicks. And while Burns has appeared in a few big studio films (Saving Private Ryan), over the last few years, he’s really focused on staying close to his indie roots. In fact, he’s stayed so close to them, that you could argue his latest efforts are even more indie than his first film.

    • The Pirate Bay Launches Promo Platform For Artists

      Hollywood and the major music labels frequently describe The Pirate Bay as a piracy haven that ruins their businesses. On the other side, however, there are many independent artists who would like nothing more than to be featured prominently on the world’s largest torrent site. For the latter group The Pirate Bay team have just released a new platform where artists can have their content promoted on the site’s homepage, free of charge.

    • Why SOPA and PIPA are bad for open source

      The widespread internet blackout last week in protest at unbalanced legislation being rushed through the US Congress was dramatic and notable. I did have some questions though on why it was important to the open source community. The way the laws have been framed by their proponents makes them look as if they are all about file sharing and specifically music and video sharing. However, the problem with them is they create badly-bounded new powers that are likely to exploited in ways that fall outside the frame.

    • Discussing SOPA/PIPA Over At On The Media

      Been meaning to get to this for a few days now, but finally had the chance now. Last week the always excellent radio program On The Media from WNYC, I had a bit of a discussion on SOPA/PIPA (and the Megaupload shutdown). I was on the first segment discussing some of the problems with the bills. The actual interview happened Tuesday, before the big protest, before all the politicians dropped off, and before the Megaupload takedown occurred. Otherwise I might have had a few more comments about all of that. There’s probably not too much surprising in what I have to say if you’re a regular reader of my SOPA/PIPA coverage.

    • ACTA

01.25.12

Links 25/1/2012: KDE 4.8, Pandora is Back, Open webOS 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • JavaScript dashboard framework jSlate open sourced

    Rasmus Berg Palm has released his JavaScript dashboard framework jSlate as GPLv3 licensed open source. jSlate allows users to create dashboards which retrieve their data from any web-accessible service. The system, which runs as a service on the jslate.com web site, allows users to create dashboard visualisations based on Highcharts JS interactive JavaScript charts and D3 data-driven documents. Each dashboard element is represented as a window which contains the visualisation and behind each is a JavaScript script which can be edited by the user to completely customise the chart to their needs.

  • Be lazy, be fast

    At its best Open Source software is about accelerating the pace of innovation by enabling unconnected groups to collaborate across organisational borders. It is a software development process that allows people to freely share ideas and implementations among a community of peers while still focusing on their own local needs and business drivers

  • Interview with Ivan Idris author of NumPy 1.5 Beginner’s Guide

    Today’s interview is with Ivan Idris, author of NumPy 1.5 Beginner’s Guide a book for developers or scientists with a little Python experience and wanting to test NumPy’s capabilities. We talk about the book, how it came to be and the experience writing it. Enjoy!

  • Events

    • OSI Reform At FOSDEM
    • Failure Is An Option

      Failure is a word that, understandably, carries a negative connotation. Nobody wants to fail, really. But failure, if you’re doing anything worthwhile, is inevitable. What’s important is to plan for failure, learn from it, try to avoid damage and do your best to recover gracefully. That was the topic of Selena Deckelmann’s keynote, “Mistakes Were Made,” Sunday morning at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE).

    • Canberra to host 2013 Linux conference

      The conference will be held from January 28 to February 2, which includes the Australia Day public holiday. This is not unusual as it happened in Brisbane in 2011 too.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Patches Five Chrome Bugs, Pays $6000 in Bounties

        Google earlier this week updated the Chrome Stable channel to 16.0.912.77 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame, patching four privately reported vulnerabilities in its browser. How come only four, you ask, when the headline clearly mentions five? Actually the fifth was patched a couple of weeks back, but Google mistakenly failed to include it in the release notes.

    • Mozilla

      • JSRuntime is now officially single-threaded

        A single SpiderMonkey runtime (that is, instance of JSRuntime) — and all the objects, strings and contexts associated with it — may only be accessed by a single thread at any given time. However, a SpiderMonkey embedding may create multiple runtimes in the same process (each of which may be accessed by a different thread).

  • BSD

    • GhostBSD 2.5 available with GNOME or LXDE

      Following several months of development, the GhostBSD project has announced the release of version 2.5 of its BSD distribution. According to its developers, this update to GhostBSD is the result of many parts of the system being “updated, tweaked and fine-tuned”.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Committee Passes “Open Source City” Resolution

      A Raleigh City Council committee gave its stamp of approval to a resolution that could make public city data easier to access and change the way the city buys software.

      The Technology and Communications Committee, a new group of city councilors created late last year, approved the Open Source Government resolution Tuesday night. It will go to the full council next week.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Contest Highlights R Language’s Big Data Analysis Power

      Revolution Analytics, a commercial provider of software, services and support for the open source R language, awarded $20,000 to contestants in an event designed to highlight the business usefulness of R.

      Hadoop is an open source software framework that enables organizations to process huge amounts of data, huge as in petabytes. R is an open source software programming language popular with statisticians who have long used it for data mining and creating predictive models.

Leftovers

  • Google’s SPDY Incorporated Into Next-Gen HTML, Offers TCP Enhancements

    Google’s efforts to improve Internet efficiency through the development of the SPDY (pronounced “speedy”) protocol got a major boost today when the chairman of the HTTP Working Group (HTTPbis), Mark Nottingham, called for it to be included in the HTTP 2.0 standard. SPDY is a protocol that’s already used to a certain degree online; formal incorporation into the next-generation standard would improve its chances of being generally adopted.

  • Security

    • Windows security breaches on the rise

      It seems like every year, near the closing of the year, Windows viruses and malware seem to creep up from nowhere. Late 2011 was no exception. Beginning in November, Windows viruses and malware started to appear and we experienced a few get through on Windows 7 64-bit with full Symantec Endpoint Protection running, with users running Internet Explorer. Yep, they slipped right on through multiple layers of protection. Meanwhile others mentioned an increase of other popups and strange behaviour with fake “Windows repair” utilities and such. Needless to say, for those supporting Windows, it made for an ever increasing need for extra time to put out these fires. Things seem to have settled down after the new year.

  • Finance

    • Romney Parks Millions in Cayman Islands

      Although it is not apparent on his financial disclosure form, Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven.

      A spokesperson for the Romney campaign says Romney follows all tax laws and he would pay the same in taxes regardless of where the funds are based.

    • Sorry, Mr. Speaker, Credit Unions are Not GSEs

      For the second time in a recent presidential debate where he seeks to answer his opponents’ charges about his firm’s years of quite profitable (and, according to most sources, completely legal although an issue he has found tough to defend in today’s “bubble burst” real estate market) consulting engagements with Freddie Mac, former Speaker Newt Gingrich has now twice misstated facts about credit unions so severely in his attempt to deal with these GSE-oriented questions that it has to be either an intentional effort to mislead or he does not understand what credit unions are.

      Either is troublesome for credit unions. And, now that he has done it two times in two separate debates, it cannot be a mere oversight on his part. One of those problems, lack of candor or lack of comprehension, must be the case. And the record must be set straight.

      Sorry, Mr. Speaker, credit unions are not GSEs. Period.

    • David Stockman on Crony Capitalism

  • Privacy

    • Facebook is Mass Surveillance, Says Free Software Founder

      Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, remains the most outspoken public personality against “non-free” software and recently lashed out against commercial software services that restrict “freedom”.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Stop throttling video games, CRTC tells Rogers

      Rogers Communications is breaking the law by deliberately slowing down certain types of Internet traffic, says Canada’s telecom regulator.

      In a letter made public Jan. 20, the CRTC gives Rogers two weeks to show it’s complying with the rules.

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Would a SOPA Version of the Canadian Copyright Bill Target Youtube?

        My post this week on the behind-the-scenes demands to make Bill C-11, the current copyright bill, more like SOPA has attracted considerable attention with mainstream (National Post, La Presse) and online media (Mashable, Wire Report) covering the story. The music industry alone is seeking over a dozen changes to the bill, including website blocking, Internet termination for alleged repeat infringers, and an expansion of the “enabler” provision that is supposedly designed to target pirate sites. Meanwhile, the Entertainment Software Association of Canada also wants an expansion of the enabler provision along with further tightening of the already-restrictive digital lock rules.

      • Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales: MPAA chairman Christopher Dodd should be fired

        Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had fighting words for Motion Picture Association of America chairman Christopher Dodd, calling the former Senator and current lobbyist out on his recent threats and pronouncing that the MPAA should fire its chief.

        “Candidly, those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake,” Dodd said to Fox News recently. “Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

      • EMI VP Comes Out Against SOPA/PIPA; Says The Answer To Piracy Is Providing A Better Service

        Over the years, I’ve definitely found that there are plenty of folks working inside the major record labels (and big studios) who really do get what’s going on. The problem is often that their voices are drowned out by others (usually the older guard) who are pretty stubborn in their anti-innovation, anti-consumer ways. It’s always nice, however, when someone from the inside pops up and says something sensible in public, and those folks deserve kudos. The latest is Craig Davis, EMI’s VP of Urban Promotions.

      • My thoughts on S.O.P.A.

        IN THE former Soviet Union, in the late 1950s and 60s, many books that questioned the political system began to be circulated privately in mimeographed form. Their authors never earned a penny in royalties. On the contrary, they were persecuted, denounced in the official press, and sent into exile in the notorious Siberian gulags. Yet they continued to write.

      • Hollywood Astroturf Group Releases Ad Saying It Needs SOPA To Shut Down Megaupload… Five Days After Megaupload Is Shut Down
      • Free Press Action Fund Calls on Congress to Return MPAA’s Dirty Money

        WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, the Free Press Action Fund called on Congress to return campaign donations from the Motion Picture Association of America.

        In an interview last week, MPAA President Chris Dodd, a former U.S. senator, threatened to cut off campaign donations to members of Congress who vote against legislation the MPAA supports.

      • The Tech Industry Has Already Given Hollywood The Answer To Piracy; If Only It Would Listen

        While many in the press have really enjoyed claiming that the SOPA/PIPA fight has been about Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley, we’ve been pointing out for a while just how silly that is. Months ago, we pointed out that it’s a strange “fight” when one side (Silicon Valley) appears to give the other side all the weapons it needs to succeed (only to watch Hollywood then aim those weapons at its own feet). It’s been pointed out time and time again that Hollywood has a habit of looking a gift horse in the mouth… and accusing it of piracy, when it later turns out to be the answer to Hollywood’s prayers.

      • ACTA

        • New Petition Asks White House To Submit ACTA To The Senate For Ratification

          As we noted in our post about people just discovering ACTA this week, some had put together an odd White House petition, asking the White House to “end ACTA.” The oddity was over the fact that the President just signed ACTA a few months ago. What struck us as a more interesting question was the serious constitutional questions of whether or not Obama is even allowed to sign ACTA.

          In case you haven’t been following this or don’t spend your life dealing in Constitutional minutiae, the debate is over the nature of the agreement. A treaty between the US and other nations requires Senate approval. However, there’s a “simpler” form of an international agreement, known as an “executive agreement,” which allows the President to sign the agreement without getting approval. In theory, this also limits the ability of the agreement to bind Congress. In practice… however, international agreements are international agreements. Some legal scholars have suggested that the only real difference between a treaty and an executive agreement is the fact that… the president calls any treaty an “executive agreement” if he’s unsure if the Senate would approve it. Another words, the difference is basically in how the President presents it.

Links 25/1/2012: Linux in Australia, Linux Foundation Grows

Posted in News Roundup at 11:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source Malwr analysis launched

    A free web-based malware analysis tool powered by Shadowsever has launched this week that aims to shake-up vendor-controlled and proprietary systems.

    The tool, dubbed Malwr, is designed to provide security professionals with a free and customisable open source malware analysis tool.

  • Free open source application developed for study of fluid dynamics

    “In engineering circles, the discipline is known as computational fluid dynamics,” noted research associate Francisco Palacios, who led the team. “Creating custom software applications to accurately model the interactions of an object in flight can take months, even years, to write and perfect. And yet, when the student graduates, the software is often forgotten.

  • Google’s Android App Inventor Goes Open Source

    Google, along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has decided to open source the Android App Inventor code

    The developers at MIT stated that for the time being the App Inventor will not accept any contribution made to the code, however, it will definitely do so in the near future. Also, there will be periodic updates to the system to keep it at par with what’s running on experimental MIT Systems.

  • Open source ‘Malwr’ analysis tool launched

    A free web-based malware analysis tool powered by Shadowserver aims to shake up vendor-controlled and proprietary systems.

    The Malwr tool is designed to provide security professionals with a free and customisable, open-source tool.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • 6 Google Chrome remixes worth trying

        Once upon a time there was a browser named Firefox — an open source project that many people happily picked up and spun off into their own versions with names like Iceweasel and Pale Moon. Now the same thing has happened with Google Chrome. Its open source incarnation, Chromium, has become the basis for a slew of spinoffs, remixes, and alternative versions.

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox in 2012

        The first public version of the browser called “Firefox” — a 0.8 release, came out 8 years ago. With that release and the 1.0 release later that same year, we showed the world that browsers mattered.

        Innovative new features like tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, spell-checking, integrated search, and browser add-ons, re-invigorated not just the browser market, but the entire Web. We put users in control of that mess of windows, and the horrible pop-ups from advertisers and malware makers. We made it simple for users to customize their experience and to find what they were looking for without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

  • Business

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Nielsen’s report and Video on the Web

    In the United States, Nielsen has long been the main source of data for evaluating television shows and stations for advertisers. It’s considered a very reliable source. So their inclusion of data on web video watching habits in their 2011 report on the “The U.S. Media Universe” is a real boon to anyone planning to enter this field. It’s interesting to ask what are the consequences to free culture productions and the free software used for creation and consumption of video arts.

  • Censorship

    • Georgia Lawmaker Looking To Make Photoshopping Heads On Naked Bodies Illegal

      Well, the Uptons are in luck. Sort of. The Agitator informs us that Georgia State Representative Pam Dickerson is looking to close this legal loophole by making it illegal to “intentionally cause an unknowing person wrongfully to be identified as the person in an obscene depiction in such a manner that a reasonable person would conclude that the image depicted was that of the person so wrongfully identified.” This would include using a person’s name, telephone number, address or email address.

    • The Day the Internet Fought Back

      Last week’s Wikipedia-led blackout in protest of U.S. copyright legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is being hailed by some as the Internet Spring, the day that millions fought back against restrictive legislative proposals that posed a serious threat to an open Internet. The protests were derided by critics as a gimmick, but my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes it is hard to see how the SOPA protest can be fairly characterized as anything other than a stunning success. Wikipedia reports that 162 million people viewed its blackout page during the 24-hour protest period. By comparison, the most-watched television program of 2011, the Super Bowl, attracted 111 million viewers.

    • Mobilizing the Public Against Censorship, 1765 and 2012

      Last week’s protests against two bills aiming to curb copyright infringement and piracy on the Internet were jarringly familiar to scholars of the American Revolution. After all, we’ve seen this narrative before. In seeking to solve a problem, legislators propose a bill that directly affects the flow of information. Those whose businesses would bear the brunt of the laws see it as a direct assault and mobilize in opposition. The public responds to the rhetoric, rallying behind the call to prevent censorship and protect the free exchange of information. The government backs down in the face of the outcry, but promises to revisit the underlying issues. That description of the Internet protests of 2012 echoes in unnerving detail the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, the moment when dissent against imperial control morphed into a Revolutionary movement.

    • Kingdom relieved after US internet law fails to pass

      The postponement of two US internet piracy bills last week was met with relief by human rights and media experts in Cambodia, who say the overreaching grasp of the proposed legislation would hinder the internet’s progress and growth in the Kingdom.

      The US House of Representative’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) had aimed to require that internet providers block access to websites accused of piracy and would criminalise the unlawful streaming of copyrighted material by domestic or foreign websites.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • New Market Research: Music Streaming Services Halve Illegal Downloads

        For a long time, the copyright industries have taken the position that they won’t launch new digital music services until piracy is “solved” – or at least punished. The inevitable consequence of that position is obvious to everyone outside the copyright industries – people turn to other, unauthorized sources to satisfy their musical needs. Fortunately, a few startups have launched pioneering digital music offerings and some, like Spotify, look like they might succeed.

      • MPAA Directly & Publicly Threatens Politicians Who Aren’t Corrupt Enough To Stay Bought

        Wow. Chris Dodd is not only an asshole, he’s a stupid, tone deaf asshole. And so are all the asshole Democrats who are on the wrong side of this issue because they want money from Hollywood. Guess what, Democrats? You’re finally starting to reclaim the populist mantle that could help you win back congress and keep the White House. You may want to, you know, get on the right side of public opinion you idiots.

      • Wil Wheaton Says Chris Dodd Is Lying About Lost Jobs; Says MPAA Accounting Creates More Losses Than Piracy
      • Do Pirate Sites Really Make That Much Money? Um… No

        One of the key refrains from the supporters of PIPA and SOPA in pushing for those bills was about how “foreign pirates” were profiting off of American industry. However, as we’ve suggested plenty of times in the past, there’s little evidence that there’s really that much money to be made running such sites. Even more amusing, of course, is that the MPAA/RIAA folks have to both argue that “people just want stuff for free,” and that these sites are raking in money from subscription fees at the same time — an internal contradiction they never explain. I’ve asked MPAA officials directly (including on stage at the Filmmaker’s Forum event last year) that if these lockers are really making so much money, why doesn’t Hollywood just set up their own and rake in all that cash. The only answer they give, which doesn’t actually answer the question, is that it’s cheaper for cyberlockers since they don’t pay royalties. But that’s got nothing to do with why the Hollywood studios don’t get this money for themselves. Of course, the real reason — somewhat implicit from the MPAA’s comments — is that it knows these sites don’t make that much money.

      • MPAA’s Chris Dodd & NATO’s John Fithian Face Sundance Wrath Over SOPA/PIPA

        The panel’s moderator called the MPAA and NATO to task for the legislation’s effective defeat: “You got your butt kicked.” It follows heavyweights like Google, Wikipedia, and thousands of websites joining forces and protesting what they claimed was a move to suppress free speech.

      • Senator Leahy Hands Republicans A Gift By Giving Them Credit For Delaying Vote On PIPA/SOPA

        We’ve noted how intellectual property issues are historically non-partisan. Sometimes, that’s good, because it means that debates on the issues don’t fall into typical brain dead partisan arguments. Sometimes, it’s bad, in that it basically means both Republicans and Democrats are generally really bad on IP issues… happy to give industries greater and greater monopoly rights for no good reason. However, we noted an interesting thing happening on the way to the collapse of PIPA and SOPA: the Republicans were first to come together as a party and decide to speak out against these bills, recognizing the groundswell of public interest. That resulted in Republican leadership coming out against the bills, and Republican Presidential candidates all rejecting the approach in the bill. The Democrats, who have traditionally been considered more “internet friendly,” simply couldn’t bring themselves to go against Hollywood and unions — two regular allies.

      • ACTA

        • What Is ACTA And Why Is It A Problem?

          Yesterday I noted that the anti-SOPA/PIPA crowd seemed to have just discovered ACTA. And while I’m pleased that they’re taking interest in something as problematic as ACTA, there was a lot of misinformation flowing around, so I figured that, similar to my “definitive” explainer posts on why SOPA/PIPA were bad bills (and the followup for the amended versions), I thought I’d do a short post on ACTA to hopefully clarify some of what’s been floating around.

          [...]

          In the meantime, for folks who are just getting up to speed on ACTA, you really should turn your attention to the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), which is basically ACTA on steroids. It’s being kept even more secret than ACTA, and appears to have provisions that are significantly worse than ACTA — in some cases, with ridiculous, purely protectionist ideas, that are quite dangerous.

        • Poles Protest ACTA Online and on the Streets

          Hundreds of people waged a street protest in Warsaw on Tuesday to protest the government’s plan to sign an international copyright treaty, while several popular websites also shut down for an hour over the issue.

          Poland’s support for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, has sparked days of protest, including attacks on government sites, by groups who fear it could lead to online censorship.

01.24.12

Links 24/1/2012: Cinnamon 1.2, Ubuntu Versus Menu Bar

Posted in News Roundup at 6:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux to rule the world then, basically

    If the Linux Foundation releases a survey suggesting that open source is poised for growth, is that hard to get excited about? Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

    If the Ovum Research team releases a study suggesting that Android is soon to become the top developer platform, is that hard to get excited about? Well, they have, haven’t they?

    The Linux Foundation sees open source technology set for its grandest age yet based on low total cost of ownership, technical features and security. Comments are based upon a new survey entitled “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users.”

  • Linux fate lies in the hands of many

    When someone presses me about the state of Linux on the desktop, I usually respond with a tightened brow and pursed lip and start talking about the current commercial push to move beyond the desktop platform and into mobile.

    And while that’s a valid observation, I also have to pause and recognize the strength of the Linux community, remembering that this collective voice has huge potential in shaping the direction of Linux and open source projects.

  • Linux: Moving from the Fringe to the Center

    One of the popular perceptions about Linux is that somehow the open source operating system is the IT equivalent of the anti-establishment candidate. But a funny thing usually happens to almost every anti-establishment trend given enough time: It moves from the fringe to the center.

    If a recent survey of 428 respondents at organizations with $500 million or more in annual revenues or greater than 500 employees conducted by The Linux Foundation is any guide, that’s exactly what’s happening with Linux. Although different distributions of Linux are more accepted by mainstream IT organizations than others, the server makes it clear that large numbers of mission-critical applications and new application workloads are finding their way onto Linux platforms. Part of that expansion can also be attributed to independent software vendors pushing Linux adoption if for no other reason than it leaves more of the IT budget available for application software licenses.

  • Desktop

    • Why oems should avoid not (possibly) making it harder to install Linux

      There has been a lot of worry lately about windows 8 secure boot making it (possibly) much harder or impossible to install certain Linux’s (possibly all) on pcs with windows 8 secure boot. So I decided to list the arguments against making it possibly harder or impossible to install Linux’s.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Preview: Intel’s Open-Source Driver Can Beat Mac OS X

      Thanks to recent advancements by Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center, the open-source Linux graphics driver not only supports more OpenGL 3.0 functionality than Apple’s Intel graphics driver for Mac OS X, but the performance is more competitive. In some cases, the OpenGL performance is now superior under Linux with the open-source driver that is developed by Intel in conjunction with the free software community. This article is looking at the performance of Intel Sandy Bridge graphics under Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” and Ubuntu Linux.

    • XFS Developer Takes Shots At Btrfs, EXT4

      Chris Mason of Btrfs fame wasn’t the only Linux file-system developer talking to the public last week. While the Btrfs talk was going on in Los Angeles at SCALE 10x, Dave Chinner was down under in Australia at LCA2012 talking about XFS. His talk included some controversial shots at EXT4 and Btrfs.

      During his Linux.Conf.Au 2012 presentation in Barratt, Australia, Chinner first talked about the XFS meta-data problems of the file-system’s meta-data modification performance being terrible. EXT4 can be 20~50x faster than XFS with certain workloads like unpacking a Linux kernel source tar-ball package. However, with one major algorithm change and various performance optimizations, the XFS performance is now scaling much better (Dave recommends the Linux 3.0 stable series or newer for the best XFS support).

    • Graphics Stack

      • Reverse-Engineered NVIDIA Driver Works On Re-Clocking

        While Nouveau for open-source NVIDIA support in Mesa 8.0 is mixed, the developers behind this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver are making some progress and hope to have more positive information to report soon.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Digia: Committed To Qt, Will Take “Extremely Active Role”

        In an email to Phoronix, Digia has clarified their Qt Commercial releases and further affirmed their commitment to the public Qt Project.

        Katherine Barrios, the head of global marketing at Digia, fired off an email to Phoronix on Monday. She sought to clarify Digia’s Qt Commercial releases and to make it known to Phoronix readers that they are committed the community project built around the LGPL version of the Qt tool-kit.

      • fine tuning the trajectory

        One of the most significant results of all the pondering in relative silence is this: My role within KDE and my relationship to the F/OSS community is going to be changing this year in fairly significant ways.

        I will be writing more on this over the course of the week, culminating in an announcement on Friday that I hope you will find as exciting as I do. :)

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • REMnux 3 review – a treasure chest for the malware-curious

      Analyzing and reverse engineering malware is a difficult task, which should be meticulously done in an isolated environment with specialized tools. In the last few years an interesting Linux distribution has surfaced with the aim to bring malware analysis to the masses. REMnux is the brainchild of security consultant Lenny Zeltser, who recently announced version 3 of his specialized Linux distribution, full of open source tools for analyzing and reverse engineering Flash malware, obfuscated JavaScript, shell code, malicious PDF files, and so on.

      Zeltser makes the REMnux 3 release available as a VMware virtual appliance and as an ISO image of a Live CD. The idea is to run the distribution in a virtual machine and then analyze the malware in its isolated environment. REMnux 3 is a trimmed-down version of Ubuntu 11.10 with a hand-picked treasure chest of useful malware analysis tools and is using LXDE as its lightweight desktop environment.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu rips up drop-down menus

            By Barry Collins
            Ubuntu is set to replace the 30-year-old computer menu system with a “Head-Up Display” that allows users to simply type or speak menu commands.

          • Ubuntu Is Killing The Menu Bar With New Tech That Is Part Alfred, Part Siri
          • Ubuntu Announces A Heads-Up Display For 12.04

            Mark Shuttleworth has announced a “heads-up display” that Canonical has been working on for its initial debut to be made with the release of the 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” release.

            The Ubuntu plan is to eventually have this heads-up display, which was developed in-house, to “ultimately replace menus in Unity applications.” The Ubuntu HUD is about a way for the user to express their intent and to then have the HUD respond appropriately based upon the interpreted intent.

          • Introducing the HUD. Say hello to the future of the menu.

            The menu has been a central part of the GUI since Xerox PARC invented ‘em in the 70′s. It’s the M in WIMP and has been there, essentially unchanged, for 30 years.

          • Beyond the desktop: Ubuntu Linux’s new Head-Up Display

            Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has announced that Ubuntu will be adopting a radical new change to the interface that will do away with the “menu” in the Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer (WIMP) interface, which has defined the desktop for the last thirty years.

            Shuttleworth states, “The menu has been a central part of the GUI since Xerox PARC invented ‘em in the 70?s. It’s the M in WIMP and has been there, essentially unchanged, for 30 years. We can do much better!” This new interface, which will first appear as a beta in April’s Ubuntu 12.04 release, is called Head-Up Display.

          • Ubuntu Linux’s New ‘HUD’ Interface Will Do Away with Menus

            A new kind of interface is coming to Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” that will ultimately replace menus in Unity applications and recognize voice commands.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Boxee Live TV first impressions

      The moment our Boxee Live TV adapter arrived, we connected it to our Boxee Box and investigated its capabilities. The screenshots below demonstrate Boxee Live TV’s setup, channel editing, watching broadcast HDTV channels, and more.

    • Get the Perfect Cup of Java with a DIY Linux-Powered Coffee Roaster

      If you’re a Linux user and just happen to have a bread machine laying around, you can make your very own Linux-powered Corretto Roaster. Now you can use your favorite distro to roast your own beans before consuming your java.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • CyanogenMod May Start Selling Forbidden Android Fruit

          The makers of CyanogenMod Android firmware may be readying an app store to sell software for rooted Android phones, including wares that have been banned from the Android Market. Rooting an Android phone gives the user a new level of control over the device, though it’s generally frowned upon by phone makers and carriers, and only a very small portion of buyers pursue the operation.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Rugged, biometric smartphone and tablet run ICS on OMAP 4 CPUs

        Elektrobit (EB) and startup Raptor Identification Systems (Raptor ID) announced two ruggedized biometric devices that run Android 4.0 on TI’s dual-core 1.5GHz OMAP4460. Raptor ID’s RaptorOne smartphone offers a four-inch touchscreen; the RaptorPad tablet features a seven-inch display; and both offer iris cameras, fingerprint scanners, and CAC/smartcard readers.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Application Development: Top 13 New Open-Source Projects of 2011 (based on a Microsoft buddy)
  • Liferay’s Open Source Community Thrives

    If you were wondering if growth and interest in open source was just hype, Liferay provided a little additional evidence today that open source is thriving. The open source portal maker has announced its community expanded to 56,000 members in 2011 — an almost 40% increase over the previous year.

  • Events

    • Looking Back on SCALE 10x

      A lot of things change in 10 years. Many of the Linux conferences we were going to in 2002 are no longer around, but the Southern California Linux Expo has not only survived – it’s grown into a major event for anybody interested in Linux. Whether you’re brand-new to Linux or using Linux to power cloud solutions, SCALE 10x had something for everybody.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla to Crowdsource the State of the Union with Multilingual Subtitles

        If you haven’t tried language translation technology in a few years, it’s worth revisiting it. As we covered here, it’s become much easier to automate multilingual websites, there are very useful translation programs for mobile phones that you can use to communicate in foreign languages on the fly, and open source machine translation tools are flourishing. So it’s notable that Mozilla will help deliver Tuesday’s U.S. State of the Union Address from President Barrack Obama in multiple languages worldwide, translated in real time.

  • Databases

    • Joomla content management gets multi-database support

      The newly released edition of the Joomla open source content management system now comes with a new search engine, and can use Microsoft SQL Server or PostGreSQL, in addition to MySQL.

    • Joomla 2.5 courts corporate, enterprise users

      Joomla is extending support beyond MySQL to increase its penetration in businesses and enterprises.

      The upgraded 2.5 version of the content management system (CMS), which becomes available on Jan. 24, offers multi-database support, notably Microsoft SQL Server out of the gate, and Oracle support in the near future, as well as an enhanced natural language search engine and automatic notification and delivery of updates and extensions.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • JavaFX makes it across platform to Linux

      A new Developer Preview of JavaFX 2.1 has been released by Oracle and now the cross platform user interface toolkit is available to download for Linux. When JavaFX 2.0 was released as a beta at the end of May 2011, many developers noted that the cross platform toolkit only ran on Windows. The problem was partly resolved with the release of JavaFX 2.0, which added Mac OS X support, but Linux support was still missing in action.

  • CMS

  • Semi-Open Source

  • Project Releases

    • Mozilla releases version 0.1 of the Rust language and compiler

      Mozilla has released the first public version of the compiler and development tools for the Rust language, which is described as “a safe, concurrent, practical language”. According to the announcement, this first release is targeted at “early adopters and language enthusiasts” and has been described by the developers as “nifty, but it will still eat your laundry”. Rust is a programming language and open source toolkit aimed at the development of client and server programs.

    • Mozilla releases Rust 0.1, the language that will eventually usurp Firefox’s C++
    • Google Brings Open Source to the Sky – Why Now?

      One of the very first things that I ever downloaded onto my Android phone was Google Sky. It’s fantastic app the lets you just point your phone at a section of the sky to see a map overlay of the stars/constellation above.

    • GDB 7.4 released

      Release 7.4 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available via anonymous FTP. GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Pascal and many other languages. GDB can target (i.e., debug programs running on) more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows variants.

  • Licensing

    • How Open Source Licenses Affect Your Business and Your Developers

      For most of the 2000s, copyleft licenses (in particular the GPLv2) were the most popular choice for new open source projects. In the last few years, developers and companies seem to be trending away from the GPL in favor of permissive licenses for open source projects. What’s behind that, does it impact your business and what licenses should you choose for new projects? Let’s take a look.

      The GPL is in decline, sort of. As Matthew Aslett reported last year, the number of projects using the GPL family has increased in real terms.

      However, the usage of the GPL as a percent of all open source projects is in decline. According to Aslett, in 2008 the GPL family was 70 percent of licenses. As of December of 2011, it was 57 percent. Clearly, there is a trend at least for now towards permissive licenses.

    • A permissive bubble?

      I remembered this after reading two articles by Matthew Aslett – “On the continuing decline on the GPL” and “The future of commercial open source business strategies“. The data this research is based on appears to me mostly correct, and I couldn’t find fatal logic flaws in them. However, my logic still couldn’t agree with some of the conclusions, and tended to see other in a different light. Something have to be wrong here.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Cambridge University joins Lilly’s open-source discovery platform

      The University of Cambridge in the UK has become the latest academic institution to sign up to an open-source drug discovery programme set up by Eli Lilly.

      The Open Innovation Drug Discovery Platform (formerly known as PD2) was set up by Lilly in an attempt to overcome the challenges posed by rising costs and declining productivity in pharma R&D by increasing its interactions with academia.

    • Aero-engineers debut open-source fluid dynamics design application

      Each fall at technical universities across the world, a new crop of aeronautical and astronautical engineering graduate students settle in for the work that will consume them for the next several years. For many, their first experience in these early months is not with titanium or aluminum or advanced carbon-fiber materials that are the stuff of airplanes, but with computer code.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Election preview: The Oval Office and the tech agenda

      In 2006, Romney won applause from open-source advocates by appointing Louis Gutierrez as state CIO and using the occasion to emphasize his support for an ongoing project to implement OASIS’ OpenDocument Format (ODF) in state government.

Leftovers

  • Julian Assange is set to host his own TV show focusing on “the world tomorrow”

    Despite an extradition to Sweden hanging over his head, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is to host his very own TV show, which will see him interview “key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries” from around the world.

  • HTC Partners With IBM in Enterprise Initiative
  • HTC Catches the Train

    HTC is also fighting the battle from one individual to the next by opening the boot-loader to run GNU/Linux or other stuff for geeks.

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Gretchen Morgenson on Corporate Clout in Washington

      Moyers talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and columnist Gretchen Morgenson on how money and political clout enable industries to escape regulation and enrich executives at the top.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Adding Your DNA To A Biobank Is A Noble Move — But Is It A Wise One?

      Anything that brings us closer to understanding and treating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people is obviously to be welcomed. But DNA is special: for a start, it is unique for each of us (even “identical” twins seem to have different DNA.) This has made DNA of particular interest to the police, since it appears to offer a perfect way for identifying those at a crime scene (not necessarily the perpetrators, of course.) Which raises the question: what happens when the police realize that biobanks offer a great way to get DNA they can’t obtain in the usual ways?

    • Ownership Mentality: Art Gallery Prohibits Sketching

      I’ve always been a bit baffled by No Photography signs in museums and art galleries. Presumably they exist to make the exhibits more exclusive and attractive, but that misses the point of why people visit museums: they want to see these things in person, which is a vastly different experience from simply knowing what they look like. Nobody has ever seen a photo of a dinosaur skeleton or Michelangelo’s David and thought “oh good, now I don’t need to go see that for real.”

    • Copyrights

      • Closing Megaupload unlikely to even slow piracy down

        The U.S. Department of Justice working in conjunction with New Zealand’s law enforcement agencies has taken down the popular file-storage and sharing site Megaupload. So, since Megaupload has been shut down, Internet piracy has gone down significantly, right? Right? Well, probably not, NPD market researcher Russ Crupnick said, “Only about 3 percent of the U.S. Internet audience relied on digital storage for legitimate purposes or piracy in the third quarter.”

        So where is the file piracy going on? The same place it always has been: over BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer software powered networks. According to Crupnick, “Peer-to-peer systems like BitTorrent, which have little central coordination and are harder to stop, still have about three times as much usage among consumers as digital lockers.”

      • Does Online Piracy Hurt The Economy? A Look At The Numbers

        Julian Sanchez has an excellent piece in Ars Technica which takes a look at the claim that content creators are being discouraged from creative pursuits due to online piracy – a claim that has fueled the recently stalled anti-piracy legislation in congress.

        Whether SOPA and PIPA would have actually worked is an open question, but whether they were ever even necessary to begin with is even more important.

      • Petition Asks White House to Probe MPAA’s Chris Dodd Over Warning

        More than 5,000 signees are asking the White House to investigate comments made by MPAA chief executive Chris Dodd, who warned in an exclusive interview with Fox News that politicians who failed to back anti-piracy legislation could see Hollywood dollars dry up.

      • How The Web Killed SOPA and PIPA

        Leaders in Congress on Friday effectively killed two pieces of anti-online piracy legislation following the increasingly vocal protests of tens of thousands of websites and millions of Internet users.

      • Canada’s bid to join TPP threatens access for blind, print disabled

        There is a danger that, in Canada’s quest to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), Canada may cede whatever leadership it has gained in the field of progressive copyright provisions. Canada’s Bill C-11, the proposed “Copyright Modernization Act”, includes provisions that would allow people who are blind and print disabled to circumvent Technological Protection Measures(TPMs) to access works (s. 41.16). These provisions, while they have been criticized as not going far enough, at the same time could put Canada on the map as being among the first to enact such provisions for the benefit of the blind and print disabled. Under the last leaked text of the American proposal for the TPP, these types of provisions would not be allowed as a permanent exception. The proposal enumerates (Art. 4, 9 (d)) the various possible permanent exceptions to TPM infringement, and these do not include a specific exception for the benefit of people who are blind and print disabled. The proposed TPP allows for temporary exceptions, which could include an exception for the blind and print disabled, but these would have to be subject to review or renewal every 3 years (Art. 4, 9(d)(viii)). Bill C-11 does not provide for such a review/renewal process.

      • Full Interview: Cory Doctorow on the War on General Computing

        The black outs of Dark Wednesday are over and the United States Congress has listened, shelving the contentious anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA indefinitely. Now, you would think that the internet was finally safe from corporate control. Huzzah! Bring on the cat gifs!

      • Creative America Restocks… Hires Former DHS/ICE Spokesperson

        We’ve talked plenty of times about CreativeAmerica, the astroturf group that keeps pretending that it’s a “grassroots” group. It was setup mainly to push for SOPA/PIPA in an attempt to pretend that “normal people” rather than just Hollywood fatcats supports SOPA/PIPA. Just one problem: it was so obviously run by Hollywood fatcats that no one ever took it seriously. It was slickly produced, was backed by the big studios, and all the big movie studios promoted it directly as well. Its executive director, Mike Nugent, came directly from Disney, where he was the company’s Senior VP of anti-piracy. Meanwhile, its “communications director,” Craig Hoffman came straight from… you guessed it… the MPAA. And before that he worked at Warner Bros. Grassroots!

      • Bloggers in China sound off on SOPA blackout

        Watching from China, where web censorship is practically a national hallmark, some can’t help but smirk and crack jokes about the controversy raging over Internet freedom in the U.S.

        “Now the U.S. government is copying us and starting to build their own firewall,” wrote one micro-blogger, relating China’s chief censorship tool to the U.S. plan to block sites that trade in pirated material.

        The Relevant Organs, an anonymous Twitter account (presumably) pretending to be the voice of the Chinese communist leadership, quipped: “Don’t understand the hoopla over Wikipedia blackout in the U.S. today. We blacked it out here years ago. Where are OUR hugs?”

        Humor aside, the brouhaha has generated some strong opinions in the country Google fled, not the least because opponents of the SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills are conjuring Chinese web censorship to promote their case.

      • Dan Bull Raps About How Megaupload Takedown Screws Indie Artists Like Him

        Independent musician Dan Bull, who we’ve written about a number of times, is one of many independent artists who used Megaupload on purpose, to distribute his own album. All of the links out there to download his album

      • Megaupload Indictment Shows That Google Does Actively Police Against Its Ads Showing Near Infringement
      • Meganomics

        The Megaupload case has important legal implications. Mike Masnick has a very good rundown, but let’s focus on two. The case will certainly challenge the scope of the “safe harbor” from liability afforded online storage providers—a very important issue in an era of cheap, ubiquitous cloud services. It will also be a front in the government’s (and, more particularly, MPAA’s) push to shift from an ex post model of enforcement, involving notification and takedown requests when infringing content is identified, to an ex ante model based on the surveillance and filtering of user activity. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is also fundamentally at stake in SOPA, and raises all the same censorship and free speech issues. Holding Megaupload liable for failing to monitor and filter user activity for infringement, for example, would compel monitoring across a wide range of web services, from search to social media. And that would mark a very fundamental shift in the freedoms associated with the Internet. SOPA and the Megaupload case are part of this long game.

      • Jonathan Coulton Destroys The Rationale Behind The Megaupload Seizure With A Single Tweet; Follows Up With Epic Blog Post
      • Megaupload Shutdown Means Other Companies Turning Off Useful Services
      • Hollywood regroups after losing battle over anti-piracy bills
      • Hollywood Unions: Now That You Lying Hacking Thieves Have Won, Can We Set A New Conciliatory Tone?
      • Bill Maher Comes Out In Support Of SOPA/PIPA Despite Knowing Nothing About The Bills
      • The silver lining of the MegaUpload shutdown

        It’s been big news online lately that MegaUpload was shut down. Along with it, many of the other annoying, wait-60-seconds-and-fill-in-this-captcha-or-upgrade-to-premium file sharing services have stopped offering public downloads. A lot of people are understandably upset about this, since in the case of MegaUpload, they don’t even have access to their own files anymore.

        This blog post isn’t about whether it was right for MegaUpload to be shut down. There’s plenty of debate going on about that, and it’s something that I’m not personally interested in taking part in. What we do know is that there were a substantial number of people using MegaUpload to distribute pirated media, and, let’s be honest: a lot of people are pissed off because piracy just got a lot harder. If you’re one of those people, and you’re angry and suddenly in search of ways to entertain yourself in the wake of the big shutdown, this post is for you.

      • ACTA

        • Blocking The Net ‘Not The European Option’ — EU Commissioner Reding
        • Polish government defends support for copyright treaty that sparked Internet attacks

          Polish officials vowed Monday to stick to plans to sign an international copyright treaty that has outraged Internet activists and prompted an attack on government websites.

          A government minister, Michal Boni, defended the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. He said that signing the international treaty would not hamper Internet usage and that Poland will sign it on Thursday, as planned.

        • Polish Government’s Plan To Sign ACTA Gets The SOPA Treatment

          We received an amusing email over the weekend chiding us for never having covered ACTA — the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Of course, we’ve actually written 247 articles that mention ACTA (yes, I just counted). It seems that among some folks who just joined the “worry about copyright legislation” bandwagon, they’ve just discovered ACTA as well. ACTA stories are quickly taking over the SOPA channel on Reddit. I’m happy that more people are coming around to these issues, but they might want to take some time to actually read up on things before they start screaming. For example, someone there put together a White House petition to stop ACTA, without even acknowledging that the US government already signed ACTA back in September.

          The petition also ignores the most obvious line of attack for the US’s participation: the questions about whether or not ACTA really qualifies as an “executive agreement.” Instead, it takes that as granted, ignoring (or, more likely, simply not knowing) that there are serious constitutional questions about the claim that this is an executive agreement — and that Senator Ron Wyden has already asked the White House to justify the claims that it’s an executive agreement, rather than a treaty. Also, it’s worth noting that other countries, including the EU, have already claimed that ACTA is a binding treaty, even as the US continues to deny that fact.

        • ACTA: Letter to the EU Parliament Development Committee

          Today, La Quadrature du Net sent a letter to the Members of the Development committee of the European Parliament. All citizens should also call on the committee to carefully consider the many serious issues raised by ACTA, the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement aimed at establishing extremist standards in copyright, patent and trademarks worldwide.

Links 24/1/2012: Extremadura’s 40,000 Free Software Desktops, ACTA in the European Parliament

Posted in News Roundup at 6:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • TLWIR 31: Using Linux and Free Software to Bring Back American Innovation

  • Desktop

    • Extremadura to move all of its 40,000 desktops to open source

      The administration of Spain’s autonomous region of Extremadura is moving to a complete open source desktop, confirms the region’s CIO, Teodomiro Cayetano López. The IT department started a project to install the Debian distribution on all 40,000 desktop PCs. “The project is really advanced and we hope to start the deployment the next spring, finishing it in December.”

    • Extremadura CIO plans Linux rollout on 40,000 desktops

      The CIO of Spanish autonomous region Extremadura says it is planning to move the administration’s 40,000 desktop systems to a Debian distribution. According to a report on the European Commission’s “Joinup”, CIO Teodomiro Cayetano López says that the project is “really advanced” and deployment will begin in the spring and be completed around the end of the year.

    • Windows 8 Secure Boot – or How Microsoft Is Riling Up the Linux Masses

      It was just the other day that Linux bloggers were celebrating the news from researcher Net Applications that desktop Linux had surged in popularity in recent months.

      Now, the mood in the blogosphere has plummeted once again as a result of the latest developments on the Windows 8 front. Secure Boot, that is — a topic astute readers may remember from last fall but that lately seems to have taken a turn for the worse.

      Exhibit A: “Microsoft confirms UEFI fears, locks down ARM (Nasdaq: ARMHY) devices,” as the the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) recently summed it up.

    • Linux Takes Off on Wikimedia

      A significant portion of PCs will be replaced by ARMed devices and desktop and notebook devices using ARM and Linux will be widespread. Considering the narrow margins of retailers and OEMs, I expect in 2012 many will find a place in their hearts for ARM and Linux one way or another.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • A New Design For FUSE File-Systems

      At SCALE 10x a new FUSE implementation was presented that while still having the file-system in user-space, the kernel component is now responsible for more of the work.

      Gordon Ross of Nexenta presented on his new FUSE implementation that implements in-kernel meta-data caching. With this caching in the kernel, less inefficient communication needs to happen between the kernel and the FUSE user-space. FUSE is what Linus Torvalds previously said was just for toys and misguided people. Among the many file-systems with FUSE variants are NTFS and ZFS.

    • Error-Fixing Btrfs FSCK Tool Is Imminent

      An fsck utility capable of fixing problems on the Btrfs file-system is imminent. Plus other features continue to be worked on for this next-generation, open-source Linux file-system.

      Chris Mason, the Oracle employee who’s been the lead developer of Btrfs, was one of the presenters this past weekend in Los Angeles at the SCALE 10x conference. Chris was obviously presenting on Btrfs.

  • Applications

    • XBMC!How to turn your Ubuntu into the Media Center of your dreams.

      Do you have a nice TV or projector? You are in the right place. Today we will see how to make an incredible and surprising combination of a low-performance PCs and a nice TV or projector. Our goal is to turn that old PC into a fantastic Media Center, which will give you many possibilities. From the view of Film and/or video, to listen to music (excellent if you have connected a good sound system), an excellent way to show photographs and browse the web with a simple click .

    • A Broad Look at Hugin

      The release notes for Hugin’s latest update begin with the words “Hugin is more than just a panorama stitcher.” That’s been true for years, but only recently has the project made a concerted effort to emphasize the other photo magic that the application is capable of working. Better still, Hugin is making more and more of the process automatic, so aligning your images has never been easier.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • RedHat Cluster Suite And Conga – Linux Clustering
      • Introduction To Linux Commands
      • VBoxHeadless – Running Virtual Machines With VirtualBox 4.1 On A Headless Ubuntu 11.10 Server
      • Lessons Learned, Not Always Easy

        Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, assorted bits of hardware new and old, and occasionally Windows XP/Vista/7.
        I’ve spent most of my time recently working on two or three of my new (or not so) sub-netbook systems, with surprising results. This information might be useful to others who are looking at such systems:

        HP Pavilion dm1-4010ez: This is the newest of the lot, and it really is a very nice system. It loaded and ran flawlessly with every Linux distribution I tried on it, including openSuSE 12.1, Fedora 16, Linux Mint 12 (with Cinnamon), Ubuntu 11.10, Linux Mint Debian 2101109 Gnome, PCLinuxOS 2011.09 and probably one or two others that slip my mind right now. It really was a pleasure to use – so much so that a friend who needed a replacement for a very old ASUS netbook I had set up several years ago ended up taking this one from me. Ah well…

  • Desktop Environments

    • Razor-qt desktop – Warning, sharp objects?

      Several people asked me to review Razor-qt. This is the name of an advanced, easy to use, and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies. It has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Unlike most desktop environments, Razor-qt also works fine with weak machines. So the brochure says.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE vs. Windows 7

        For several years, I’ve been saying that KDE is no longer trying to catch up with Windows, but surpassed it several years ago. However, last week a reader challenged me to prove it.

        I immediately told him that, if he didn’t believe me, he should open KDE and Windows 7 side by side. Even a casual comparison shows that not only does KDE generally have more features than Windows 7, but that, conceptually, KDE has a healthy lead.

        While KDE is consistently extending the metaphor of the desktop, Windows 7 is different only in a few minor ways from its first ancestor Windows 95. Moreover, many of these differences are more a matter of fashion, such as displaying icons on the taskbar rather than application names, as they are genuine improvements.

  • Distributions

    • Let’s talk tiny – Tiny Core Linux 4.2

      While experimenting with CorePlus I ran it on two machines, a generic desktop box (2.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM, NVIDIA video card) and my HP laptop (dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 3 GB of RAM, Intel video card). The distribution was able to detect and use all of my hardware, including my Intel wireless card. My screen resolution was set a little lower than normal, but still within a reasonable range. CorePlus runs almost no services, which makes it incredibly quick to boot and very responsive. Generally, with the window manager and a couple of applications running my memory usage was still below 170 MB.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Now it’s the 27th

        Mandriva users must now wait until the 27th to find out what the decision on the future of the company is. That came from a brief announcement on the Mandriva blog. It’s been a prolonged suspense: first the resolution was expected on the 16th, then on the 23rd, and now it is scheduled to the 27th.

      • Mandriva Decision Delayed Again

        The fate of Mandriva is still in flux today as Jean-Manuel Croset posted of yet another delay in determining the future of the once popular Linux distribution. He said, “The deadline for the decision on the proposal has been extended by the proposing entity upon request of some shareholders.”

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • The newsletter for the Debian community
      • Debian Project News – January 23rd, 2012

        Welcome to this year’s second issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

        * Debian ahead on web servers
        * Dummy web server in Debian?
        * Aptitude strikes back
        * About donations to Debian
        * Armhf status in Debian
        * IGMP denial of service in Linux
        * Interviews
        * Other news
        * Upcoming events
        * New Debian Contributors
        * Release-Critical bug statistics for the upcoming release
        * Status of Debian Installer localisation
        * Important Debian Security Advisories
        * New and noteworthy packages
        * Work-needing packages
        * Want to continue reading DPN?

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, 12.04 On The NVIDIA Tegra 2

            For those that were interested by the CompuLab Trim-Slice, a desktop built around the ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform, here are some more benchmarks. This time the numbers are looking at the performance of the dual-core ARM Cortex A9 system when using the Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, and 12.04 packages.

          • Why Don’t Other Linux Distros Use Unity? A Few Thoughts
          • Ubuntu readies new Unity

            With Ubuntu 12.04 scheduled for release in April 2012, the Ubuntu developers have released a test version of Unity 5.0, the newest version of Ubuntu’s desktop interface.

            This release is still in development and not recommended for day-to-day use, but here are a few of the things you can expect if you decide to give Unity 5.0 a spin.

            One of the most welcome changes to Unity are the improvements to the Launcher. Chief among these are additional options for rearranging icons on the Launcher and setting the Launcher’s behaviour, including making the Launcher ever-present on the desktop. This was possible in previous versions but not as easily achieved as it is now.

          • Ubuntu’s Already Making Plans For ARM In 2014, 2015

            David Mandala of Canonical talked last week at Linux.Conf.Au 2012 about the history of Ubuntu Linux supporting the ARM architecture, what’s coming up for Ubuntu ARM in the 12.04 LTS release, and even what’s expected from Ubuntu on ARM as far out as 2015.

            In terms of ARM support under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin”, Mandala didn’t unleash any surprises. Ubuntu ARM will continue to be supported for netbooks as well as their quickly-developing Ubuntu ARM Server edition. On the client/netbook side, the OMAP3 Beagle Board and OMAP4 Panda Boards will continue to serve as prime development targets. There will also hopefully be initial support for the first round of ARM server SoCs from Marvell and Calxeda by April, assuming there’s hardware available in time. These first-generation ARM server parts will be quad-core 1.0+GHz SoCs, as was detailed last year.

          • Precisely how we’re going to make the wallpapers in 12.04 the best ever!

            As developers all over the world sink their teeth into the new features for the next release of Ubuntu it’s time to get out our cameras, brushes and pencils out and start creating the images that will make up the wallpapers for the next release. 12.04 will be an LTS so the same super high quality that the teams delivering the desktop experience are working to should inspire us to make this the best wallpaper set we’ve released yet!

            As usual there is a group on Flickr set up for your submissions – Precise Pangolin wallpaper submissions group. Simply upload your pictures to Flickr – accounts are free – and again as usual the contributors who were selected last time will be the ones asked to choose from the final selection of images. For guidance around what might make appropriate content, image resolutions to be used and the like check out the Ubuntu Artwork team wiki page on wallpapers.

          • Hacking On Accomplishments

            A little while back I blogged about an accomplishments system that Stuart Langridge and I designed when he came to visit a while back. The idea was simple: a de-centralized system in which we can easily define different types of accomplishments (e.g. filing a bug, submitting a patch, getting a patch sponsored, translating a string) and a means in which users can be rewarded trophies for these accomplishments as well as discovering new accomplishments and how they can be achieved.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux for migrants: Zorin OS

              The latest version, ZorinOS 5.2, was released very recently, on the 10th of January 2012. I downloaded the Core version of it. The ISO size is 1.1 Gb. It meant I could not use a CD for it, and I went to the USB option. Unetbootin utility successfully “burnt” image to USB.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • WAGO IEC-Compatible TeleController and I/O-IPCs

      WAGO Corporation’s IEC-compatible TeleControl PLC and four Linux-equipped I/O-IPCs are comprehensive solutions for both control and smart grid integration.

    • Raspberry Pi Founder Eben Upton Walks You Through the Launch of the $35 Computer

      In just a few weeks UK’s Raspberry Pi Foundation will be ready to launch one of the most anticipated products of 2012 – a $35 computer. The Raspberry Pi Model B is a bare-bones circuit board that packs a surprising punch – 700 MHz ARM processor, 256 MB of memory, and HDMI output. Designed as a low cost, easy to explore learning platform to attract a new generation of students to coding, the Linux Box computer is a marvel of efficiency. The first 10,000 Model Bs will be shipping into (and then out of) the UK very soon, so it only makes sense that Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton would take the time to prepare everyone for what to expect. He gives a detailed report on the exciting new device in the video from Slashdot below.

    • Linux-based flight recorder optimized for drones

      Ampex Data Systems announced a compact, ruggedized airborne recorder that runs SUSE Linux on a 1.3GHz Intel Atom E660T CPU. The ruggedized TuffServ 40 (TS 40) offers 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 2GB boot disk, an 80GB or 160GB solid state drive, a gigabit Ethernet port, and a -40 to 159.8 deg. F operating range.

    • Tiny USB server runs on batteries, streams to iOS, Android devices

      The $100 CloudFTP runs Linux on a Texas Instruments ARM9-based processor, features a 132 x 32-pixel LCD display and powered USB port, and supports backup and synchronization with online cloud storage services.

    • How Disruptive Could Raspberry Pi Be?

    • Phones

      • Upstart mobile OS Tizen previews code

        An alpha release of the source code for the Tizen open-source operating system, aimed at giving Android and iOS a run for their money, is now available for download.

        Backed by Intel, Samsung and other vendors, Tizen is a Linux-based platform. It includes an HTML5 application framework and a customizable user interface, in addition to the operating system. The interface, also called a “user experience,” will be able to move among the different devices that Tizen supports.

      • Android

        • CyanogenMod App Store To Sell Root, Banned Apps

          Koushik Dutta, the co-founder of the popular CyanogenMod project has been contemplating the idea of an App Store which will sell apps for rooted devices. Usually many of these apps can’t be on the official Android Market due to restrains from either the carriers or the OEMs.

        • Huawei to launch two ”Diamond” smartphones, even better than the Ascend P1 S

          If you had asked 100 US technology enthusiasts about Huawei last year, chances were that around 90 of them had no clue about what you were talking about. The Chinese technology manufacturer kept its efforts at a national level and only released a few entry to mid-level devices in the US and Europe until…

        • Sony Kumquat LT25i dubbed as Sony Xperia U?

          According to one of GSMArena’s tipsters, Sony Kumquat recently leaked in real life photos, is revealed as Sony Xperia U by the Indonesian equivalent of United States FCC. The Indonesian website also reveal a link to China, which makes us wonder if Xperia U is due to join Chinese market.

        • Motorola Prepares New “Project” for the DROID RAZR

          Motorola’s Feedback Network is sending out invitations tonight to DROID RAZR owners, asking if they want to participate in a soak test for a new “project.” The details of the update are absent as usual, but with software leaking within the last couple of weeks, we have a pretty good idea as to what we can expect. You probably shouldn’t assume that this one is Ice Cream Sandwich just yet and should instead focus on the likelihood of simply being a bug fixer and slight UI enhancer.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Android Tablets May Go Transparent, Soon!

        Microsoft introduced the concept for tablets, Apple took it to the next level (and in the process also claimed that they ‘invented’ the tablet), and now Android will take tablets to the next level, into the future.

        Samsung is working on display technologies which will make these tablets flexible (just like the paper magazines) and even transparent.

      • Notion Ink’s Adam II tablet will move to OMAP 4 chip

        Notion Ink says it will switch to a Texas Instruments OMAP 4 processor running Android 4.0 for its next generation Adam II tablet. In other tablet news, Pew Research found the percentage of U.S. adults who own a tablet computer nearly doubled from 10 percent to 19 percent between mid-December and early January, and RBC Capital estimated that Amazon.com will earn $136 in content-related revenue from each Kindle Fire customer.

      • Calibre And Project Gutenberg: Liberate Your eReader!

        Now, I’m no stranger to ebooks. Long before the release of the first generation Amazon Kindle, I read Dracula on a Handspring Visor. Once I moved into the world of smart-phones with the Palm Treo, I read many great books with the excellent offline reader Plucker. In fact, I’ve been dissing paper quite vocally since as early as 1999. That said, I love reading on my Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Sourcefire jumps into anti-malware market

    Sourcefire, the security biz behind the commercial versions of the open-source Snort intrusion-detection software, is bowling itself at enterprises and touting tech designed to quickly detect and block malware outbreaks.

  • Google and MIT open source App Inventor for Android

    SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Google and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) open sourced the App Inventor for Android software toolset.

    App Inventor was started as a project between Google and MIT to create a modular, easy to use integrated development environment to build Android applications. Now the pair have announced the first open source release of App Inventor.

  • Codethink Adds “Open Source 3D Graphics Drivers for ARM” to its Services

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google’s Chrome Browser Sprouts Programming Kit of the Future

        Chito Manansala is the reason you and about 2 billion other people can instantly pay with a Visa card in shops across the planet.

        As chief system architect at Visa, Manansala designed the communications system at the heart of VisaNet — a worldwide network of shops, ATMs, banks and websites that handles 130 million payments a day. In other words, he knows how to build a contraption that juggles ridiculous amounts of information with each passing second.

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • Is MySQL usage really declining?

      One of the most interesting aspects concerned the apparently imminent decline in the usage of MySQL. Of the 285 MySQL users in our 2009 survey, only 90.2% still expected to be using it two years later, and only 81.8% in 2014.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • 10 Things to Look Forward to in LibreOffice 3.5

      Hard on the heels of the release of the bug-fixing LibreOffice 3.4.5 last Monday, the Document Foundation on Friday published a release candidate version of LibreOffice 3.5, which will be the next major version of the office productivity software.

  • CMS

    • Is the European Commission Helping or Hindering Tech Entrepreneurs?

      Drupal is now an open source challenger to publishing software such as WordPress. How did it start, and did you ever expect it to get so big? I started Drupal 11 years ago, just for fun while I was in college. It started out as a message board, working a few nights a week on updating and maintaining the project. This soon developed into a free tool for building customised Websites both quickly and easily. By the time I had finished my PhD, hundreds of companies were using the platform to support their online offerings. With open source at the heart of the Drupal platform it quickly gained interest from developers and a passionate active community grew to support the project.

    • Open Source Closed Door

      It has been announced, across the pond, that IT analyst firm, Gartner Inc has now positioned Drupal Acquia in the Visionaries quadrant of both the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Externally Facing Social Software and the Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, thereby raising Drupal’s visibility and promoting its accessibility amongst the top 10,000 global businesses.

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Fellowship Interview with Heiki Ojasild

      Heiki Ojasild joined the Free Software Foundation Europe in 2011, undertaking the task of translating fsfe.org into Estonian, his mother tongue. He is currently developing an XChat add-on, as well as a website for free SVG and JavaScript games. In 2010 he took part in the Baltic Olympiad in Informatics. I talked to him about copyright, Digital Restrictions Management, kopimism, and activism.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Ideas for your open government

      Open Government Partnership is a global effort initialized by the government of United States to make worldwide governments better. To this date, 46 countries have committed to take steps to change their government to more open, more transparent, and more valuable for the citizens.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Google’s Sky Map App Becomes Open Source

      On their recent announcement, Google has revealed it is going to make the Sky Map app available for the open source community. Thus, from now on, developers can get a copy of this application’s source code via the Google Code website.

    • Google’s Latest List of “Retired” Projects Includes Open Source Contributions

      For years now, Google has gained a reputation for launching many new projects at a scattershot rate, only to shut many of them down when they don’t succeed at hoped-for levels. In fact, some have said that the company’s strategy is to throw spaghetti at the wall and see which noodles stick. Now, in a post that makes references to keeping New Year’s resolutions, the Google Blog has announced the latest series of company projects that will be “merged, open sourced or phased out.” You’ll recognize some of the names.

    • Moose

      Because Moose is still just Perl 5, it’s fully compatible with all of those wonderful modules on CPAN, regardless of whether they are written in Moose (and most aren’t, as CPAN has been around for so long, and Moose is relatively new).

    • Ruby on Rails 3.2 Aids the Developers

      Those who maintain Ruby on Rails have released a new version of their popular open-source Web application development framework, one that features a number of improvements to help developers build applications more quickly.

Leftovers

  • The Internet Spoke and, Finally, Congress Listened!

    The misguided proponents of the disastrous Internet blacklist bills have blinked. Today, Senator Harry Reid announced he would postpone a cloture vote on PIPA scheduled for next Tuesday, which means, as a practical matter, that the bill is dead for now. Shortly after that announcement, Representative Lamar Smith issued a statement conceding PIPA’s evil House stepsister, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also wasn’t ready for prime time.

  • We will be heard now.

    On this date, at approximately 8:31 PM CST, the petition requesting that Chris Dodd be investigated for bribery was validated by the required 25,000 signatures.

    If you don’t know the story, it is fairly simple. After the stunning setback of SOPA and PIPA, Chris DODD, former Senator and now current President of the Motion Picture of America Association, openly threatened President Obama with withholding further campaign contributions until he “got on board” with the MPAA line.

  • Lookout Washington, Reddit Just Organized Another PAC

    Fresh of the heels of feeling its own might in the fight against SOPA and PIPA, a civic-minded Redditor who goes by the handle “ajpos” has decided to start a section 527 political action committee.

    It’s called Test Pac, it has its own Tax ID number and it purports to represent “the special interest group that represents the views of Reddit’s users,” which we guess means boobs, the free flow of information, weed, and cats. In that order.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Park City Tragedy Underscores Tragedy of the U.S. Health Care System — for Both Canadians and Americans

      It hit me immediately that had my circumstances been a little different when I was growing up near there, I could have been one of those people. It also hit me that the work I was doing as a spokesman for the insurance industry was making it necessary, at least in part, for those people to resort to such humiliation to get basic medical care. One of my responsibilities was to persuade Americans of the lie that most of the uninsured are that way by choice, that they have shirked their responsibility to themselves and their families.

  • Security

    • Linux root exploit due to memory access – Update

      Linus Torvalds released a Linux kernel update last week which fixes a flaw in the access control to memory. Shortly afterwards, exploits appeared making it possible to gain root privileges using this error.

  • Finance

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • The MegaUpload Seizure Could Be An Opportunity

        The US Department of Justice, chose the day after the massive Internet blackout protest against SOPA / PIPA to demonstrate their power by acting as if these laws were already in effect. At first, I was simply dismayed and angered by this reprehensible act, but I began to wonder if there isn’t also an opportunity here to challenge a major part of of the legacy entertainment industry’s rhetoric in a court of law, where their mendacity on the subject would constitute perjury.

        First of all, here’s an account of the MegaUpload Takedown, if you’re not familiar with the facts of the case.

        [...]

        If you read the article, though, the authorities allege that they were involved in large-scale “piracy” leading to “$500 million” in “lost sales”. Do you believe this claim? I certainly don’t.

      • The Pirate Bay Press Release On SOPA: We Are The New Hollywood

        Given its general contempt for the repeated attempts to close it down, you wouldn’t expect The Pirate Bay to be particularly worried by SOPA. But in its very own press release on the subject, it goes much further: it flings the ultimate insult at Hollywood by claiming that not only are the two of them spiritual kin, but that The Pirate Bay is the New Hollywood.

      • The Behind-the-Scenes Campaign To Bring SOPA To Canada

        The Internet battle against SOPA and PIPA generated huge interest in Canada with many Canadians turning their sites dark (including Blogging Tories, Project Gutenberg Canada, and CIPPIC) in support of the protest. In writing about the link between SOPA and Canada, I noted that the proposed legislation featured an aggressive jurisdictional approach that could target Canadian websites. Moreover, I argued that the same lobby groups promoting SOPA in the U.S. are behind the digital lock rules in Bill C-11.

        While SOPA may be dead (for now) in the U.S., lobby groups are likely to intensify their efforts to export SOPA-like rules to other countries. With Bill C-11 back on the legislative agenda at the end of the month, Canada will be a prime target for SOPA style rules. In fact, a close review of the unpublished submissions to the Bill C-32 legislative committee reveals that several groups have laid the groundwork to add SOPA-like rules into Bill C-11, including blocking websites and expanding the “enabler provision”to target a wider range of websites. Given the reaction to SOPA in the U.S., where millions contacted their elected representatives to object to rules that threatened their Internet and digital rights, the political risks inherent in embracing SOPA-like rules are significant.

      • ACTA

        • Letter to EP Committee on Development

          As we reported earlier, tomorrow, Tuesday 24 January 2012, around 16.30 Paris time, the European Parliament Committee on Development will hold an exchange of views on ACTA. Today, the FFII sent the committee a letter. (pdf version)

          Dear Members of the Committee on Development,

          We are writing to express our concerns with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Below we will present points which we believe are essential for a proper assessment of ACTA’s impact on development.

          1. ACTA is not only TRIPS plus, ACTA even goes beyond current EU law, the acquis. Prominent European academics [European Academics, 2011] and the study commissioned by the EP International Trade committee (INTA) [INTA, 2011] pointed this out. While the Parliament’s legal service concludes that on the face of it, ACTA appears to be in line with current EU law, it could only reach this conclusion by consistently overlooking known issues. [FFII-922] ACTA’s damages based on retail price lead to damages based on an imaginary gross revenue, which is way beyond actual loss suffered. Its border measures have a broader scope, its injunctions and provisional measures are more intrusive. The INTA study recommends asking the European Court of Justice an opinion on ACTA.

        • EP legal service consistently overlooks known issues with ACTA

          Today the FFII sent a letter to the European Parliament about the EP legal service’s opinion on ACTA. (pfd version, see also press release)

          Dear Members of the European Parliament,

          In the coming months the Parliament will have to decide whether to give consent to ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) or not. In preparation, the INTA and JURI committees asked the Parliament’s legal service an opinion on ACTA.

          We welcome the decision to release this opinion. We have compared the legal service’s opinion with multiple academic opinions on ACTA and some civil society analyses.

        • After SOPA/PIPA in the US, ACTA Makes Its Way to the EU Parliament

          Paris, January 23rd, 2012 – After the huge online protests against the extremist SOPA and PIPA copyright bills discussed in the United States, the EU Parliament starts working on their global counterpart: ACTA, the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement. Citizens across Europe must push back against this illegitimate agreement bound to undermine free speech online, access to knowledge and innovation worldwide.

01.23.12

Links 23/1/2012: Desura Game Client Open Source, Megaupload Seizure

Posted in News Roundup at 5:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 183

  • Server

    • NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

      This formerly obscure Web server is gaining popularity with businesses. NGINX is now the new number two Web server, largely because it promises a fast, light, open-source alternative to Apache. Here’s why it’s attracting so much attention.

  • Kernel Space

    • Where The Linux 3.3 Kernel Will Come Up Short

      While there’s a lot of improvements in the Linux 3.3 kernel, it’s not perfect. Here’s some of what’s unfortunately missing from this forthcoming kernel.

      First of all, among the “great stuff” being introduced in the Linux 3.3 kernel is Btrfs and EXT4 file-system improvements, ACPI 5.0 support and other improvements, many staging changes, Byte Queue Limitsimproved Ivy Bridge support, many open-source graphics improvements, and the fix for the notorious ASPM power regression, among hundreds of other Git commits. With Linux 3.3, the kernel is weighing in at over 15 million lines of code.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Plans For X.Org, Wayland At FOSDEM 2012 Are Drawn

        Besides formally announcing an open-source, reverse-engineered ARM graphics driver, there’s lots of pother interesting X.Org / Wayland related talks happening in two weeks at FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, Belgium.

      • XBMC May Soon Run On Top Of Wayland

        This weekend at the SCALE 10x event in Los Angeles I caught up with Cory Fields of the XBMC project. He was showing off XBMC running on the Raspberry Pi. This was my first time seeing the Raspberry Pi running first hand, which was the $35 model that has a 700MHz ARM processor, VideoCore IV graphics, and 256MB of RAM. XBMC was running well on this low-cost ARM platform — the video playback was smooth and reliable with the only area where the performance was struggling was the video overlays for the on-screen display. It’s hopeful though that the OSD performance issue will be figured out soon for XBMC on the Raspberry Pi.

  • Applications

    • Linux Programs (Apps) for Common Computer Tasks

      The purpose of this page is to introduce people new to linux to some programs I use for common tasks on my computer (sorry, no games). I include a list of programs to install beyond the default Ubuntu Linux distribution. Most of these notes would also apply to Debian GNU/linux, because Ubuntu is based on Debian.

    • MPlayer2 Is Still Being Actively Developed

      MPlayer2 — a fork of the popular MPlayer open-source project that’s added on several new features — has been quiet for a few months but is still being actively developed.

      The discussion surrounding MPlayer2 was resurrected in the Phoronix Forums this past week. One Phoronix reader immediately jumped to say that “Mplayer2 is dead. Nothing new for 11 months now.” and to also criticize the program for the lack of supporting the (outdated) MPEG-1 format.

    • Top 10 Plank Dock Themes

      Plank dock is one of the most lightweight application launchers, it does not require a big amount of memory or CPU usage. Plank dock is written using Vala programming language and developed by Docky Core team. Here we are going to have a look at 10 great Plank Dock themes looks stunning on many different desktop styles and user interface customizations.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • A Book Review of The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction
      • Deploying ChiliProject on Tomcat

        We have been using Redmine as our project management tool of choice at work for about a year and half. We use it primarily to manage our Pentaho and data warehouse implementation, along with some smaller initiatives. It meets our needs quite well by allowing us to host multiple projects (unlike Trac) with different needs on the same deployment. I love how flexible and easy it is to configure, however, I also like to keep my eyes open for potential alternatives. The last time I upgraded our Redmine installation, I decided to deploy Redmine on our Tomcat environment in an attempt to avoid having to maintain a apache+passenger install purely for Redmine (most of the apps we host are java based, so my Tomcat skills are much more polished than my apache+passenger skills).

      • Some time-saving tips that every Linux user should know

        Here is a selection of command-line tips that I’ve found useful when working on Linux. The emphasis is on somewhat less-known techniques that are generally important or useful to technical users. It’s a bit long, and users certainly don’t need to know all of them, but I’ve done my best to review that each item is worth reading in terms of projected time savings, if you use Linux heavily.

    • Games

      • Desura Game Client Is Now Open-Source

        Desura, the Steam-like game distribution service that came natively to Linux last year, is now open-source.

        Back in November I wrote that Desura was looking to open-source their client (the Desura server will remain closed-up) and now two months later they’ve finally committed to doing so and published the code.

      • Desura open sourced as Desurium
      • Project Zomboid, on the road to release!

        Project Zomboid another favourite indie game of mine is nearing the release of their very eagerly awaited version, after the tragedy of losing code due to a break in they are full steam ahead re-doing the game!

        Preview videos of the version to come (new to older)
        Build yourself a barrier!

      • 7 Best Racing Games For Android Phones And Tablets

        Crave Speed? Love the feeling of wind rushing at your face as your watery eyes struggle to stay fixated on your opponents? Yep, we too love racing; however, sadly, not everyone can drive a Formula One car, and not everyone can break city speed limits without getting arrested.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • 5 Reasons Why KDE Is Better Than Unity

        It’s no secret that KDE is not the most popular desktop environment for Linux/Unix users. With Ubuntu’s success slowly breaking through to the mainstream, there is now a whole swath of users who have no idea about it, or recognize it as “the other one”. In many ways, it’s exotic, having no other desktops environments forked or built from it. It seems to stand alone in excellence.

      • 12 reasons to love KDE

        We rain positivity onto the world’s most configurable desktop and pick out some of its best functions and applications…
        01. Keep it configurable

        The best thing about KDE is that you can change it. This has been its most consistent feature since version 2, and the latest releases are just as strong as their predecessors.

        Need that toolbar moving? Right-click on it then uncheck Lock Toolbar Positions, and drag them around until you’re happy. Want to add a function or remove an icon? Use the Configure Toolbars menu option. This works for every KDE application.

      • New Tool Gives Greater Control Over GTK Theming in KDE

        Running GTK+ applications on the KDE desktop isn’t as brutish-looking as it once was.

        This style-matching is due to the ‘oxygen-gtk’ package present in KDE theming GTK+ applications with an ‘Oxygen’ style theme.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat: A Software Investment For The Next 30 Years

        Need a foundation for the house you’re building? That’s easy: You can Google probably a dozen nearby contractors to come fill your big hole with concrete.

        Need a foundation for the house you already own? Say what? Exactly: There’s no such thing as a replacement foundation, unless you’re going to rip your house down.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Deal of the Day: Ultra-thin Dell Vostro V131 with Ubuntu: $399

            If you’ve made it this far past the title of this post, you’re probably not afraid of venturing out of the Windows comfort zone faced by most PC users. So change it up and check out this dirt cheap deal on a Dell. In slimness and portability, the 13.3-inch Vostro V131 ranks near the top of the list, thanks to a 0.8-inch thick design and a light 4.08-pound weight. This business laptop is available now with an Intel Core i3 CPU, for $399 through a deal at LogicBUY.

          • A few thoughts on Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 1
          • Release schedule of Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin”

            Here is the all key dates of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. This time Canonical goes to support this LTS [long term support] version for 5 years. So this time they try to make a better version in their history.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Surprise! It’s Xubuntu

              I’ve been using Linux Mint for almost everything these days, but like everything else in the Ubuntu/Debian family, Mint has been pulled in multiple directions by the unfortunate decision of the Gnome developers to go batshit insane, and the concurrent decision by Ubuntu to force a mobile device interface onto the 24″ dual monitors of bemused and disappointed desktop users all over the world. So now the main branch of Mint has three different desktop managers: Gnome 3 (with or without the Mint extensions), MATE (a fork of Gnome 2), and Cinnamon (Mint’s own spin on making Gnome 3 usable). I read the Mint forums regularly, and the one thing these three desktop environments have in common is that they are all apparently full of frustrating bugs. Gnome 3 is not fully baked, and the bolt-on attempts to customize it back into something half as usable as its predecessor are even less baked; and MATE is also a work in progress. Everything available in Mint 12′s flagship release seems like beta software.

            • Pear OS Linux Panther v3.0 – Not impressed

              Like Kororaa, Pear OS came up on my TODO list following a squall of emails. All right, let’s take a look, me says. Indeed, the prospect is promising. Pear OS is based on the latest Ubuntu, which is quite neat. However, it tries to do even more. Challenge legal issue by using yet another bitten fruit as its logo, use the top panel contextual reveal-as-needed menu and a bottom dock much alike the copycatted operating system in question. And you still get the Gnome Shell underneath, plus supposedly tons of usability, a unique branding, and an app store.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open-source software can be the answer

    You just bought a new computer. It’s full of promise and has that “new computer” smell. You can’t wait to get started.

    But, of course, there’s no software on it, and you’re accustomed to taking that for granted. You search your desk drawers but don’t seem have the discs for those programs you bought last time around. Plus, you resolved to get a more powerful photo editor. You start adding up what it will cost to replace and improve all you had. It’s staggering. What can you do?

  • App Inventor Rises From the Ashes Like Phoenix

    Google’s App Inventor is being implemented at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). It’s not ready for public use yet but geeks are invited to try the sourcecode and give feedback. It is expected to be ready for public use some time in April, 2012. The idea of App Inventor is to give ordinary non-programmers a “building-block” approach to creating an application for Android/Linux. Google and MIT have been cooperating to make the project an ordinary FLOSS project with a server at MIT for public use.

  • Life-giving software should be open: GNOME Foundation chief

    Software that controls vital human functions should always be open source, else it could prove to be a danger to one’s existence, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation says.

  • When Should Open Source Be Written Into Law?

    As a systems administrator, I tend to think about source code and computing platform in large numbers. Computers however are getting smaller and more powerful, and the reality of computers that we put in or on our body as a normal daily routine is coming closer, and for many is already here. When our safety, our liberty, and our sense of humanity are tied to programmable devices, should we not only hope, but expect that we should have the right to examine how these devices function?

  • Events

    • Locking down Linux.conf.au

      Conference organisers zero in on rogue wireless access points.

      Give five hundred very technically proficient Linux enthusiasts unfettered access to the same Wi-Fi network and you might be asking for trouble.

      Nearly every year, network administrators at Linux.conf.au, Australia’s premiere open source conference, have to deal with some sort of shenanigans on the network.

  • BSD

    • PC-BSD 9 Review

      PC-BSD 9 is a BSD distribution that is based on the latest version of FreeBSD 9 and uses KDE 4.7.3 desktop environment as it’s default desktop. It is somewhat more geared to novice and intermediate based users of BSD like how Ubuntu is for Linux users, but we won’t go into the differences between BSD and Linux in this review.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

    • Open Access/Content

      • Elsevier — my part in its downfall

        The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Combinatorics, Historia Mathematica, Journal of Algebra, Journal of Approximation Theory, Journal of Combinatorics Series A, Journal of Functional Analysis, Journal of Geometry and Physics, Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, Journal of Number Theory, Topology, and Topology and its Applications. For many years, it has also been heavily criticized for its business practices. Let me briefly summarize these criticisms.

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • #Occupy the SEC Submits Letter on Volcker Rule to House Financial Services Committee Hearing (#OWS)

      For those who are fond of depicting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of hippies with no point of view, counterevidence comes in the letter submitted by the Occupy the SEC subcommittee for a joint subcommittee hearing tomorrow, January 18, of the House Financial Services Committee on the Volcker Rule. The title of the hearing broadcasts that financial professionals are ganging up against the provision: “Examining the Impact of the Volcker Rule on Markets, Businesses, Investors and Job Creation.” The supposed “business” representatives are firm defenders of the financial services uber alles orthodoxy, and there is a noteworthy absence of economists or independent commentators on the broader economic effects. The one non-regulator opponent to the effort to curb the Volcker Rule is Walter Turbeville of Americans for Financial Reform. However, they made the fatal mistake of accepting the banksters’ framing about financial markets liquidity and merely disputed the data submitted.

    • Goldman lobbying hard to weaken Volcker rule

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc has just a few more months to put its stamp on the Volcker rule, and it is not wasting any time.

      The rule, designed to limit banks from speculating with their own money, will cost Goldman at least $3.7 billion in annual revenue, by one estimate. And billions more could be at stake if regulations now being drawn up are extra-tough.

    • More Evidence that JP Morgan Stuck the Knife in MF Global

      The death of MF Global and JP Morgan’s role in its demise is starting to look like a beauty contest between Cinderalla’s ugly sisters. As much as most market savvy observers are convinced that there is no explanation for how MF Global made $1.2 billion in customer funds go poof that could exculpate the firm, JP Morgan’s conduct isn’t looking too pretty either.

  • Privacy

    • CIA Tracks Public Information For The Private Eye

      The rise of social media, hash-tags, forums, blogs and online news sites has revealed a new kind of secret — those hiding in plain sight. The CIA calls all this information “open source” material, and it’s changing the way America’s top spy agency does business.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Geist: The day the Internet fought back

      Last week’s Wikipedia-led blackout in protest of U.S. copyright legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act is being hailed by some as the Internet Spring, the day that millions fought back against restrictive legislative proposals that posed a serious threat to an open Internet.

  • DRM

    • The poor get poorer and the rich get richer with Apple’s iPad-based textbooks

      Can you afford that for your kids? Can your school board? I could, but I’ve been lucky enough to do well in my career and I only have the one daughter. There’s certainly no way that any county I’ve ever lived in during my life in West Virginia, Maryland, or North Carolina could afford to give every student from K to 12 an iPad. They’re lucky when they can provide any kind of computer seat for each kid.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Two lessons from the Megaupload seizure

        Two events this week produced some serious cognitive dissonance. First, Congressional leaders sheepishly announced that they were withdrawing (at least for the time being) two bills heavily backed by the entertainment industry — the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House – in the wake of vocal online citizen protests (and, more significantly, coordinated opposition from the powerful Silicon Valley industry). Critics insisted that these bills were dangerous because they empowered the U.S. Government, based on mere accusations of piracy and copyright infringement, to shut down websites without any real due process. But just as the celebrations began over the saving of Internet Freedom, something else happened: the U.S. Justice Department not only indicted the owners of one of the world’s largest websites, the file-sharing site Megaupload, but also seized and shut down that site, and also seized or froze millions of dollars of its assets — all based on the unproved accusations, set forth in an indictment, that the site deliberately aided copyright infringement.

      • SOPA, PIPA Shelved, Internet’s Defeat Postponed
      • Explainer: How can the US seize a “Hong Kong site” like Megaupload?

        The Megaupload takedown, and the arrest of its key employees, might seem to vindicate late 1990s worries about the Internet and jurisdiction. Does putting a site on the ‘Net, though it might be hosted anywhere in the world, subject you simultaneously to the laws of every country on earth? Why would Megaupload, based in Hong Kong, be subject to US copyright laws and to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act?

        “Because events on the Net occur everywhere but nowhere in particular,” wrote law professors David Johnson and David Post in a 1996 Stanford Law Review article, “no physical jurisdiction has a more compelling claim than any other to subject these events exclusively to its laws.” The flip side was that every jurisdiction might make a claim—after all, Internet publishing is “borderless,” right?

      • Hold Your Horses – We’ve Only Won a Reprieve

        I just received an email from Demand Progress, a progressive web site, proclaiming, “Wow. We just won.” The reference, of course, was to Wednesday’s Internet blackout to protest SOPA and PIPA. Indeed, it does appear we’ve won a battle, as both bills appear to be dead – for the time being.

        Winning a battle is not the same thing as winning a war. The losing side in any war always wins at least a battle or two. A war isn’t won until the other side raises a white flag and agrees to terms of surrender. So far, all we’ve won is one battle.

      • U.S. DOJ: The Cloud Provides No Legal Cover for Criminals

        The Cloud is a model for computing that provides new opportunities for consumers, businesses — and yes, even criminals. As a result, one question that has emerged is: What is the reach of U.S. law enforcement agencies into the cloud, and to what extent are they able to operate in jurisdictions around the world?

      • Investigate Chris Dodd and the MPAA for bribery after he publicly admited to bribing politicans to pass legislation.

        Recently on FOX News former Senator Chris Dodd said (as quoted on news site TechDirt), “Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,” This is an open admission of bribery and a threat designed to provoke a specific policy goal. This is a brazen flouting of the “above the law” status people of Dodd’s position and wealth enjoy.

      • Bye Bye SOPA, PIPA; Will See You Again Next Year!

        SOPA has followed PIPA and has bit the dust, dead in the water, dead as a door nail. SOPA fiend Lamar Smith made the announcement shortly after Senator Reid postponed next Tuesday’s vote on PIPA.

01.21.12

Links 21/1/2012: Linux 3.3, GNOME Shell 3.2.2

Posted in News Roundup at 10:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux Setup – Goblin, TechBytes/OpenBytes

    Who are you, and what do you do?

    I run a blog and co-host an audiocast which highlights diversity in the computing world. I emphasise FOSS solutions [and] champion the plethora of choice in today’s market.

    I run these projects as hobby and it’s as far removed from my real job as is probably possible.

  • American Drone Controls Experiencing Virus Assault Migrate to Linux

    After the control systems of American military drones became contaminated with Windows USB viruses in 2011, there has been a shift of these control systems to adopting Linux operating system, published TheRegister on January 12, 2012.

  • Online banking has multiple elephants in its room

  • Server

    • NGINX: The Faster Web Server Alternative

      This formerly obscure Web server is gaining popularity with businesses. NGINX is now the new number two Web server, largely because it promises a fast, light, open-source alternative to Apache. Here’s why it’s attracting so much attention.

    • Cloud, Big Data, Virtualization Driving Enterprise Linux Growth

      Linux is poised for continued growth among new and existing users thanks to lower total cost of ownership, technical features and security, among other reasons, according a recent Linux Foundation survey.

  • Kernel Space

    • Kernel Log: Linux 3.3 goes into testing

      Linux 3.3 can change the size of ext4 filesystems faster and supports ACPI 5.0, LPAE for ARM processors, Ethernet teaming and hot replace for software RAID. Meanwhile, Linux 3.1 has reached the end of the line, and the Linux Ate My RAM web site explains why Linux often appears to use all of the RAM.

    • Graphics Stack

      • An Open-Source, Reverse-Engineered Mali GPU Driver

        There is some exciting news to break today on Phoronix… Coming up at FOSDEM (the Free Open-Source Developers’ European Meeting in Brussels) will be the formal announcement of an open-source, reverse-engineered graphics driver for the ARM Mali graphics processor. OpenGL ES triangles are in action on open-source code. Will this be the start of fully open-source ARM graphics drivers for Android and Linux?

      • Bumblebee 3.0 Released (Nvidia Optimus GPU Switching For Linux)

        Nvidia Optimus is a technology available for notebooks, used to increases battery life by switching the dedicated GPU off when it’s not needed and then switching it on again when it’s needed. When the dedicated GPU is off, the integrated graphics chip is used.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Xfce’s Early April Fool’s Joke

      I saw a post on the Xfce blog Tuesday or Wednesday about changing versioning scheme of the next Xfce release. I saved the URL knowing that I’d want to write about it. Just thank goodness that a storm blew in and caused my computer to shut off. Otherwise, I might have never seen the Update 2. Dirty rats.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE SC 4.8 Upcoming Features

        GWENVIEW Just like Dolphin 2.0 will meet icon animations, Gwenview will get some animations and transitions of its own. The following video demonstrates both Gwenview’s and Dolphin’s. This video also demonstrates the new QML based device notifier.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME Shell 3.2.2 improves extensions support

        Developer Owen Taylor has released version 3.2.2 of the GNOME Shell, an update which fixes a number of bugs in the GNOME 3.2 control panel. These include several which have previously caused problems with the recently launched extensions web site at extensions.gnome.org. The new version allows extensions to be reliably uninstalled from a web browser – something which had previously been problematic – and allows extensions to be installed using WebKit-based browsers like Epiphany and Chrome.

      • All aboard the Bendy Bus

        Bendy Bus will listen for D-Bus method calls and property changes made by your client program, and execute transitions within the FSM as coded in your FSM description file. These transitions may, for example, change the FSM’s state, change data stored in the FSM (technically making it a nondeterministic DFSM, but that’s immaterial), emit D-Bus signals, throw D-Bus errors, etc. Why do I say it’s a nondeterministic FSM? Because you may specify several transitions between the same pair of states which are triggered by the same (for example) D-Bus method call. Bendy Bus will randomly choose one of the transitions to take. For example, if your client program calls a frobnicate : string → string D-Bus method, you could code one transition which successfully replies to the method call with a string return value, and another transition which simulates a failure in the D-Bus service by throwing a D-Bus error instead.

      • Multitouch is near

        So, after a few strives during the last year, the multitouch Xorg patches were posted and merged to master last month, making multitouch available in the upcoming Xorg release. This turns the multitouch GTK+ branch into a suitable candidate for GTK+ 3.4…

      • GNOME Shell 3.3.4 Released

        The Gnome team has announced the release of Gnome Shell 3.3.4. The new version comes with fixes and improvements. It has fixed the new-workspace drop indicator that sometimes getting stuck. It has added ‘browse’ for labels for dash items – once a tooltip is showing it can switch to other items without a delay.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Electronic Arts, Red Hat Particularly Vulnerable To European Slowdown

        Although the European debt crisis is raging on halfway across the world – out of sight of most Americans – the impact could hit home. And in a big way. As my colleague, Karim Rahemtulla, pointed out in September 2011, “The reality is that a European crash – even a slowdown – would have a devastating impact on U.S. growth.”

      • IBM and Red Hat Introduce Local Virtualisation Facility in Sydney
      • CentOS upgrade from 6.1 to 6.2

        Just as I thought the storm has passed, there comes another upgrade for CentOS, this time version 6.2. My CentOS 6.1 box is working fabulously after a rather painless procedure that took only about fifteen minutes to complete. The one problem was the Nvidia driver, which was not installed for the latest kernel, so I had to grab it and install it again.

      • IGEL Supports Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0

      • Fedora

        • Things to do after installing Fedora

          Fedora is a great OS. Its Linux as it should be free and usable, at the cutting edge but completely stable. But it still lets a lot to be wanted such as the non free software, libraries which are essential in day to day life. Few nitty gritties installed and the make a wonderful environment to work and play.

        • Thoughts on Progress

          I tend to measure the success of an tech event (such as FUDCon) not by how many people show up or what talks were given, but by the work that happens in the days and weeks after the event. By that measure (along with the traditional measurements), our recent FUDCon event was a huge success. I have also been inspired by the friends in our community who have publicly posted their post-FUDCon to-do lists, so that we can all have insight into the work that FUDCon helped bring to light.

          Rather that give a day-by-day account of my own FUDCon activities, I want to just highlight some of the the things that resonated with me at FUDCon.

          First, I was impressed with the Virginia Tech campus. It was a beautiful location for the event, and the amount of space we had was absolutely fantastic. Thanks again to Ben Williams and the Math Department at VT for their awesome support.

    • Debian Family

      • Meet Debian at FOSDEM 2012

        The Debian Project is happy to announce that as in previous years it will be represented at this year’s Free and Open Source Developer’s European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels, Belgium on the 4th-5th February. Debian will be present with a booth in the K building, ground floor, members of the project will be available for questions and discussion, and various Debian-branded items will be on sale.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 10.04 Lives! Go Back To The Future With Lucid Lynx

            Does Oneiric have you down? Is your hardware not up to snuff? Well, what are you going to do about it? Ubuntu 10.04 is almost 2 years old now, but you can teach it the electric slide even if all it know how to do is the funky chicken. Here is a short and simple guide for bringing Ubuntu 10.04 into 2012.

          • Introducing Ubuntu Flickr/Shotwell Photos Lens for Unity

            Following our previous articles, Ubuntu Spotify Scope, Ubuntu DeviantArt Scope, Ubuntu SSH Lens, Ubuntu Binary Clock Lens, Ubuntu YouTube Lens and Scope, Ubuntu Calendar Lens, Ubuntu Web Sources Lens, Ubuntu Gwibber Lens, Ubuntu Books Lens, Ubuntu Cities Scope, Ubuntu Grooveshark Scope, Ubuntu Calculator Scope and Pirate Bay Torrents Lens for Unity, today we are introducing the Ubuntu Flickr/Shotwell Photos Lens for the Unity interface.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • $35 Raspberry Pi Model B computer shows off AirPlay capabilities

      Not long ago we published a story about Raspberry Pi, a $35 Linux-based single board computer that is still in development. Now, a Model B version of the device is being demoed and it shows off the small computer’s AirPlay streaming capabilities.

    • XBMC running on Raspberry Pi

      We wanted to keep the fact that XBMC is running beautifully on Raspberry Pi at least moderately quiet until Gimli and Davilla from XBMC had unveiled their demo at Scale 10x this weekend. Now they have done, so we can all talk about it: here’s some video showing how you can use your Raspberry Pi as a media centre. A $25/$35 media centre the size of a pack of playing cards.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android App to Find SOPA Supporters

          SOPA- I’m against it. Yeah, I’m talking about the Stop Online Piracy Act. It’s a U.S. bill, but if you think you’re fine because you live outside U.S., think again. This bill covers all foreign countries, so if you copy a song off the internet, you could land in jail for a couple of years. It is just another one of those reasons that will keep you up at night. And since both parties- Republicans and Democrats are in favor of it, you might want to start losing your sleep as of now.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Benefits: A Developer’s Perspective

    Open source benefits to businesses are pretty obvious, even if only recently recognized. It costs less, and often works better, than its commercial competitors. Developers have long preferred open source products to their commercial counterparts. In fact, this developer preference is why we are seeing the surge in enterprise open source usage. Why do developers prefer open source so strongly?

  • Darktable For Open-Source Photography

    For those less than impressed by Corel releasing some professional-grade Linux photography software earlier this month, Adobe still not providing native Linux clients for their popular applications, and haven’t been fond of the major open-source photography programs out there, you may want to try out Darktable.

    For those that haven’t heard of Darktable previously, it’s an in-development open-source photo workflow program. The software can also fully support RAW images and provides a virtual lighttable and darkroom for those interested in photography.

  • 10 open source shopping carts to run your e-commerce business

    More and more companies have turned to the Web to transact business. And, of course, if you are going to sell on the Web, the right shopping cart can mean the difference between red and black ink. When shopping for your own e-commerce shopping cart software the most important aspect to consider is how well the cart software meets your business objectives. An e-commerce shopping cart has to be customizable to fit your business needs and branding, be flexible enough to scale as your business grows, be secure and support industry standards and provide solid integrate with payment gateways.

  • State Hygienic Lab program lets clients collaborate

    The University Hygienic Laboratory is in the midst of a groundbreaking collaboration of open source software and public health laboratories at the lab’s three Iowa locations.

  • Events

    • SCALE 10x Kicks Off Today In Los Angeles

      Yesterday was the beginning of some SCALE presentations and the first of the parties while today the popular US open-surce event gets kicked off by Greg DeKoenigsberg (formerly of the Fedora Project) keynoting about cloud computing. For those interested the schedule can be found online. Among the talks I’ll be checking out today and potentially writing about or tweeting about include: Qt Project, Chris Mason’s Btrfs, Consolidating Linux and Open-Source Projects on ARM, PandaBoard, and FUSE with in-kernel meta-data caching.

    • Linux.conf.au 2012: planes and freedom

      For security researcher, software hacker and activist Jacob Appelbaum, the equation is clear. Anyone working on surveillance or censorship technology is part of a serious global problem.

      “When someone says that they are in favour of internet filtering, what they’re actually saying is that they’re in favour of you being ignorant and them having power to be your master. I reject that,” he told the Linux.conf.au 2012 (LCA) conference in Ballarat yesterday.

      Appelbaum is one of the key developers of The Tor Project, software that enables its users to communicate anonymously on the internet, and he’s represented controversial whistleblower site Wikileaks.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Anti-Censorship Campaign Reached 40 Million People

        From Facebook posts to redirected Wikipedia searches to water cooler conversations, you could hardly miss the many discussions and signposts about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP bill (PIPA) this week. Many sites on the web went dark in protest, and Mozilla reimained one of the most active organizations opposing the proposed legislation. As we posted here, the bills drew widepsread opposition in the tech community due to online censorship concerns, and Mozilla put up an online page months ago urging people to contact U.S. politicians in opposition to SOPA and PIPA. Now, Mozilla has clarified that its activism efforts reached a whopping 40 million people.

  • Semi-Open Source

  • Public Services/Government

    • NASA Clears Runway for Open Source Software

      The NASA Open Government Initiative has launched a new Web site to expand the agency’s open source software development. Open source development, which invites the public access to view and improve software source code, is transforming the way software is created, improved and used. NASA uses open source code to address project and mission needs, accelerate software development and maximize public awareness and impact of research.

      In 2009, the White House issued the Open Government Directive, which requires federal agencies to take specific steps to achieve milestones that are transparent. NASA’s Open Government Plan has been recognized as one of the best. NASA was among several federal agencies recognized with two leading practices awards from the White House for achievement above and beyond the requirements in the “Participation and Collaboration” and “Flagship Initiatives” categories of the Open Government Directive.

    • NASA Clears The Runway For Open Source Software

      Open source development, which invites the public access to view and improve software source code, is transforming the way software is created, improved and used. NASA uses open source code to address project and mission needs, accelerate software development and maximize public awareness and impact of research.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • FLOSS Body of Knowledge

      The FLOSSBOK concept is based on a similar project, known as SWEBOK, sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, that was used to develop a body of knowledge for software engineering. The SWEBOK project is now more than a decade old and in its third revision. It’s easy to see that the FLOSSBOK effort has a long way to go to match the extensive content found in that document. While I have some significant disagreements with the SWEBOK content, it’s important to notice that there is a sizeable community around that project.

    • Open Hardware

      • FLORA wearable electronics platform appears

        “The FLORA comes with projects at launch, the FLORA addressable and chain-able 4,000 mcd RGB LED pixels and premium stainless steel thread.

        “The FLORA has built-in USB support. Built in USB means you plug it in to program it, it just shows up. No additional purchases are needed! Works with Mac, Windows, Linux, any USB cable works great. Currently the PCB comes with a mini B connector but future versions may change to microUSB. Either will work great.

Leftovers

  • Kangaroo Group kicked out of Parliament?

    The Kangeroo Group, a lobby group that emerged as an MEP round table in the early stages of the European Parliament and chaired by Karl von Wogau, finally moved its office out of the European Parliament buildings. It was quite odd to have a lobby platform with a letter box address inside Parliament which covered up as an MEP group.

  • Has the World outgrown Commercial UNIX?

    When you read articles about cloud computing or Enterprise computing, you rarely see the term ‘UNIX’ anymore. You see plenty of rhetoric about Linux and Windows but UNIX seems to have left the building, for good. And, by ‘building,’ I mean data center. However, that’s not the case. UNIX is alive and well in the world’s Enterprise data centers. It just doesn’t grab headlines like it used to. Does the fact that UNIX isn’t a newsworthy buzz term mean that it’s on its last legs as an Enterprise operating system. Certainly not. Commercial UNIX might have lost its “coolness” but it hasn’t lost its place running your business-critical applications and services.

  • Security

    • X.org server allows anyone to unlock computer

      The French blogger “Gu1″ has discovered that versions 1.11 and above of X.org’s X Server contain an interesting vulnerability that enables users to gain access to a locked computer. Simultaneously pressing the Ctrl key, the Alt key and the * key on the numeric keyboard disables a user’s screensaver and unlocks the computer; we were able to reproduce the problem on a Fedora 16 system that hadn’t been updated to include Fedora’s recent patch.

  • Finance

    • It’s Goldman Bonus Day

      Groans and grimaces inside a 200 West Street skyscraper can mean only one thing – yes, it’s Goldman Sachs bonus day.

      Thursday is “Compensation Communication Day,” the name Goldman gives to the day when its employees learn how big – or how small – their annual bonuses will be.

      Many Goldman employees are dreading this year’s big reveal, and for good reason. The firm announced on Wednesday that its revenue in 2011 was down significantly, probably bringing bonuses down with it.

    • Our Morally Bankrupt Government, Justice Edition Part 1: Enforcement Against Financial Meltdown Perpetrators

      Perhaps the clearest window into a nation’s soul is its criminal justice system. Criminal law is legislated morality: certain acts are so vile, we exile the perpetrators to prison. But not every criminal. America will never have enough resources to catch and prosecute all criminals. As a result many guilty go free without ever being pursued, simply because the government decided spend its limited resources elsewhere. Looking at whom the government prosecutes, therefore, is an easy way to see law enforcers’ priorities in action.

      Sadly, when it comes to the Financial Meltdown perpetrators, scrutiny reveals those priorities are deeply distorted. Our law enforcers chose to become the protection detail of our wealthy-beyond-dreaming-crooks-in-chief, while throwing the book at their guilty but less destructive subordinates.

  • Privacy

    • Why we need a sound Do-Not–Track standard for privacy online

      This really is privacy and data protection week! In Brussels there is the Computers, Privacy & Data Protection conference and the Commission is soon adopting its proposal for a reform of the European Data Protection legal framework (which I wrote about here).

      So today, a blog on how I want to ensure privacy and user control when you’re browsing online: in particular, a standard known as “do not track” (DNT) that I hope will have a big role to play for the future of online privacy.

  • Civil Rights

    • The Importance Of Anonymity On The Web
    • Internet Blackout Day Fires Up Digital Rights Activism Around the World

      Yesterday was a defining moment for the global Internet community. The effects of the massive online blackout in protest of U.S. Internet blacklist legislation, SOPA and PIPA (H.R. 3261 and S. 968), were felt around the world as countless numbers of websites, including Google, Wikipedia, Mozilla, Reddit, BoingBoing, Flickr, Wired, and many others joined in the global action against over-broad and poorly drafted copyright laws that would break the fundamental architecture of the Internet. To quote [pdf] last year’s landmark Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion: “…Censorship measures should never be delegated to a private entity, and [..] no one should be held liable for content on the Internet of which they are not the author…” The massive opposition from both companies and individuals around the world demonstrates how much these and similar laws would hurt business and innovation, and most importantly, restrict online free expression.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Futurist Prediction Update – Copyright

        The five cases I mentioned above involved anti-competitive acts. The four cases I mentioned two years ago also involved anti-competitive acts.

        Two years ago I saw the industry making anti-competitive acts. Now we have SOPA. They can take down any website, and if they mess up and take down the wrong site, you can’t sue them, they are golden. But they can sue you. Does that sound fair?

      • White House declines MPAA’s call to hold piracy summit

        The White House appeared to brush back a suggestion from the Motion Picture Association of America on Friday that the president step in on negotiations over controversial online piracy legislation.

        MPAA Chairman and former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) suggested Thursday that the White House would be the perfect place to convene a summit between Hollywood and the tech industry, which are at odds over a pair of online piracy bills that were shelved by congressional leadership Friday morning following massive protests earlier in the week.

      • Why Congress couldn’t clean up the Internet with SOPA

        Seldom, even in the acronym-focused world of American politics, have truth and lyricism been so Cirque-du-Soleil-contorted as they have been in the naming the of PROTECT IP Act, or the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011.

      • Stupid High School Kids (and Teachers) Freak Out Over Wikipedia Blackout

        The best part of any internet news story is when the social media power user and sometime Gawker contributor Katie Notopoulos starts searching for it on Twitter. Like the SOPA-driven Wikipedia blackout, which sure freaked out high school kids—and their teachers.

      • MPAA Uses Anon Attacks To Make Nonsensical Comments About Free Speech

        Ok. So then you condemn SOPA and PIPA, right? Since those are attempts to silence people. But here’s the thing: “free speech” issues are about government censorship. Such as passing a bad law that allows the government to take down websites. Having some people protest you may be annoying, but it’s not a free speech issue (other than, perhaps, in arguing the protesters’ rights to free speech. Trying to regain the high ground on this issue is pretty transparently ridiculous by the MPAA — and simply calls much more attention to who’s actually trying to stifle free speech by passing bad laws that allow for censorship.

      • Staunch SOPA Supporter, Marsha Blackburn, Says It’s Time To Scrap SOPA
      • Did DOJ Provoke Anonymous On Purpose?

        Over at News.com, Molly Wood is suggesting that DOJ did this all on purpose — including the timing of the release — in order to provoke just such a response. This serves multiple purposes for the government. It gives them the chance to make the (obviously bogus and laughable) argument that the wider protests were done by this same group. But, it also gives DOJ and law enforcement the chance to go even further, and use this as an excuse to crack down online and put people in jail. It also gives a (again, bogus) reason to pass far-reaching cybersecurity legislation. The end result could be a lot worse.

      • GOP chairman shelves Stop Online Piracy Act
      • Why Chris Dodd Failed With His SOPA/PIPA Strategy
      • Battling Internet Censorship: The Long War

        There’s a lot of understandable enthusiasm about today’s array of anti-SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), anti-PIPA (Protect IP Act) demonstrations and protests.

        But there’s a real risk as well. When the big home page banners come down, and the site “blackouts” are lifted, the urge for the vast majority of Internet users to return to “business as usual” will be very strong.

        Perhaps you’ve signed an online petition or tried to call your Congressman or Senator today, and you’ve probably already heard that DNS blocking provisions (at least for the moment, pending “further study”) were announced as being pulled from SOPA and PIPA several days ago.

      • Patrick Leahy Still Doesn’t Get It; Says Stopping PIPA Is A Victory For Thieves
      • Megaupload Details Raise Significant Concerns About What DOJ Considers Evidence Of Criminal Behavior
      • Unintended Consequences of the Rogue Website Crackdown SOPA, PIPA and OPEN Legislation
      • ESA Drops SOPA Support, Video Game Lobby Laments Bill’s ‘Unintended Consequences’

        The Entertainment Software Association no longer supports the Stop Online Piracy Act, the controversial anti-piracy bill that was shelved earlier today in the House of Representatives after a week of fierce online protests.

      • Consumer group accuses Hollywood of ‘threatening politicians’

        Consumer group Public Knowledge on Friday accused the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its head, former Sen. Chris Dodd, of trying to intimidate lawmakers into supporting a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills.

        In recent days, Dodd and other top Hollywood figures have threatened to cut off campaign donations to politicians who do not support their effort to crackdown on online copyright infringement.

        “Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake,” Dodd said on Fox News on Thursday.

      • MPAA Directly & Publicly Threatens Politicians Who Aren’t Corrupt Enough To Stay Bought
      • Clay Shirky: Why SOPA’s Not Going Away
      • Fight SOPA/PIPA, change your license

        All over the free world, government laws and court decisions are limiting our access to free Internet. Not that these measures are very useful, most of us hackers are able to circumvent them within minutes. But in essence, these counter measures are simply work-arounds – they do not eliminate the root cause.

      • The Seizing of Domains

        Really I find what happened with the megauploads take down stunning. Bear in mind that there were at least some legitimate files stored on those servers: for example, a lot of xda-developer files were distributed through megauploads.

      • Elaborating on Domain Seizures

        I want to elaborate on the previous post. The point of the SOPA/PIPA as well as the meguploads take down is that there is no accusation that the site operators were pirates, merely that pirates used their site to distribute pirated material. For the sake of argument let’s just accept the law that piracy is illegal. People can easily use social networking sites such as facebook, and cloud storage sites such as dropbox to exchange links to pirated files and make them available. Nor can the site operators easily police their sites; the technical difficulties aside (and they are significant) there is also the issue of user privacy if the operators go poking around in files and postings.

      • Why Google Opposed and Should Oppose SOPA/PIPA

        The last post might leave you wondering: if closing down small start up domains prevents competition, why were the big guys against SOPA/PIPA? That is the difference between a growing innovative industry and a dying industry. Music, movies and books may be thriving, but studios and publishing houses are dying. So: what is the last refuge of the desperate? Government protection – read SOPA/PIPA.

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