01.22.09

Links 22/01/2009: HyperSpace-SplashTop Intersection, Obama Seeks Open Source

Posted in News Roundup at 6:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Phoenix Strikes HyperSpace Deal With ASUS

  ASUS was the first company to ship SplashTop, an embedded instant-on Linux environment, on any of its products. They began by offering SplashTop on select ASUS motherboards, then it turned into ASUS notebooks, and then to many more ASUS products. However, Phoenix Technologies has now wooed ASUS into shipping HyperSpace on their notebooks.

• Asus Will Add Phoenix HyperSpace Shell to Notebooks

  Asus plans to incorporate the Phoenix Technologies HyperSpace pre-boot environment into its next-generation notebooks, the company said Tuesday.

  Asus did not specify which notebooks will receive the HyperSpace treatment; the company also did not indicate whether its netbooks, some of which already use a quick-booting Linux environment, would also receive HyperSpace.

• LCA2009: Collaborating across distributions

  Krafft devoted a session at Australia’s national Linux conference in Hobart today to presenting details about the concept; his talk was titled “Cross-distro collaboration: packaging with modern version control systems.”

• LCA2009: Building trust through the abundance mindset

  Systems administrator, author and activist Tom Limoncelli kicked off Australia’s 10th national Linux conference proper in Hobart this morning with the first keynote.

  Limoncelli spoke about the two mindsets that prevail in the IT community – that of scarcity and abundance – and how focusing on the latter could free up energy for creative ways of dealing with the problems that IT people face at work, in their communities and in life as well.

• Shuttle Linux Minis to Come with VIA

  Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer Shuttle has released a series of mini-desktops running Linux. The next generation will have power-efficient VIA Nano processors.

• Step-By-Step: Moving Your Server To Linux

  Many of the steps to an Ubuntu Linux server setup are either trivial (e.g., selecting a language) or similar to the desktop installation process (e.g., choosing a time zone or providing information to set up a default user account). Others, however, are very different from the Ubuntu desktop setup process, and some require your careful attention.

• Enigma ported to Linux

  Inspired by the wonderful Enigma desktop by Kaelri, featured at Lifehacker, I decided to port at least some of the beautiful design to my Linux desktop.

• French Lawmakers Hope to Inspire Linux Revolution

  If the French National Assembly gets its way, the open-source Linux operating system will take over the governments of Europe, seizing on a weak economy to displace Windows.

  About 18 months ago, the Assembly shifted from running Windows on the 1,100 computers of its members and their assistants to running a version of Linux called Ubuntu. (I profiled the rise of Ubuntu in a recent article.) According to Rudy Salles, vice president of the assembly, the decision to abandon Microsoft’s Windows software was both an economic and political gesture.

  The French Parliament should save about 500,000 euros over the next five years, thanks to the low price of Ubuntu –- free –- and have lower management costs. Linux tends to have fewer security issues than Windows, for example.

• Liberation fonts for Linux

  I was reminded yesterday that just because I know something, doesn’t mean that everyone knows it. This time it was some friends who really didn’t like their current fonts in Ubuntu and OpenSolaris respectively. So, I suggested that they try Red Hat’s open-source Liberation fonts. To my surprise, it turns out they didn’t know about them.

  [...]

  Most, but not all, Linux distributions now come with Liberation fonts. To see if you already have them, just use your usual package manager, such as OpenSUSE’s YaST; Debian/Ubuntu’s Synaptic; or Fedora’s PackageKit manager, to see if they’re installed. If they’re not, just grab them and let the package manager install them for you.

• Another reason to use Linux: Maximum burning speed!

  So in short, burning CD’s and DVD’s is faster, more stable, and better quality in Linux.

• Migration from Microsoft to Linux – O, the Joy

  So I finally made the plunge. I’ve long wanted to be part of that geeky elite who broke from the crowd, stepped aside from their fellow computer lemmings and took a different plunge – not off the cliff, but into an alien and poorly understood (by the masses) computer operating system – Unix.

• Kernel Space

  • LCA2009: That mysterious thing called the kernel

    Corbet pointed out that maintaining code outside the mainline kernel was expensive; if code made it to this kernel, the one that is handled by Torvalds, then the chances of it being in every distribution were very good.

  • Nouveau Companion 42

    The 42nd edition of the Nouveau Companion is now available to provide an update on the status of this community project to provide an open-source 2D/3D driver for all of NVIDIA’s graphics hardware. Covered in this developer update is the status of the Nouveau driver on newer NVIDIA hardware, work underway on NV20 Gallium3D code, the LLVM back-end for Gallium3D progressing, the work that’s left on kernel mode-setting support, and the GEM / TTM memory management work. The lack of a stabilized memory manager for the Nouveau kernel mode-setting driver is what’s postponing a stable 2D driver release.

• Desktop Environments

  • Call to authors

    For the last couple months I’ve been quietly working on a publishing deal for KDE books. I now have a contract in hand and we’re making our way to Making It Happen. The number of books under this deal would be significant: 3 250 pagers, 15 100 pagers. That’s a lot of writing.

• Distributions

  • Granular 1.0 Released

    After a long wait, Granular 1.0 is finally out. And we are pretty much excited about this release because this is the first stable Granular release since about a year, and because it’s version 1, of course. This final release of Granular 1.0 brings with it solid stability, out-of-the-box usefulness, great multimedia experience, support for running Windows software, and all of this & much more in the size of a CD (livecd).

  • Back to Gentoo

    Gentoo is a bit of work, but it’s worth it, in particular if you want to learn about how your system works. I recommend it.

  • GNUmed Live CD 0.3.9 released

    A new GNUmed live CD is out. With the help of this CD one can test drive GNUmed without altering the currently running environment such as operating system. No installation necessary.

  • Red Hat

    • LCA2009: Going the Satellite route with Red Hat

      The company in question is Red Hat; its revenue went up 22 percent in the third US quarter, with earnings going up by 20 percent. Those are certainly figures that no-one would sneeze at.

      Hence, it was to be expected that Richard Keech, who works for Red Hat locally as principal consultant, would be wearing a grin on his face when I met him to discuss the talk he gave at the Australian national Linux conference in Hobart.

  • Ubuntu

    • Interview with Daniel Holbach, Ubuntu Community Developer

      In the proceedings of the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 9.04, held at Mountain View’s Googleplex in December, I read that “every Debian Contributor is an Ubuntu Contributor”. Actually, the relationship between Debian and Ubuntu showed good moments but some critical situations too, especially around the problem of Ubuntu Developer not sending their patches back to Debian. Do you believe that Debian and Ubuntu will always remain kind of half brothers, or do you see a closer future for them?

      We improved the situation a lot. Lots of patches are sent to Debian every week and we have lots of teams that are actively working together and coordinating development together. Actually we have a bunch of MOTUs who decided to go all the way to become Debian developers too. Of course this is not the route for everyone, but it’s great that we are having a greater overlap between both distros.

      I don’t think we’re at a point yet where “everything’s perfect”, but I feel we’re getting closer and closer.

    • Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3: New Notifications and Ext4

      Canonical has released its third alpha version of Ubuntu 9.04. It brings a few new features to test, including notification settings in the user interface and the much publicized ext4 filesystem support.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Giant battery comes with rugged PDA

    Rugged handheld specialist AML has unveiled a Linux and Windows CE-ready PDA targeting retail and hospitality applications, entertainment venues, and trade show events. Boasting a far larger battery than most laptops, the AML M8050 has a built-in MSR (magnetic stripe reader), WiFi, and barcode scanner.

  • “Green” netbook boasts five-hour battery life

    CherryPal announced an Atom-based “Bing” netbook that runs Linux or Windows XP, and offers a claimed five hours of battery life. The company also announced an upgraded version of its Linux-based nettop, the CherryPal C114, and launched a “Green Maraschino” open-source Linux distribution supporting the Bing.

  • Linux MID sports 3G WLAN radios

    Korean manufacturer Yukyung unveiled a large mobile Internet device (MID) equipped with an Intel Atom Silverthorne Z520 running Linux at 1.33GHz. The Viliv X70 Communications MID is equipped with a 7-inch, 1024×600 touchscreen, GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, WiMAX, HDSPA, and even a hard drive.

  • Linux Recording With the MobilePre

    Linux is well-suited to be a powerhouse audio engineering platform. It offers advanced, reliable memory management, task scheduling, stability, and its endless hackability makes it customizable for all occasions. It’s certainly a superior platform to Windows: while there is a much larger selection of software and hardware available for Windows, it’s not exactly a feast of riches, but more like a feast of meh. For audio hardware that requires drivers, they are often not very good quality and do not get updated like they should. Vendors are still slow to release Vista drivers, and Vista is such a system resource hog it’s impractical to use for audio recording and editing. There is still Windows XP, and while it is frugal of system resources, the downfalls of using Windows are well-known.

  • Phones

    • Android “G2″ emerges, as G1 preps for Europe

      Images have surfaced of a keyboard-less “G2″ Android phone reportedly being readied by HTC. Meanwhile, T-Mobile announced a G1 rollout in Europe, Kogan’s Android-based Agora smartphone has been postponed, and Android is gaining a “Cupcake” update and key retrieval system, while losing a core developer.

    • ISV announces Palm Linux ports

      Brazilian independent software vendor (ISV) Handcase says it is porting about 100 of its PalmOS applications to the Linux-based WebOS platform set to debut in Palm’s forthcoming Pre smartphone. Handcase is also translating some 323 of its PalmOS apps from Portuguese to English, it says.

F/OSS

• Open source developers ride the cloud

  The survey of more than 360 open source developers conducted in November 2008 also found that 52 percent use Linux in a virtualized environment and that MySQL remains the open source database of choice, with more than half of developers using it in some of their projects.

• Tridgell to teach FOSS course at ANU

  Tridgell said he and Bob Edwards would be teaching a free and open source software development course at the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science.

• How to promote activism over Internet

  As part of my campaign for social change, I have slowly been getting involved in different types of activism in the recent past, Free Software being one of them.

• Eclipse goal to become ‘management-aware’ in 2009

  Developers might get the picture, but Eclipse reckons it had better ramp up awareness its products among senior management as it moves beyond tools in 2009.

  Eclipse Foundation marketing director Ian Skerrett has blogged it’s important to help senior business and technology executives to understand the Foundation as it moves into runtimes.

• Apache Lucene to get Lucid

  InternetNews.com has learned that Lucid Imagination, a new venture to provide commercial support and services for the open source Apache Lucene text search engine is ramping up with an official launch on January 26, 2009.

• Business Cases

  • Firm finds gain after open-source shift pain

    It’s nice to read what open-source vendors think of open source: it’s easy, cheap, and quite possibly the cure for cancer. (That last one is my personal hope.)

    However, it’s much more useful to get real customer feedback on open source. That’s what makes Mercian Labels’ shift to open source–with all the benefits and negatives that come with such a move–so intriguing. It’s especially useful data, since the company meticulously tracked the highs and lows of its shift to open source on its blog, as its managing director, Adrian Steele, told me over e-mail.

  • Linux can save your business.

    So just by using Linux you are free of the pressure of auditors and software giants breathing down your neck.

  • The Case for Open Source Development, a Personal Case Study

    A couple of days ago I happened to meet my old friend Idel Fuschini on the street, and we have been talking about things happened ten years ago or longer when working in the mobile VAS sector, when WAP was still to come.

  • Nokia using Drupal

• Government

  • Google Docs vs. Microsoft Office

    Microsoft Office is the office suite of choice for millions of users; Google Docs is a web-based office suite that offers superior sharing and collaboration options. Should you switch from Microsoft Office to Google Docs? In this article, Cloud Computing author Michael Miller presents the pros and cons of both suites[md]and helps you decide whether it’s time to jump into the world of web-based applications.

  • Gmail Fills the Bill for Obama Staff

    E-mail is near and dear to Barack Obama (thus his reliance on his Blackberry). But when Obama’s incoming staff members first enter the White House on Inauguration Day, they won’t yet have access to the traditional White House e-mail system. According to The New York Times’ Adam Nagourney, being out of the loop for even a few hours is just not acceptable for the tech-savvy Obama crowd. So the administration has turned to Google. No, it didn’t tap Google’s Eric Schmidt to fix the problem. Instead, it issued its staffers Google Gmail accounts to bridge the gap.

  • Calls for open source government

    The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products.

    The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley’s most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

    He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration.

  • SA govt officials meet to thrash out OSS progress

    The South African State IT Agency’s (SITA) Free and Open Source Software Programme Office (FPO) will host the second annual chief information officers (CIO) workshop on February 24.

    The one-day workshop will bring together all government IT decision makers to share ideas and experiences regarding FOSS implementation in government.

• Development

  • The cross-platform option: Developing Web applications for smart phones

    A second major advantage is the popularity of WebKit, an open-source library that renders HTML on the page. The iPhone and Google Android both use WebKit directly, and now Torch Mobile is making a WebKit-based browser for Windows Mobile. Eliminating the incompatibilities among mobile browsers makes it a bit easier to develop cross-platform tools. Android may run Java and the iPhone may be built on Objective C, but the same application can reach both via WebKit.

  • Open-sourcers get with the git

    There was a time when the Linux community used BitKeeper as its source code control system, after switching from the open-source CVS. But then Samba developer Andrew Tridgell figured out you could telnet to a BitKeeper server, type “HELP,” and get a list of commands. Upon hearing of Tridgell’s daring hack, BitMover – the company that maintains BitKeeper – got all license-revokey on the community, changing the terms of the agreement and demanding that Linux developers start paying for its software.

  • DVCS Round-Up: One System to Rule Them All?–Part 1

    In 2002, Linus Torvalds caved in to the pressure from the community to finally adopt some sort of source control mechanism for the Linux kernel. Since the existing alternatives (namely CVS and SVN) did not fit his requirements, Torvalds finally settled on a closed source solution: BitKeeper by BitMover Inc. This decision was controversial at best, and many argued that BitKeeper’s advantages were not worth the risk of becoming dependent on a piece of closed source software. Notable criticism came from GNU founder Richard Stallman, arguing that especially a flagship project like Linux should avoid using proprietary tools. However, Torvalds did not give in, essentially asserting that he would use either BitKeeper or no source control at all.

• Audio

  • Eric Raymond on Hacking, Open Source, and the Cathedral and the Bazaar

    Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the ideas in the book–why open source software development has been so successful, the culture of open source, under what conditions open source is likely to thrive and not to thrive, and the Hayekian nature of the open source process. The conversation closes with a discussion of net neutrality.

  • Episode 0×05: Eben Moglen on Origins of Copyright and Patents

    In a speech recorded in December 2008, Eben Moglen speaks about the origins of copyright and patents from a historical perspective.

    This show was released on Tuesday 20 January 2009; its running time is 00:54:50.

  • FLOSS Weekly 52: Casey Reas and Ben Fry on Processing.org

    Guests: Ben Fry and Casey Reas for Processing

• Applications

  • Open Source E-Commerce: Twelve Promising Programs

    Small business owners, rejoice! Last year while the Big Three — osCommerce, Zen Cart, & CRE Loaded — open source commerce teams made mega-blunders or didn’t do anything noteworthy, dozens of smaller teams were hard at work taking advantage. The difference between open source and proprietary became almost indistinguishable except to developers, with some open source programs now selling for more money than proprietary programs.

  • Open source trading platform could be a win for Wall Street

    Linux and open source software are a key component in the underlying infrastructure of the finance industry, but the higher layers of the stack are still dominated by a multitude of proprietary, in-house solutions. A software startup called Marketcetera aims to change that with a new, open source platform for building automated trading systems.

  • Rush Hour: Newest GNU Restricted User Shell

    The latest stable release of the GNU Restricted User Shell (Rush), version 1.5, includes new configuration offerings and a notification feature.

  • Firefox

    • Short Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 new feature list

      There is a new feature to the source “Syntax Highlighting” when you “View Page Source”, it now let’s you navigate through any file in the source by clicking on them like links. A good feature here would be to add the support to have tabs in the source window.

    • Mozilla solicits user feedback with Test Pilot

      More critically, much of the best input to any product, open- or closed-source, would come from average users who provide usability and other input, but this is precisely the sort of person that has no idea how to write software, despite being the likely day-to-day customers of software.

    • Fennec, Mozilla’s Mobile Browser, Marches On

      Just as Android is heading for multiple types of hardware platforms, Fennec should too. This project remains one to watch, and I’m looking forward to moving beyond the screencasts and videos and working with the beta next month.

    • about:mozilla – Add-on updates, Community Store, Ubiquity, Personas, Firebug, Fennec, XULRunner, and more…

Internet

• FCC Again Wants Details From Comcast On Its Traffic-Shaping Efforts

  Comcast has already been slapped down — well, slapped on the wrist, anyway — by the FCC for violating Commission rules with its traffic-shaping efforts, and it could be on its way for a second rebuke. The FCC has asked Comcast for some more details on its newest “congestion management” system, which throttles heavy users’ speeds for periods of time.

• All Major Canadian ISPs Slow Down P2P Traffic

  Net neutrality really is the hot topic at the moment. After the FCC slapped Comcast for slowing down BitTorrent users, Canada is now looking into the network management practices of its ISPs. And rightly so, as a CRTC investigation reveals that most of the ISPs in Canada actively slow down customers using P2P applications.

• Danish ISP Blocks The Pirate Bay; But Is It For Legal Reasons… Or Competitive?

  A year ago, recording industry lobbying group IFPI successfully convinced a Danish court to force ISP Tele2 to block The Pirate Bay. This came after a similar ruling that forced Tele2 to block access to AllofMp3 (which, you’ll recall was the big “threat” prior to The Pirate Bay). Of course, these blocks don’t work particularly well, and seem incredibly annoying for those content creators who actually want their content distributed through systems like The Pirate Bay.

• Ding Dong, COPA Is Dead

  The federal government has been trying to pass a law to “protect the children” online for ages. First there was the CDA, the Communications Decency Act, which was struck down as unconstitutional. Then, there was COPA — the Child Online Protection Act. It tried to be more narrow… but was still a very questionable law, with rather vague wording. It bounced around the courts for years, including hitting the Supreme Court twice — which sent it back to lower courts both times. Last summer, the appeals court knocked it down again, and today the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal… meaning that COPA is about as dead as can be. This is definitely a big win for free speech online.

Leftovers

• EU data protection authority confirms privacy breach in “Telecoms Package”

  The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) released his opinion on the current state of the Telecoms Package. His views on the ePrivacy directive confirms La Quadrature’s analysis: If nothing is done, article 6.6 will allow any company to collect and process traffic data from any Internet user, for an undetermined period of time. This disposition is harmful and unacceptable. MEPs must react by strongly reaffirming citizens’ right to privacy and the interests of society as a whole during the second reading of the package.

• China’s anti-censor software pimps user data

  As well as selling aggregate usage data, software developers were also offering to sell detailed surfing histories of individual surfers for a fee, something that poses an even greater privacy risk, according to an analysis by Hal Roberts from The Berkman Center for Internet Society at Harvard University.

• Intel boss Otellini warns of first loss in 21 years

  INTEL’S CEO, Paul Otellini, has fessed up to the possibility the firm may report its first loss this quarter after 21 years of profitability.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

Lawyer John Koenig on how people make money with Free Software 10 (2004)

Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.

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