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07.23.11

Links 23/7/2011: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 is Out; Linux Distribution From DoD

Posted in News Roundup at 5:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Pinoy IT activist Manny Amador found dead

    Passionate Linux advocate and local IT pioneer Manny Amador was found dead by authorities on Friday in his rented house in Cebu where he had relocated to work for open-source firm InfoWeapons.

  • Software Wars are updated now in git
  • Stats for browsers and operating systems accessing sutor.com

    Linux 12.82%

  • Google’s Problems with Android Apps, Webmaster Tools and Oracle – RMS Says Don’t Go There

  • Desktop

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux by the numbers

      The latest version of the Linux kernel, Linux 3.0, was pushed out last night, marking the end of the 2.6 kernel series.

      As most people in the know understand, this does not represent a big sea change, since the new version numbering was really just a way to discontinue the 2.6 numbering, which would have been 2.6.40 for the kernel today, had not Linus Torvalds announced in late May that the time had come for a new numbering scheme.

    • Don’t Panic! It’s only Linux 3.0

      There have also been improvements with how the kernel works with the still experimental Btrfs (B-tree file system) and the now standard ext4 file system. This, in turn, should lead to faster and, in the case of Btrfs, more reliable, file systems.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Desktop Summit Announcements

      In case you missed them, there have been a couple of exciting announcements around the Desktop Summit in Berlin, Germany.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • public transport plasmoid looking for your input

        I really like the ability to quickly see route information with times and associated alerts for my home station, and with multiple instances of the Plasmoid I can keep track of several stations quite easily at a glance. The journey features are also indispensible.

        Using it with Contour, which is getting support for random Plasmoids in addition to the Nepomuk-derived resources that are associated with an activity, is going to be very, very nice for someone like me who travels a fair amount: I’ll end up with one Activity on my tablet per trip with all my files, contacts and even transit information agregated in one place that I can switch to with a simple thumb swipe. Oh, yeah!

      • ++performance

        Plasma uses a lot of files from disk, particularly when using QML and scripted Plasmoids, but also whenever something requests an image from the theme. The Package class is responsible for the former functionality and the Theme class for the latter. We already cache the results of the Theme rendering, but not the results of looking around on disk for the requested image. There is essentially no caching at all for Package: every request for a file sends it looking on disk for it.

      • KDE Plasma Desktop Introduction
      • KDE Commit-Digest for 17th July 2011
      • Improving KDE’s Plasma Performance

        Due to KDE’s Plasma extensive use of the hard disk for Plasmoids and other activities, and thinking about KDE’s performance on mobile device, Aaron Seigo has been working to make the library consume less memory. He has achieved at least partial success in this effort.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Setting up GNOME 3 on Arch Linux

        It must have been my curiosity that drove me to exploring Arch Linux a few weeks ago. Its coming on a Linux Format DVD and a few kind words about its being a cutting edge distribution were enough to set me installing it into a VirtualBox virtual machine for a spot of investigation. In spite of warnings to the contrary, I took the path of least resistance with the installation even though I did look among the packages to see if I could select a desktop environment to be added as well. Not finding anything like GNOME in there, I left everything as defaulted and ended up with a command line interface as I suspected. The next job was to use the pacman command to add the extras that were needed to set in place a fully functioning desktop.

  • Distributions

    • A Linux Distro From the US Department of Defense
    • Lightweight Portable Security (LPS)-A Linux disto from the US Department of Defense
    • Preview: What’s Coming Up In VectorLinux 7?

      A while ago I received an invitation to view a video presentation giving 10 good reasons to review VectorLinux, and it’s true that I cannot recall to have read a review of it in years. This venerable distribution has been around for a long time but has also garnered some controversy around offering a paid for Deluxe version, introducing a paid for members club, and has been accused of not making source code freely available and thereby infringing on the GPL. It seems the club did not take off as I cannot find any mention of it anymore on the web site.

      All that aside, VectorLinux 5.0.1 was my distribution of choice when returning to Linux in 2005, and a nice experience it was. Basically what I had been looking for was something like Mandrake Linux back in the late 90′s but based on Slackware, and Vector did just fit the bill.

      It had and probably still has a very enthusiastic, helpful and polite community, and the forums were a great resource. I still remember the names and the fact that all these people are still actively involved as you can see in the credits during installation speaks volumes.

    • Not Your Average Linux Distribution: DOD’s Flavor

      The Department of Defense (DOD) has released a unique Linux distribution designed to be a secure option for people, such as telecommuters, who need remote access to internal government and corporate networks from potentially insecure desktops.

      Created by a collaboration between the DOD and the Air Force Research Laboratory, Lightweight Portable Security (LPS) can be booted from a CD or flash drive onto nearly any Intel-based PC or Mac, according to information posted on the project’s website.

    • Arch Linux: I stand corrected

      In my last article, ArchBang: A small review I was a bit unfair to the distro. I did not want to see these distros (ArchBang and Arch Linux) for what they really are and I consider that to be very wrong. Therefore, I bring you a few thoughts on Arch Linux after playing around with it for about 2-3 days.

      Arch is not your average, over-dressed, underpowered and over-popular Linux… as I so wrongly tried to see at as. Arch has the ability… no, gives you the power…

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Apple Lion? No – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 instead

        In a week peppered with massive exposure for Apple’s new OS X release Lion, open source converts will hopefully be more interested to read that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 is now here.

        Key “extra toppings” in this iteration centre on features that enhance the flexibility, security and stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 environments.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 Updates Linux Security
      • Red Hat updates Enterprise Linux 5.7

        Red Hat has updated Enterprise Linux 5.7, which now includes several features from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.

        The operating system processors supports deployments on Intel, AMD, POWER and IBM System z architectures.

        Red Hat also offers a security framework based on the OpenSCAP Security Content Automation Protocol, including a library and set of utilities, giving a standardised approach to validating Red Hat Enterprise Linux security.

      • Ouch! Oracle Drops Support For Red Hat, Suse Linux

        Oracle is dropping support for the leading open source operating systems — Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Suse Linux. The company made this announcement post its acquisition of Ksplice, the creator of innovative zero downtime update technology for Linux.

      • The changes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7

        The main improvements to the latest release of RHEL series 5 are optimised virtualisation with KVM and Xen, as well as new and revised drivers. Slowly but surely, the series is nearing the end of the first and most active phase its lifecycle.

      • Fedora

        • Font Rendering in Fedora

          Shortly said, it’s not very impressive. But what are the options we have? Can we improve it? Well, there are some font settings that are available. See e.g. this blogpost about making fedora fonts look Ubuntu-like. Although I personally see that as making things worse, there are people who think otherwise. What I decided to do was to skim through most of the hinting options we have and decide for myself what looks best. And of course, provide my readers with some images so that they could decide for themselves.

        • Fedora 15 Shutdown

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android Market adds multiple-APK support to battle fragmentation

          Android Market now lets developers mount multiple Android Package (APK) files optimized for different devices and releases, instead of selling the optimized versions separately, says Google. Meanwhile, security firm Dasient reports that eight percent of Android apps are transmitting personal user data to unauthorized computers, and some Android malware is specializing in “drive-by downloads,” leaving users unaware of what’s being installed.

        • Toshiba tablet’s loaded with ports, but too hefty for eWEEK reviewer

          Toshiba’s Thrive is a decent, if unspectacular, entry to the trundling Android “Honeycomb” tablet market, according to this eWEEK review. However, the availability of multiple ports will please enterprise users, who might also like the removable battery better than did author Clint Boulton.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source Vs proprietary: the war goes on!

    Torry Harris Business Solutions (P) Ltd., (THBS) is one among them who are actively embracing open source solutions and contributing to open source community.

    “Being a player in the software services space, Torry Harris considers the open source software as a key enabler to cost-effective software solutions,” says Karthik T S, head of CoE SOA, Cloud and OSS, Torry Harris Business Solutions (P) Ltd. in an interaction with CIOL.

  • Indian open source community, biggest in the World

    The technology industry in India has developed significantly in the last few years and India has evolved relatively well to the idea of open source software and adoption rates are remarkably good.

    With many companies embracing for open-source technologies, the role of open source in IT has been changed in many companies.

  • Before you get locked into Lync, consider open source options

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Thunderbird 6.0 arrives in Beta Channel

        Mozilla has announced the release of version 6.0 of Thunderbird – its open source news and email client – into the Beta Channel. While a final release date for Thunderbird 6.0 has yet to be confirmed, a production version will likely follow shortly after Firefox 6.0, which is scheduled for 16 August.

      • Google Toolbar drops support for Firefox. Why now?

        Google has decided to drop support for Firefox for the Google Toolbar.

        No, that’s not a bad thing at all. The toolbar is a relic of any older era. An era when Firefox Sync didn’t exist, an era when the awesomebar wasn’t truly aweseome.

        Apparently however, Mozilla is seeing the Google Toolbar issue as being a potential barrier to adoption for Firefox 5.

  • SaaS

    • Is open source in the cloud still open source?

      Open source platform as a service (PaaS) platforms are one of the most exciting topics in the software industry nowadays. Following the $212M acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce.com, we’ve seen how in a matter of months, platforms like dotCloud of VMWare’s Cloud Foundry have emerged with complete PaaS suites based on popular open source technologies.

      The value proposition behind this type of PaaS offer is very simple. These platforms will enable the foundation to host, manage, provision and scale solutions based on some of the most renowned open source technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Hadoop, MySQL among dozens of others.

    • Open source and the IT company, a lucrative proposition

      As my colleague Derrick Harris suggests, the open-source cloud-computing project OpenStack has come a long way in just a year. But it’s only one of a growing number of open-source projects challenging expensive and proprietary incumbents across the IT industry. From storage to networking, open-source projects are emerging that offer viable alternatives.

    • Rackspace’s cloud going all OpenStack
    • WS02 Brings Middleware to the Cloud

      Middleware servers used to be locked down to on-premise deployments, but that has now changed in the modern world of the cloud and Platform-as-a-Service.

      Middleware servers used to be locked down to on-premise deployments, but that has now changed in the modern world of the cloud and Platform-as-a-Service.

  • Databases

    • EnterpriseDB Announces the Postgres Enterprise Manager BETA!

      EnterpriseDB is proud to introduce Postgres Enterprise Manager, the first enterprise-wide architected management tool for database professionals who are looking to efficiently manage and monitor Postgres servers throughout their organizations.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Test-Driving VirtualBox 4.1 on Linux: Bumpy but Pretty Good

      Oracle released VirtualBox 4.1 on July 19 with a slew of improvements ranging from usability improvements to rasing the ceiling for RAM to 1TB for 64-bit hosts. With 4.1, we decided to take VirtualBox out for a spin and see how it handles.

      I’ve been using desktop virtualization since the early days, when VMware was a scrappy little company shipping a nearly unheard-of product — a desktop virtualization tool that would let you run Windows in VM in Linux. No more dual-booting for those folks who had to have access to Microsoft Word or QuickBooks but wanted to enjoy Linux as their desktop of choice.

  • CMS

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Zenoss Community Alliance (ZCA)

      The community has created the Zenoss Community Alliance (ZCA) which is a group of senior community members who are working to evolve Zenoss core and the community to better serve the needs of the community and the entire Zenoss ecosystem. To this end, the board of ZCA has provided the following agenda…

    • Jaspersoft may be looking to acquire with its $11M funding

      Business intelligence software maker, Jaspersoft, announced yesterday that it raised $11 million dollars in funding. The round was lead by existing investors Red Hat and SAP Ventures in addition to including newcomer Quest Software.

      Jaspersoft caters to the enterprise with business intelligence products. It aims to centralize the way data is secured, delivered and analyzed.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • nginx-1.0.5

      2011-07-19

      nginx-1.0.5 stable version, nginx-0.8.55 and nginx-0.7.69 legacy stable versions have been released.

    • Imixs open source BPM, workflow engine reaches 3.0

      And in May, BonitaSoft upgraded its open source BPM suite which is also developed in Java and available under the GPL.

    • The Evolution of Asterisk (or: How We Arrived at Asterisk 10)

      We are fast approaching the seven-year anniversary of the release of Asterisk 1.0.0, which occurred at the first AstriCon in September, 2004. If you look back a little further, there were various “0.x” releases made as early as December of 1999… my, how time has flown!

      We’ve had quite a few ‘major’ releases of Asterisk since then, including 1.2, 1.4, and most recently, 1.8. Each of these releases has included significant changes, and sometimes architecture-improving changes. Each of them has also included substantial new functionality for Asterisk users. Along the way, we’ve been asked by many people in the community when we are going to start working on (or release) “Asterisk 2.0.” Typically, we’ve responded by saying that will not happen until we can really justify such a significant change in the version number. Many open source projects have gone through similar progressions, and quite a number of them have in fact undergone complete (or nearly complete) rewrites resulting in new ‘major’ versions.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • ActiveState Advances New Cloud Platform, Stackato, to Beta With New Features

      PostgreSQL, Python 3 and Additional Core Services Added, Opens Testing Group Further

    • Google Summer of Code 2011: midterms and statistics

      Google has published “a few more interesting statistics” from this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event; in May, a statistical breakdown of accepted students was published. According to a post by Stephanie Taylor on the Google Open Source Blog, 202 (18.1%) of this year’s 1,115 student participants took part in last year’s programme. Of those students, 35 were also part of the 2009 programme, meaning that 3.1% are three year students.

    • Gearing up for Java 7

      The last four Java Specification Requests (JSRs) required for Java 7 have received the blessing of the Java Community Process (JCP). JSR 292, support for dynamically typed languages, JSR 334, small enhancements to Java language and JSR 203, more new I/O APIs (NIO.2), all passed with unanimous support in the final approval ballot. The only note of dissent was from Google in the final approval vote for JSR 336, the umbrella JSR which incorporates all the JSRs required for Java 7.

    • European Space Agency Summer of Code

  • Standards/Consortia

    • DOJ Delays Web Accessibility Regulations

      Earlier this month the United States Department of Justice admitted what many of us have suspected: we will not be seeing web accessibility regulations in the United States for commercial and public entities any time soon. Some time in 2013 at the earliest.

      In July, 2010, the Department issued what is called an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rule Making indicating that it was planning to issue regulations about web accessibility. The step after an “Advanced Notice” is a “Notice of Proposed Rule Making” (NPRM). After that is the rule itself. In its semi-annual regulatory agenda for Spring 2011, however, the DOJ called the NPRM for Web Accessibility a “Long Term Item” not expected until December, 2012. That’s well over a year from now. And it is close to two years after the public comment period on the Advanced Notice closed, and almost two and one half years after the DOJ announced the possible regulations in July, 2010.

    • TinyOgg finally comes to an end

      But now, it seems that what we are doing is obsolete. In May 2010, Google set free the WebM format which was quickly adopted by major web browsers in addition to the largest online video provider, YouTube. 99% of what people watch on YouTube is now available in WebM and thus playable without Flash or any other unfree technologies. (Well, in addition to the fact that I have not posted any entry in many months, which meant that there was no itch anymore!)

      Now is the time to move on to other projects (or to college life, who knows? :) ). By July 15th, TinyOgg entries URLs will be automatically redirected to the original video page and I will run the service for at least eighteen months more.

Leftovers

  • Government shutting down hundreds of data centers

    The U.S. government is aiming to pull the plug on hundreds of unneeded data centers over the next few years in an attempt to save taxpayers some hard-earned cash.

  • No apologies for Microsoft Windows

    Recently I’ve had some discussion with colleagues about Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux in comparison to each other. Generally, I’ve found that most people agree that Mac OS X is more stable than Windows, and those that are familiar with Linux feel that it too is more stable than Windows. But after that being said, they come back with an apology for Microsoft stating that they (Microsoft) have to get Windows to run on fragmented hardware, whereas Apple standardizes the hardware and can therefore provide a more stable operating system for it, because there aren’t nearly as many variations in hardware configurations.

  • Cablegate

    • Petition defends David Hicks from censorship attempt

      Julian Assange, John Pilger and Noam Chomsky have added their names to a new online petition in support of former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks.

      They join scores of other signatories, including Greens MP Adam Bandt, human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, Liberty Victoria President Spencer Zifcak and Overland Journal editor Jeff Sparrow. Overland released the online petition on July 21.

    • Framing The Narrative: Murdoch v. Assange

      In Murdoch’s empire, talking points from above dictate the news delivered to the masses. Yet Rupert’s writers need only scan the front pages to discern how best to please their boss and get prominently featured. It’s a culture of corruption, as countless recent articles have documented, designed to maximise profits and political power.

      But the media landscape is changing. Why should we ordinary citizens of the world keep paying for news, when we can get it online for free? But then, if media organisations are not making a profit, how can they afford to keep supplying news for free? This remains the great unresolved Catch-22 of the C21st Fourth Estate.

      News Corporation is planning more firewalls to protect media content, despite the previous failure of such models at organisations like the New York Times. The UK Independent newspaper is now running an online survey asking readers to tell them how the paper can deal with the shifting media paradigm. The Economist prominently features an on-going debate on the subject.

      Meanwhile, I suspect The Guardian’s apparent anti-WikiLeaks crusade may be motivated by a desire to “own the space” that WikiLeaks has staked out (namely, the safest place to publish leaks in this new globalized, digital world). Yes, all the big media organisations are scared, even Murdoch’s dreaded nemeses at The Guardian.

    • Wikileaks report reveals corruption in Lithuanian newspapers
    • Library of Congress: We didn’t call WikiLeaks ‘extremist’

      The Library of Congress says it was not responsible for categorizing a WikiLeaks-related book as “extremist” and that it has decided to removed that label.

  • Finance

    • Consumer Bureau Launches in Shark-Infested Waters

      According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street and the financial services lobby spent an eye-popping $1,400,000,000 between 2008 and 2010 to kill financial reform. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a whole unit dedicated to killing it. This year, the those same forces spent $156 million on lobbying in the first quarter. The big banks are fighting the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill with a stable of willing Congressmen and an army of lobbyists fanned out across a dozen federal agencies where Dodd-Frank rulemaking is underway.

    • Debt debate reverberates in state governments

      Virginia’s governor is livid that his famously tight-fisted state could face higher borrowing costs to build roads and schools. Maryland has put off a $718 million bond sale for three days because of the current financial uncertainty. And California plans to borrow about $5 billion from private investors next week to ensure it can cover day-to-day operating expenses should the federal government default on its debt.

    • House votes to check new consumer agency

      The House greeted the official opening Thursday of the new agency to protect consumers from financial abuse by voting to change its structure and reach.

      Republican sponsors said they were trying to make the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau more transparent and accountable. Democrats said Republicans wanted to cripple the agency before it gets on its feet.

    • Morgan Stanley Posts Loss That Hints at Recovery

      At Morgan Stanley, even a loss can be a win.

      Although the financial firm reported a second-quarter loss of $558 million on Thursday, three crucial divisions posted significant gains, a promising sign that the turnaround plan Morgan Stanley embarked on after the financial crisis was taking hold.

    • On Its First Day, Consumer Bureau Finds Support

      The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau formally opened for business on Thursday, much to the consternation of Congressional Republicans.

      But as conservative lawmakers step up their attacks on the new regulator, aiming to undermine its structure and authority, champions of the bureau are pushing back.

    • 4 more Credit Suisse bankers charged in tax case

      Federal prosecutors in Virginia have charged four more bankers with Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group with conspiracy in what they say was a long-running scheme to help U.S. taxpayers hide as much as $4 billion in assets.

      Prosecutors originally charged four people in the scheme in February, so the charges announced Thursday bring the total number of people charged up to eight. Charging documents filed in the case do not specify what bank the group worked for, but The Associated Press previously reported its identity.

    • Why aren’t Obama’s numbers lower?
    • Harry Reid: Cut, cap may be among ‘worst legislation’ in history

      Majority Leader Harry Reid said the Senate will vote Friday on the Cut, Cap and Balance Act, a bill backed by conservatives that he called “weak and senseless” and “perhaps some of the worst legislation in the history of this country.”

      The Senate had been expected to vote Saturday on the House-passed bill, which has little chance of passing the Democratic-controlled upper chamber. But Reid expedited the vote so the Senate can quickly move to a backup plan he and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are hatching to raise the debt ceiling and avert a financial default by the Aug. 2 deadline, a Democratic aide said.

    • Economy’s spring slump could last through summer

      The economy could lapse even further if Congress and the Obama administration fail to reach an agreement on raising the nation’s borrowing limit in the coming week.

    • Goldman wins dismissal of Timberwolf CDO lawsuit

      NEW YORK (Reuters) – Goldman Sachs Group Inc won the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing it of causing an investor to become insolvent by fraudulently misleading it about risky debt it expected would tumble in value.

      In a decision made public on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones in Manhattan said the plaintiff, Basis Yield Alpha Fund, failed to sufficiently show that its investment in the Timberwolf 2007-1 collateralized debt obligation was a “domestic” transaction, entitling it to sue in a U.S. court.

    • Goldman Model Championed by Blankfein Planted Seeds of Distress

      The window shades were lowered to block out the sunlight soaking lower Manhattan on a Friday afternoon in June as 14 students in Eric H. Kessler’s executive MBA class gathered in a conference room to present their analyses of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s leadership.

      The firm’s management shows “resistance to change” and is “doing business in a bubble,” one of the three student teams explained in a PowerPoint presentation. Another recommended creating an “ethics role” within Goldman Sachs’s securities division. Kessler, who teaches management at Pace University’s Lubin School of Business, peppered the students with questions. Could cohesive culture be a weakness as well as a strength?

    • 15 Reasons You Don’t Want To Work At Goldman Sachs

      There are plenty of good reasons to work at Goldman Sachs; we’ve written about them before.

      But inspired the bank’s miserable earnings report this morning, we realized that the negatives are piling up considerably.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • ALEC Exposed: The Koch Connection

      Hundreds of ALEC’s model bills and resolutions bear traces of Koch DNA: raw ideas that were once at the fringes but that have been carved into “mainstream” policy through the wealth and will of Charles and David Koch. Of all the Kochs’ investments in right-wing organizations, ALEC provides some of the best returns: it gives the Kochs a way to make their brand of free-market fundamentalism legally binding.

    • The Murdochs must stop spinning and resign

      In 2004, I created Outfoxed to expose Rupert Murdoch’s war on journalism. Focusing on Fox News, we examined how NewsCorp has long blurred the line between corporate interests and journalistic integrity. The film presented an in-depth look at the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know. Those dangers were shown to include ethic-less journalism, as well as the role of public relations spin in replacing the honest presentation of facts.

      On Tuesday, as Rupert and James Murdoch appeared before parliament, this theme was repeated. Their testimony was less about true and honest answers and more about the script of a public relations firm, and an attempt to spin the public debate on issues of corporate disgrace.

      If their testimonies presented any information at all, it would be how much the Murdochs want to promote the spin of willful ignorance. For two incredibly involved businessmen, their testimonies would lead you to believe that they have long had absolutely no idea about what happens within their company.

    • Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News ran ‘black ops’ department, former executive claims

      Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News television channel had a “black ops” department that may have illegally hacked private telephone records, a former executive for the station has alleged.

  • Censorship

    • Website blocking minutes released under FOI

      109 MPs have now signed Julian Huppert MP’s EDM 1913, which called for the Government to reconsider policies such as website blocking, in light of the recent UN Special Rapporteur Report that was expressly critical of blocking on freedom of expression grounds. More recently, the Organisation for Security an Cooperation in Europe released a report that reached similar conclusions about disconnection and website blocking jeopardising rights to freedom of expression. Over 8,600 people have written to their MPs about this issue.

  • Civil Rights

    • The Government still wants to hack your phone

      While politicians are convinced that Murdoch’s press has over-stepped the mark by routine hacking of citizen’s phones, let’s remember that plans for mass, pervasive hacking of our phones and emails is still sat waiting for revival by the Home Office.

07.22.11

Links 22/7/2011: Linux Kernel 3.0 is Out, New Ubuntu LTS, Oracle Buys Ksplice

Posted in News Roundup at 6:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Australia to tweak constitution

    Linux Australia, the umbrella group for Linux user groups in the country, plans to make some changes to its constitution, according to its president, John Ferlito.

    The major change will be moving the organisation’s financial year from one that is the same as the calendar year to one that begins on October 1.

    “We need to change our financial year so we have time to put an audit together as we are now required to by NSW Fair Trading,” Ferlito told iTWire.

    [...]

    Last year, the organisation conducted an online survey of members to find out what functions they expected the body to perform.

  • TLWIR 9: Microsoft’s Kernel Contribution, The Hurd, and Open Hardware from CERN

    Summary: In the last edition of TLWIR, I discussed Toyota’s recent embrace of the GNU/Linux operating system. In this week’s edition, I will expand on this theme of organizations embracing the concepts of openness and freedom.

  • What’s new in Linux 3.0

    The transition to the Linux kernel’s ‘third decade’ sees numerous changes to the Btrfs filesystem. The kernel now includes all the major components needed to host guest systems under Xen and includes many new and revised drivers.

    Linus Torvalds and his collaborators have taken just two months to complete the latest kernel. The most notable change, however, is cosmetic rather than technical – the transition from version 2.6.39 to 3.0. This not been taken as a cue to insert major changes, however, and the new kernel is in fact a perfectly normal version increment, following the pattern set for the 2.6 series.

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Oracle Buys Ksplice

      Oracle announced that it has acquired Ksplice, Inc., the creator of innovative zero downtime update technology for Linux. The transaction has closed. Ksplice’s management and its highly-regarded team of engineers bring significant domain expertise to Oracle.

    • Oracle Fires Another Shot Over Red Hat’s Bow

      Oracle announced today that it had bought Ksplice Inc., the company behind the software that allows a rebootless kernel change. This exciting technology was welcomed by the Linux community and was even provided free of cost to Fedora users. Knowing Oracle’s track record, this will undoubtedly cause worry throughout the community.

      Oracle isn’t planning on shutting this one down, although the ksplice.com blogs are currently down, but is planning on using it to offer zero downtime guarantees. In fact, the very wording of their press release almost comes out and states that this technology willl no longer be available to other distribution makers.

    • Oracle Buys Ksplice for Rapid Linux Updates

      Make no mistake about it, Oracle is serious about its Linux business. Today Oracle announced what I consider to be a significant addition to that business with the acquisition of Ksplice.

      Ksplice is this really neat tech that lets Linux admins ‘hot patch’ that is patch an in-use system without the need for a reboot. For a mission critical system, that’s a big deal.

    • Note on Linux 3.0 and the 3.1 merge window

      As everybody knows by now, not only did I do an -rc7 last week instead of releasing 3.0 (due to some worries about the RCU code), but I ended up also not doing the 3.0 on Monday because of a pathname lookup bug and then some _more_ RCU issues.

    • Preparing For The Linux 3.1 Kernel

      Linus Torvalds is expected to release the Linux 3.0 kernel today. He has announced that the last-minute bugs that held up the Monday release should be addressed and he’s preparing for the Linux 3.1 kernel merge window to be opened.

    • Linux kernel 3.0 released

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • Gallery: My top five Linux desktop distributions

      SystemRescueCD isn’t a Linux desktop you’d use every day, but it’s essential to anyone who’s ever had to fix a misbehaving desktop of any sort.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS In The Classroom

        The following comes from Jim, a member on the PCLinuxOS forums.

        I thought I’d share it with my blog readers. It points out how new users immediately see Linux as being attractive, powerful , and easy to set up and use. Once you see Linux is action, your curiosity level spikes!

      • Review: PCLinuxOS 2011.6 KDE

        The last time I tried out PCLinuxOS was at version 2010.07, and I tried the KDE version then too. I didn’t particularly it then because I felt it dropped a lot of useful applications from the 2009.2 release (which I tried out before I started this blog), and because it was pretty slow on my computer. Then again, my perspectives and desires have changed a little bit since then, so don’t read too much into that.

        [...]

        So what’s the deal? I really liked the applications, and other applications installed and worked well. After much struggle with getting PCLinuxOS to start X/11 properly, my laptop’s hardware was detected fine. Another strong point is PCLinuxOS’s reputation as being stable, yet having access to the latest software through its rolling-release nature. Finally, it’s configuration tools are still really good and really handy. But as with SimplyMEPIS 11.0, because I had to type GRUB commands to get it to work correctly in the live session, I can’t recommend this to total newbies to Linux, at least based on my own experiences. Plus, even the positive part of the experience was marred by that lone KDE Plasma crash, which I am not used to seeing much anymore. I would recommend this more to slightly more experienced Linux users who aren’t afraid to tinker and troubleshoot.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Inc. (RHT) EVP, CFO Charles E Jr Peters sells 5,532 Shares
      • Insurance Technology – NTT Com Honored By Red Hat for Its Biz Hosting Basic Solution

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Community (the app) Update
        • Kororaa 15 (Squirt) Beta 2 released

          The second beta release of Kororaa 15 (codename “Squirt”) has been released and is available for download, in 32 and 64 bit with KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3.

          This release fixes the black screen issue that some users were reporting, as well as having the desktop theme customisations for KDE (as well as GNOME) correctly applied. The usual Kororaa goodies apply.

        • Fedora 16 to have Grub2, GNOME 3.2 and KDE 4.7

          The range of features in Fedora 16, which is scheduled to be released at the end of October, is becoming clearer now that the deadline for submitting new features has passed. Late submissions are accepted on rare occasions, but the “feature freeze” is planned for next Tuesday – by then, all major advancements on the Linux distribution’s feature list are planned to be largely complete and ready for testing. The first and only alpha version is to be released three weeks later – on 16 August.

        • Living with Fedora – A Debian/Ubuntu User’s Take on Fedora 15

          I’ve been a die-hard Debian fan for about 10 years, and I’ve written several articles on the subject. That said, most of our Linux-savvy readers are Ubuntu users, so that’s been my main desktop OS for as long as I’ve been a MakeTechEasier writer. Ubuntu has always been fine, and generally got the job done without hassle, however this past release (11.04, Natty Narwhal) has been the cause of a rift among many Ubuntu users. This release pushed Unity, their homegrown desktop environment, front and center. Like many others, I’ve never managed to get a feel for Unity. After weighing my options, I decided to jump ship and try out Fedora 15. It’s the first Fedora I’ve tried since Core 1, and things certainly have changed.

    • Debian Family

      • People behind Debian: Martin Michlmayr, former Debian Project Leader

        Martin Michlmayr is a Debian developer since 2000 and I share quite a few things with him, starting with his age and involvement in the quality assurance team. He managed to be elected Debian Project Leader in 2003 and 2004.

        He’s no longer as active as he used to be but his input is always very valuable and he continues to do very interesting things in particular concerning the support of NAS devices. Read on for the details.

      • Derivatives

        • Elementary OS: A True User-Friendly Linux

          A Linux desktop that’s easy to use for people who don’t have a Ph.D. in computer science has been a holy grail. But a new release, Elementary OS, comes pretty close.

          While the Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack powers many of the Web servers bringing you your pages, as a quick check of Netcraft shows (yes, even Walyou!) it’s success on the desktops of non-techies has been more limited. Some Linux partisans entertain Microsoft conspiracy theories, but the simple fact is that Linux has traditionally been rather difficult to set up. A few distributions, notably Ubuntu, have come fairly close to making Linux mainstream for ordinary computer users.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • New Look Ubuntu Software Centre Delayed Until 12.04?

            The design overhaul of the Ubuntu Software Centre many had hoped would land in Ubuntu 11.10 is seeming unlikely.

          • Ubuntu 10.04.3 (Lucid Lynx) LTS released!

            The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, the third maintenance update to Ubuntu’s 10.04 LTS release. This release includes updated server, desktop, alternate installation CDs and DVDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures.

            The Kubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Kubuntu 10.04.3. This release includes updated images for the desktop and alternate installation CDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures.

          • Ubuntu Development Update
          • Ubuntu 11.10: Fast And Friendly

            Ubuntu 11.10, which also goes by the somewhat ridiculous code name of Oneiric Ocelot, is anything but ridiculous if you’re a power desktop user — judging by its early “alpha” version. It has the fastest boot-time we’ve seen on an HDD-based PC, shows snappy performance between applications and just may be the easiest PC operating system in the world to navigate.

            A change under the hood seems to have made all the difference in the world.

            When Ubuntu 11.04 met the world earlier this year, it provided a new “Unity” interface that looked cleaner and friendlier but many complained that it acted clunky and slow at times. Developers of the Linux distro then jumped into action like the pit crew on a NASCAR team; they swapped out the Gnome Desktop Manager (GDM) with a newer, lighter LightDM. From what we’ve seen, what that did was, essentially, remove legacy code with code that was built to be less complex and faster.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Vodafone Smart Android smartphone

          You can argue all you want about the merits of the various mobile operating systems but it’s undoubtedly Android that has put smartphones into the hands of the impecunious masses and in numbers that would have been inconceivable just eighteen months ago.

        • My favourite Android applications

          It’s been a year now that I’ve replaced my old Sony Ericsson with a brand new HTC Desire! I have to admit that I am amazed by this excellent Android mobile phone. 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 576MB RAM, 5 Megapixel camera with 720P video recording and Android 2.2 Froyo along with HTC Sense UI. For those who hear the word Android for the first time I will say that Android is Google’s operating system for mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets. And of course it is based on Linux!

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Android tablets take 30 percent global share, but struggle in enterprise

        Android tablets took a 30 percent share of global tablet shipments in the second quarter, compared to 61 percent for Apple, as part of a 331 percent growth in total sales since Q2 2010, says Strategy Analytics. According to a Good Technology study, however, Android tablets still trail the iPad significantly in the enterprise — where Apple represented 95 percent of second-quarter sales.

Free Software/Open Source

  • The future of free software – are we on rocky ground?

    And what if other things become more sexy? Exactly. If a free software project is not seen as innovative, as ‘doing cool things’, it loses momentum. Which, due to the high turnover in free software, quickly leads to a project’s end. This might indeed be the effect of being able to write software for mobile phones which everyone can get their hands on. It is far more cool if you can do that, get your ‘app’ out there, even make a buck.

    The obvious answer to the question you don’t even have to ask is then obvious: yes, to make free software grow, it needs to be more interesting. We need to talk about technology. Not talk down new initiatives, but be excited about them! This is why I applaud GNOME for the work on GNOME Shell. This is why I think what KDE is doing with Plasma Active is awesome. Such projects bring energy, excitement and, most importantly, new contributors! New people in free software!

  • Copyright, copyleft, and culture

    Nina Paley has certainly stirred things up with her recent “rantifesto” on free culture and free software. It has spawned numerous responses on various blogs, both from supporters and those who disagree with her contention that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is being hypocritical in its licensing of its web pages and other non-software works. For some people it is a bit galling to see an organization that is set up to ensure the right to create and distribute derivative works (subject to some conditions, of course) of software, be so steadfast in its refusal to apply those same freedoms to text and other works.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox and Thunderbird Stable, Beta, Aurora and Nightly Channel PPAs

        Here is a list of all PPAs for different Firefox and Thunderbird Channels which you can add to your sources list and always have up to date packages. We have covered PPA instructions all for all these channels in different articles but now you can find them all at one place.

        PPA instructions for Stable, Beta and Aurora channels will upgrade your existing Firefox/Thunderbird installation while instructions for Nightly channel will install a new daily build trunk version side by side to your existing Firefox/Thunderbird installation. Please note that other than Stable channel, all other channels have beta/development builds not suitable for production purposes so use them at your own risk.

      • Firefox 8 is 20% Faster than Firefox 5, Install Firefox 8 in Ubuntu via PPA

        Firefox 8 recently found its way into the nightly build channel. According to a recent study by extremetech.com, Firefox 8 is already 20% faster than Firefox 5 in almost every metric and has got a drastically reduced memory footprint as well.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Developer Interview: Tor Lillqvist

      I am Tor Lillqvist. On LibreOffice IRC I am known as tml_ . I live in Helsinki, Finland, with my wife and our 10-year daughter. My son has already grown up and moved out. Some of my passions are trains (modern and recent electric and diesel technology, I am not that much into steam nostalgia), reading good books, listening to challenging and/or good music, the visual arts, architecture, and travels.

      Most recently I have read “The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore” by Benjamin Hale, “Hitch-22″ by Christopher Hitchens and “Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell. Among art museums that have impressed me are the Guggenheim Bilbao and ICA Boston. I love the music of for instance David Sylvian, Nico, Steve Reich, Sigur Rós, Erik Satie, rechenzentrum, Emilie Simon, Carnatic and Gamelan music.

  • Project Releases

    • Breakin Version 3.20 Released

      Advanced Clustering Technologies announces the latest version of its open source stress test and diagnostics tool, breakin. The new release offers UI improvements and bug fixes, and new utilities in the rescue environment, including: blockdev, numastat, and bonnie++. SSH and SCP clients are now included in the boot image environment, and the 3.20 release easily builds under Red Hat/CentOS 6. Upgrades to testing procedures also provide improved processor stress testing.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Eclipse illustrates open source development diversity

      As we have highlighted on numerous occasions, we are seeing growing focus on corporate-led open source communities. A prime example would be the Eclipse Foundation, which is clearly dominated by corporate interests but encourages a community effort to work together to with a joint purpose – to deliver the Indigo release for example.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • I’ll be away for a week next week.

      Relations between Washington and Islamabad deteriorated further when the US justice department charged two men alleged to have been in the pay of the Pakistani intelligence service.

    • New film tackles military justice system in the West Bank

      A new film by Israeli director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz tackles the issue of military courts in the West Bank like it has never been investigated on film. Israel’s military legal justice system in the West Bank has been treated on +972 in relatively great detail especially in reference to the unarmed demonstrations which have spread through border villages for the past eight years. According to the press release for the film,

  • Finance

    • New film tackles military justice system in the West Bank

      In 2009, stock owners, bankers, brokers, hedge-fund wizards, highly paid corporate executives, corporations, and mid-ranking managers pocketed—as either income, benefits, or perks such as corporate jets—an estimated $1.91 trillion that 40 years ago would have collectively gone to non-supervisory and production workers in the form of higher wages and benefits. These are the 88 million workers in the private sector who are closely tied to production processes and/or are not responsible for the supervision, planning, or direction of other workers.

    • Advice Hillary Clinton Should, But Won’t, Give to Economically-Strapped Greece

      When U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Greece, she praised the Greek government’s austerity measures to reduce deficits and cut spending. The U.S. and Greece face a common challenge of dealing with soaring deficits, but they also face something else in common: a refusal to deal with out-of-control military spending. And given that the United States is a major arms seller to Greece, Hillary Clinton will encourage the Greeks to slash workers’ wages and pensions, but not its enormous military appetite.

  • ACTA

    • European Parliament Study Confirms ACTA Must Be Rejected

      The EU Parliament just published a study assessing ACTA in view of its upcoming ratification vote. Most of the report includes the typical copyright extremism nonsense, especially when it comes to the digital environment. However, this scholarly study cannot but recognize that ACTA contains serious legal flaws and brings nothing to EU citizens. Despite trying hard to help the Commission, it is forced to conclude by suggesting that the EU Parliament should reject ACTA.

Reader’s Picks

07.21.11

Links 21/7/2011: Linux is Gradually Beating Apple in Europe

Posted in News Roundup at 5:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Developer gets Chromium OS up and running on a MacBook Air

    A UK-based developer who finally scraped together enough money for a MacBook Air managed to hack Google’s Chromium OS onto it a short time later, according to a blog post published on Tuesday. Chromium’s startup time is slower than OS X and the need for BIOS emulation bogs the entire thing down, but the author managed to force the OS and the hardware to put aside most of their differences. For science.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • Linus is on Google+ will Linux users follow?

      Where Linus goes, I (for better or for worse) will now follow. If he’s on Google +, the so am I. For journalist that cover Linux, I suppose they’ll all come to the same conclusion too. But what about users?

      Following the LKML can be a tedious and painful process. If Linus is not giving out vital human-readable kernel information over Google + won’t that be interesting to potentially millions of people? (or at least tens of thousands?)

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Good Bye, Kubuntu! Hello, Linux Mint XFCE!!!

      If you look at systems, you see that I have GNOME (Debian) and KDE (Mageia). Would it be nice to have something else installed? Yes, and this something else is XFCE.

    • Black day for green jobs: Feds prepare to cut environmental agency

      The federal government will slash funding to the environmental agency that evaluates potentially harmful policies and projects before they get the green light.

      And if the trend in declining funds and employees continues, Canada could experience a series of environmental disasters, as government loses access to valuable information about proposed resource projects — whether it’s shale gas extraction, offshore drilling or big hydroelectric projects, critics say.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia: the return of the Girl Next Door

        Like many acolytes in the Temple of the Mighty Penguin, I had my first successful Linux experience with Ubuntu. (It was 7.04. I still have the disk.) I was generally satisfied with Ubuntu, but had some trouble with WiFi, looked for alternatives, enjoyed the exploratory nature of distrohopping, and sometime in 2009 I made my way over to Arch Linux. I liked Arch Linux. I liked commencing a hardworking, creative day with startx. I liked trying to keep up with the new stuff that populated the repos daily, almost hourly. But one day, I ran the pacman -Syu command, which is something like the conary updateall command I waxed hysterical about in a previous post. After that, my Work Computer didn’t work.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Latest Roku boxes shrink, get their game on

      Roku announced three new versions of its Linux-based, Netflix-ready streaming IP media player, all running on less than two Watts and adding support for casual gaming. The Roku 2 HD ($60) supports 720p playback; the Roku 2 XD($80) moves up to 1080p; and the Roku 2 XS ($100) adds USB and Ethernet ports, as well as a motion-control remote and Angry Birds.

    • Roku officially unveils new game-enabled video players
    • Linux-Based Wireless Device Server

      Lantronix, a leading global provider of smart connectivity solutions that enable cloud-based access to virtually any device, anywhere, anytime, today announced the commercial availability of its next generation Linux-based wireless device server, PremierWave EN™. Also available with this release of PremierWave EN is an embedded Linux development offering from Timesys Corp., provider of the industry’s most-easy-to-use and affordable embedded Linux development products and professional services.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Dual-core Droid 3 slider is Motorola’s best yet, review says

          Motorola’s Droid 3 is a nice addition to the Android smartphone family Verizon Wireless began selling in October 2009, according to this eWEEK review. With a new keyboard, an eight megapixel camera, and Android 2.3 (“Gingerbread”), this device is “the best of the Droids yet.”

        • Apple suffers stunning iPhone market share slide

          Android drowns out iPhone sales in Europe

        • Apple gets a kicking in Europe

          It seems that the heathens in Europe are abandoning the fruity cargo-cult Apple almost as fast as the Anglican church is losing its members.

          According to Computerworld, Jobs’ Mob has lost more than a third of its UK iPhone market share since June 2010.

          Apparently Apple’s moderate majority have had a gutsful of the Walled Garden of Delights and are converting to Android.

          Apple fanboys are insisting that the reason for the conversions is because the world is waiting for the new iPhone 4, which are slightly cheaper.

          The figures come from Kantar and are mostly being seen as a sign that Symbian is dying more than anything else. For example in the UK Symbian’s share fell from 32.7 percent to 10.7 percent. However what is strange is that while RIM in most countries in the UK its share rose from 19.4 percent to 22.3 percent.

        • Android Phones Help Poor Farmers in Uganda

          About 400 so-called “community knowledge workers” in Uganda are using Android phones loaded with an open-source data-collection application that feeds data into Salesforce. The phones are powered by batteries that can be recharged in a variety of ways, including solar and bicycle.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Lenovo’s Honeycomb tablets feature Netflix

        Lenovo announced two Android 3.1 tablets: a consumer-oriented IdeaPad Tablet K1 claimed to be the first tablet to offer Netflix, and a business-focused ThinkPad Tablet. Each tablet follows the Honeycomb script by offering an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, a 10.1-inch WXGA display, and dual cameras, but the ThinkPad also features pen support and a standard-size USB port and SD reader.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Top general says Defense Department IT in ‘Stone Age’

    Cartwright, who was speaking at the FOSE information technology conference here, said the DOD is sending increasing amounts of data, such as video, to soldiers on the battlefield, and it’s beginning to build an architecture “that starts to take us where we need to be.” But Cartwright quickly tempered that.

    “Quite frankly, my feeling is — at least being a never-satisfied person — the department is pretty much in the Stone Age as far as IT is concerned,” Cartwright said.

    Cartwright cited problems with proprietary systems that aren’t connected to anything else and are unable to quickly adapt to changing needs. “We have huge numbers of data links that move data between proprietary platforms — one point to another point,” he said.

    The most striking example of an IT failure came during the second Gulf War, where the Marines and the Army were dispatched in southern Iraq.

  • New hardware-based open source tool to measure broadband performance

    BISMark, a project led by Georgia Tech and the University of Napoli, measures Internet performance via router

    Researchers have released a new open source tool that could be downloaded by anyone to measure their broadband speed and identify speed issues if any.

  • Mozilla

  • SaaS

    • OpenStack Turns 1

      It was 1 year ago today that openstack was officially announced.

      I remember the day well, because it was the first time I’ve spoken with Chris Kemp, NASA’s chief technology officer for IT. NASA was one of the key founding members of OpenStack alongside Rackspace.

      It is NASA’s Nebula engine that started off as the core compute cloud technology, while Rackspace’s tech is on the storage side.

  • CMS

  • BSD

    • What to expect in OpenBSD 5.0 onwards

      That does not mean that there is nothing to be excited about this time around, only that the OpenBSD approach is about guided and well planned evolution rather than revolutionary changes where large chunks of code are thrown away and replaced with new, untested code with bugs to be explored and exploited until a future dot-something-else release is finally considered stable.

      [...]

      In about six months’ time, you will see blog posts and other news items announcing the change to OpenBSD 5.1-beta, and we will be gearing up for yet another OpenBSD release. In any case, the best way to support the project (that produces, among other widely used software, OpenSSH, more likely than not by a wide margin, your remote login system) in addition to contributing code, testing and direct donations is to go to the OpenBSD Orders page and order one or more items.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Free software isn’t a single school of thought

      However, even a brief investigation shows that the term “free software” covers a wide variety of positions. To start with, there are degrees of support for the general beliefs. Some free software supporters never use proprietary software. Others will use proprietary software, but only if no practical free software alternative exists. A few will even use proprietary software if it is the best-quality alternative.

      Then there are the points of emphasis. While most free software advocates focus — naturally enough — on software, there are those like Peter Brown, the former executive director of the Free Software Foundation, who consider free software something that should be part of the general progressive philosophy, like recycling or environmentalism. You can also find people still who use the term “open source” as it was originally intended as a less intimidating term and who champion free software values. Increasingly, too, I’m encountering people who view free and open source software alike as part of a general movement towards free culture and technology that includes other interests such as the Open Access and Maker movements.

  • Licensing

    • Project Harmony: Red Hat and Others are Early Critics

      Recently, one of the biggest topics in the open source arena has been whether businesses and organizations are giving back to the projects and communities that they benefit from. In this post, we discussed how many organizations that now use open source aren’t giving back at all. While this debate is ongoing, though, there is a coordinated effort to establish rules and guidelines for making contributions to open source. It’s called Project Harmony, is heavily backed by Canonical, and is stirring up quite a bit of controversy.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Backblaze open sources 135TB storage architecture

    • Open Hardware

      • Robots for Humanity, Powered by Open Source

        A new collaborative robotics project is ripping the idea of autonomous assistance for the disabled out from the land of science-fiction and planting it firmly in the real world – and all using the power of Open Source.

        ‘Robots for Humanity’ is the result of a team up between Willow Garage, developers of personal robotics hardware and software, ‘Healthcare Robotics Lab’ at Georgia Tech and disabled user Henry Evans and his wife Jane.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Cablegate

    • WikiLeaks show US calling shots in Haiti

      A month before a newly elected Haitian President René Préval was to assume office in 2006, frustrated U.S. officials found themselves in a diplomatic tussle with Haiti’s interim government over returning criminals to the country.

      Nine months earlier, the U.S. had unofficially halted deportations amid concerns that deportees were behind a wave of kidnappings and violence. With presidential elections over, and the security situation somewhat improved, U.S. officials wanted the program resumed.

    • Harvard internet hero arrested on hacking charges

      A respected Harvard researcher has been arrested in Boston on charges related to computer hacking, based on allegations that he downloaded articles that he was entitled to get for free.

      A US federal indictment was unsealed on Tuesday on charges that Aaron Swartz broke into the computer networks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to gain access to JSTOR, a non-profit online service for distributing scholarly articles, and downloaded 4.8 million articles and other documents – nearly the entire library.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Civil Rights

  • Copyrights

    • Movie industry buries report proving pirates are great consumers

      The movie and music industry seem hell bent on portraying pirates as criminals and parasites who cost both industries billions of dollars in lost sales. In order to prove this fact a number of studies are commissioned to help demonstrate the effect a pirate has on sales of entertainment.

      The problem with this approach is that it has been found to be biased towards portraying pirates as the movie industry wants them to be seen, rather than presenting the facts. A great example of this has been discovered by the German-language politics and media website Telepolis.

    • Frustrated judge pushes Google digital book deal

      A Manhattan federal judge set a Sept. 15 deadline for Google, authors and publishers to come up with a legal plan to create the world’s largest digital library, expressing frustration that the six-year-old dispute has not been resolved.

      At a hearing on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said if the dispute is not “resolved or close to resolved in principle” by mid-September, he will set a “relatively tight schedule” for the parties to prepare for a possible trial.

07.20.11

Links 20/7/2011: Linux Vitality, Tablets With Linux Grows Fast

Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 12 Things You See Every Day That Wouldn’t Exist Without Linux

    We checked around, and it’s true. Linux is all over the place. We rounded up some of the less obvious and more offbeat things that depend upon Linux to function.

  • Kernel Space

    • Real-time patches for the Linux kernel take a major step forward

      Thomas Gleixner has released the first test version of a real-time (RT) Linux kernel based on a current release candidate of Linux kernel version 3.0; having been slightly delayed, version 3.0 is due to be released any day now. With version 3.0-rc7-rt0, the developers have taken the biggest step towards a modern basis for the RT kernel, a kernel that is chiefly maintained by Gleixner and several other developers – the current stable kernel with real-time capabilities is still based on the Linux 2.6.33 series, which Greg Kroah-Hartman has continued to maintain specifically for the RT developers.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • The Grand Review of three new desktops, pt. 3: the Glorious GNOME Upgrade

        In a very short while, I have had the opportunity to try three new desktops. KDE 4 (not new but completely unknown to me previously), Unity on Ubuntu Natty (not a new desktop, but a novel shell nevertheless), and GNOME 3. I have previously documented my experiences on KDE 4 and Unity, and in this third and final installation it is GNOME 3′s turn.

  • Distributions

    • The A.Typical RPG Released

      A KDE-based distro powered by Arch Linux? Sounds like a perfect combo. We put Chakra through its paces to find out whether it would bring us closer to Linux computing nirvana…

      Pros: Fast and sleek distro with several innovative tools and features backed up by excellent documentation
      Cons: The lack of persistent storage capability in the Live CD mode
      Chakra Homepage

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Funding

    • Open Source Developers Can Make Money From In-App Payments

      Google’s open source Android and ChromeOS have created a viable shop for open source developers to monitize on their apps. Unlike Apple’s restricted AppStore, which may take weeks to get an app approved, and you are always at the mercy of Apple for the survival of your app, Google’s Chrome WebStore and Android Market offer a more ‘democratic’ and innovative approch.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Resist the Temptations of the Cloud!

      There is a systematic marketing campaign to drive users to entrusting their computing and their data to companies they have absolutely no reason to trust. Its buzzword is “cloud computing,” a term used for so many different computing structures that its only real meaning is: “Do it without thinking about what you’re doing.

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • You Want to Fix the U.S. Economy? Here’s a Start

      A simple 8-point plan would restore both the banking and the real estate sectors, and end the political dominance of the parasitic “too big to fail” banks.

      Craven politicos and clueless Federal Reserve economists are always bleating about how they want to fix the U.S. economy and restore “aggregate demand.” OK, here’s how to start:

      1. Force all banks to mark all their assets to market at the end of each trading day, including all derivatives of all types, including over-the-counter instruments.

      2. Allow citizens to discharge all mortgage and student loan debt in bankruptcy court, just like any other debt.

      3. Banks must mark all their real estate to market weekly as defined by “last sales of nearby properties” adjusted for square footage and other quantifiable measures (i.e. like Zillow.com).

    • Goldman Sachs Plans Job Cuts as Debt Trading Misses Estimates

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the U.S. bank that makes most of its money from trading, said it will cut about 1,000 jobs after a plunge in fixed-income revenue that was bigger than analysts estimated.

      Second-quarter fees from trading debt, currencies and commodities tumbled 63 percent from the previous quarter, more than twice the drop at other major U.S. banks. Net income was $1.09 billion, or $1.85 per share, the New York-based company said today in a statement, falling short of the $2.30 per-share average estimate of 23 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

Links 20/7/2011: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Release Schedule, Linux-powered HP TouchPad Competitive With iPad, New OLPC Surfaces

Posted in News Roundup at 3:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • It’s Time for Packt’s Open Source Awards

    Has it been a year already? It must have because Packt Publishing (news, site) is launching its annual Open Source Awards, formerly the Open Source CMS Awards, designed to recognize and support promising open source projects . This year’s awards will be very similar to the awards in previous years, but there are a few changes.

  • Open Source Pulse Sensor Project Looking for Funds

    An interesting new project on Kickstarter is raising money to support the creation of a small, cheap pulse sensor. The device is being developed on the open source Arduino platform so that it can be easily integrated into other projects.

  • vSphere 5′s licensing opens the door for open source
  • 10 things to think about to improve software product descriptions

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • OpenStack turns 1. What’s next?

      OpenStack, the open-source, cloud-computing software project founded by Rackspace and NASA, celebrates its first birthday tomorrow. It has been a busy year for the project, which appears to have grown much faster than even its founders expected it would. A year in, OpenStack is still picking up steam and looks not only like an open source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space.

    • Yahoo and open source

      Yahoo is a well-known user of, and contributor to, open source projects. The company is most closely associated with Hadoop, and rightly so, as it is this open source project’s biggest contributor. Last month, it sponsored the Hadoop Summit 2011, in which its internal Hadoop experts, and others, ran a collection of workshops on the distributed workload operating system. It even announced that Yahoo had collected some top Hadoop engineers and spun off a new company, Hortonworks. Hortonworks hopes to sell Hadoop consulting services to enterprises.

    • The big deal about big data
    • OpenStack Turns One; What’s Next For The Open Source Cloud?

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.1 has been released! PPA Ubuntu

      Oracle today released VirtualBox 4.1, a new major release. Introducing VM clones, this mean the ability to clone virtual machines via the GUI and VBoxManage, the New Advanced wizard for creating new virtual disks and virtual disk copy also for 64-bit memory limit is up to 1 TB. For guest Additions, status of modules and features can now be queried separately by the frontends, Experimental support for PCI passthrough for Linux hosts

    • Free hypervisor adds virtual machine cloning

      Oracle released a new version of its free virtualization software, now offering an easy way to clone virtual machines (VMs). VirtualBox 4.1 also includes a memory limit increase to 1TB for 64-bit hosts, guest support for Windows Aero, a new UDP networking tunnel for interconnecting VMs, and support for SATA hard disk hotplugging, among other cited new features.

    • Oracle Improves VirtualBox 4.1

      VirtualBox 4.1 is being officially released today, debuting new features that expand the use cases and deployability for the virtualization software. VirtualBox came into Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) as part of the Sun acquisition in 2010. The technology is used both as a desktop virtualization tool on the client side and as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) delivery server side.

    • Oracle revs VirtualBox, mushrooms memory

      The open source VirtualBox hypervisor for PCs and servers got a major release on Tuesday when Oracle – which controls the VirtualBox project – kicked out version 4.1.

    • Oracle Girds VirtualBox for Enterprise Use
    • VirtualBox 4.1 Supports Upto 1TB RAM
    • IBM to donate Symphony code to Apache for consideration

      Six weeks ago I noted here that Oracle had to decided to offer the codebase for OpenOffice.org, the open source word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software suite to the Apache Software Foundation. Two weeks after that, Apache voted to accept the proposed project for incubation. Now, one month later, IBM is announcing that it will offer the Symphony source code to the Apache OpenOffice incubator for consideration. Why and what does this mean?

  • CMS

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Interview: Kuno Woudt, MusicBrainz

      During November 2010, I travelled around Europe, meeting various free software developers on my way to FSCONS, the annual free software conference, in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Leftovers

  • Computer scientists say it’s time to start looking at treatment of data waste

    Hasan and Burns analyzed three computers: a MacBook laptop, a desktop running Ubuntu Linux and a Fedora Linux fileserver in the University Library (Linux is a variant of the Unix operating system used primarily at educational and research institutions).

  • How to move your Facebook photos to Google+

  • Security

    • Lulz Security hackers target Sun website

      A group of computer hackers has tampered with the website of the Sun, owned by News International.

      At first, readers were redirected to a hoax story which said Rupert Murdoch had been found dead in his garden.

      A group of hackers called Lulz Security, which has previously targeted companies including Sony, said on Twitter it was behind the attack.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • ALEC, For-Profit Criminal Justice, and Wisconsin

      As the first half of 2011 has revealed, Wisconsin is not a moderate “purple” state, but a state divided between staunchly “blue” progressives and righteous “red” right-wingers. That rift is particularly apparent in legislative conflicts over the criminal justice system, a debate spurred by corporate interests represented in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and perpetuated by ALEC legislative members, including Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

      Wisconsin’s history and public policy reflects the red/blue divide. It is the state that gave birth to the Republican Party, which supported slavery abolition, and the John Birch Society, which opposed the civil rights movement. In the first half of the 20th Century, the state elected both progressive hero Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette and right-wing extremist Joe McCarthy. It is the state that elected both former Senator Russ Feingold (D) and Representative Paul Ryan (R).

    • ALEC Exposed: Milton Friedman’s Little Shop of Horrors

      Although he passed away in 2006, states are now grappling with many of the toxic notions left behind by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.

      In her groundbreaking book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein coined the term “disaster capitalism” for the rapid-fire corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock. The master of disaster? Privatization and free market guru Milton Friedman. Friedman advised governments in economic crisis to follow strict austerity measures, combining radical cuts in social services with the full-scale privatization of their more lucrative assets. Many countries in Latin America auctioned off everything standing — from energy and water utilities to Social Security — to for profit multinational firms, crushing unions and other dissenters along the way.

  • Censorship

    • Telex to help defeat web censors

      Data smuggling software could help citizens in countries operating strict net filters visit any site they want.

      Developed by US computer scientists the software, called Telex, hides data from banned websites inside traffic from sites deemed safe.

      The software draws on well-known encryption techniques to conceal data making it hard to decipher.

      So far, Telex is only a prototype but in tests it has been able to defeat Chinese web filters.

Reader’s Picks

07.19.11

Links 19/7/2011: Ubuntu 12.04 Event Planned, GParted 0.9.0 Out

Posted in News Roundup at 7:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 8 Places to Find Help for Your Linux Server
  • Toyota’s open road

    Now why would a car company want to join a nonprofit consortium made up of mostly technology companies dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux? The answer is, it makes business sense.

  • Loosing work because I use Linux

    Their online application was three pages long. Even though I saw the above block on the first page I had a small hope it wasn’t a strict requirement because after I checked “no” to having Windows I was able to select that I used “Linux” from a drop down menu. Tutor.com then proceeded to waste another ten minutes of my time while I filled out the next two pages. Immediately after hitting the “submit” button I was informed that my application had failed.

    I understand they have certain system requirements, but why they felt it was necessary to waste my time filling out the last two pages after I already marked that I did not use Windows is beyond me. What is also beyond me is why they choose to develop their browser based software for the Windows only Internet Explorer instead of any of the cross platform browsers that exist. Oh and did I mention that they opted to support iOS before they added support for non-Windows desktop operating systems?

  • Desktop

    • Wolverton: A look at the new Samsung Series 5 Chromebook

      Chrome OS is also theoretically much more secure than standard laptops. Because Chromebooks are designed to be connected to the Internet, little data is stored on the machine itself. And because everything is focused on the browser — which Google updates frequently — there’s less chance of a malicious program running in the background.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linus Torvalds delays Linux 3.0 launch due to a subtle bug

      Torvalds announced back in May that the Linux 2.6.40 kernel will be rebadged as the Linux 3.0 kernel. The projected release date of Linux 3.0 was supposed to be today, but in a post on Google+, Torvalds explained that the discovery of a “subtle pathname lookup bug” has delayed the release.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • 5 Absolutely Useless Compiz Plugins

      Compiz is no doubt the best compositing manager for Linux. It has been a part of Ubuntu for a long time and is actively maintained as well. Since the addition of the contentious Unity plugin, Compiz has become the most popular and reliable compositing manager easily surpassing GNOME 3′s Mutter.

      Being a part of a big project like Ubuntu, developers are coming up with amazing new plugins like Modal dialogs. This, of course, doesn’t mean that there aren’t any useless plugins for Compiz. Here are 5 such plugins that find no practical applications whatsoever:

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE 4.7: Long-Term Vision, Ongoing Myopia

        hree years ago, KDE was the innovative desktop, and GNOME the conservative one. Today, KDE is the conservative desktop, doing incremental releases, while GNOME is divided between GNOME 3 and Unity, each as innovative and as controversial as the other.

  • Distributions

    • ArchBang: A small review

      ArchBang is a simple GNU/Linux distribution, which provides you with a lightweight Arch Linux system combined with the Openbox Window Manager. Suitable for both desktop and portable systems – It is fast, stable, and always up to date. (Source: ArchBang front page)

      I like fast, stable and up to date distros. But of course most of them say that.

    • New Releases

      • Zorin OS Lite Release Candidate
      • Announcement: RapidDisk (rxdsk) 1.0b Stable release

        I am writing to announce the release of my Linux RAM disk kernel module. Yes, the Linux kernel has the brd module already integrated into it, and also the zram module it the staging tree. And yes, you can instead utilize ramfs or tmpfs for RAM based file systems. But RapidDisk or rxdsk is a bit different.

      • 18 July 2011: GParted 0.9.0

        The most significant change in this release is the ability to compile and link with libparted 3.0.

        GParted retains full functionality when compiled and linked with libparted versions prior to 3.0, for example libparted-2.4.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • I owe you an apology, PCLinuxOS

        Two years ago, when I first entered this vast world that Linux is, I came to realize that there was a distribution that was mentioned over and over: PCLinuxOS. I became curious and followed some old posts in multiple threads. To be honest, being a total newbie, I felt sort of intimidated by the vocal followers of this distro and my aversion grew stronger when I visited the forum and was greeted by the rules. Boy, did I ever read something harsh!

        [...]

        From all of this, my biggest conclusion is that I, because of my lack of experience with Linux, acted unfairly. However, as Ezra Pound said of Walt Whitman, “I am old enough now to make friends”. Yes, PCLinuxOS… I owe you an apology.

      • Another day, Another PCLOS – Xfce Edition 2011-07

        Following the releases of PCLinuxOS 2011.6 and PCLinuxOS 2011.07 MiniMe KDE comes PCLinuxOS Phoenix XFCE Edition 2011-07 Final. As you can probably gather, it features the low-weight high-performance Xfce desktop which makes it perfect for machines a few years old. It also can be quite pretty and configurable.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Review: Scientific Linux 6.0 “Carbon”

        Overall, I was pretty pleased with Scientific Linux 6.0 “Carbon”. It recognized all my hardware correctly, software worked well on it, and it was fast, recognizable, and easy to use.

      • Fedora

        • Newly-expanded Fedora Logo Guidelines

          Due in major part to Ian Weller’s extensive work on expanding Fedora’s logo usage guidelines, we now have updated logo usage guidelines that cover the usage of the Fedora logo in more detail, including:

    • Debian Family

      • Debian invites you to Debian Day

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • How to Freshly install Ubuntu Linux 10.10
          • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Developer Summit Event Announced

            As expected, the second Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) event for 2011 has been officially announced a couple of minutes ago by Jono Bacon in an email. The Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit event will take place in Orlando, Florida, USA from 31st October to 4th November.

          • Wireless dominoes
          • Canonical to simplify Ubuntu certification

            Canonical has announced that it will be changing its commercial certification programme in order to make it simpler for consumers to understand. The certification programme allows original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) to apply for their systems to be validated and endorsed to work with the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

          • Ubuntu Certification Is Changing
          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 224
          • [Oneiric Updates] Some Upcoming Changes in Unity

          • Flavours and Variants

            • UbuBox “SalentOS” 11.04

              The idea to make a personal operating system, flashed in my head for quite some time, but for one reason or another I never managed to get to work seriously on such a project. In these days I decided to commit myself “full time” to it and I did it, also pushed by the wave of news that are coming in the world of the penguin! I did not, initially, planned to make UbuBox “SalentOS” public. Then, along the way, thanks to the advice of some friends and the realization that the system satisfy me, I said “Who knows … maybe this could satisfy someone else too. Why not make it public?”.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Meraki Slims Down Cloud Routers

      The underlying operating system in the MX50, MX60 and MX70 router is a customized Linux base that Meraki has enhanced.

    • Tiny Wi-Fi device server ships with Linux SDK

      Lantronix is now shipping a wireless device server module with a Timesys LinuxLink software development kit (SDK). The PremierWave EN includes a 400MHz Atmel ARM9 processor, an Ethernet port, and a dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n modem, and ships with Linux-based Lantronix firmware — offering secure tunneling, configuration, diagnostics, LAN bridging, and remote access applications.

    • Plustek announces upgrades to its MultiManager video management software

      Plustek Inc., the leading manufacturer of the innovative Linux-based standalone Network Video Recorder (NVR), announces today a notable upgraded to its Centralized Management Software “MultiManager.” This version introduces powerful enhancements and new features to further improve monitoring effectiveness and efficiency. The new “Smart Cycling Control” tool brings added convenience to multiple-channel monitoring. Additionally, alert notification functionalities are improved to assist users in staying on top of alarms and to better respond to emergencies. User permissions also are better refined, providing more control and flexibility to the system. Last but not least, several other developments to image and video output file types, video recording performance, and user operations are made.

    • Phones

Free Software/Open Source

  • Business reporting group promotes XBRL tools

    Non-profit consortium in the US offering cash prize to encourage development of new software resources

  • Events

    • Blender Conference 2011 registration opens

      The Blender Foundation has announced that registration for 2011 Blender Conference is now open. The 10th annual event will take place from 28 to 30 October at the De Balie in Amsterdam.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla lays out multi-process Firefox engineering goals

        Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard has detailed the non-profit organisation’s plans for the engineering behind Firefox, as it looks to make the browser spread even more of its workload between multiple processes. Blizzard notes that, although the multiple process model for Firefox is not a panacea, “it does gives us a leg up on some of the more systemic problems”.

      • Mozilla outlines goals for multiprocess browsing implementation

        Mozilla’s Chris Blizzard has published a blog entry that outlines the goals of Mozilla’s renewed effort to bring multiprocess browsing to the Firefox Web browser. The post highlights the key advantages that deeper process isolation will bring to Firefox and addresses some of the underlying requirements for Mozilla’s implementation.

      • Mozilla: We don’t hate enterprise users!
      • Announcing Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group

        Recently there’s been a lot of discussion about enterprises and rapid releases. Online life is evolving faster than ever and it’s imperative that Mozilla deliver improvements to the Web and to Firefox more quickly to reflect this. This has created challenges for IT departments that have to deliver lots of mission-critical applications through Firefox. Mozilla is fundamentally about people and we care about our users wherever they are. To this end, we are re-establishing a Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group as a place for enterprise developers, IT staff and Firefox developers to discuss the challenges, ideas and best practices for deploying Firefox in the enterprise. It will be a place to ask questions and get information about Mozilla plans.

      • Firefox development team lays out efforts to improve speed, stability and performance.

  • SaaS

    • Hadoop & Startups: Where Open Source Meets Business Data
    • OpenStack turns 1. What’s next?

      OpenStack, the open-source, cloud-computing software project founded by Rackspace and NASA, celebrates its first birthday tomorrow. It has been a busy year for the project, which appears to have grown much faster than even its founders expected it would. A year in, OpenStack is still picking up steam and looks not only like an open source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle admits Sun work needed in Aussie market

      According to Oracle, it is not stepping away from the SPARC server line. MacDonald said that the company would not favour x86 over SPARC. “We will continue to treat x86 and Sparc equally, the same as Solaris and Oracle Enterprise Linux,” MacDonald said. “We are a two chip/operating system [company] and we will continue to foster those [offerings],” MacDonald said.

    • IBM donates open source code

      Hoping to further sharpen OpenOffice’s competitive viability against Microsoft Office, IBM is donating the code of its Symphony open source office suite to the non-profit Apache Software Foundation, says ComputerWorld.

  • CMS

  • Semi-Open Source

  • Funding

  • Public Services/Government

    • CISL and communities strengthen FLOSS office suites

      On Friday, July 1, at the International Free Software Forum (FISL) in Porto Alegre – Brazil, the Brazilian Government’s Free Software Implementation Committee has signed, along with the communities of the LibreOffice and OpenOffice projects, maintained respectively by the The Document Foundation and Apache Foundation, a Letter of Intent which signals the mutual interest of cooperation with the FLOSS office suites.

  • Licensing

    • CFP: Legal and Licensing Aspects of Open Source at OWF 2011

      Licensing is an important component of every free software and open source project. This is especially true as an increasing number of corporations are adopting and distributing open source applications and code. This track considers various legal and licensing aspects of open source, both from a community and a corporate perspective.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Migrate Git Project from GitHub to Google Code
    • Google Code gains native Git support

      Google has added native support for Git, the distributed revision control system developed by Linus Torvalds, to its Google Code project hosting site. Now, when developers create a new project, they can choose between Git, Mercurial and Subversion as their project’s version control system – support for Mercurial was added in April 2009. The long awaited change also applies to Eclipse Labs, a Google-hosted portal launched in May 2010 for open source projects based on the Eclipse platform.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • ODF Plugfest: “ODF still needs to establish itself”

      Five years after being adopted as an official ISO standard, the Open Document Format (ODF) still appears to have a long way to go, despite the support it has received from politicians and administrative agencies. Andreas Kawohl from the civic centre and IT processing department at Freiburg City Council told Friday’s session of the ODF Plugfest in Berlin: “ODF is a long way from being able to function as a standard format for exchanging documents”. According to Kawohl, 2000 administrative staff in Freiburg are now using both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, with 70,000 OpenOffice documents generated over a six month period, but hardly anyone outside of the organisation is able to use them.

Leftovers

  • The Unix revolution—thank you, Uncle Sam?

  • Security

    • Passwords are made obsolete with Mozilla’s BrowserID
    • Mozilla pushes simplified Browser ID login system
    • Skype Holes

      If you really know how Skype works, you know it’s about as safe as juggling firecrackers. Skype, the popular VoIP program, relies on every PC running Skype between you and who you’re calling to serve as stepping stones for your conversation. That’s bad. What’s worse is when Skype doesn’t check to see if Skype calls are actually sent, or received, by the right people.

      Or, to quote Levent “Noptrix” Kayan, the security researcher that uncovered this hole, “Skype suffers from a persistent Cross-Site Scripting [XSS] vulnerability due to a lack of input validation and output sanitization of the ‘mobile phone’ profile entry. Other input fields may also be affected.”

  • Finance

    • Wall Street’s Euthanasia of Industry

      Michael, I read the in the newspapers that the great recession, so-called, has long since ended, but unemployment remains stubbornly high with only a measly 18,000 jobs created in June. I believe the term that was coined some time ago is a jobless recovery. What is a jobless recovery?

      We call that a depression – in this case, caused mainly by debt deflation. Just because the stock market is being inflated by the Federal Reserve doesn’t mean that the economy itself is growing. It’s shrinking – from a combination of families and businesses having to pay off debts rather than spend their income on goods and services, and the government’s shift of taxes off finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) onto labor and industry.

  • Censorship

    • CFP: Legal and Licensing Aspects of Open Source at OWF 2011

      I’m pleased to announce a research result that Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and I have been working on for the past 18 months: Telex, a new approach to circumventing state-level Internet censorship. Telex is markedly different from past anticensorship efforts, and we believe it has the potential to shift the balance of power in the censorship arms race.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Shaw Places Spotlight on Net Neutrality Rules With Online Video Service Plans

      Two of the leading issues before the CRTC – over-the-top video and usage based billing – have come together as Shaw has announced plans to launch a new online movie service designed to compete with Netflix. Subscribers to the service, which will cost $12 per month, will be able to watch on their TV and computer. Most notably, Shaw says that the service will not count against subscriber data caps. Given the problems users of over-the-top video services have encountered with the caps, the Shaw approach places the spotlight on the CRTC net neutrality guidelines and undue preference rules. [Update: Shaw now says that watching movies via the Internet will count against user caps]

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Lawyer Trying To Trademark Bitcoin Threatens Techdirt With Bogus DMCA Takedown

        And what are these “offending works?” Well, looking at the DMCA notice (full notice embedded below), he appears to be claiming that both the header and the footer from his law firm’s legal correspondence, as well as the header of Magellan Capital Advisors LLC, are copyrights held by him. If you don’t recall, Magellan Capital Advisors was supposedly Pascazi’s “client,” in the attempt to trademark Bitcoin, and a letter sent from Magellan with the header in question was available on the USPTO website as Pascazi’s “evidence” for Magellan’s use of “Bitcoin” in commerce. You can see this part of the DMCA notice identifying “the works” here…

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • Notes on ACTA and Access to Medicines

          The analysis is based on the December 2010 text, the “Final ACTA text following legal verification”. The later 2011 version does not contain substantial changes other than: “This Agreement shall remain open for signature by participants in its negotiation,17 and by any other WTO Members the participants may agree to by consensus, from 1 May 2011 until 1 May 2013.”

Links 19/7/2011: Why GNU/Linux Feels Better Than Mac OS X, Howard County Library Uses Ubuntu

Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Price of “7″ Premium is $56

    An Italian retailer, Monclick, is selling identical eeePC 1215P with “7″ Premium and Ubuntu. The price difference comes to $56 with that other OS costing that much more. Well, they aren’t identical, quite; that other OS comes in red while Ubuntu comes in black, but who cares? They’re both N570 Atoms at 1.5gHz with 2gB RAM and 12.1inch screen so they are, officially, not netbooks.

  • How to best choose hardware for Linux

    Let’s say you want to buy a laptop and install a Linux distro on it. However, you’re facing a sort of a dilemma. Unlike Windows, which often comes preinstalled and configured with all the necessary drivers, you do not really know if your distro will fully support the underlying hardware. You might end up with a non-functioning system that will require a long time fixing and tweaking.

    So what do you do? How do you choose hardware that will make your Linux flavors behave without compromising on your actual needs? No worries, I will help you. Today, you will learn how to make the best decisions when it comes to purchasing hardware for Linux.

  • Ubuntu VS OS X

    So, if you were like me, and curious about Mac OS X, you can see I am not overall impressed.

  • How Linux saved my computer from Windows Update

    Without the Linux CD, I’d have been stuffed.

  • Desktop

    • Howard County Library and Ubuntu

      Well today I stepped foot inside Howard County Library in Woodbine, MD for the first time and saw that all of their computers were in fact still using Ubuntu. It was so much cooler in real life than what I read about it.

    • On Linux Distributions and Desktops

      However, what names come into mind when you think about Desktops? I believe that in this case, the names which feel most like it are Mac, Windows, Android, Meego, BeOS, ChromeOS, JoliCloud, and so on. Some of them are running proprietary OSes, some of them are partly open, and some of them are actually based on a Linux distribution or a Linux kernel and libraries stack.

      And finally, what comes into mind when you think about the term ‘Linux Desktop’? Without holy wars and discussion which distribution is better (notice the word distribution here), I believe that it is hard to escape from the names as Ubuntu, Mandrake, Linspire, SLED, and similar solutions.

      Some of you perhaps have already got my point. What makes a “Desktop” is not a mere combination of packages, applications, community and artwork; but it is the integration and common feeling among all of its components, and somewhat inherited desire of having a ‘standard’ way of doing everything. And Linux Distributions, on their turn, inherently have the essence of freedom of choice, flexibility and multitude of combinations of applications and goals within, which make them much more flexible on one hand, but much less focused on another.

      Why Linux distributions will never (in my humble opinion) beat Windows or MacOS on desktop? By a one simple reason – they are too flexible. They provide too many options and possibilities by default, without a ‘standard’ way of doing things, and while everything works and is usually tightly integrated, this is still a combination of packages and applications, and not a Desktop. This is not a bad thing – by the contrary, I believe that this is awesome! But this opposite to what is expected from a Desktop experience.

    • Look What’s On Amazon.com’s Best Selling List!

      That’s right folks. On 2011-7-17 at 0634 Winnipeg time, items 8 and 9 in notebooks ordered by “Bestselling” are “Chromebooks” from Samsung.

    • 7 days in the cloud: My week with the Samsung Chromebook

      But, brave soul that I am, I decided to give it a try. This is what I found. I warn you now, it’s a tale of both triumph and tragedy. Well, OK, so it’s really a story of what worked and what didn’t work, but you get the idea.

    • Flash Drive Linux vs. Standard Linux Desktops

      Flash drives have had a long-lasting relationship with Linux distributions. These portable storage devices are among the most reliable for out of the box hardware support on the Linux desktop. Clearly, using flash drives to run Linux has its benefits for various types of users.

      As luck would have it, I was told of a company that is apparently running individual installations of Linux on flash drives for each of their employees. Apparently cost was a major motivation, but so was the need to VPN into the office from home without needing to configure a separate piece of software for each person.

  • Kernel Space

    • Test Driving GNU Hurd, With Benchmarks Against Linux

      Last week there was a GNU Hurd status update, which generated a fair amount of attention as it stated there are plans for a Debian GNU/Hurd release in conjunction with Debian “Wheezy” when it’s out in late 2012 or early 2013. After being in development for more than 20 years, the Hurd is finally taking some shape. The Debian GNU/Hurd installer for Wheezy is even now working, which I tried out and ended up porting the Phoronix Test Suite to GNU Hurd. In this article is a brief look at Debian GNU/Hurd along with the first-ever benchmarks of Debian GNU/Hurd against Debian GNU/Linux.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Missing Functionality From The Linux Graphics Drivers

        While NVIDIA yesterday released a new Linux driver, it was quick to be pointed out in our forums that NVIDIA Optimus Technology still is not officially supported under Linux. But that’s not all that’s missing from their proprietary driver.

        Also still missing is support for Fermi overclocking (overclocking the GeForce 400/500 series). Last August is when I mentioned that it was missing and NVIDIA confirmed they had it disabled in their Linux driver (but not under Windows) for all Fermi hardware. When testing out the NVIDIA GeForce GT 520 last week, I noticed the support was still missing when trying to enable CoolBits. I asked NVIDIA’s Andy Ritger for a status update concerning Fermi overclocking on Linux, but he hasn’t yet responded to that message from five days ago.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Seven Great Enlightenment (DR17) Themes
    • Get Over The Old UIs

      Anyway, it had the KDE 3.5X series desktop environment as default. I thought, cool! I’ll like this probably. Then I paused. You all should know that pause, right? It’s the one where our mind is actually being rational for a minute and starts spinning trying to figure something out. Then it’s almost as if a bell gets rung once and the answer’s there. My mind was telling me that it remembered that the last time I looked at a distribution using the KDE 3.5X series I thought it looked antiquated at best.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Community Keynote Interview: Stuart Jarvis

        Stuart: At the moment I mainly try to keep KDE’s marketing in good shape. This means working with the promo team to keep up to date with happenings in our community, and spreading the word about events through articles on the official KDE news site, KDE.News. It also means getting involved in writing press releases about the latest software news and doing a bit of people management to get things done on time.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Slackware Family

      • Slackware Turns 18

        Slackware 1.0 was released by Patrick Volkerding exactly 18 years ago in 16 July 1993 in an official release when he was still a student. At that time, it was distributed under 24 disks (yes, floppy disks) and it only has two series, A and X. No one will ever thought that it’s now being the oldest maintained Linux distribution up to now Applause

      • A Weekend with Kongoni 2011

        My experience with this new CD was a bit worrisome at the beginning. I inserted it and let its automatic boot go…but got the unpleasant error message that the live CD was not found. Since I had nothing else to do, I rebooted the computer and pressed “enter” before the 10 seconds for the automatic boot were over.

      • Learning to Slack with Kongoni!

        Some days ago, I had said that I was bored since my multi-boot systems were working perfectly. I also said that I wanted to try Kongoni GNU/Linux.

        Since booting the live CD wasn’t enough, my quest for knowledge led me to actually installing this Slackware-based distro. Three were my main motivations to add yet another head to my hepta-boot desktop computer:

        1. I have not tried a purely Libre distro.

        2. I’ve always wanted to try Slackware, but I feel I’m not yet up to it.

        3. I felt it was about time for me to see if I could do well with a text-based installation.

    • Mandrake Family

      • PCLinuxOS Phoenix XFCE Edition 2011-07 – Final is here

        PCLinuxOS Phoenix Edition 2011-07 is now available for download, PCLinuxOS Phoenix Edition 2011-07 features the following updates.

      • A first look at PCLinuxOS 2011.6

        Under the hood PCLinuxOS is still a good distribution. It has a nice installer, the KDE desktop has pretty good defaults and it comes with a wide selection of useful software. It’s the presentation that I feel could use some improvement. I don’t mean the grey theme — it’s not my favourite colour, but at least it’s not purple. No, by presentation I mean, for example, the default icons on the desktop. Most users aren’t going to regularly access their firewall configuration, their localization settings or the LibreOffice Manager. Most users will want to access their web browser and e-mail client on a daily basis, but those icons aren’t on the desktop or the quick-launch bar. The application menu does quite a bit of nesting in some places, even if the sub-menu has just one item in it. Synaptic is a capable package manager, but it’s not as newcomer-friendly as Mageia’s software manager. What it boils down to is that, if we put Mageia beside PCLinuxOS, I think an argument can be made that the latter is more appealing from a technical, “let’s tweak the settings,” point of view, but loses points in presentation and user-friendliness.

      • PCLinuxOS 2011.6 – You don’t give me love
      • Mageia 2 Release Details Revealed

        After an extensive discussion with the community on the Mageia developmental mailing list, Anne Nicolas revealed the results concerning Mageia release and support cycles as well as the release schedule for Mageia 2. The consensus was to use basically the same cycle used in Mageia 1.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 7 might come in a GNU Hurd version

        As you all might be aware Debian is a popular Linux distribution that forms the basis of many other more popular distributions such as Ubuntu. Hurd on the other hand is something you might not be aware of.

        While Linux is most popularly considered a family of operating systems, Free Software Foundations purists reserve that name for the kernel, or the very core of the operating system. They prefer to call the resultant distribution of kernel and software running on the kernel as GNU/Linux since it is a combination of GNU software and the Linux kernel. Debian is thus known as Debian GNU/Linux.

      • Debian invites you to Debian Day

        During Debian Day, the conference opens its doors to anyone interested in finding out more about Debian and Free Software, inviting enthusiasts, users, and developers to a full day of talks on several subjects — such as Free Software in government and enterprise, and involvement — as well as a string of talks about the Debian Project and operating system.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical Finally Hiring Consumer Marketing Expert!

            Canonical has been doing ads focused on business and it’s business products for at last a few months. But the question was when would they finally start advertising Ubuntu itself? Well that time is getting very near. On July 14th Canonical posted this job ad on it’s career portal.

          • Ubuntu 11.10 Says Goodbye to the ‘Me Menu’

            The ‘Me Menu’ will no longer be installed by default in Ubuntu 11.10.

          • Leaky Unity in Oneiric

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Sometimes things don’t go all that well (Linux Mint 11) (Harry Potter was better)

              I installed Linux Mint 11 last night. And this morning. And again this morning. I think I’m done now.

              I’ve been using Linux Mint for several years and just loving it. It’s the most stable, most newbie-friendly, most media friendly Linux I know. Release 7 was terrific, 8 even better — and there I happily stayed until I began having browser woes. I knew there could be hassles jumping three versions forward, but Mint is so friendly I wasn’t worried.

              Ha!

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • 80 “Funnest” Open Source Applications

    In the summer, we like to take a break from all the serious open source applications that we usually cover and take a look at some apps that are just plain fun.

    This year, we’ve updated our list of the “funnest” open source applications with more games than ever before. In fact, the 2011 list has 74 games in all, including 46 that we’ve never featured before. At the end, we’ve also included a few apps that aren’t really games, but are still pretty fun.

    Notably, the majority of the apps on this list run on multiple platforms, so you should be able to find plenty of games for your system, no matter which operating system you run.

    If you’d like to call attention to a great open source game that isn’t on our list, please make a note in the comments section below.

  • The open source “shallow fork” approach to pre-deployment

    The not-for-profit Outercurve Foundation’s systems infrastructure and integration gallery has launched a new developer competition.

    The open source group’s work with “CoApp” is focused on this community driven “package management system” for open source applications on the Windows Platform.

  • Control Points and Steering Mechanisms in Open Source Software Projects

    Most commercial software today depends on open source software. The commercial software might be using an underlying open source platform, or it might be incorporating open source components, or it might be provided as a commercial open source product itself. Whichever the case, the software firm behind the commercial software needs to ensure that its interests are met by the open source software projects it depends on. This article shows how commercial software firms manage or steer open source software projects to meet their business needs.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Firefox world loses Web dev guru to Chrome

        For years, an extension called Firebug has been a powerful tool that kept Web programmers loyal to Firefox.

        But now, as browser makers add their own tools geared to attract those who build Web sites and applications, the lead Firebug programmer has taken a job with Chrome, CNET has learned.

        “Monday, I start work on next-gen Web dev tools at Google on the Chrome browser team. Consequently I will no longer be contributing routinely to the development and maintenance of Firebug for Firefox,” John J. Barton told members of a Firebug mailing list yesterday.

      • Mozilla Challenges Google: Open Source Chrome Isn’t Good Enough

        There are people who claim that Mozilla does not have the guts to openly challenge Google in the same way the company attacked Microsoft in the mid-2000s. Mozilla’s official competitive strategy can be described as almost being mushy in a time when the company needs to be more aggressive than ever to make its case. But the company gets more confident and its chairman has just told us that, while Google is the lesser of two evils, Firefox will have to evolve to sustain its role as the Robin Hood of the open web.

    • Mozilla

      • At last, the Bird became the Thunderbird

        Well, today I want to talk about Thunderbird 5, a recent update to the popular Email client from Mozilla that I believe is worth talking about.

      • Firefox Is Going 64-Bit: What You Need To Know

        Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler determined that figuring out the 64-bit confusion surrounding Firefox will be “near the top” of his to-do list this summer and fall. One could conclude that Mozilla has no idea at this point what people are expecting from a 64-bit version of Firefox, so Dotzler is asking for some feedback. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of 64-bit – are you ready for a 64-bit Firefox?

      • Firefox at 64-bit: Do You Care?

        Mozilla has begun collecting feedback on what appears to be a more serious approach to move Firefox for Windows from 32 to 64 bit.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Discordant Notes Surround IBM’s Symphony Move

      It was just early June, of course, when Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) decided to donate OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation rather than to LibreOffice — a move at least one blogger equated with a “spiteful child, smashing their toys instead of sharing.”

      Well, so much for any kind of lasting quiet since then. Last week, none other than IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that it was donating its Lotus Symphony office suite to the Apache OpenOffice.org project, thus throwing its own weight behind the Oracle-affiliated project as well.

    • OpenOffice.org and Symphony: Did IBM Do the Right Thing?

      Along with that sigh of relief, however, red flags began to fly in the FOSS blogosphere because IBM had a hand in Oracle’s decision. Experience has taught open sourcers to be suspicious, and there was plenty of fodder here to make one wary of Big Blue’s possible motives, mostly revolving around IBM Lotus Symphony, the freeware suite that utilizes OpenOffice code. Since the permissive open source Apache License allows a commingling with proprietary code in a way strictly forbidden by the GPL and its derivatives, it was feared that OOo would be neglected as IBM and Oracle focused their efforts on proprietary add-ons to create non-free versions of OpenOffice.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Interview with MusicBrainz developer Kuno Woudt
    • Creative Commons Chief Technology Officer

      The Chief Technology Officer manages all aspects of the company’s technology infrastructure and provides strong leadership in setting the overall technology direction and goals for the organization. Responsibilities are twofold. First, directly managing the staff responsible for supporting the technology needs of staff; managing the organization’s intranet and internet services; directing the organization’s varied development projects; ongoing technical oversight of the company’s products and services; and solving the most challenging of technology development problems facing the organization. Second, the CTO is a visionary, looking beyond the existing curve with respect to opportunities and innovations that Creative Commons can explore and embrace to remain timely and relevant to its broad constituency.

  • Licensing

    • Harmony 1.0 Reflections

      The month before the Harmony 1.0 release was quiet, and I was starting to wonder if anyone other than the drafting group was even paying attention any more. So, I was pleasantly surprised to see the posts start to appear last week after the Monday release. Some more positive, some more negative, but the most important thing right now is that people are engaging with Harmony, thinking through what the agreement templates mean, and how they fit in the general FLOSS ecosystem. So far I’ve read posts by: Bradley Kuhn, Dave Neary, Jon Corbet, Mark Webbink, Richard Fontana (part 1 & part 2), Simon Phipps, Stephen Walli and a Slashdot mention (glad for links in the comments if you come across others). I’ve observed a few common themes, so I thought it might be useful to take a step back and ponder through them.

    • Why I would not sign a Harmony Agreement

      Jos blog post today reminded me that I had a look at the Harmony Agreements and tried to decide for me whether I would consider to sign such a CA. To make it short: signing a Harmony Copyright Assignment is for me unacceptable. I think it could be valuable to others why I would not sign such an agreement. As a note: I have signed the KDE Fiduciary Licensing Agreement, so I am not in general opposed to licensing agreements.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • What I’ve learned from (nearly!) a year of open source

      Whilst Agnitio v1.0 was only released 7 months ago I announced that I was writing the tool at SecurityBSides Las Vegas last year and that it would be “free for anyone to download and use” (see slides 49, 50, 51 and 53 here). That particular statement makes me think of one thing in particular I learned and I will cover later in this post.

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • ALEC and the Tobacco Industry

      The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is an influential, under-the-radar organization that facilitates collaboration between many of the most powerful corporations in America and state-level legislative representatives. Elected officials then introduce legislation approved by corporations in state houses across the U.S., without disclosing that the bills were pre-approved by corporations on ALEC task forces.

    • Common Cause Alleges ALEC Violates Non-Profit Status

      Common Cause has asked the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) for possibly violating its tax-exempt status. The request came one day after the Center for Media and Democracy unveiled “ALEC Exposed,” a website uncovering more than 800 model bills created by the corporate-funded organization.

    • ALEC Hotels

      ALEC’s Annual Meetings and Task Force Summits are held in some of the nation’s top travel destinations, at swanky hotels where state legislators and corporate executives enjoy lavish accommodations and exclusive excursions. A registration form for ALEC’s 21st Annual Meeting in Tampa, Florida invited members to “come and experience endless sandy beaches, sunny days, beautiful sunsets and the cool gulf breezes,” at the posh Hyatt Regency, which features more than 17 golf courses within 35 minutes of the hotel. In fact, a golf tournament and clinic sponsored by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company was one of the event’s top activities.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Lawsuit Accuses 70-Year-Old Retired Widow of Downloading Porn via BitTorrent

        We’re fairly certain if you take a random sample of folks in their 70s and ask them to describe what BitTorrent is, the majority of them will tell you to hush up because you’re interrupting Matlock. Even folks much younger who aren’t entrenched in the tech world aren’t likely to be all that familiar with BitTorrent, but they’re all fair game for sue-happy firms looking to score quick settlements for big media.

Reader’s Picks

07.16.11

Links 16/7/2011: PCLinuxOS Reviews, Kororaa 15 Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 11:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report – Operating Systems
  • Windows Got Me Lost, Linux Came To Rescue On The Roads Of Brussels

    Not again Microsoft. Incidents like these were one of the reasons why I threw your crappy products out of my door and migrated to GNU/Linux.

    Well, now I did not know where was I. After two stops, the bus came to a halt. It was not the NATO stop. The driver said something in French, which meant that’s the last stop. I told him that I wanted to go to NATO. He said bus won’t go there. The message was supposed to flash on the display, but Microsoft Windows screwed it. My appointment was at 12 and it was already 11.50. I was 3 Km away from the NATO HQ.

  • Graphics Stack and Compiz

    • NVIDIA 275.19 Linux Driver Published

      While NVIDIA is already in the middle of working on the 280 driver series and there’s been a public beta of that, this Friday morning NVIDIA has released a new 275.xx stable release. While this release is still tagged in the 275 series, it does contain a few worthwhile fixes and new hardware enablement.

    • Maximized windows which must be larger than the screen size

      There’s been an odd case that I’ve not seen one window manager be able to handle correctly. It’s the case where you are required to resize a window to be smaller than than it’s defined minimum size, because you are tiling it, semi-maximizing it or maximizing it. Basically attempting to fit a big object into a small space because the user requested it.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • The Dark Side of Distrohopping

      As fun as distrohopping is, it’s not all wine and roses. There’s a dark side to never being able to stay with one distro and that’s what I’ll talk about in this column.

    • New Releases

      • Introducing Linvo GNU/Linux

        A new distribution flew onto my radar today and thought it might be interesting to take a quick look. Linvo is Bulgarian hailed distribution based on Slackware featuring the GNOME 2.32 desktop. Yesterday, developers released Linvo 2010.12.6.

        I say new because it’s new to me and the Distrowatch database, although its version numbers go back to 2009.0. News posts on the Website start March 13, 2009 with what appears to be the first release on March 28, 2009.

      • Kongoni GNU/Linux 2011 (Firefly) released.

        I’m very happy to announce the stable release of Kongoni 2011 (codename Firefly). Most bugs and glitches have been removed and we can say now that Kongoni is ready for the stable release.

        Some extensive work has went into the Live CD and initrd. We have moved to initramfs for the Live CD, udev is used now and there is no limitation in space when creating the initramfs as we dropped dd and mkfs.ext2 in favor of cpio. This also should make the Live CD a bit faster and much more reliable.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS 2011.6 KDE review

        PCLinuxOS has all the tools it needs to be one of the best Linux or BSD desktop distributions, but for some reason, they always manage to miss the mark. It is understandable that for a community distribution, the community decides it wants, but at some point, the developer(s) should take a stand and educate the less knowledgeable member if the community why certain ideas should not be implemented. Comments posted by some of its members here should give you an indication of what I am trying to convey.

      • PCLinuxOS 2011.07 MiniMe KDE Released

    • Gentoo Family

      • Pardus 2011.1: Turkish Delight

        I have written in my previous review that Pardus is OS which deserves very close attention.

      • Gentoaster – Week 7 progress report

        This week has been excellent in terms of progress. The Gearman worker/client is now complete, and can be used to queue builds. I’ve tested this setup on a few different machines and it seems pretty solid as long as you configure the paths correctly. Also, as part of this, builds will now isolate all their activity into a single directory. It’s not chrooted as such, like I said in my previous progress report, because the use of binaries from the host is required. I’m not entirely sure chrooting makes any sense after giving it some more thought, because they’d still be root and they could break back out of the chroot anyway. However, all input to this tool is heavily sanitised before it reaches Gearman, so the potential threats should be dealt with before they even reach the build tool.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Up Close & Personal with Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst

        BY going through some famous books about magic, James Whitehurst hopes to find a spell that can create an even closer bond between him and his nine-year-old twins, Jack and Emma. He finished reading the whole Harry Potter series last year in the hope that he could share more with his son and daughter, whom he says are so fascinated with the fantasy tales of the boy wizard.

        You see, while Whitehurst is passionate about his job, nothing is more important to him than his family. “Family always comes first,” the president and chief executive officer of Red Hat Inc, the world’s leading provider of Linux and open-source solutions for the Internet, tells StarBizWeek.

      • Fedora

        • Kororaa 15 (Squirt) Beta released

          The first beta release of Kororaa 15 (codename “Squirt”) has hit the mirrors, and is available for download, in 32 and 64 bit with KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Toshiba Thrive: Boxy, but it’s good.

          That’s what I thought when I heard Toshiba was introducing its own tablet, another “me too” in the Android space, the Thrive.

          I mean, we’ve already got the Motorola XOOM, the Acer Iconia A500, the Asus Transformer, and now the ultra-sexy and thin Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which is generally regarded as the front-runner out of all of these devices and the only one of this group that currently presents any real challenge to Apple’s iPad 2.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Kogan Agora PRO review

        The Kogan Agora PRO is a lightweight budget laptop with 11.6in screen and Ubuntu 11.04 operating system.

      • 12.1-inch netbook runs Ubuntu on dual-core Atom

        Asus released a netbook that comes with an unusually large 12.1-inch screen and — at least in some markets — Ubuntu Linux. The Eee PC 1215P includes a dual-core Atom N570 processor, 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, up to 2GB of RAM and 320GB of hard disk storage, six hours’ battery life, and optional Bluetooth, the company says.

      • ASUS Preinstalls GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • A Grab Bag of Unsung Open Source Gems
  • Project Harmony, Open Hardware License and Open Hardware Repository

    First, Project Harmony has released version 1.0 of its contributor agreement templates. Version 1.0 includes a rather nifty Agreement Selector tool that generates both individual and entity agreements for your project. Project Harmony does not come down on the side of license-in versus assignment-in; its primary benefit is to assure standardization of language regardless of approach. Check it out.

  • How I learned to stop Architecture and love Free Software

    When I was finishing high school I was destined to continue my academic life studying Architecture. I took special art classes to get prepared to study one of the fine arts I always loved, and so I did, I entered the architectural school at my hometown in the Canary Islands.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • The safest web browser?

      Surely not a difficult question to answer? Just look at the statistics for security vulnerabilities- especially those that were exploited by malware “in the wild” before a patch was issued and how long those vulnerabilities remained unpatched.

    • Browser Wars: Usage stats for June 2011

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Webian Shell Takes On Google Chrome OS

        Anyone who was around during the original browser wars between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape might remember the ill-fated ‘webtops’ that both Microsoft and Netscape attempted to create. In both cases, each company tried to build a kind of operating system shell that centered around the Web browser as the main or only interface.

        These early webtops were both horrible failures that basically set the whole idea of browser-as-operating system back 10 years. But maybe they were just way ahead of their time. Because now, two of the browser leaders are once again pushing browser-only interfaces.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • OpenOffice: Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Bride

      If yesterday’s announcement by IBM is any indication, the answer is “not likely,” despite the fact that Big Blue’s latest commitment to OpenOffice, on its surface, sounds like good news. The reason? It’s too little, and too late. Here’s why.

      First, let’s start with the announcement. As reported in various venues (e.g., ComputerWorld, The Register and Heise Online), IBM will be donating the standalone source code for its ODF-compliant Lotus Symphony office suite to the Apache Foundation. As you’ll recall, Oracle became the owner of OpenOffice after acquiring Sun Microsystems. After issuing various mixed signals, Oracle officially decommitted to supporting OpenOffice, and contributed the code in early June (but not the trademark) to the Apache Foundation, where it can now be downloaded under version 2.0 of the permissive Apache License.

    • Google’s Java Jam

      Oracle’s lawsuit against Google is “a test case really for whether or not Oracle will be able to monetize Java in the mobile space,” according to IDC’s Al Hilwa. Developers use Java for the attractive tool that they know and love at the top end of the technology. But whether at the bottom end of the technology it breaks any of the rules with the way the Dalvik engine works is what is being tested.

    • OpenOffice.org in Apache: The Next Step

      A few weeks ago, I wrote about what submitting OOo to Apache meant for the various parties involved. In particular, I said “IBM can continue to develop Symphony, with a licence it’s happy with.”

  • Programming

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