10.11.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Hooray! The Airbus finally brought me to the land where law is taken slightly more seriously than in Russia. With great responsibility, however, usually comes great power, and a lot of absolutely legal video streaming services are available in the U.S. Moreover, my corporate-sponsored temporary apartment has a large, like, 30-inch TV, and it would be a sin to just let it collect dust in silence.
No, I couldn’t just watch cable TV! The very idea that I watch something on a predefined schedule is not appealing to me. I’d have to spend money on a TiVo or something that records TV shows anyway. And what about DVDs and feature movies? TV shows isn’t the only thing I watch, by the way. And what about shows that are not airing? how to watch older seasons? No, TV is for the weak.
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If, one day, we really are all going to be carted around in driverless cars from the likes of Google and others, then we may as well have some apps on board to keep us occupied. Today, the Linux Foundation announced that it was throwing its hat into the car-apps ring, with the creation of the Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup. Early sign-ups among car companies include Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan and Toyota. Tech companies include Harman, Intel, NEC, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Texas Instruments, along with Tizen, the Linux-based platform backed by Samsung and Intel.
The Linux Foundation is not exactly an early mover here. We’ve already seen “car of the future” odes from the likes of Ford and Honda – not to mention Google — even some suggestions that Apple is working on concepts, too. The point with the Linux news, it seems, is to try to keep it relevant in that wider picture of development, and to try impart some standards in the process.
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Linux went from being a cool personal hack in a bedroom to software that would eventually change world just over 21 years ago when Linus sent out his famous “Hello everybody out there using minix” message that invited people to join in. As I noted last month, that open, collaborative approach was really quite new and proved key to the uptake and development of Linux.
That was possible because the internet was sufficiently widely available for enough people to join Linus’ distributed team of volunteers. In other words, the rise of free software is intimately bound up with the internet. Indeed, the rapid take-off of Linux compared with the rather slower progress of the GNU Project is probably due, at least in part, to the fact that the latter could not take global connectivity for granted. It was thanks to this that Richard Stallman was able to live off the sales of GNU Emacs, which he sent out on tapes.
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Linux, unfortunately has been long surrounded by myths. Despite the speedy adoption of Linux as mainstream operating systems for enterprises particularly, the common misconceptions about Linux seem to continue. The post enlists five traditional myths about Linux Security and attempts to debunk each; discussing real facts.
There exist mainly two schools of thoughts regarding security of Linux. One group that assumes ‘ Linux is Virus Proof’ and the other, advocating a completely contrary thought i.e. ‘Linux is more insecure (when compared to contenders), as it makes source code available to everyone’. Let’s investigate in detail.
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Desktop
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Everyone agrees that desktop Linux has become more diverse in the last couple of years. But how diverse? And how are the dethroned dominant environments responding?
Those are questions that nobody is asking — although they probably should.
So far, 2012 has yet to see one of those magazine polls that are our main — although imperfect — indications of what desktop environments users prefer. However, with a little digging, a few indicators can be unearthed.
Several indicators are available from Distrowatch, the site that attempts to track distributions.
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Like an evangelist, I frequently tell people about a free Windows-like alternative that is faster and more secure than Microsoft’s OS. The most common response I get is, “Linux, what’s that?”
Often I also hear, “I can’t switch systems. I am too busy to start from scratch with all my files.” Or, “I’m too busy to go back and forth between two sets of files, one on my Windows computer and the other in my new Linux set up.”
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I didn’t blog yesterday. I’m sorry. I know the internets were in a frenzy arguing over whether I quit or gave up or what have you, but I didn’t. I was just busy doing boring stuff that wasn’t worth blogging about.
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CAINE, acronym for Computer Aided INvestigative Environment, is a Linux distribution specially crafted for performing computer (digital) forensics. It started life as the graduate thesis of Giancarlo Giustini at the Information Engineering Department of the University of Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy. It is now a project of Digital Forensics for Inter-department Center for Research on Security (CRIS) at the same university.
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Server
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IBM is expanding its portfolio of PureSystems today with new offerings for transactions, analytics and operational analytics.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: More jury confusion on the Apple vs. Samsung case. Blue Systems sponsors KWin. Linux kernel 3.6 is out, and 3.7 is going to be ARM-unified. You can now shutdown Gnome 3.6 and the French adore le logiciel libre. Plus, hear our discoveries, our rants and raves, and your own opinions in the Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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While it will still be a while before the Linux 3.7 kernel is even released, the Linux 3.8 kernel may end up having better Nouveau driver re-clocking support for the common “NV50″ NVIDIA GPU family.
In the forum discussion surrounding the significant underlying Nouveau driver changes found in Linux 3.7, Nouveau’s Martin Peres wrote, “No luck for this kernel, but I think I’m not that far from delivering good reclocking support for the nv50 family. Maybe next kernel?” His comments were in response to a Phoronix reader asking about dynamic re-clocking and voltage changes.
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This week The Linux Foundation is hosting its first-ever event in South Korea, the Korea Linux Forum in the Gangnam District. This was planned long before PSY’s Gangnam-style videowent viral but who are we not to do our part in contributing to this craze and honoring our host location?
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Graphics Stack
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While the Linux 3.7-rc1 kernel has not even been released yet, most of the feature pulls have now made their way into the mainline Linux kernel tree. Here are some of the first benchmarks of the Linux 3.7 kernel to see if anything has changed for the Intel x86_64 Linux performance with this very exciting kernel.
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Applications
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MyPaint is an easy to use open source digital painting application that also works with Wacom tablets supporting pressure susceptibility.
The application is designed with simplicity in mind, while also ensuring a seamless and undistracted drawing experience for the artist. It is all about you and the canvas, with the interface showing only when needed.
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Modern operating systems lay so much emphasis on perfecting the desktop environment. Both Windows and OS X incorporate the desktop environment directly into the operating system. Windows 8 extends this further by adding touch technologies to the desktop environment. Apple has spent 12 years enhancing Aqua, the graphical user interface and visual theme of Mac OS X.
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Task management programs are commonplace in our busy lives, but it seems that every system lacks something. Google Tasks is nice, but it lacks the features of a more robust task management system. Remember the Milk is nice, but it charges for some of its features. Many standalone task management programs are great, but they don’t sync between devices.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Rigs of Rods is one of the most amazing open source simulation projects that we reviewed a while ago. It is distinguished for its vehicle plethora and the realism of the vehicles body movement and damage.
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The Humble Indi Bundle has released it’s new offering – a bundle of ebooks where the customer pays what they want. It’s an an idea that has proved successful in the past and also highlighted that far from being “freetards” as some Microsoft Advocates would suggest, Linux users are willing to spend more money than Windows.
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Sometimes, in our busy lives, it is necessary to cut ourselves a little slack and play a quick game just for fun. After all, we cannot procrastinate for a long time!
Sometimes, our gaming needs are not very demanding: we don’t want great graphics, involving plots, or adrenaline-releasing games…especially when we can barely spare from five to ten minutes to gaming.
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Yesterday (following their monthly release cycle) a new alpha from Unvanqished was released. For those with bad short term memory: Unvanquished is trying to revitalize the RTS/FPS hybrid Tremulous.
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In this post I’ll show you 4 NEW RPG games, they are all developed from the scratch to run on our beloved Penguin: Questverse, Hale, Dawn, Flare and Arakion
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Desktop Environments
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Snowlinux 3.1 is a bug fix release for GNOME, XFCE and E17. It solves many bugs and it also brings many features to the users. CTRL_ALT_Backspace restarts the x-server if it has hung up. Click on tap was activated and lots of bugs were solved.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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With the push towards Wayland and other various advancements being desired out of KDE’s compositing window manager, Martin Gräßlin is joining Blue Systems to further work on KWin.
Beginning a new blog post by Martin, “Very soon after joining the KWin development team almost five years ago, I realized that KWin would need at least one full time developer. It is one of the most important parts for the user experience of the KDE Plasma Workspaces and we have seen quite often that important changes for the user experience could not be implemented due to lack of manpower.”
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KDE developer Martin Gräßlin has announced that he will be joining Blue Systems to continue his work on KWin window manager for the KDE Plasma Desktop full time. The developer says that soon after joining the KWin development team nearly five years ago, he realised that the project would eventually need at least one full time developer. “With the upcoming required changes like Qt 5 and Wayland the need for developers is increasing,” noted Gräßlin.
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Citing the benefits of a KDE project the site says: Being part of the international KDE community conveys certain benefits and rights.
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Amarok, popular KDE music manager, is turning 10 years old this month and the project is taking this opportunity to review the last year and look head to the future. Amarok 3 will debut at FOSDEM next February, and planning has already begun. So, it’s time for the team to raise some money.
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I’ve recently replaced Unity, on the little MSI Netbook, that I wrote about recently after installing Ubuntu/Unity on it.
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I haven’t gotten the chance to do a review in a while. It’s a long weekend, so I finally do have some more free time now, and I need to take a break from the otherwise endless stream of work, so I’m taking a look at Cinnarch now.
Cinnarch is a relatively new distribution on the scene. True to its name, it is based on Arch Linux and uses GNOME 3/Cinnamon as its primary DE. At first I figured that the packaging would be fairly stock, but as it turns out (and as you will see later in this post), there are a few other mild customizations present as well.
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For many newcomers to Linux, Zorin has a deal maker that is unmatched in any other Linux distribution. It comes with several integrated tools that let you modify Zorin’s appearance. Look Changer lets you decide how the desktop looks and acts. You can tweak the look and feel even more with Splash Screen Manager, Internet Browser Manager and Background Plus.
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New Releases
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Version 3.0 of the Zentyal small business server is now available; the new version upgrades the underlying operating system and integrates Samba 4. Aimed at small and medium businesses (SMBs), Zentyal is a Linux-based server distribution that can act as a Gateway, Unified Threat Manager, Office Server, Infrastructure Manager, or Unified Communications Server, or as a combination of these. The system can also be extended using over 30 modules, such as HTTP Proxy, firewall and the Zarafa collaboration platform.
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon 10, the latest release of the Gentoo-derived Linux distribution, introduces a new edition of the operating system with version 1.4.1 of the MATE desktop, a fork of the older 2.x branch of GNOME. For the first time, Sabayon also provides Amazon Machine Images (AMI) to deploy the distribution on Amazon’s EC2 cloud platform.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has expanded its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) ecosystem by collaborating with Zend, the PHP Company.
The new Zend Server for Red Hat OpenShift gives professional-grade PHP development and runtime environment, alongside the benefits of the OpenShift PaaS. PHP applications deployed to Zend Server for OpenShift can access built-in debugging, monitoring and application performance tuning capabilities, making application development and management easier.
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Red Hat is still only previewing its OpenShift platform cloud, and one of the reasons why is because it had not yet inked a deal with Zend Technologies, the commercial entity that is to the PHP programming language as Linux Torvalds and Red Hat together are to the Linux operating system.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced six appointments across the Asia Pacific region to support market interest in open source technologies and the company‘s growth plans across the region.
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Fedora
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Fedora 18 Beta codenamed Beefy Miracle is going to be delayed by another week. This is mainly because of unfinished/non-testable nature of its build. The decision was taken in Fedora 18 Beta Change Deadline readiness meeting and its expected that this delay will make the beta release possible soon.
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Naming suggestions are now open for Fedora 19, which is scheduled to be released sometime next year. The upcoming release, Fedora 18 Beefy Miracle is going to release end November 2012. Fedora maintains a 6 month release cycle while older releases get unsupported after a period of 1.5 years.
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That was a popular exchange at the Fedora booth during this year’s Ohio LinuxFest. The iconic Model B Raspberry Pi, running Fedora Remix and proudly displaying the Beefy Miracle fireworks on a XFCE desktop, was drawing lots of attention.
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Debian Family
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As we all know ‘Waldorf’ is the testing branch of CrunchBang Linux based on the upcoming Debian ‘Wheezy’. Two weeks ago I wrote a shortish post about how the latest testing image failed to install, and promptly an update got released with the release announcement pointing to a known bug in the Debian installer. So, time to try again now that we’re back home.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It’s almost half year since the last major release of Ubuntu Tweak. In 0.7.x release, I polished the UI of Ubuntu Tweak, and also brought back the App Center & Source Center that you miss.
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Canonical has opened up donations for the Ubuntu project and users who do not have much time to contribute to the project in kind, now can help it in cash. The donation mechanism is similar to the Humble Bundle, where users will be able to select the exact usage of the donations.
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Allison Randal is such a brilliant speaker that she could keep us interested in anything, for hours.
Fortunately, when our sister title Linux Format met her she was talking about the best ways to engage the next wave of Ubuntu users to join in and become good citizens.
As technical architect of Ubuntu, it’s her job to, as she puts it: “champion the community’s vision for Ubuntu; to facilitate conversations as we integrate multiple perspectives and balance multiple needs; to ask good questions that help us find better solutions.”
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A couple weeks ago, I reviewed the book Ubuntu Made Easy, and a few days after that, I thought “why not do an interview to the authors”? So, here it is. Rickford Grant and Phil Bull both agreed on making it. I also got a few questions from you on Reddit, which got asked here.
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Jono Bacon, the community manager for Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux, believes in open-source software, but even more, he believes in the ability of open-source communities to help move code forward to drive success for enterprises. By getting their developers more involved in open-source communities, Bacon believes that enterprises will reap far more than they sow by benefiting from better code that helps solve their business challenges. That’s why, he argues, more enterprises today are correctly hiring community managers to nurture and grow such efforts. Bacon was in San Francisco Oct. 8 to speak on the subject at the Liferay Symposium. There he sat down with eWEEK’s Todd R. Weiss to answer questions about the state of open- source software in 2012 and why participation in open-source communities should be taken even more seriously by enterprises. Bacon authored a book on the topic, “The Art of Community,” which was updated in a second edition this past May by O’Reilly Media, and is the founder of the Community Leadership Summit. Begun in 2009, it’s been held each year in Portland, Ore., just before the O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON).
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The new Shopping lens that received so much publicity in the last month, both positive and negative, could be illegal in Europe.
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Ubuntu 12.10 ‘Quantal Quetzal’ is due for release in approximately one week. But before we start preparing a full review of the new version, we thought we’d give Unixmen readers a small preview of what we should all expect from the ‘Quantal Quetzal’.
I’ve spent some time with the latest Beta 2 in the last few days. And I must admit, the past few releases of Ubuntu I have found to be rather uninspiring and I think there are much better Linux based operating systems currently available. Yet, I think 12.10 could be the version that gets back my respect for Ubuntu.
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Just a few weeks after Canonical integrated Amazon product results into Unity’s Dash in an effort to generate more money through affiliate/referral revenue, they have taken another step today to try to increase their cash flow.
Ubuntu has long accepted donations for the project, but now they have made it more apparent with changes to the Ubuntu web-site.
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Ubuntu is a free operating system, free as in speech and free as in beer. And Canonical are keen to reinforce this Richard Stallman ethos as they announce a new way for users to optionally contribute to Canonical before they download the desktop version of Ubuntu.
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Here’s a look at how the open-source Intel Linux graphics performance has changed in Ubuntu 12.10 when comparing benchmarks results of Ubuntu Quantal development snapshots from the end of August to the beginning of October.
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Flavours and Variants
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With the 2.1.0 update release, the developers of the minimal desktop distribution Bodhi Linux have introduced a new file manager, improved the login manager and given users four new themes for their desktop. Bodhi Linux is based on the Enlightenment E17 desktop and the latest version drops the PCManFM file manager in favour of the desktop’s own alternative called Enlightenment File Manager (EFM).
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Debian gave birth to Ubuntu and Ubuntu, in turn, gave birth to hundreds of other distros like Linux Mint, Pinguy OS, Zorin, Crunchbang, Pear OS, Luninux, OS4, Super OS, Ultimate OS, Kiwi, etc. to name a few apart from the usual Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Lubuntu. When I read the release news of AriOS 4.0 on distrowatch, I was expecting something in the similar lines – just another remix of Ubuntu with plenty of necessary and unnecessary applications and other stuff! Needless to say, once you have a Linux Mint, do you really need any other Ubuntu derivative? These days, Linux Mint is my benchmark after my experiment with 20 odd Linux distros and I start comparing any distro I test with Linux Mint. If Linux Mint is 100, where do others lie?
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The open source AllJoyn framework is designed to enable peer-to-peer communication between mobile devices without the need for servers to be involved in the process. The Apache 2.0 licensed framework supports near field communication (NFC), Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and can be used for a variety of tasks. Accordingly, there are several different application technologies for the Peer-2-Peer App Challenge, including Best Gaming App, Best Educational App, Best Social App and others. Qualcomm is providing prizes with a total value of $170,000. The application deadline is 27 December.
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has performed testing on the effects of overclocking and overvolting, and is now providing what it calls a “turbo mode” for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer. While the Foundation has always supported these kinds of modifications, they have in the past voided the customer’s warranty for the product – a sticky bit in the BCM2835 chip makes sure this operation cannot be performed undetected. The turbo mode option enables users to get more performance out of their Raspberry Pis without having to be afraid of affecting their warranty.
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Phones
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HP bet big on the smartphone world when it purchased Palm, but the company fell flat on its face and webOS failed to take off. The reasons for the failure are numerous, but the new CEO Meg Whitman is smart enough to realize it can’t simply abandon the market entirely. In an interview with Fox Business, she said that HP “ultimately has to offer a smartphone.”
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Android
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French publication “Le Figaro “says that LG Nexus 4 is scheduled for a worldwide release on October 29. With Nexus rumors at its peak, this news has certainly been the most delighting of all for all the Nexus fans.
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More significantly, the battery is claimed to last much longer than on earlier phones featuring Medfield chips. Battery life has long been a challenge for Atom-based mobile devices, but if Motorola’s claims are true, the issue may be moot. The Razr i and its 2000mAh battery is claimed to offer up to 20 hours of use — almost as long as the long-lasting Razr Maxx and 40 percent longer than the iPhone 4S.
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Apple iPhones aren’t seeing the uptake in some markets due to price. Android devices are more affordable and therefore more accessible.
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HTC will not be making a Windows 8/RT-based tablet, but that might turn out to be a good thing for competition as now more details surface about an upcoming HTC Flyer 2, the second generation of HTC’s 7-inch Android tablet.
The second-gen Flyer is said to feature a 7-inch screen with a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels and the same gorgeous anodized aluminum body like the HTC One S, according to a source in the know
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According to him, Android is now at 480 million install base and is growing at a rate of 1.3 million per day.
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MOGA, the first complete mobile gaming system for Android devices, will be available in more than 7,000 stores in the U.S. starting on October 21, 2012.
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Telecom minister Kapil Sibal hopes that the Aakash tablet will be launched on 11th November. Speaking at the Economic Editor’s Conference, he said, “Hopefully on November 11, you will see the President talking to 20,000 students across the nation who will have their hands on Aakash”.
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Sprint is lining up four new 4G LTE Android phones – Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, LG Optimus G, LG Mach and Sprint Plug-in-Connect Tri-mode USB. The company is holding back on pricing and availability for the moment.
Features to attract your interest include, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 is the first tablet to combine the benefits of Sprint 3G and 4G LTEand comes with a 10.1-inch touchscreen display, Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich and a 1.5GHz dual-core processor.
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The release of Android 4.1.2 to AOSP was announced by Jean-Baptiste Queru, (Technical Lead, Android Open Source Project, Google) today via Android Building Group. This will just be an incremental update over Android 4.1.1, as stated by the update notification “improves performance and stability and fixes bugs.” Nexus 7 tablets will be the first to receive these updatess.
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Things are heating up on the open source gaming front. The buzz continues over the open source Ouya gaming platform. A Los Angeles-based project, Ouya is billed as “a new kind of video game console” and famously pulled down millions in funding on Kickstarter. As Ouya’s plans ramp up, there are also new details emerging about Steam for Linux, which looks like it may include many more advanced games than previously thought.
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MetroPCS today announced yet another affordable 4G LTE Android with the debut of the Coolpad Quattro 4G. As the second smartphone of its kind to cost less that $150, the handset runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread and features a 1GHz processor. Additional details include a 4-inch touch display, a 3.2-megapixel camera, front-facing VGA camera, and your standard fare of connectivities.
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Huawei announced at IFA that they’ve got a 7-inch tablet for those of you with eye for both fashion and function. Called the MediaPad 7 Lite, the device runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and features a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, a 7-inch 1024×600 IPS display, 1GB RAM, 8GB internal storage, and pair (3.2-megapixel rear, .3-megapixel front-facing) of cameras.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Today, I discovered that the Quiros-Tanzi Foundation, the NGO that handles the XO computers of OLPC, launched its first TV campaign to promote the goal of distributing the inexpensive computers. The TV ad features a simple concept: children are afraid of a hideous creature called “The Browser,” who can find them anywhere. The point of the ad is that children should not see technology as a monster. Interestingly, this 2009 video proves that even adults ignore what a browser is!
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The new tablet, which has disadvantages and advantages when compared with the Google Nexus 7, is clearly priced as a reaction to that and other recent devices – the last Acer seven-incher launched at £300.
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Labeling desktops, laptops, and tablets all as personal computers, the ACSI gave the category a grade of 80 out of 100. That proved a 2.6 percent gain over the 78 score earned last year and in 2010. Though some may disagree with the tagging of tablets as PCs, the iPad and its brethren were partly responsible for the bump in satisfaction among computer buyers.
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This week may belong to Amazon and whatever information the mega-retailer decides to drop on our heads tomorrow at its press conference in Santa Monica, but Barnes & Noble’s apparently won’t be letting the Kindle maker hog the spotlight for too long.
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A 10 inch tablet from Google is on its way, presumably the Nexus 10. CNET has learned from Ricard Shim (analyst at NPD DisplayDearch), that Google will partner with Samsung to produce this device and it is going to be a high end device compared to the $199 Nexus 7 or rumored $99 Nexus tablet.
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The blockbuster Android Tablet, Nexus 7 from Google has added another jewel to its crown. Nexus 7 by Asus has won the T3 Gadget Awards for “Tablet of the Year” as well as the “Gadget of the Year.
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The Verge has obtained images of what appears to be the next version of the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s Android-based tablet that’s expected to be announced next week, following news that the current model is “sold out.” We’re being told that a “pair” of Fires is likely — a 7- and a 10-incher — though it remains unclear whether both models will be introduced at the same time. We’re not sure which model we’re looking at here, but the scale of the keyboard suggests that seven inches is more likely.
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At Synnex National Conference, scores of VARs last week discovered open source business solutions from Digium, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and Open-Xchange. Many of those channel partners investigated Asterisk (an IP PBX), unified communications, virtualization and cloud-based email solutions that leverage open source at the core. This certainly is not Synnex’s (NYSE: SNX) first move to promote open source business partners. But it may be the most successful effort yet. Here’s why.
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The developers at OpenGeo worked on improving the server side of their geodata platform in version 3.0 of the OpenGeo Suite to make it a more comprehensive platform for processing spatial data on the web. Features include a OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) which allows geospatial processing to be run against the GeoServer, rendering transformations for cartography and support for serverside scripting in Python and JavaScript.
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst used his company’s Boston user summit this June to explain the core concept behind open source innovation and Computer Weekly reported on the former Delta Airlines chief’s comments at that time.
Whitehurst reminded us that it was only 100 years between the invention of the ‘autolathe’ machine to manufacture “standard components parts” in physical engineering such as the standard screw and, then, subsequently, the invention of the combustion engine and the jet plane.
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NoteCase Pro’s forte is organizing notes in a sensible, tree-like system. Note-taking is not confined to data you manually enter. Rather, it stores scanned images and customizable text formatting for fonts. These include bold, italic, strike-through, text and background color. One of the most useful features is the ability to embed pictures in the text note.
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For all the freedom promised by cloud computing, businesses may be really looking at less choice and more constraint than ever before. Whether that happens is the technology industry’s next great battleground.
On one side are large incumbent tech providers like Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, who already have broad portfolios of technology and deep corporate relationships after years of selling products. On the other are younger companies, whose products and services were built for cloud computing and thus may offer more innovative approaches.
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Events
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Registrations are now open for India’s one of the largest conferences on free software and open source. The normal entry fee is Rs 2500, but you can get it at early bird discount of Rs 1500 till October 21st.
The event will be held in Bangalore, India from November 29th to December first. If you are looking to attend this event, this will be a good time to purchase your tickets and save a lot.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of the popular and free web browser, Firefox. This version comes with a developer toolbar that will make web developer’s life even easier.
Firefox makes developing for the Web faster and easier with a unique Developer Command Line. The new tool provides easy keyboard control over Firefox Developer Tools and is intuitive, completing commands and parameters for you.
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Mozilla’s Firefox 16 open source web browser is now generally available and with it comes more goodies for developers.
That’s right. While Firefox has long positioned itself as browser for users, the focus since moving to the rapid release train cycle has clearly shifted – towards developers. I personally think that’s a good thing because it’s not something that any other major browser vendor does.
The Mozilla focus on developers means that developers will use Firefox more than other browsers. If developers use it more, I suppose that the prevailing notion is that they will also be more prone to recommend it to others, thus feeding a virtuous cycle of referrals and future adoption.
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Mozilla has uploaded a few minutes ago, October 9th, the final packages of the Mozilla Firefox 16.0 web browser for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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After a bumpy start, Oracle’s stewardship of Java has steadily improved, except for the Google mess and a feckless JCP.
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CMS
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The recently released Joomla 3.0 upgrade will be a treat for web content producers that want to improve the functionality for mobile users.
Most notably, version 3.0 leverages Bootstrap, Twitters’ tool collection for creating websites and web applications, for ntaively optimizing how content is displayed on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.
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Education
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Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) is a landlocked country located in Southern Africa. For many years, it was regarded as the breadbasket of Africa. But since Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980, Robert Mugabe has been the leader, and the fate of the country has largely been tied to him and his policies.
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BSD
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A new version of DragonFlyBSD 3.2 is expected by month’s end and it will possess several new features.
DragonFlyBSD 3.2 was branched this morning as the developers of this BSD operating system prepare to release the new version on the 22nd of October. The branching announcement was made by Justin Sherrill today on the project’s mailing list.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We are pleased to announce the availability of GNU Xnee 3.14
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Software freedom is not just about software, it’s also about the hardware it runs on. The Free Software Foundation has launched the “Respects Your Freedom” computer hardware product certification program to encourage the production of hardware which respects user’s freedom.
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Project Releases
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The OISF development team is proud to announce Suricata 1.4beta2. This is the second beta release for the upcoming 1.4 version.
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Public Services/Government
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Malaysia continues to promote and to implement FLOSS in government. Adoptions of FLOSS on servers is widespread. Adoptions of FLOSS on the desktop are ramping up. The latest figures show 33872 seats of OpenOffice.org.
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For twelve years now, the administration of Vieira do Minho, a municipality in the north of Portugal, is using open source wherever possible. “These IT solutions are flexible, easy to study, test and switch”, says António Rebelo, head of the IT department. “It keeps us free from IT vendors and, because of the lower costs, results in a more sustainable IT infrastructure.”
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Openness/Sharing
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The Humble Bundle Project is now limited to games alone. While the Humble Bundle 6 finished successfully with raising over $ 2 million, the Humble Bundle team has released another Humble Bundle, but this time, with digital ebooks.
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Our Beat Making Lab is applying for an Open Art grant, which would allow us to start development on our dream: open source beat making software we are calling PAMOJA, which means oneness or solidarity.
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Programming
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The prominence and pervasiveness of open source software in cloud computing is something I’ve researched and written about quite a bit. I’ve also discussed how open source software is a key component and catalyst for the devops trend that blends application development and deployment via IT operations. Now I’m seeing the same effect from open source software yet again in a disruptive trend: polyglot programming.
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Standards/Consortia
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The W3C has announced the alpha release of Web Platform Docs (docs.webplatform.org), a new site which it hopes will become a comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation. Such documentation has been been available, but scattered over many sites, some of which have been less up to date or less informative than they should be over how elements of HTML5 and CSS work across browsers, operating systems and devices.
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Tech heavyweights Apple, Adobe, Google, HP, Microsoft and many others have joined forces and launched a new resource – the Web Platform in a bid to create a “definitive resource” for all open Web technologies.
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Last week Tim Cushing wrote about the hugely-worrying new “cybercrime” law passed in the Philippines that seemed likely to criminalize all kinds of everyday online activities. As an article on Radio Australia’s site reports, the Philippines’ highest court has now stepped in after being petitioned to block the legislation…
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Privacy
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Jim Killock, who is an invited expert on the W3C panel for Do Not Track (DNT), welcomed Neelie Kroes’ demands for DNT to be rich and meaningful.
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Civil Rights
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The Supreme Court refused to hear a case on Tuesday that holds telecom companies accountable for letting the National Security Agency spy on unknowing Americans without a warrant. Dating back to 2006 when the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation first filed the class-action lawsuit, the case accuses AT&T of providing the NSA with customers’ personal information — phone calls, emails and web browsing history — without seeking a court order. Verizon and Sprint are also mentioned. The plaintiff, former AT&T technician Mark Klein, even provided internal documentation that showed evidence of the NSA surveilling Americans’ Internet traffic from a secret room in San Francisco. That case, Hepting v. AT&T, has now been thrown out, and the Supreme Court didn’t even comment on why.
This sound very important! After all, doesn’t the Constitution protect American citizens from being spied on by their government without their knowledge or consent? Well, yes and no. Warrantless wiretapping sounds invasive and terrible, sure, but it’s actually technically legal under a 2008 law that retroactively granted immunity to all of the telecom companies that were spying on Americans at the government’s behest. Unsurprisingly, the practice can be traced back to President George W. Bush’s anti-terrorism program following the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. Once things calmed down and people actually started suing the government for eavesdropping on everyday Americans, Congress passed the FISA Amendements Act. (FISA stands for the original law, the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act.) That law is currently up for renewal in Congress.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Internet Association, a lobbying group made up of some of the Web’s most powerful companies, has officially launched.
The organization today announced that it’s now operating in Washington, D.C. under the leadership of president and CEO Michael Beckerman. First announced earlier this year, the Internet Association is backed by 14 giants of the Web, including Amazon, AOL, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and others. The companies hope to have their voices heard in Washington, Beckerman says.
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Brussels, 10 October 2012 – The EU Commission has confirmed that ACTA-like criminal sanctions are currently present in CETA, the Canada-EU Trade Agreement. This attempt by the EU executive to impose repression of online communications through the backdoor is unacceptable. La Quadrature du Net calls on EU citizens to demand their governments remove copyright provisions from CETA during the upcoming round of negotiations1; failing to do so, the final text would have to be opposed as a whole.
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10.09.12
Posted in News Roundup at 1:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Torvalds merged code in last week that will fundamentally change the way ARM is handled in Linux.
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A recent focus on the problem of software patents raises the question: could Linux be sued off the face of the Earth?
The not-so-random thought came up this weekend when I read the New York Time’s special report, “The Patent, Used as Sword.” This article, which I highly recommend you read when you get a chance, comprehensively examines the broad landscape of software patents without really coming down too hard on one side or the other. It does, I should add, leave you with the sense that something is wonky with this whole idea that billions can be spent and companies can go down just because one side’s lawyers are quicker on the draw than others.
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Desktop
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he last week saw the number of distros with 1000 or more hits per day increase from 9 to 15 compared to the last month. What happened is that the total hits/day for the top 100 distros increased 9%, but the hits/day for the top 15 increased 20%. This means the world is becoming more focussed on the popular distros. A consolidation of distros is happening.
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The new form of personal computing sits in the cloud. As computer users rely more and more on Internet services, and spend most of their computing time working online, it makes sense that operating systems would begin to focus usability around the Internet browser. We see that this exactly the case with Chrome OS as they have built an entire operating system platform and corresponding hardware systems around the Google’s Chrome browser. The XPUD operating system is actually designed to run completely within the browser. The Peppermint distro is a sleek, streamlined system that relies completely on cloud based apps and web services while maintaining something of a traditional desktop look and feel.
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Kernel Space
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ARM processors and Linux have been married for years. You name an ARM-based device—smartphones, Raspberry Pi, tablets—and you’ll find Linux running beside it. It’s not been a happy marriage though. For every ARM system on a chip (SoC) there had to be a different Linux spin. With the forthcoming Linux 3.7 kernel we’re on our way to seeing all ARM processors working with a single Linux kernel.
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It’s not even Friday yet, but there’s more awkward entertainment today at the expense of Linux kernel trolls. The latest in the series of weird messages hitting the Linux kernel mailing list is a proposal to drop support for all CPU architectures but ARM and a new “invisible” file-system feature.
There’s been a string of messages on the kernel mailing list lately from alleged trolls requesting various functionality be removed from the mainline kernel or other weird changes that don’t make too much common sense: Linux doesn’t need x86 32-bit support, Linux doesn’t need keyboard support, and then last Friday was Linux doesn’t need multi-monitor, multi-user, Ethernet, and optical drive support.
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A new installation image for Arch Linux is now available that sees the distribution’s default boot process switch from the previous System V implementation to systemd for booting the live system. Because of the change, initscripts are no longer available on the live system. However, the developers note that they are still installed by default, but this “is likely to change in the near future”.
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A brief status report was shared concerning supporting the Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) feature of HDMI under Linux.
Back at the Linux Plumbers Conference in August, the Linux developers meeting in San Diego decided to create a CEC bus with CEC clients that is independent of the Video 4 Linux 2 and DRM APIs, so that both those sub-systems along with other “clients” could use this HDMI feature.
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Graphics Stack
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The second DRM pull request was submitted and subsequently pulled for the Linux 3.7 kernel.
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The eighth alpha release of Unvanquished was released this weekend with some major changes to its graphics renderer.
This open-source first person shooter that is a very promising non-commercial title with impressive graphics (similar to Xonotic) continues to see new alpha releases on a monthly basis.
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Mesa 9.0 is the latest development version of the open source implementation of OpenGL’s specification for rendering interactive 3D graphics. The new release sets out to implement version 3.1 of the OpenGL API for selected hardware; the developers do note that the software reported version will vary dependant upon what is supported by the hardware and drivers.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Steam for Linux has already entered beta phase and soon, users will be able to evaluate it on their computers. Its time more and more games are getting ported to Linux, along with Left For The Dead. Among in the list are some popular titles like World of Goo, Trine 2 and Serious Sam 3.
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Valve has promised to launch Steam for Linux before the end of 2012, and last month it was confirmed that an external beta would be happening in October. It’s limited to 1,000 people, but the point is Valve seems to be on track to meet the release target of this year.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Work on version 2 of Rekonq, the popular QtWebKit-based web-browser focusing upon the KDE desktop, is now underway.
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I wrote a quickie on Kdenlive last time and wanted to do a more thorough job this month because this is one killer video editor. If you like to make movies and show them to your friends, or even need software for a presentation, Kdenlive is your candidate. If you want to create something that looks professional, I can tell you that while it may not stand as tall as Final Cut Pro, Kdenlive comes quite close to Sony Vegas Pro or Adobe Premiere.
It doesn’t matter if you have a Web cam, a mobile phone camera or a high-definition camera; Kdenlive is ready with all the punches. The software supports so many formats that it’s not possible for me to give the list without missing out something (for the full list, visit kdenlive.org/about-kdenlive/audio-and-video-formats).
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KDE users love Plasmoids, the small little widgets that you can put in your desktop or system tray. Well the default KDE comes with Plasmoids for RSS Feed, System monitor, comic strip reader to even a web browser! So why not a plasmoid for Apper updates?
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Since it began more than 15 years ago, the international KDE community has grown bigger and more diverse than could have been imagined at the beginning. These forces created a need for clarity about what pulls us together as a community. Over the last six months or so, we have examined this critical issue, moving beyond assumptions and what has been taken for granted. In a rigorous project led by Kévin Ottens, many thoughts were distilled down to essentials. Today, we present the result of that effort: the KDE Manifesto.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome 3.6 has been released, and developers are now busy with the next Gnome release, Gnome 3.8. We have compiled a list of new apps that may ship with the next Gnome release, along with some handy screenshot for each. For time to time, we will keep you updated about development of these apps, most of which are currently in design phase.
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Gnome developers are working to integrate the web services in your desktop, and Google, Facebook and Windows Live! have already been tightly integrated. This means you can access your Google and Windows Live! mails, documents, photos and more right from default Gnome apps. This makes working easier, specially if you use cloud services more than desktop ones.
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Newer Gnome apps are set to make our lives even easier. Earlier we covered a few apps that will debut in Gnome 3.8. Gnome Reads is another new app that is being designed to make ebook reading easier, both online and offline.
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When a woGue reader sent an email to us suggesting that we should try AriOS I wasn’t very optimistic. The description was showing the same trodden approach that we saw in so many other projects that is “an Ubuntu based distribution that offers a more ready to use Ubuntu”
AriOS is really not just simply one of those distributions… It is a truly carefully tailored operating system that offers exactly everything you need, combined with elegance and a sense of opulence!
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Two Slackware derivates recently made it known that they are still alive and developing. One released their first new work in over three years. The other is an update to a release now a year old. AgiliaLinux is known to release once a year, but most thought Draco was pushing up daisies.
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With so many Linux distributions out there, it can be difficult to keep tabs on all the updates that come out over the course of an average week or month.
I’ve featured a few key arrivals over the past few months–including PCLinuxOS 2012.08, OpenSUSE 12.2, the Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1, and Sabayon 10–but several others have appeared in short order as well, making the challenge more difficult than ever.
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Arch Linux is now one of the most popular Linux distributions out there and that is for a good reason. It is the distribution with the largest number of available packages, the most recent/up-to-date packages, the rolling release nature, one of the most complete and comprehensive documentations and one of the biggest userbases out there (that is certainly the most knowledgeable too).
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I am new to Linux and about 3 months ago tried Zorin 5.2 Core. I was very impressed with a Linux based operating system and decided to make my laptop a dual boot with Win7. I wanted a very stable Debian distro. I found Solus OS which seemed to have what I was looking for in a distro.
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New Releases
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Parted Magic lead developer Patrick Verner has released an update to his specialist Linux distribution for hard disk partitioning and duplication that includes a new version of the Gnome PARTition EDitor (GParted) with LVM support. Newly supported LVM features include the ability to create, check, move and delete physical volumes; resizing is currently only partially supported.
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Want to use Cinnamon on Arch Linux? Then you might be interested in the latest Arch spin-off, Cinnarch
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Red Hat Family
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The new Zend Server for Red Hat OpenShift offering provides a professional-grade PHP development and runtime environment, delivered with the benefits of the OpenShift PaaS. PHP applications deployed to Zend Server for OpenShift can access built-in debugging, monitoring and application performance tuning capabilities, making application development and management easier.
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Every year, Marbles in downtown Raleigh holds their annual Big Idea Forum. The lunchtime discussion aims to highlight ways corporate and community leaders shape organizations and people through inspiration and innovation.
Jim Whitehurst, President & CEO of Red Hat, Inc., opened up to Ron Wilder, a business author and executive coach, this past Wednesday, October 3rd, to talk about his big idea.
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Fedora
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It’s a topic that has been brought up before, but there’s still a number of users and developers interested in seeing a “Software Center” / “App Store” for Fedora Linux.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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While LLVMpipe may be a different story, when using hardware-accelerated graphics drivers with the recently released Unity 6.8 desktop, the performance doesn’t change much. For at least one driver, there’s even a new OpenGL performance regression under certain workloads. Here’s some test results of Unity 6.6 vs. Unity 6.8 on the Radeon and Nouveau drivers.
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The Ubuntu juggernaut is moving ahead and huge improvements and brand new features keeps pouring in. Every new Ubuntu release cycle gives you the impression that, things have really been improved and enough features have been added, until you start seeing the changes being done in the next release cycle. Case in point is the latest Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases. Lets see what makes Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal one of our favorite releases till date. 23 things new in Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal.
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Guess what? Two weeks ahead of the final release of Ubuntu 12.10, Canonical decided to open up their shop with DVDs for the next major release of Ubuntu.
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Customizing Unity is easy and fun, specially because of its ever growing set of lenses, with new ones coming out almost everyday. Previously we had featured a Python Doc search lens for developers, and this time, Unity GitHub lens will also come handy for devs to search GitHub repos and users.
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Ubuntu 12.10 release is coming closer and Canonical has just opened up a new section in its store for Ubuntu 12.10 DVDs. While you can download the .iso file for free and burn it into a disk, it becomes handy to keep a DVD with you, specially if you want to install it on multiple computers and show it off to your friends.
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A few of the new features will be in the installer (see the state of manual LVM and full disk encryption configuration in Ubuntu’s Ubiquity), while most will be on the running desktop environment itself. If you have been following the development of this next edition of Ubuntu, especially via the blog of Jono Bacon (see On The Recent Dash Improvements), I am sure you must be familiar with the issue surrounding the search results that the system throws in front of you when you use the Dash to search for content.
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Canonical has come under some heavy criticism in the past couple of weeks with its controversial decision to include Amazon shopping results in the Ubuntu Dash search results. I have to admit, when I first read of the news I was also enraged with a certain amount of anger and honestly couldn’t believe that our beloved Ubuntu had fallen victim to the commercial trap. The more I thought about the issue the more accepting I become of the concept. Allow me to delve a little deeper in to my thoughts and explain to you what I mean.
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Ubuntu Software Center (USC) other than making software installation easy, it is more important because it helps us to discover Apps and the see their ratings and comments from people that they already have used them.
Unfortunately USC is only available in Ubuntu and Ubuntu spins and derivatives, but apparently it seems there is a web-interface (somewhere hidden) that everyone can access no matter the distro. Even with Windows and Mac.
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Ubuntu Tweak is a open-source teaking tool for Ubuntu that allows you to customize your Ubuntu desktop the way you like. Apart from regular tweaks, the updated version Ubuntu Tweak 0.8.0 comes with a native app store.
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Learning some basic methods to navigate and customize the launcher can make it an efficient tool that is used to complete daily tasks. With several icons located in the launcher, reordering the applications may reduce your time searching for your desired program to execute.
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In an effort to appease users, Canonical has pushed out some updates to its Unity interface in the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 release that include a simple turn-off function for the controversial Amazon.com “lens” feature. But will this be enough to calm an unruly community in near revolt over the company’s original plans to push this functionality on users?
The “fix” for the much-berated Amazon feature comes among a slew of updates, most of them simple bug fixes, that landed with version 6.8 of Unity. It was uploaded into the development version of Ubuntu 12.10 Oct. 5.
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Looking back at the progress of Ubuntu over the years, including the various off-shoot distributions based on it, I cannot help but be amazed. I find myself amazed at the improvements made to the desktop, both in usability and new features.
But sadly, some of these improvements mean that slower performing PCs will be left out in the cold.
In this article, I’ll discuss what Ubuntu is doing to make using the Unity desktop more difficult for older PCs, examine whether or not this matters and talk about options are for all of us going forward.
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FXI has announced that the Cstick Cotton Candy any screen microcomputer development platform has passed CE and FCC certification and is now available. It allows any Intel processor based laptop or PC with a USB connection to be used as a thin client to the Android or Linux Ubuntu operating systems running on the Cotton Candy.
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Raspberry Pi, a $25 hackable credit card sized computer, is taking leaps in development and is becoming a hot bed for experimentation. Earlier, we had seen people using Raspberry Pi for different innovations such as shooting photos from space or for controlling home equipment, but this time, a hacker has used a Raspberry Pi to make a perfect beer brewing controller.
A few small commercial breweries were already using Raspberry Pi for automation, but Elco (creator of BrewPi) has open sourced the code and has made it available for the community. The BrewPi website has detailed instructions that will allow you to set you your own cheap brewery at home.
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Phones
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Jolla Tides, a Jolla blog posted a poll on October 1 asking the users which kind of device they like and going by the results till now it seems MeeGo users want a QWERTY keyboard instead of a full Touchscreen only device. Till now 46.73 % respondents voted for QWERTY design whereas only 29.79% want full Touchscreen.
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Ballnux
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HTC and AT&T’s have announced two new smartphones – the HTC One X+ and HTC One VX. The HTC One X+ is the first smartphone in the U.S. running HTC Sense 4+ on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), while the HTC One VX will be running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)
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Android
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It’s no secret the biggest downside to Android is fragmentation, the dirty F-word that comes with the territory of playing in Google’s open source playground. Fortunately for Android fans, Google’s mobile platform has tremendous upside, but it doesn’t help when handset makers highlight the negatives, as Motorola recently did by reneging on a promise to update all devices to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS).
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Family trees are monstrous wonders of genetic distillation, alternately yielding grotesque and delightful offspring. And, as is nature’s wont, it’s within the strongest of these “carriers” that dominant traits are passed on, ensuring a continued legacy for a specific branch marked by beauty, brains or beastliness. And so the same rings true for the RAZR lineage: a once forgotten, but now revived brand that’s helping to define the new Motorola (as experienced through Verizon). Tucked safely under the protective wing of Google’s guardianship, the manufacturer’s embarking on a wireless renaissance and soldering that second chance at relevance to the Kevlar back of its latest Droid progeny. But as with all litters, there’s bound to be one runt and here that distinction belongs to the Droid RAZR M.
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Apart from reports about new soon to be released Nexus device(s), there are lot of speculations and rumors about new flavor of Android that might be running on it, that is Android 4.2
A source tipped Android and Me regarding the new features that may be expected coming with Android 4.2.
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It seems Google is having some big plans with its Nexus Brand. A source has tipped Android and Me that Google is planning to launch a new Nexus Program. With this program, they want to lure as many manufacturers as they can to make “Nexus” devices. The new devices may not be exactly Nexus “Branded” but more like “Nexus” Certified and will enjoy the “Nexus” benefits.
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We can sense that something big is coming from the world of Google, Android and Nexus. The rumor mill and clue hunting has marked the beginning of Nexus Fever. Recent evidences suggest that Android 4.2 on a Motorola Nexus phone and tablet may be on the cards. People behind Android Police have done some “Sherlock Holmes” stuff and extracted some pretty interesting information from server logs.
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No one wants laptop-style keyboard accessories for their phones. Or, rather, no one wants Motorola Mobility’s version. The Google-owned handset maker last week admitted it had canned the product.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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I love my Nexus 7, just wish it had more space as my 16GB is full after I downloaded 5-6 HD games which consume around 2GB each. If there was a 64GB model I would have bought that one, alas 16GB was the most I could get at that time. Now, the rumors have it that there may exist a 32GB Nexus 7. According to Droid-Life ‘Carephone Warehouse’s internal systems revealed the possibility of a 32GB Nexus 7′.
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Do you remember WebTop from Motorola? For people who don’t have any clue what I am talking about, the WebTop concept was introduced by Motorola with Atrix 4G which allowed the phone to be docked into a special laptop accessory, activate a custom version of Linux to act as the brain of the laptop. It can be easily guessed the device was a commercial failure and Motorola is against devoting any more resources towards its development.
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Few weeks back I visited Auroville to meet my friends from BlueLight. BlueLight is a non for profit shop which does all the consulting related to IT and Open Source software. They manage infrastructure for many organizations inside Auroville. They have a diverse team with people from Russia, Gemany, India, France and other countries. They manage a Cyber Cafe which is running on Ubuntu and I was surprised to see the internet savvy users had no issue in using Linux.
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It struck me this morning when I was reading up about this cool little open source operating system called Contiki, a very lightweight embedded OS designed to work well with the Internet of Things.
My colleague Rohan Pearce has a great write-up about Contiki over on Techworld Australia, detailing what Contiki and the Internet of Things are and how they work. But the passage that struck me was this one:
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The Hong Kong newspaper, which has 1.3 million page views and about 500,000 people visiting the website each week, approached Catalyst originally as one of four companies it had selected worldwide to invite to tender.
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Most of the buzz around the cloud has centered on infrastructure as a service (IaaS). However, IaaS is no longer good enough. Sure, you can forgo buying servers and run everything virtually on Amazon’s EC2 server farm. So what? You still have to manage it, and to do that you’ll have a growing IT bureaucracy. Companies that want to focus on writing their code and not have to think about application servers at all are now looking to platform as a service (PaaS).
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Events
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Now that Ohio Linux Fest is in the books and now that the only thing really left on the Linux horizon is LISA in San Diego just after Thanksgiving — but then, LISA is not for us mere mortals, but for the hallowed and revered system administrators. So we get to set our sights on Linux/FOSS events for next year.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Reditr is to Reddit what Tweetdeck is to Twitter. And now you can experience it under any GNU/Linux based system thanks to Google Chrome. Today Reditr has made its desktop app available for download. At the moment the app is available for Mac, Windows and Ubuntu. It’s may be disappointing for some users as the app is not yet available for rpm based systems such as Fedora, openSUSE or Mandriva.
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A new stable release of the Google Chrome browser is now available. This version, 22.0.1229.92 fixes a number of stability issues and security venerabilities and also features an updated version of Flash. Google Chrome, and Chromium browser features inbuilt support for flash from version 20.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is in the process of updating all Firefox channels in the coming ways. Firefox 15.0.1 will be updated tomorrow to version 16.0, followed by updates for the browser’s beta, aurora and nightly channels bringing the respective versions of the browser to 17, 18 and 19.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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“I use LibreOffice, and will no longer use OpenOffice,” said Google+ blogger Linux Rants. “Oracle’s heavy-handed attempt at taking it over soured me to the entire project. I realize at this point that it’s been given back to the community, but the damage has been done for me. I moved to LibreOffice as soon as it was available, and have no plans on returning to OpenOffice.”
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For ages I have been convincing people to switch from close source to open source, from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. I have been telling people to ditch the controversial docx format and adopt .odt only to find myself in an embarrassing situation, thanks to Google.
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CMS
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“A content management system (CMS) is a computer program that allows publishing, editing and modifying content on a web site as well as maintenance from a central page. It provides procedures to manage workflow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual steps or automated cascade. The core function of Content Management Systems is to present information on web sites. CMS features vary widely from system to system. Simple systems showcase a handful of features, while other releases, notably enterprise systems, offer more complex and powerful functions.”
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Drupal is one of the most powerful open-source CMS platform available currently, but in spite its power and flexibilty, the software suffers from contributor crisis and unpopularity. In a recent interview to opensource.com, Doug Vann, a training consultant at Drupal community cited brain drain as the main reason preventing widespread adaptation of Drupal.
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BSD
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Following the recent Phoronix news articles about an easy way to try out FreeBSD 10 in its current development state along with Clang becoming the default compiler, there’s been questions raised by Phoronix readers about the FreeBSD ARM support. Simply put, at the moment it’s not in as good of shape as it is for Linux. ARM is considered a “Tier 2″ architecture of FreeBSAD with no official releases or pre-built packages being made by the project.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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There are distros we decline to recommend that offer the user the option of installing only free software. Given that option, a user who values freedom strongly enough, and thinks about the issue, can make those distros respecting her freedom.
A distro that offers that option is clearly better than one that fails to offer that option. But that option does not make the distro ok to recommend in general. After all, most people in our community are not conscious of this issue. We cannot expect most of them to reject nonfree software just because the distro offers a way to do so.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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From time to time, I have the opportunity to speak with someone from EnterpriseDB, a company devoted to bringing the open source PostgreSQL database to organizations of all sizes. The propose of the call was introducing EnterpriseDB’s new Multi-Master Replication (MMR) capability. The conversation then went on to focus on how EnterpriseDB was trying to compete with giants, such as Oracle, to win over decision-makers and database architects.
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Open Hardware
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For the last several years, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. In fact, an Open Source Robotics Foundation is now driving many global efforts to produce next-generation robots and share source code for them. Now, a brand new open source hardware platform created by the University of Bonn’s Team NimbRo performs many specialized functions and can even play soccer.
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In previous articles, we’ve looked at the question of how free are the phones that people use every day, and looked at the theory behind building your own GSM phone network using open source software. Now, in this article we take a look at the sysmoBTS, a small form-factor GSM Base Transceiver Station (BTS) built around these principles and the steps required to configure it to provide a standalone mobile telephone network that is useful for research, development and testing purposes.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Standards do anything but drive the status quo – they enable new devices and networks to become possible that never did before the standards were agreed upon.
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Amazon has announced that developers can now submit apps for distribution later this year in Japan. It’s all part of their plan for developers looking to build, market, and monetize their apps and games.
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Security
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) hired Andrew J. Donohue as managing director in its legal department, deputy general counsel of its asset management division and general counsel of its investment companies group.
Mr. Donohue, who goes by the nickname Buddy, served as director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Investment Management from 2006 to 2010. Most recently, he was a partner at the law firm Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP.
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Censorship
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Yesterday Matthew Woods was given 12 weeks in a youth offenders institution for posting jokes about the missing 5 year old girl April Jones (see Padraig Reidy’s write up of this yesterday on the Index on Censorship blog). Today Azhar Ahmed was given a community order for posting some very stupid and offensive comments about soliders.
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Send this to a friend
10.07.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There are two misconceptions about Linux that have plagued the open source platform from the very beginning. Jack Wallen tries to assuage the doubts of those hesitant to learn something new, user-friendly, and powerful.
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There’s no doubt that demand for IT professionals with Linux skills is growing rapidly, and earlier this year I wrote about a brand-new certification program targeting newcomers to the open source operating system.
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This week’s Linux Top 3 strikes right at the core of Linux with a kernel update, a new release of the world’s first Linux distro and a milestone update of Red Hat MRG.
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Desktop
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I came across Terry through a Linux.com feature that mentioned him as a Linux hero. I was also familiar with his work for Free Software Magazine, so he seemed like a great subject.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Just a little more than two months after the release of version 3.5, Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Sunday unleashed the next new version of the Linux kernel.
Perhaps most notable among several key new features in Linux 3.6 is “hybrid sleep,” a capability much like one that has long been offered by Microsoft’s Windows.
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Have you ever wanted a watch running Linux? If the answer is yes, then you might want to know that the guys from Leikr have made this a real possibility.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman has already sent in the Linux kernel staging driver changes for the Linux 3.7 kernel.
There’s 662 source files changed this time around and more code was added then removed. Highlights for the Linux 3.7 kernel staging area include continued work on xgifb (the frame-buffer driver for XGI graphics cards), minor work and clean-ups on various Android components, Ramster is still being touched, a new Silicom Bypass driver, lots of work on the Comedi Linux driver, work on Ipack, lots of IIO activity, and various other work scattered throughout the kernel’s staging area.
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The perf performance counters sub-system and utility are seeing some mighty improvements with the Linux 3.7 kernel.
Ingo Molnar writes in the merge, “Lots of changes in this cycle as well, with hundreds of commits from over 30 contributors. Most of the activity was on the tooling side.”
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Jon Masters summarises the latest goings-on in the Linux kernel community, including the 2012 Kernel Summit and the closing of the 3.6 merge window
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Linux 3.6 has been officially released, and from most angles it appears to be a lack-luster one, bringing only what Linus calls “solid progress”. Of course like any major kernel release, Kernel 3.6 comes with a bevy of new drivers, optimizations and more. But one features stands out above all the rest, and it’s really a big deal.
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With the Linux 3.7 kernel there is now support for the SPARC-T4 processor that Oracle introduced last year.
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Great news, guys, it was just announced that the upcoming Linux 3.7 kernel will incorporate support for multiple ARM System on Chips (SoCs) platforms.
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Announced this morning on the kernel mailing list was F2FS, a new open-source Linux file-system that comes courtesy of Samsung.
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The pull request for the EXT4 file-system updates targeting the Linux 3.7 kernel were sent in on Friday afternoon by Theodore Ts’o.
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Graphics Stack
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While the main DRM pull request for the Linux 3.7 kernel has yet to be submitted to Linus Torvalds, the Radeon DRM pull for the Linux 3.7 was just sent into David Airlie as the DRM sub-system maintainer.
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While Linux 3.7-rc1 hasn’t even been released yet as the merge window is still open, the Linux 3.7 kernel is exciting and users of the open-source Nouveau driver will be greeted by the Nouveau DRM driver rewrite / code restructuring. Due to the invasive Nouveau work, some early Nouveau tests under the Linux 3.7 kernel were carried out. The 3.7 results were then compared to the earlier Linux 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6 kernel releases.
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Applications
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What’s Gimp3? Simply the port of Gimp 2.8 in GTK 3, or if you prefer the version after the 2.10 version. The look was quick indeed, because Gimp was consuming 100% CPU so I couldn’t check it at all.
I guess that this bug had to do with my compiling and it isn’t a real bug, but it isn’t really matter because all I wanted to see was the theme, which by the way was -by default- the impressive dark Adwaita!
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The most awaited GIMP Magazine has been released. This first issue contains over 40 pages of tutorials, personal experiences, reviews and photos edited with GIMP and is available for free download. Users can also submit their own photos and tutorials. The magazine will release once every three months.
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If you’ve ever taken the time to dig through the vast collection of Linux software titles, you know it’s easy to get lost among them. And with so many pieces of software available, it’s hard to know which ones are worth trying. So to help you out, I created a list of 10 of my favorite lesser-known (but very useful) tools available free for the Linux platform.
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With the advent of Kindle, Nook, and the Apple iPad, many bibliophiles are slowly moving away from paperbacks and hardbound books. Earlier a book lover used to spend hours looking for that perfect book in a rustic library, now they just search for their favorite title on Amazon.com and they can start reading in minutes. Of course, not all are happy with this e-book market, and many authors — though e-books being an established platform– often sneer at this surging new medium of publishing.
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Out of the myriad of utilities that are available for Linux, top is a troubleshooting tool that often comes up in conversation. With good reason, top is a tool that many users frequently turn to. It is is a small open source utility that offers a dynamic real-time view of a running system, allowing users to monitor the processes that are running on a system, and to identify which applications are consuming more resources than they should. Whilst top (and other alternatives) are useful tools to monitor the running processes on a system, functionality does not extend to network activity.
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John the Ripper is a free and Open Source password cracker. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords and It is one of the most popular password testing and breaking programs. It combines a number of password crackers into one package, autodetects password hash types, and includes a customizable cracker. JTR is available in official Ubuntu repositories.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Unvanquished is based upon the open-source id Tech 3 engine with the XReaL rendering improvements to form what they call the OpenWolf engine. There’s a GL3 renderer with this work and they have been working to improve it as of late.
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We have known about Valve’s plans to make Steam more than just about gaming and beginning today you can buy some non-gaming software from the digital distribution client.
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Developers working on the Unvanquished open-source game as a visually impressive project have been advancing their OpenGL 3.x renderer.
Unvanquished is based upon the open-source id Tech 3 engine with the XReaL rendering improvements to form what they call the OpenWolf engine. There’s a GL3 renderer with this work and they have been working to improve it as of late.
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Desktop Environments
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Xfce is a lightweight and distraction free desktop environment with hight customizability and stability. The next major release of Xfce, Xfce is scheduled to happen next March. The previous edition of Xfce used GTK 2, and it was expected that the next major version will use GTK 3. But some of the Xfce developers are not convinced about switching to GTK 3.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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For some, the 1st of the month is something to rejoice about, but unlike checks from the Department of Welfare, KDE brings nothing but good tidings and cheer with this latest series of updates, one day later.
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GNOME Desktop
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The Gnome foundation has announced the second beta release of the Gnome 3.5.91 desktop environment. This codebase will be merge into Gnome 3.6 that is scheduled to be released soon.
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A few days ago I had the great pleasure to interview Allan Day, GNOME designer and enthusiastic contributor.
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The latest version of the GNOME Shell is here, has it addressed the concerns of users, or gone further down the path of simplification?
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Every Detail Matters is an initiative that aims to focus attention on improving specific parts of Gnome 3 that would make a real difference in the user experience.
Designers work alongside developers to identify the bugs that need to be fixed to improve the UX in that area and then assist volunteers in resolving them.
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Every Detail Matters is an initiative that aims to focus attention on improving specific parts of Gnome 3 that would make a real difference in the user experience.
Designers work alongside developers to identify the bugs that need to be fixed to improve the UX in that area and then assist volunteers in resolving them.
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Gnome development is moving forward with leaps and bounds and the developers are trying to create a complete desktop environment to cater every needs of the user. Some new apps that have hit the spotlight are a new software installer for Gnome, Gnome Clocks, Boxes, Calender etc. Among this, developers are working on an app that will allow you to take quick notes and memos – Gnome Notes.
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InSync is a Google Drive client for Linux PCs. Currently its in beta stage but works quite well. InSync previously supported integration with Unity desktop via Ubuntu app indicator, but with this release, it is tightly integrated with Gnome shell and other desktops like KDE and Cinnamon too.
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Gnome 2 had some wonderful tools that allowed you to change and customize the desktop themes the way you like. With the arrival of Gnome 3, among with other killer features, theme customizations was gone. If some user needed to customize his/her desktop theme, he would need to edit the configuration files which is out of capability of most users.
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Dreamlinux has been added to the sad list of the dead distributions today. The Brazilian distribution had released version 1.0 in 2006 and version 5.0 that was released this January was apparently the last one to exist.
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Chakra 2012.08 review, code-named Claire, is the latest stable release of Chakra Linux, a semi-rolling release, desktop-centric, Linux distribution forked from Arch Linux.
Chakra uses the K Desktop Environment (KDE) exclusively, so it is no surprise then that Chakra 2012.08 was named after Claire Lotion, a popular figure in the KDE community who passed away recently.
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I have written before about Zorin OS 6 (http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2012/07/zorin-6-best-operating-system-i-have.html) which is the main Zorin operating system for general everyday use.
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New Releases
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I’m happy to announce AriOS 4.0 Final has been released. Built upon the solid base of ubuntu 12.04 LTS, AriOS comes with GNOME Shell as the default desktop, carefully modified and enhanced using a number of extensions to offer a better and more familiar user experience.
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The Blender Foundation and its online community of developers were proud to announce earlier today, October 3rd, the immediate availability for download of Blender 2.64.
As stated in the release schedule for the 2.6x branch of the software, this version focuses on making a complete and functional VFX Pipeline, which incorporates a better motion tracking, green screen keying, title-based compositing, better color management, and much more.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the October 2012 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat is seeking a new name for its JBoss Application Server project (JBossAS). This is the upstream project that Red Hat uses as the foundation for its commercial product JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. “We believe that the time has come to change the name of our project to better reflect the changes we’ve seen in its reason for existence so far, but also for what’s to come in the future,” said JBoss technical leader Mark Little.
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Red Hat says its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform has evolved to embrace far more than just Java, and to reflect this, it has launched a contest to rename the JBoss Application Server (JBossAS) to something more in line with its current vision of multi-language programming.
In a blog post on Monday, Red Hat Senior Director of Middleware Engineering Mark Little explained that JBossAS is a very different project than what it was when it launched as an open source Java EE application server.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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After reviewing the last version of Ubuntu 12 a few months ago I wasn’t too impressed with the OS in general. Ubuntu kept loyal to its obscure following by not dipping its toes into the real reason Windows and OSX are popular. And I’m happy to say that it has finally broken out of that mold with Linux Ubuntu 12.10.
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Gnome Clocks is the first Gnome 3 application for clock, world clock, alarm and stopwatch. It was developed in Google Summer of Code this year and we have covered a lot of articles on its development. The good news is its finally available in Ubuntu 12.10 and users can have a taste of it right away.
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There have been reports of display issues concerning Linux distributions and Intel’s third generation processors. Codenamed Ivy Bridge, these processors were launched this year, so they are brand new to the market.
Like their predecessors, they come with Intel HD Graphics (integrated graphics), and there have been reports of freezing and lines on the screen (mostly freezing) when running many Linux distributions.
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Flavours and Variants
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Peppermint three is the third major release of Peppermint OS, a lightweight LXDE-based web-oriented Linux distribution built on Ubuntu’s LTS release. The focus of Peppermint are simplicity, stability, elegance, and web integration. In this review I will give my experiences with Peppermint on my netbook, having used it as my sole Linux distribution for the past few months:
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David Tavares has announced a few days ago that the fourth Alpha version of the upcoming Pear Linux 6 operating system is now available for download and testing.
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Last Christmas, my friend Norman Robinson gave me a BeagleBoard-xM computer to play with. The BeagleBoard is a small, single-board, ARM-based computer. As I started to work with it I was impressed with its relative performance and low-power consumption. However, due to its price (approx. $150), I didn’t think it represented a tremendous value. After all, I only paid $199 for by HP Mini netbook at my local computer store and the netbook comes with a case and a keyboard!
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Beer is as old as civilization itself, but beer brewers are still finding new ways of improving the way the stuff is made. Case in point: BrewPi, a fermentation temperature control system powered by the tiny Rapsberry Pi computer that’s taking the tech world by storm.
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With the recent announcement of their Enterprise Pentesting Appliance (EPA), Pwnie Express has once again leveraged the power of open source and the Linux operating system to deliver a world-class security testing platform. Taking all of the software advancements developed on their “Plug” line of devices and combining it with the raw horsepower of a modern x86 computer, the EPA looks like it will make a formidable testing and research platform for serious security analysts.
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Phones
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There’s a bit of a spat that started between Intel and Samsung developers working on the Tizen operating system.
This latest corporate food fight started when Intel’s Arjan van de Ven noticed that the modern C-based Bootchart tool was replaced by a 2005 Java-version of Bootchart that is quite old and carries less features. The commit swapping out the modern Bootchart for the legacy Java Bootchart can be found here and happened back in August. The change was by Samsung’s Kim Kibum.
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When it comes to Open webOS on Android, things seem to progressing rather quickly. Open webOS isn’t even a week old yet, but within a few hours after HP released it, it was already booting on the Galaxy Nexus. Just a couple of days later we saw it booting on the Transformer Prime, and today, the source code for the Galaxy Nexus port has been posted online, so the open source community can officially go nuts.
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As webOS failed to become a competitive mobile operating system, HP acquired now defunct-developer Palm. The former recently announced that webOS would become open source, and the first release of the new software is available.
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Jolla, the company resurrecting the MeeGo mobile OS, has announced $260 million in funding and plans to reveal its first phone soon.
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Android
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While the aging Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” operating system continues to be the most popular version, Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” finally has the 2 percent market share milestone in its sights.
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Clearly, free Android apps can be part of highly productive tablet use.
Okay, sure, maybe you’re not meant to use a tablet for productivity. Tablets are supposed to be for consuming content, for texting, email, and web browsing rather than creating content – or so some people think.
But if you hang out at coffee shops or pass through airports, you only have to count the tablets to know that people are using these devices for serious work, and in growing numbers.
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A small team of cybersecurity researchers have lashed the computers together to form a homebrew computing cluster. They are stacked five levels high, braced in impromptu fashion with metal girders in the event of earthquakes, and woven together with colorful Ethernet cables. They serve as a cyber-Potemkin village — a distributed software simulation that is intended to mimic the behavior of an entire city’s worth of Android smartphones.
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PhoneSuit has introduced a pico projector named “Light Play”. Now you would ask so what is so great about this device? Well, for starters it’s an Android Powered device. If you are still not impressed, then it comes bundled with a keyboard with motion control, which serves as the interface of the device, a tripod and also access to Google Play store, and all that for $500.
When compared to something similar yet different, Samsung Galaxy Beam and its 15 lumen bulb, Light Play seems more practical with its 50 lumens. This device is specifically designed to be projector and therefore looks like one, even though it runs (now old) Android Gingerbread with a custom UI.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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As Tablets become cheaper more Americans are buying, with an increase from 11% to 18% in just 7 months, and it’s mainly Android Tablets, dominated largely by the Kindle Fire. Two in ten, 21%, own a Kindle Fire, 8% the Samsung Galaxy, and the rest, a mix of others.
There has been a drop of 29% in one year of people buying an iPad as the realization hits that Android is more open, competitively priced and doesn’t involve selling your soul to the devil.
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Programmers seem to be prone to dyslexia, or is it that dyslexics are prone to programming? Whatever the cause, an open source dyslexic font is welcome news.
Yes reader, I am dyslexic and I am a programmer – and yes it makes things difficult, especially when I get an attack in the middle of a published article, and variable names are often more variable than they are supposed to be.
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The School of Business and Information Management at Oulu University of Applied Sciences (OUAS) created an open source project management software named OpixProject. The objective was not to create something that would compete with the current project management software, but to place students in realistic problem-solving environments in order to reduce the gap between the concepts covered in the classroom and real-world experiences.
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So how many of you ever thought of installing/configuring an application like WordPress/Drupal and compact Big Data mammoth like Hadoop in less than few clicks?
I am sure everyone of you. A system admin loves automating his work and getting his/her most of the deployments done with some magic scripts. We all are living in the cloud world, its not a buzzword anymore, people are leveraging on it. So I will ask again how will you automate/autoscale/load-balance your entire application ?
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Google has released a general purpose framework for reranking problems, ReFr (Reranker Framework), as open source. Reranking is a technique that is used when there is a model that can offer several scored hypothesised outputs; rerankers can reorder the ranked outputs based on information not available to the original model.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Looks like we weren’t the only Internet users that got fed up with Chrome’s constant crashes, as the latest numbers show its popularity has been waning a smidge. The chart above shows worldwide mobile browser market share over the last 12 months. Back in May Chrome’s adoption numbers just about matched Firefox’s. And, at the end of last year, after a year of huge growth, different numbers found the Google made browser surpassed Firefox as the number two most popular browser, just behind Internet Explorer. But since then—perhaps because of the constant flash crashes, or that hip Internet Explorer campaign—Firefox has regained the No. 2 spot, according to numbers from Net Marketshare. Another way to spin the numbers is that Firefox’s sped up six-week new release schedule attracted more users.
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Mozilla, the organization behind one of the most popular browsers in the world, is busy developing a new mobile operating system of its own. Competing head-on with biggies like Android and iOS, the fledgling smartphone OS attempts to create its own niche by seamlessly blending the power of the web and the mobility of smartphones together. Codenamed Boot to Gecko (or B2G), the open-source project will include applications that will be written in HTML5. These apps can then use the device’s API to run natively with the help of JavaScript.
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Australis is the name of the new default Firefox theme that Mozilla has been working on for quite some time. The decision was made to release the update gradually, with some updates already in the browser, while others still waiting to be delivered to it. One of the next Australis-related updates comes in Firefox 19. You may have already seen how the new tab bar will look like in mock-ups that Mozilla designer Stephen Horlander released a while ago.
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SaaS
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OpenStack. CloudStack. Eucalyptus. There are many open source platforms for building Amazon-like cloud services in your own data center, and they’ve all received an awful lot of attention in recent years. But are real companies actually ready to use them?
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Databases
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Oracle is making waves this week in the database world with not one, but two separate pieces of major database development release news.
On the one hand, Oracle issued an open source MySQL 5.6 release candidate. On the other, the company detailed its plans for the commercial Oracle 12c cloud database.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The course of open-source software does not always run smoothly, especially when the development of software becomes entangled with broader corporate strategies.
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Java developers are not left out though, with improvements such as a new-style breadcrumb navigation bar, new member and hierarchy views, updated hints and refactorings, filtering for “Find Usages” and an “effective” POM editor tab for pom.xml files. Java EE developers will find a JPQL testing tool and enhancements to the REST service development features. FXML and the SceneBuilder are better supported in 7.3 Beta’s JavaFX handling, which is also compatible with JDK 7u6 on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
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CMS
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Today open source content management company MODX is launching a hosted cloud service to commercialize the product, much as Acquia and WordPress.com have done for Drupal and WordPress.
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BSD
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If you have been wanting to try out the FreeBSD 10-CURRENT operating system that’s presently under development, there’s now an easier way.
Rather than needing to install a current FreeBSD release and then upgrade to the “-CURRENT” packages from there, a FreeBSD developer has finally started offering snapshot images of the FreeBSD 10-CURRENT and 9-STABLE versions. Yes, finally ISO snapshots to make it easier to try out the current development state from a clean install.
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Project Releases
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Cross platform video editor Avidemux 2.6 has been released and it features a ton of changes to make the video editing easier and better. All the video editor internals have been rewritten and user will able to experience improved performance in editing and encoding tasks.
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There’s a new release of OpenShot, one of the popular open-source non-linear video editing applications.
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The first release of AppStream-Core is now available, which provides support for creating the AppStream database and accessing it via a GObject-based interface. This basically comes down to the simple creation of “Software Centers” for Linux.
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Open Access/Content
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It’s official. In California, Governor Jerry Brown has signed two bills (SB 1052 and SB 1053) that will provide for the creation of free, openly licensed digital textbooks for the 50 most popular lower-division college courses offered by California colleges. The legislation was introduced by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and passed by the California Senate and Assembly in late August.
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Open Hardware
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A starter kit for the Arduino Uno open-source prototyping board which can be used by professional embedded system engineers and students is available from RS Components, writes Richard Wilson.
The kit contains the components required to start programming with the Arduino Uno board along with a guidebook featuring 15 different projects. There is a definite mechatronics flavour to the kit which includes a motor, servomotor and driver.
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If there was an overarching message from the speakers at last week’s Open Hardware Summit, particularly those in the first morning block, it’s that openness isn’t that critical. It sounds strange coming from a conference whose name starts with “open,” but speaker after speaker talked about hybrids and doing whatever worked, not just doing what was open.
That’s not to say they don’t believe in the power of openness. The first words of Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s opening keynote were the very foundation of open source: “Everything I’ve learned as I built my own business is because people shared what they knew.”
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Programming
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Health/Nutrition
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The rapid adoption of a single weed-killer for the vast majority of crops harvested in the United States has given rise to superweeds and greater pesticide use, a new study suggests. And while crops engineered to manufacture an insect-killing toxin have reduced the use of pesticides in those fields, the emergence of newly resistant insects now threatens to reverse that trend.
Farmers spray the herbicide glyphosate, widely sold under the Monsanto brand Roundup, on fields planted with seeds that are genetically engineered to tolerate the chemical. Found in 1.37 billion acres of corn, soybeans, and cotton planted from 1996 through 2011, this “Roundup Ready” gene was supposed to reduce or eliminate the need to till fields or apply harsher chemicals, making weed control simple, flexible, cheap, and less environmentally taxing.
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Finance
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Now they tell us? More than four years after investors in mortgage-backed securities began filing class actions accusing MBS issuers of deceiving them in offering documents — and at least three years after federal judges began tossing class claims because name plaintiffs didn’t have the requisite standing — the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has redefined standing in MBS class actions. In a 38-page opinion that revives a class action against Goldman Sachs, the appeals court rejected what had been conventional wisdom, finding that a union healthcare fund represented by Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd isn’t limited to claims based on specific offerings it invested in. Instead, wrote Judge Barrington Parker for a panel that also included judges Reena Raggi and Raymond Lohier, the union fund has standing to assert claims related to every certificate backed by mortgages originated by the same lenders that originated the loans backing the notes purchased by the fund.
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Such a policy, which received wider attention during Ben Bernanke’s Congressional questioning last year and was also highlighted this year in a paper delivered at the Jackson Hole conference (Woodford, opens to PDF), has not caught any visible traction with Washington policy makers possibly because it’s seen as either too radical, or simply too new.
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Send this to a friend
10.06.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Sure, you could keep using Windows, although Windows 8 looks worse every time you look at it; or you could buy a Mac for big bucks; or you could buy a Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook starting at $449 and have a great Linux-based desktop that you already know how to use.
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Kernel Space
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the fifth new major Linux kernel release of 2012 late Sunday. The new kernel provides incremental improvements to multiple aspects of the open source operating system.
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Companies will spend $1.4 trillion this year on global R&D to design and build their core products. They don’t have the time or dollars to build the software from scratch that runs in those products. So, they’re turning to Linux and open development. Once upon a time just an operating system for servers, mobile devices and supercomputers, Linux is giving companies $10B in R&D that they can pull from and run with to build everything from cars to custom devices, and much more.
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There is good news being reported today throughout online, print and broadcast newsrooms: The U.S. unemployment rate has dipped to a four-year low to 7.8 percent, and staffing and consulting firm Robert Half International released its 2013 Salary Guide showing technology jobs will see the highest salary increases of any sector in the year ahead.
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Greg KH, the lead Linux kernel developer applauded the file system on his Google+ page, “Sweet, a new Linux file system from Samsung that is faster than existing ones when running on flash storage devices, submitted in a clean, easy-to-apply manner. This will be great for Android-based systems.”
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Applications
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Ebook Managent Application Calibre has been updated to version 0.8.69 and this version comes with better support for Mathematical formulas and custom themes. Users will have the ability to create their own themes (visual styles) and read ebooks according their choice.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The above screenshot shows its current status. The developers are also planning to support other services like Twitter, Identi.ca etc.
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In theory Calligra presents an alternative to the LibreOffice and OpenOffice suites. It goes far beyond the usefulness of lightweight word processors such as Abiword and Kword. In practice Calligra has so much going for it that few things work impressively well. Needed functions were difficult to locate, and the suite has a steep learning curve.
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These updates are the second in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.9 series. 4.9.2 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.9 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.9.1 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.
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KDE had a visible presence at LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego, California, August 29-31. Thanks to the Linux Foundation for donating an exhibit space to KDE.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome Shell, a desktop environment based on top of Gnome 3, will soon have some intelligent search features integrated with it. Current search function in Gnome shell allows one to search for apps and files, however, in future, it may do more. Like a single search can fetch things from your empathy chat log, photos, documents and more.
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The Linux Mint team has announced an updated version of the Cinnamon desktop. This is the first update in Cinnamon 1.6 series. Along with bug fixes, this release also includes some stability enhancements and extension updates. Detailed updates have been given below:
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Gnome developers are working to make a Calender app integrated with the Gnome desktop. Note, the Evolution software suite also features a Calender app, but this software will be separate. This app will also allow you to integrate online calenders like Google, Facebook etc in your desktop. Some screenshots:
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The Gnome foundation had earlier announced plans to develop a Software Center like app for the desktop that will allow easier installation and updates of apps. While the PackageKit is pushed to the back, here are some design ideas put forward in Gnome Live.
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While Linux has tons of web browsers to choose from, little is heard from Gnome’s own web browser – Web. While Gnome 3.6 is going to be released soon and developers pledging to make it the best release ever, its not surprising that this web browser has got tons of changes and more integration with the overall desktop environment.
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Do Linux bloggers enjoy extolling the virtues of their favorite distros? Let’s just say there aren’t superlatives superlative enough for some.
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I recently had the need to build a virtual appliance, a small Linux server that did one thing, and required no interaction. And by small, I mean really small, tiny. After considering the options and searching around a bit, I found the Tiny Core Linux, and when they say tiny, they mean it. The Tiny Core download is only 12MB.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Back in September 2010, when Mageia was born, we had big dreams for our baby distro. It’s great to be able to say: our dreams are coming true!
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Red Hat Family
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We recently started a section in Muktware called Woman Force In Open Source where we interview female executives and developers playing an important role in the Open Source world. This week we are interviewing DeLisa Alexander, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer of Red Hat.
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Although business headlines still tout earnings numbers, many investors have moved past net earnings as a measure of a company’s economic output. That’s because earnings are very often less trustworthy than cash flow, since earnings are more open to manipulation based on dubious judgment calls.
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Held at the Embassy Suites in Cary, the event recognized dozens of companies for their best practices when it comes to keeping employees happy at work. Those honored included the local offices of Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), Rex Healthcare, EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), NetApp (Nasdaq: NTAP), and Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT).
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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You may be weary of all the cloud computing hype, but behind the hype is considerable substance. Cloud technologies are complex, versatile, and revolutionizing the data center. Canonical’s Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) revolutionizes setting up your own cloud infrastructure, bundling everything you need in a sleek integrated package for free.
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From standard feature upgrades to controversial integration with Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), we’ve already surveyed the highlights of the desktop version of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 release. But what do Ubuntu server users have to look forward to Oct. 18? Read on for a round up of the new bells and whistles set to make their debut in the backroom version of one of the world’s most popular open source operating systems.
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Here is an interesting video which shows the evolution of Ubuntu operating system from version 4.10 to 12.10.
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Linux is about people and communities. Much of the development is done by the community itself and most of the support we get is from forums and social sites where people thrive. After a point of using Linux, most of the users like to give something back to the community, though this is not mandatory. Unfortunately, people don’t know where to start and what to do to make themselves a part of this revolution.
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It has been a little while since I last talked about Ubuntu Accomplishments, but there has been ferocious work going on in the project. The new release includes a number of important features and refinements.
The goal of the 0.3 has been to focus on quality. Our intention here was to raise the reliability and quality of the core system and provide another good solid iteration towards a 1.0 release. As such many of the features in this release are not particularly visible, but you can really feel the improvement in quality.
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Jeremy Bicha announced the second beta of Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 yesterday. This release is another step towards bringing the pure Gnome experience to Ubuntu. This beta will definitely please the long time Gnome-Ubuntu users who felt left out when Ubuntu switched to Unity. Now Gnome users have more choices, they can use Ubuntu, openSUSE or Fedora for pure Gnome experience; those who want a tweaked version of Gnome Shell can always try Cinnamon on Linux Mint.
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The other day I announced our 24-hour horsemen marathon. In a nutshell, we in the Canonical Community Team are going to work for a continuous 24-hour session on Thursday next week. Each of us has picked a charity that we are going to support and I wanted to share some words on why I picked mine…Homeless International.
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If you’re the type of person who installs Ubuntu’s server edition, you’re also likely the sort of person who knows how to configure network settings. For most distributions, especially those based on Debian, the process is a bit strange, but familiar.
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It is the grooviest thing. For example, I simply type in “fuzzy m”, and magically the first search result is Fuzzy matching – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Likewise, with the Sublime Text editor, I type Shift + Cmd + P and up pops the Command Palette, with the next command only a keystroke or two away. And ditto Ubuntu’s Unity desktop, with the Intent Driven Interface aka Heads-Up Display — now with added advertising.
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Micromax has launched yet another tablet to there existing lineup of Funbook family Infinity P275. Priced at INR 6,699 Infinity P275 features 7-inch display. The tablet is running on top of Android 4.0.4, and is powered by 1.2GHz Cortex A8 processor. Infinity P275 comes with a back up of 6hrs which is backed by 4000 mAh battery.
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Now here’s a sudsy open source idea. You’ve heard all about the Raspberry Pi–the diminutive Linux-based $25/$35 computer that is being welcomed by hackers everywhere. The tiny devices have already drawn interest from educational system and technology industry leaders. But now there is BrewPi, an open source fermentation controller that runs on Arduino open source hardware and a Raspberry Pi. This device joins the Lego-based Raspberry Pi supercomputer as one of the best Pi devices yet.
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Phones
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Jolla Mobile is setting up a new ecosystem by forming an alliance in Hong Kong together with the leading players in the industry. The new fully mobile operating system, based on MeeGo and codenamed “Sailfish”, will be ready for licensing by other device manufacturers, design houses and service companies in spring 2013.
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Jolla Mobile a Helsiki-based startup plans to release their first handset by the end of this year which will be running on MeeGo OS. This piece of news comes from Jolla Mobile CEO Jussi Hurmola during an interview with GigaOM.
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The funding will come from a number of partners in Jolla’s newly established ecosystem alliance, the company announced on Tuesday. While Jolla is yet to name the partners in question, it has said they will include chipset vendors, OEMs, ODMs, operators and retailers and that the alliance will be based in Hong Kong. Jolla itself will contribute €10m to the funding pot, Jolla’s chief Jussi Hurmola told the Wall Street Journal.
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The Finnish startup Jolla Ltd says that it has raised €200 million from a number of, currently unnamed, telecommunications companies and that it will be unveiling a MeeGo-based device next month. The funding consortium is reported to include at least one telecom operator, a chipset maker, and device and component manufacturers. Reports in the Wall Street Journal say that the company is well advanced with its plans and will show the first version of its MeeGo-based system, “Sailfish”, next month.
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Android
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The launch of the new Netfilx UI interface was a highly publicized stuff, but the hidden feature that was added with the update failed to see the lime light. It is discovered that the new Netflix app now allows you to use your Android device as a remote control for Netflix on your PS3 as long as both are on the same local network.
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Google has officially seen 500 million Android devices activated since the release of the G1 back in fall 2008.
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A mini Android PC won’t let you perform molecular modeling or quantum physics. However, it could be perfect for kids’ homework, kitchen counter-top menu research, workshop manuals display and such — in fact, anywhere you need light word processing, Web and video. Plus, you get all of the Ice Cream Sandwich apps you want from the Google Play store.
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HTC has unveiled the HTC One X+, a refreshed version of its HTC One X smartphone, running the HTC Sense 4+ experience on Android Jelly Bean. It is claimed to be 67% faster than the equivalent One X and up to 27% faster than the HTC One X.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The $199 Google Nexus 7 might already be the most affordable and probably the best Android tablet available in the market currently. However, Google might try to take things one step further with a cheaper $99 Nexus tablet. According to DigiTimes and its industry sources, Google may launch a $99 Nexus Tablet by the end of 2012 along with a new model of the existing Nexus 7 tablet.
Both the new models of the Nexus tablet shall use Twisted Nematic (TN) display panel manufactured by HannStar Display of Taiwan, which is the same company that is in the Apple’s portfolio of vendors.
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Samsung’s (005930) Galaxy Note “phablet” was a huge success, with cumulative sales having recently topped 10 million units. Though T-Mobile USA just got around to launching the supersized smartphone last month, the sequel has already been unveiled and Samsung has high hopes for it. Speaking with reporters on Friday, Samsung mobile boss JK Shin said sales of the upcoming Galaxy Note II could top 20 million units. ”Sales may grow more than two-fold (compared with the previous model),” Shin said according to Yonhap News Agency. The Samsung executive also reportedly said that the Galaxy Note II will launch some time in October.
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I like iPads. I own one and often use it. That said, I never cared for its size; Apple’s locked-in, proprietary software ecosystem; and lately Apple’s iOS updates have been including a lot of sloppy mistakes. So it is that more often than not I’ve been using a variety of 7″ Android-powered tablets instead of my iPad. And, you know what? Just because it seems almost certain there will soon be an iPad Mini, I don’t see any reason to be rushing out to buy one.
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It’s no great surprise, perhaps, that Google’s Android is taking tablet share from Apple, but new figures suggest the rate of catch-up has accelerated this year.
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Keeping kids in mind, Oregon Scientific has launched MEEP tablet running on top of Android Ice Cream Sandwich. Tablet features a 7 inch screen. Meep is powered by 1GHZ cortex A8 processor, 512MB RAM, 4GB internal storage, HDMI output, Wi-Fi, and a 0.3 MP front-facing camera.
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Open source fear mongering is still a reality. But in today’s world, it is nuanced with the belief that an open enterprise means open APIs.
They are not the same and should not be confused.
The issue surfaces more now that RESTful APIs have become the chosen way to exchange information through applications. They turn the enterprise metaphor on its head. It’s no longer a fortress surrounded by four walls. Instead, the enterprise walls are porous with data flowing in and out like never before.
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Piwik is a free and open source web analytics tool which is highly customizable. It is a great open source alternative to the widely used Google Analytics. Piwik provides users with full control of their data. Eliminating the risk of sharing unwanted information with advertising companies that is faced while using Google Analytics.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Here at OStatic, we’re big fans of real-time reports on full immersion trials of open source platforms. On ZDNet, James Kendrick is reporting on his real-time immersion with a Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook, running Google’s Chrome OS. His early reaction to the system shows that Google may be fixing some of the problems with its operating system, and could win over more users with it.
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Mozilla
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SaaS
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Finland native, LinuxCon Europe keynoter and Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos took a few minutes to share his latest thoughts on what open cloud really means and what role Linux and open source software are meant to play in the technology shift being prompted by cloud computing. LinuxCon Europe takes place November 5-7, 2012 in Barcelona.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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With each year, Oracle becomes a bigger company and in turn, so does its annual OpenWorld conference, which kicks off Sunday in San Francisco.
In fact, Oracle’s long run of acquisitions, spanning from applications to middleware to hardware, has resulted in so many partner and customer constituencies that it’s now co-locating a number of additional shows, including MySQL Connect and JavaOne, along with the main OpenWorld program.
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Even as Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) launches a MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate, there are no plans to offer MySQL as a PaaS platform within the new Oracle Cloud Partner Program. But Channel Chief Judson Althoff, speaking at Oracle OpenWorld 2012, described numerous other ways that Oracle is enhancing and promoting MySQL to partners and customers.
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Oracle’s proprietary posture may have soiled the welcome mat and vilified its good standing in the FOSS community as CEO Larry Ellison has pushed the balance point between servicing his customers and nickel-and-diming them to turn a higher profit. Clearly, since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems — and with it OpenOffice and Java — the company has not acted very neighborly with open source developers.
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The Document Foundation today announced the latest stable release of popular free office suite, LibreOffice 3.6.2. This release bring lots of bug and regression fixes. Yeah, the changelog is long and boring, but it adds up to improved stability for LibreOfffice users – which is always a good thing.
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CMS
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As Linux Journal’s resident Drupal nerd, I could not be more pleased to bring you this special Drupal issue. Drupal really is everywhere these days, and it’s available in more “flavors” than most people in the Open Source community are aware of. So in the interest of spreading awareness about my favorite and ever-growing open-source project, we hope you’ll find this special issue both informative and inspiring.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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If you often need to customize GRUB entries, the usual way we do this is to edit the configuration files by hand. With GRUB 2.00 arriving, this has become more complicated as GRUB entries do not reside on a single file. However, GRUB Customizer is a nice app that allows you to view, edit and manage GRUB entries in a simpler way.
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Hampshire student and FSF campaigns organizer Kira shares the success of their ambitious project to help fellow students get started with free software. The achievements of Kira’s organization, LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture, is exciting and replicable outside of Hampshire. Kira provides suggestions to help other students realize the same changes at their schools.
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Project Releases
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As you might have guessed, Ekiga 4.0 is on its way. It will be the latest release to be based on GTK2 technologies.
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Public Services/Government
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A grass roots campaign has managed to get 278 candidates for the upcoming Belgian communal and provincial elections to pledge their support for free and open source software. “And, so-far, three political parties, the Socialist Party, Ecolo and Mouvement Réformateur, have promised me their general support”, says Nicolas Pettiaux, one of two volunteers contacting politicians.
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The French city of Arles is content with the savings that it made by switching to free and open source enterprise applications. The city’s 2006 migration plan, however, proved too optimistic: the switch took not three but six years, and it resulted in savings worth 450,000 euro, instead of the estimated 780,000.
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Programming
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Some Apple iPhone and iPad users are facing a major new problem with Wi-Fi/cellular data use while others are still dealing with earlier, unresolved iOS 6 Wi-Fi problems.
The latest annoyance is a real pain-in-the-rump. It turns out that while some of you have been watching videos, playing a game, whatever, on what you thought was a Wi-Fi network, you were actually running up your giant 3G data bill. Apple hasn’t commented on this, but on September 30th, Apple quietly released a bug fix for the problem for its Verizon customers.
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My sceptical mind has me thinking that people turning up to this midnight launch of Microsoft’s, will certainly be more than just “average consumers” but for the camera, I’m sure they will be hyperactive, happy, Microsoft consumers. Lets hope if Microsoft is making a PR stunt of sorts out of this that they fair far better than when they tried it with the “iPhone funeral” stunt.
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Ahead of the next round of negotiations of CETA, the Canada/EU Trade Agreement1, La Quadrature du Net publishes its dedicated web-dossier. The citizen organization urges the Members of the European Parliament to demand full transparency and be ready to reject CETA as they did with ACTA, if any of the anti-Internet, anti-citizens’ freedoms provisions remain in the final agreement.
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Finance
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The legal odyssey of Sergey Aleynikov, a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer, has been so complex that it’s like the Grateful Dead’s lyrics “what a long, strange trip it’s been.”
He was convicted in federal court of stealing computer code from Goldman, only to have the conviction reversed on appeal, which resulted in his release after spending a year in prison. A few months later, the Manhattan district attorney charged him with essentially the same violations, which led Mr. Aleynikov to file a lawsuit against Goldman to force the firm to pay for his lawyer.
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HighTower’s Weissbluth faults bank brokerage business model; derivatives expert Tavakoli says Goldman’s misbehavior well documented
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Censorship
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The US government recently asked Google to remove the controversial YouTube movie which triggered the anti-US protest in the Middle East.
Google has however restricted access to the movie in sensational areas such as India and Indonesia to avoid any communal conflict. Google maintained that the restriction has been imposed to comply with the local laws and not due to some political pressure.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Cyberspace has become the platform of the best and worst things that people can come up with when they’re online. While it’s a hotbed of game-changing ideas and artistic expression, it has also turned into a breeding ground for trolls and cyberthugs. That being said, well-meaning Pinoy lawmakers thought it best to pass Republic Act No. 10175 or The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012. But, wait! There’s a catch. This very same law that professes to protect us from those who would do us wrong via digital means also threatens to take away our freedom to say what we want.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The European Union’s governmental machine is a complicated beast, with its intertwining of supra-national, national and party-political levels (if you’re interested in understanding how it works, the digital rights organization EDRI has put together a useful introduction (pdf).) That makes it quite hard to tell what is going on behind the scenes with this new Opinion of the International Trade Committee on a Digital Freedom Strategy in EU Foreign Policy (pdf.)
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Open Rights Group has just learnt that the debate in the Lords scheduled for Monday, in the Moses Room, to discuss the DEA Costs Order has been pulled.
We do not know the reasons why, but there are some very serious concerns with the order. The order had previously been withdrawn due to drafting errors.
Firstly, Ofcom ran a consultation at the same time as DCMS laid the Order before Parliament. This seems pretty odd.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.02.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I think this shows the Government of Canada is a little behind the curve in GNU/Linux and needs to open up to the standards of some European governments like Germany. Germany created their own GNU/Linux desktop for government use back in 2006. Germany isn’t spreading FUD about security of GNU/Linux. TFA from Canada was produced in 2010 using M$’s office suite and Adobe’s Distiller on that other OS.
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First off, I had never planned to do a review of any DJ software. I’ve never been a DJ, nor have I ever had the desire to be a DJ. But you know what they say; Never say never. So, how did I come to learn about Mixx, and how did I end up with a real use for it? I’ll tell you.
It all started when my wife’s co-worker decided to get married. There was a little drama surrounding the entire ordeal and long story short, the bride had lost a bridesmaid. Though the bride only knew my wife for a short time, she thought she would ask her to fulfill those needs and balance the wedding party. My wife graciously accepted.
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Server
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While IBM’s Watson expert system isn’t ready to take over the world ala Skynet, it’s certainly “smart” enough to beat the world’s best two Jeopardy players. The company isn’t treating this as a trivial exercise; they’re also hard at work turning Watson technology into medical expert systems for cancer research and treatment, as they explained at LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego last month.
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Kernel Space
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This week is the annual migration of Linux kernel developers from all over the world to the Linux Kernel Summit, which is taking place in San Diego and is co-located with LinuxCon and CloudOpen. This group of developers are among the very best in the world, and we’re excited to bring you a profile this week that introduces you to another participant in and contributor to the world’s largest collaborative development project. Martin Petersen is profiled in this week’s 30 Linux Developers in 30 Weeks series.
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Linus Torvalds has released version 3.6 of the Linux kernel. A major new feature for desktops and laptops is hybrid sleep, long supported by both Mac OS X and Windows. This involves writing the contents of the RAM to the hard drive prior to suspending to RAM, thus ensuring that the system is able to awake from suspend in the event of a power interruption.
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Laurent Pinchart, a.k.a. The Media Controller Guy, is a Linux kernel developer working on video capture and display. Here he tells us about the lucky introduction that got him involved in Linux and recalls the time a Taiwanese company tried to pay him $50,000 for the free software he developed. As are many of the developers we’ve profiled in our 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks series, Pinchart is motivated to work on Linux by more than money.
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Jon Masters summarises the latest goings-on in the Linux kernel community, including the 2012 Kernel Summit and the closing of the 3.6 merge window
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The Linux 3.7 kernel will feature support for the ARM 64-bit architecture (ARM64), which is officially known as AArch64.
The Linux 3.6 kernel is one day old but there’s already lots of interesting ARM work happening for 3.7. ARM Xen virtualization support is going into the Linux 3.7 kernel, per the pull request this morning that Konrad has accepted as the Xen kernel maintainer, and now we have AArch64.
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Graphics Stack
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X Server 1.13 has been released by the X.Org project with improved support for hot-pluggable, hybrid graphics hardware. This includes DisplayLink hardware which is connected using USB, and hybrid graphics technologies such as NVIDIA’s Optimus, a feature that is primarily used in notebooks. Optimus enables the dedicated GeForce GPU on demand and works with the GPU in the CPU.
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Applications
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Slidewall is a free utility for Linux systems that will rotate your desktop background at an interval you set, and choose from a folder full of images or from Wallbase when siwtching your wallpaper for something new
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If you’re learning a foreign language, there is always the need to go beyond the standard textbooks and listening materials. Resources like CDs,DVDs, and even movies in that particular language help you become a good listener and communicator. Also, these days, there are plenty of software available that help you learn better and faster. On Linux too, there are many such applications that can push you further in your linguistic endeavors without you having to pay a single penny. Here is a list of the best ones.
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Business intelligence tools comprise the important software that helps in the strategic planning process of a corporation. Using them, you can gather, store, access, and analyze corporate data. The data collected by corporations are huge and to keep track of them, you need business intelligence software. You can use these tools in customer profiling, customer support, market research, product profitability, market segmentation, statistical analysis, and more.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Running Windows programs on Linux is largely a myth. No matter how much we geeks may try to portray the transition between Windows and Linux to be a painless procedure, it is far from being anything simple or smooth. Now and then, programs come to life that try to dispel this myth. One of them is CrossOver by Codeweavers.
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A new development branch of Wine has been released that features improved support for Shader Compiler, GIF and JavaScript. Also, it includes better handling of URL cache and usual set of bug fixes.
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It may occur that the user needs to run a Windows application or game in Ubuntu and it finds that it cannot install windows programs.
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Games
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Will gaming prove to be a key to increased usage for Linux? Valve’s decision to cater its gaming platform to the OS could be a step in that direction. “Linux-based games consoles are clearing the way to push Linux gaming into the mainstream,” said Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza.
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When Valve announced to the world that the Steam Linux client for its digital distribution service was in the works, everybody rejoiced. But what can we realistically expect from a Linux client launched so late in the game?
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Last year I wrote an article very much extolling what a great game the last in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series ‘Call of Pripyat’ was. Balanced, well-thought out game play, great graphics and so on. Like so many teenage and not any longer so teenage boys I absolutely love post-apocalyptic games and movies and this series falls right in there.
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Whether you’ve been an Android tablet user since the days of Honeycomb on the Motorola XOOM, or you just opened up your brand new Nexus 7, one thing is for sure: you’ve been looking for software which really shows off what your tablet is capable of.
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Desktop Environments
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Xfce 4.10 is the latest release of the excellent Xfce desktop, full of useful incremental improvements and no shocking surprises.
Workflow and efficiency are everything. I want my Linux graphical environment to be the way I like it, and not an obese system hog. I have a lot of favorite Linux desktop environments (Fluxbox, KDE4, Ratpoison, E17, Razor-qt) and Xfce is always near the top.
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The other day, I received an announcement about a new distribution. That’s not unusual; I receive announcements about new software each week. But what struck me about this one was that, while the announcement mentioned a few new features, it gave no reason why I should care about them as either a reviewer or a user. As a result, it failed to interest me in the distribution, and the sender of the announcement might have saved his efforts.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The effort towards a Qt library for Android is progressing, with a fourth and final alpha release being sent out the door – despite confidence in the platform having steadily eroded since Nokia dumped it.
Qt is a library of cross-platform APIs which enables even complicated apps, such as VLC’s VideoLAN, to run across operating systems. Nokia bought the owning company, Trolltech, back in 2008, then dumped the technology earlier this month. The move left Qt with an uncertain future, but seemingly a future which includes Android.
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With GLX set to be deprecated in the not too distant future and EGL being in use with OpenGL ES on mobile platforms, KDE’s KWin compositing window manager now has support for using desktop OpenGL over EGL instead of GLX.
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As some of you might have noticed, display management in KDE is not really something we could be proud of. It does not work as expected, it lacks some features and it’s not really maintained. Time to change it, don’t you think? Smilie: 
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GNOME Desktop
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With the recent release of GNOME 3.6, developers and distributions are making updated versions of their packages available and applications such as Firefox are getting improved integration into the GNOME desktop.
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Integrated Application Search inside Gnome Shell is one more exciting feature we will see in Gnome next release in March, 27. The work has started from 3.5 cycle and Gnome Shell can already search for our cloud files (ie G. Docs).
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gThumb may look like yet another image viewer, but behind its unassuming appearance hides a rather capable application that can help you to manage photos efficiently.
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I’m taking this opportunity to relay two pieces of Cinnamon news to the Linux Mint community.
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BleachBit is a general purpose cleaning application that covers almost every application or component of your system that stores any kind of data, taking hard disk space and risking the unintended sharing of personal data over the internet.
The application is unfortunately still using gtk2, but other than that it is completely simple to understand and use in daily basis.
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Rythmbox is a free and open source Gnome music player that features a simple UI and fast playback. With Ubuntu One Music integration, you can also buy and download new tracks in Ubuntu.
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The user observation hackfest was an attempt from the part of Gnome developers to learn more about what users want.
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We are not used to such surprises! Same day with the release of Gnome 3.6,we also get a Live Media to try it out! The image is based as always in the next Fedora release -Spherical Cow.
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We tested Gnome 3.6 by downloading the live image and here are a list of changes we loved, and hopefully, you will love too.
First and foremost, the Activities overview, looks more cleaner and the space for workspaces has been reduced
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I recall in 2009, I had only a desktop for all my computing needs – a desktop bought in 2003 and post SP3 update, struggled to run Windows XP, plagued with virus problems, slowness and often crashing. Every 2 months, I had to re-install Windows XP! I still persisted with XP, thinking Linux was for the geeks and not my cup of tea. Finally, in 2010 I gathered courage to try out Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and I was amazed by the speed and stability it rendered to my old computer. After that there was no looking back! I installed Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty” thereafter which performed amazingly well on it. Now all the four systems that I have, run on Linux only!
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Today I am doing a quick video review of Hanthana Linux 17 “LXDE”. Hanthana is a Linux based operating system and a Fedora remix suitable for desktop and laptop users. Hanthana comes to you in the form of a LiveDVD for regular PC (i686 & x86_64 architectures) systems. You can run Hanthana Operating System directly from the LiveDVD and check out each and every feature before installing it on your hard disk.
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New Releases
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Among the new features of version 1.2.0 of QEMU is support for passing through PCI devices to hardware-virtualised Xen guests. The open source system emulator is used in both the KVM and Xen virtualisation platforms, but can also be used independently. The new release can migrate active guest systems to different hosts (live migration) even if the guests use USB storage media and pass-through devices. In addition, live migration is said to be more reliable for guest systems that use large amounts of RAM.
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Version 1.2 of the QEMU processor emulator has been released. “Even though this was the shortest release cycle in QEMU’s history, it contains an impressive 1400 changesets from 180 unique authors.”
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Fuduntu, the distro with a pun for a name, has released its latest quarterly update. Version 2012.4 was released today with the usual “small incremental distribution improvements” including “several changes, new features, and improvements.”
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Red Hat Family
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As JavaOne 2012 gets started this week, Red Hat is using the occasion to announce some shake ups for its venerable Java-based JBoss product line.
There’s a lot of yummy sauce, but it’s a little hard to find the actual meat of the news buried within the commercial Linux vendor’s announcement today. Here’s what we do know.
Probably the biggest potential news is the intent to “increase access and availability to JBoss for developers,” according to Stephen Yi, Director, Strategy & Product Management at Red Hat. Specifically, Yi is referring to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), which currently is under the GNU Lesser GPL for development, but requires a Red Hat support subscription for production use.
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Fedora
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FreeIPA has a couple of new features that are showing up in Fedora 18. Support for SELinux Confined User labelling will be covered in a future blog… In this blog I will be talking about better integration with Windows environments.
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Debian Family
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The Debian project is pleased to announce the sixth update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 (codename “squeeze”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.
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Today we are pleased to announce the arrival of the next generation of desktop operating systems, OS4 OpenDesktop 13. With this release we bring a lot of new functionality and bug fixes to the OS4 family. OS4 OpenDesktop 13 is the most capable Linux desktop featuring an easy to use interface and including a vast array of hardware support, wifi support along with all the multimedia codecs, Blu Ray and DVD Playback. OS4 OpenDesktop 13 is the premier Linux distribution for the home or business user. Our unprecedented commitment to cloud computing and internet technologies makes OS4 OpenDesktop 13 the best platform for consumption of cloud services.
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Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well engineered platform and you don’t have to start to build up your PDC and your clients from GNU/scratch; I’ve already done this once and I can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much hassle.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A tentative launch date for Ubuntu 13.04 has already appeared on the “R” schedule, just weeks before Ubuntu 12.01 “Quantal Quetzal” becomes a proper release on October 18. Naturally dates are subject to change, and so far Ubuntu 13.04 has yet to be named.
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“Making money on the consumer desktop as an open source vendor is hard, as Canonical is finding out,” offered Chris Travers, a blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project. “This current approach is an attempt to monetize users by collecting Amazon affiliate revenue, making Ubuntu the second-largest adware OS after Android — and even Google has trouble monetizing Android.”
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A tentative launch date for Ubuntu 13.04 has already appeared on the “R” schedule, just weeks before Ubuntu 12.01 “Quantal Quetzal” becomes a proper release on October 18. Naturally dates are subject to change, and so far Ubuntu 13.04 has yet to be named.
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Unless you’ve been living devoid of Internet access recently, chances are good that you’ve heard about the addition of Amazon affiliate links on the Unity Dash in Ubuntu 12.10 beta.
When Mark Shuttleworth first made the announcement, his goal was clearly to inject new revenue into the Ubuntu project, in a non-intrusive manner. And at its core, the idea was sound: as the Unity Dash is used to search for stuff, the Amazon affiliate links will display with the native results presented.
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Take a quick look around the Ubuntu forums and IRC channels and you can miss the pattern: it’s mostly men. That is not to say that there is no diversity in the open source community, only that you need to look a little deeper to find it.
According to a recent survey, only 12% of professionals in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are women. So I felt especially lucky to “sit-down” with Ubuntu Women members Elizabeth “Lyz” Krumbach and Cheri Francis over a Google+ hangout to discuss the work they are doing with the organization.
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With the recent release of the Unity 6.6 desktop for Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2, benchmarks were done to see how the OpenGL gaming performance compares to that of Unity 6.4 from the earlier beta state of the Quantal Quetzal, plus the respective Compiz versions. At least for Intel Ivy Bridge graphics under some workloads, it looks like the Unity/Compiz updates are slowing down the GL performance even further.
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There are many things that comprise a successful Linux distribution, but there may be none more important than trust. Before you build a production Linux system, you have to trust that the distribution isn’t going to contain malicious code or back doors or any number of other potentially major problems. Since the advent of Linux, this really hasn’t been an issue.
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Ubuntu 12.10: More to Um Bongo Linux than Amazon ads
A new Lens in the Unity Dash will poll Amazon to find results relevant to your search terms. And yes, if you click the link and buy the item Ubuntu-maker Canonical gets a small percentage of the income, much like Mozilla makes a bit of money for allowing you to search Google from Firefox. Here’s what the new Lens looks like:
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Flavours and Variants
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An Ubuntu based distro, wattOS uses Openbox and is optimised to be lightweight, low-power, and able to run on older machines
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This is the best time to get into electronics because we have an abundance of high-quality hardware for cheap and great software for free. Arduino, Beagleboard, and Raspberry Pi give us hundreds of inexpensive hardware components to play with. On the software side check out the new Fritzing project. Fritzing lets inexperienced electronics noobs make great-looking schematics and circuit diagrams, and even design and build their own printed circuit boards.
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Phones
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Smartphones are so popular here that it’s difficult to avoid seeing one, and in China, these devices are poised to become even more widespread.
This year, China will account for 26.5 percent of all smartphone shipments, compared to 17.8 percent in the United States, according to a forecast by the International Data Corporation, a research firm.
China has surpassed the United States in smartphone sales in the past. However, only in the first quarter of this year did it become clear that the smartphone gap between China and the United States would become a “long-lasting gulf that won’t be bridged,” said Kevin Restivo, a senior research analyst with IDC.
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Verizon’s Lowell McAdam believes Samsung has the capability to create a successful third mobile operating system.
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Android
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Today we have news for you of a really interesting insight about Android and iPhone apps that comes from a tech enthusiast and Android user. Despite the fact that Android smartphones have a bigger share of the market, with recent statistics showing Android at 52.2% and Apple’s iOS at 33.4%, this particular Android device owner is honest enough to say that he prefers iPhone apps. Taking in mind the usual Android vs. iOS debate and the fierce loyalty it evokes in many people, that’s quite an admission.
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When CyanogenMod team had announced that their new OTA update system would be available “soon”, they really meant it. The feature is already available in all the nightly builds since 30th September. The new option has been added in the settings menu as CM Updater. It will automatically check for updates and install them, similar to over the air updates that are received from carriers and manufacturers.
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There’s some great news for CyanogenMod fans. The CM team has decided to drop ROM manager which was the de facto standard of getting CyanogenMod updates. Now you must be wondering how CyanogenMod will be updated then. Fear not, the CM team is going to build its own updating method.
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Ahead of the IFA show, the company upsizes its Android device for playing music, video, and games. It’s edging closer toward Nexus 7 mini-tablet territory.
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X-Plane 9 is claimed to be the best flight simulator available on Android and now you can enjoy the experience for free, after it dropped the $2.99 price tag. The app is available on a freemium model, you will initially get 10 different types of aircraft with the free download but there are in-app purchases available for 43 more planes.
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Until self-driving cars become mainstream, it’s best to keep eyes on roads and hands off phones. With this in mind, Samsung’s debuting Drive Link, an app that balances in-car essentials with driver safety, complete with approval from the no-nonsense Japanese Automotive Manufacturers Association. It’s all about the bare essentials — navigation, hands-free calling and audiotainment from your phone-based files or TuneIn.
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The YubiKey Neo hardware token represents an interesting new concept for one-time passwords on NFC-capable Android smartphones. Rather than typing them in, the token uses the near field communication (NFC) standard to send generated one-time passwords to a smartphone. To unlock items such as the password safe application LastPass, the YubiKey key fob token is simply brushed across the back of the phone after logging in.
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Google’s Nexus 7 tablet has a killer spec sheet, an enviable operating system, and cutthroat price. But all of those combined can’t do for the tiny champ what Google’s actions today will. And that might just be enough to help it beat back the rumored iPad Mini.
Google takes great pride in maintaining the sanctity of its homepage. It’s a pristine white canvas, a zen garden of searching calm. Because of that cache—and the extraordinary number of visitors it draws—its value to advertisers is literally priceless. As in, Google has never sold it to an advertiser.
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The Pocket TV is a thumb-size micro-computer that connects to the HDMI port of any TV and converts it into an Android Smart TV
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The AV-Comparatives test lab has examinedPDF 13 security programs for Android smartphones. The study found that all of the test candidates offer reliable protection against 75 virus families; detection rates were always at least 93 per cent. In total, the experts unleashed more than 18,000 infected apps on the test devices. None of the security programs produced any false alarms; however, testing involved only 200 widely used benign apps.
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Ice Cream Sandwich is now running on 20.9 percent of all Android-based devices, according to new data from Google.
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I am a big fan of the Kobo eReader Touch and use it as my primary eInk device because the form factor is so compelling and I can read all of my EPUB content on it. With Amazon’s Kindle press event, I am not sure that Kobo’s announcedment today of several new devices was timed well. However, it is likely that I will preorder one of them. They announced the new Kobo Mini, Kobo Glo, and Kobo Arc with preorders available now.
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You must be wondering that Samsung has been at the forefront of Android smartphone market, with its highly successful devices which have even surpassed iPhone’s sales figure, then why am I going against Samsung Manufacturing the next Nexus device, like the last two years. Well here are my points:
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Toys”R”Us has taken a good long look at the increasingly crowded Android tablet market and decided it wants a minuscule sliver too. So starting October 1st, every child’s favorite store will start selling a seven-inch, $150 Android device called the Tabeo (Tabby-oh? Tabe-e-oh?) targeted at younger users.
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Displaying a new processor design, MIPS Technologies hopes to challenge ARM’s reach in the high-end mobile device market.
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Zareason technologies have launched a new open and hackable Android tablet – ZaTab. The tablet costs $349 and is a beast in sheer power and performance.
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The 7 inch tablet segment is a hotly contested market and now Acer has joined the race with its Iconia A110 tablet which has been released in UK. The tablet looks similar to the very popular flagship model from Google the Nexus 7. In fact, it carries specs similar to the Google offering.
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This number doesn’t appear to count any non-Google Android tablets like the Kindle Fire, B&N Nook, or any of the other Android tablets that don’t come with Google Apps (and thus are not activated through Google).
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With today’s announcement, the Apache Wicket project has jumped from version 1.5.8 to version 6.0 for the latest release of its web framework for Java. The version number change is due to a switch to semantic versioning and because there are changes to the Wicket API. One of the headline changes is that Wicket now requires Java 6 at a minimum, so updaters may have to look at upgrading their Java runtimes.
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“Did you use open source code to save time and the virus was hidden in it?” one character asked another on a recent episode of the Disney show “Shake It Up.” Was it the work of an uninformed children’s show screenwriter who simply tried to make up a line that would sound vaguely like high-level techno-talk? Or is Disney really anti-FOSS?
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There you go. You won’t find a more truthful article anywhere. Now, I am aware this lovely essay will be buried deep in the search annals because it is not politically correct or written to cater to pseudo-journalistic websites that have to mind what they say lest they lose sponsorships and suchlike. I cannot possibly change the world on my own, but at the very least, I can share truth with my users, and hope they will carry it around, so the truth is known.
As much as I’m good with words, I am somewhat at loss in expressing my absolute disdain, loathing and dislike for the forced plastic cultural phenomena imposed on the world by those who shout the stupidest and loudest. Even if Microsoft products merit attention, and some definitely do, like EMET, the quality of technology is drowned in the diarrhea-like dross of marketing religion and exaggeration. I am most offended by the fact people silently accept this instead of going This Is Sparta against all this bullcrap.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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We are using a new facility, introduced in Linux 3.5 and developed by Will Drewry called Seccomp-BPF.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s Mark Côté has reminded us that the arewefastyet page, which the browser maker launched prior to the introduction of Firefox 4, is still alive and is now tracking the progress of Mozilla IonMonkey JIT.
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SaaS
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ownCloud was launched at Camp KDE in January 2010 by its founder, Frank Karlitschek. (Mr. Karlitschek is now the CTO of ownCloud, Inc.) The goals of ownCloud, as laid out at the KDE conference, are ambitious: easy cloud setup and management, and ubiquitous access to your data from multiple devices wherever that data may be — on local storage, hosted storage, or even on social networks. ownCloud also wants to give us the ability to mash up and connect data from different providers, while maintaining privacy and security. While they’re at it, I’d like them to provide pink unicorns and rainbows too, which seem about as probable as everything else ownCloud is promising.
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nginx is still neck-and-neck with Microsoft’s IIS on global surveys of web servers, but it’s racking up significant wins in the cloud along the way.
Back in April, nginx looked ready to take the number two web-server spot in market share for top servers across all domains, according to the April Netcraft Web Server Survey. That was supposed to happen last month, actually. But that trend has apparently stalled, according to the latest Netcraft survey, as IIS remains in the number two spot with a recent climb in use that nginx was unable to pass.
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Databases
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With the rise of NoSQL, it’s easy to assume that old-school relational databases are simply living out their dinosaur dreams for legacy applications. But a funny thing happened on the way to the SQL cemetery: PostgreSQL became cool again. Yes, PostegreSQL.
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Monty Program’s MariaDB team has announced the first availability of MariaDB Galera, a clustering solution that is the result of a partnership between the MariaDB team and Codership. The alpha release, which should not be used for production systems, includes a merge of MariaDB 5.5.25 with Galera Cluster from Codership in a combination that is said to offer a read/write scalable system, synchronous multi-master replication and guaranteed data consistency.
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At the MySQL Connect conference in San Francisco, Oracle has presented the release candidate for the next version of its open source relational database, MySQL. For MySQL 5.6, the developers have focused on adding features to InnoDB, for example, implementing full-text searches that were previously only available in the non-transactional MyISAM, and on improving server performance by improving database’s optimiser.
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The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces PostgreSQL 9.2, the latest release of the leader in open source databases. Since the beta release was announced in May, developers and vendors have praised it as a leap forward in performance, scalability and flexibility. Users are expected to switch to this version in record numbers.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle, claiming to be intent on shining more attention on MySQL, announced at its annual conference this weekend the first release candidate of MySQL 5.6.
The database giant seems to be taking its time on moving the open source database forward. The first preview of MySQL 5.6 was made available in July of 2011.
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The proposal, as part of JSR 355, to combine the previously separate Executive Committee (EC) for Java SE (Standard Edition) and Java EE (Enterprise Edition) and the Java ME (Micro Edition) Committee has now received the approval of the Java Community Process.
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If you are like me, you prefer LibreOffice over (Apache) OpenOffice because (1) It has a better open source license. (2) It has more community support. (3) It is more rapidly developing and releasing updates.
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CMS
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Word on the street is, Drupal is hiring. Well, Drupal shops to be exact. But the lack of experienced Drupal developers and themers is hurting the ecosystem.
Chances are, you’ve recently visited a website running Drupal. (This is one of them.) How many projects out there want to be using Drupal but don’t have the in-house talent? Or they’ve contacted a Drupal shop and found out they’re all booked up with other projects for the next for weeks and even months!
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The Joomla community has released version 3.0 of the popular Content Management System (CMS), and the big news is that Joomla now optimizes content created in it for mobile platforms. This represents the new frontier for all CMS systems, and there are many other new additions in Joomla 3.0.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Hampshire student and FSF campaigns organizer Kira shares the success of their ambitious project to help fellow students get started with free software. The achievements of Kira’s organization, LibrePlanet/Students for Free Culture, is exciting and replicable outside of Hampshire. Kira provides suggestions to help other students realize the same changes at their schools.
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A patch has emerged that provides “AutoFDO” support for the GCC compiler for automated feedback-directed optimizations.
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Project Releases
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The very first release of the FreedomBox software has been announced. “This 0.1 version is primarily a developer release, which means that it focuses on architecture and infrastructure rather than finish work. The exception to this is privoxy-freedombox, the web proxy discussed in previous updates, which people can begin using right now to make their web browsing more secure and private and which will very soon be available on non-FreedomBox systems.”
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Codethink announces version 1.1 (aka Secret Volcano) of its Baserock Embedded Linux software. Baserock is a Linux build system for the development of embedded, industrial or bare-metal, server-based Linux systems.
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While we have been looking towards an FFmpeg 1.0 release for nearly one year, the version 1.0 release of the popular FFmpeg library was finally tagged after being in development for more than one decade.
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Openness/Sharing
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Inkscape is a magnificent open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
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Open Access/Content
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We’ve written before about companies that help get digital textbooks into the hands of students, and efforts to bring low-cost textbooks into K-12 classrooms. Now, California, one of the largest economies in the world, has signed a new bill to provide versions of popular textbooks to college students for free. This move is effectively like open sourcing popular textbooks, and is a progressive step from a state that is well-known for its broken university system.
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Open Hardware
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What happens when a prime example of the open-source hardware movement locks down its products?
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Programming
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The latest version of the Python language, Python 3.3.0, has arrived. This is the first major version to have language changes since the language moratorium expired, and as such brings new syntax to the language in the form of “yield from” which allows developers to delegate work to a sub-generator (PEP 380). The changes also bring back the Python 2 style Unicode literal syntax for strings, which will make more code from Python 2 valid in Python 3 (PEP 393).
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The Eclipse Foundation has quietly made the first service release (SR1) for Eclipse 4.2 Juno available. The publication saw no apparent announcement or release notes from the Eclipse Foundation, although it was planned to ship at the end of September. The SR1 release is designed to fix serious problems with the June release of Eclipse 4.2. The J-Development blog noted that around 80 bugs had been fixed in the release.
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Standards/Consortia
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HTML5 promises great things for smartphone developers, but is yet to deliver in full. That leaves developers with a tricky choice: to build for openness or go with what works now.
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Security
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The White House confirmed but sought to downplay a report by a conservative website on Sunday that it had been the victim of a cyberattack, volunteering to POLITICO that no harm had been done.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that Chinese hackers had attacked a computer system in the White House Military Office.
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Finance
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The ritual performance of the legend of democracy in the autumn of 2012 promises the conspicuous consumption of $5.8 billion, enough money, thank God, to prove that our flag is still there. Forbidden the use of words apt to depress a Q Score or disturb a Gallup poll, the candidates stand as product placements meant to be seen instead of heard, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture. The sponsors of the event, generous to a fault but careful to remain anonymous, dress it up with the bursting in air of star-spangled photo ops, abundant assortments of multiflavoured sound bites, and the candidates so well-contrived that they can be played for jokes, presented as game-show contestants, or posed as noble knights-at-arms setting forth on vision quests, enduring the trials by klieg light, until on election night they come to judgment before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they were produced.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The draft chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement on Intellectual Property—as of its current leaked version [PDF], article 16—insists that signatories provide legal incentives for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to privately enforce copyright protection rules. The TPP wants service providers to undertake the financial and administrative burdens of becoming copyright cops, serving a copyright maximalist agenda while disregarding the consequences for Internet freedom and innovation.
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I’ve often written in regards to the open-wifi defence. No more so when it pertains to allegations of filesharing when infringing material is being shared. I am fully expecting the UK to push through a law (“unthrottled” of course because the Government will give in to Hollywood et al and their pressure).
I am awaiting the day when we see the creation of an offence “Failure to take reasonable steps to secure your WIFI”. We already have a semi-similar law in the UK that says if you leave your keys in the car with the engine running, you commit an offence, so legislating against WIFI and insecurity would not be such a surprising move. Of course it will be win-win for government who will scoure the streets locating connections and sending out penalty notices for “offenders”. I am convinced this is coming.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
10.01.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Their tales are as varied as the ways in which their systems are used, but the common thread among Linux professionals’ career arcs is that they took matters into their own hands and made things happen. Here are their roll-up-your-sleeves stories.
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Desktop
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Just a few days ago I wrote about Edubuntu, the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution targeted to the “market” of teachers, students, pupils and everyone in the industry of education.
You can install this operating system on a Linux Desktop or Laptop, which you bought for your child or yourself.
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I have written about why I believe Linux remains under 10% of the desktop market: the lack of preloaded systems available in stores and the slow uptake of Linux on the enterprise desktop. The enterprise desktop is critical if Linux is to make progress on the consumer desktop without a presence in big box stores. People use what they know and like. If they use and like Linux at work they may well want to use it at home as well.
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“I don’t think Apple killed anything,” said consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack. “‘Killed’ implies a permanent state, and I don’t think it’s actually permanent — I’m seeing more interest from my non-techie friends, and announcements such as the porting of Steam to Linux give me hope for the future.”
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Despite being an open source system, Linux received less support from users as it is known to be harder to navigate than Windows. It gained popularity only with developers and computer geeks because they had the freedom to tweak the code to suit their preference. But Linux has made great strides over the years. Where Linux was previously limited only to servers and supercomputers, now more users are daring to use the system in their laptops and desktops. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said in the business environment. Why are businesses resisting the change?
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For a long time, the co-founder of the GNOME desktop project, Miguel de Icaza, has not been heard of in the media. A few days back he surfaced, claiming to know why the Linux desktop has made little or no gain among computer users.
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Server
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(Phys.org)—Computational Engineers at the University of Southampton have built a supercomputer from 64 Raspberry Pi computers and Lego.
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Kernel Space
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The tool collection util-linux has been extended to include resizepart, a utility that is useful when repartitioning. Some X.org graphics drivers now support hybrid graphics. The infrastructure to support UEFI Secure Boot is maturing
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Smaller buffers are designed to help avoid bufferbloat. “TCP Fast Open” promises to speed up HTTP connections. The netfilter infrastructure can now use userspace programs to help with connection tracking.
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“Release early, release often” is a popular mantra in the open source world. Unfortunately, some developers don’t pay enough attention to it – and contribute to the reputation that Linux offers bad support for current hardware.
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According to a blog posting by Sean Michael Kerner, Linus Torvalds has declared his intention to jump the version number of the Linux kernel up to 4.0 when the second version number of the current branch gets close to reaching “the 30s”. At the current kernel development speed, Linux 3.29 would be released in the autumn of 2016.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a couple of days ago, August 25th, the immediate availability for download of the third maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.5 kernel series.
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Applications
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Computers have been a popular medium for playing music for decades. Most computers are not silent and may therefore be discounted as an ideal platform for audiophiles. Nevertheless, for the vast majority of music listeners, fan noise is a minor annoyance. The benefits offered by computers cannot be ignored allowing music lovers to enjoy music without needing a standalone music player. The ability to play a wide range of formats, manage large music collections, and access a huge raft of music available over the internet are just a few examples of the benefits offered by audio players.
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Science is the effort of seeking to comprehend how the physical world works. From observation and experimentation, science uses physical evidence of natural phenomena to compile data and analyze the collated information.
In modern research it is essential for scientists to keep abreast of the latest statistical software. Just like the fast moving world of research, developments in statistical software and methods continue to abound. Making full use of the improvements in computer software helps to advance the pace of research.
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Playing poker under Gnome is a relatively hard situation. There are almost no GTK poker clients, and those who are lack many things. The good news is that we can use the Qt based PokerTH just fine!
PokerTH has been around for 6 years now making it a mature application that keeps the poker linux fans amuzed. It offers both a local game mode and the ability to play with others over the internet. You can also connect and play with someone else using the IP.
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A configuration management database (CMDB) is a repository of information related to the various components of an information system detailing an organisation’s IT services and the relationships between those components. The purpose of a CMDB is to catalog and track all of the information that an IT department needs to keep.
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Blender is a 3D content creation suite available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. It is a fast and versatile design tool that excels in modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing and rigging. You can use it to create water, particle and other simulations. It’s also great for non-linear editing, compositing and creating interactive 3D applications.
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Proprietary
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A few hours ago, on August 28th, The Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, proudly announced that Inktank, Servergy and Twitter joined the organization.
Putting Inktank and Servergy aside, some of you already knew that Twitter was about to join The Linux Foundation on Tuesday, thanks to the media coverage from the past week.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Good news for fans of truck simulator games. Euro Truck Simulator 2 will have a native Linux version.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 is developed by SCS Software. The game is still in development and it will have following features:
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Linux platform has made its first appearance on Steam website. Few days back, Valve added a zombie Tux to Left4Dead 2 website announcing that it well head to Linux soon and now a Linux platform filter has been added to Steam Greenlight.
Steam Greenlight is a new initiative by Valve where community votes for games submitted by developers. If Valve finds that a game has generated lots of interest, then it gets included in Steam game library.
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Yesterday the public beta of Steam Big Picture Mode was started. With the optimization for using with TV and with a sophisticated control system, Steam and thus the PC platform enters to compete with game consoles. Of course, all games out of the Steam library can be used in the Big Picture Mode and it is still possible to use mouse and keyboard controllers. Have not we been waiting for a PC-console for years? Now it’s here:
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We’ve announced a couple of weeks ago that with the release of the Unity 4.0 game engine more games will be published on Linux, especially on the Ubuntu platform, via Ubuntu Software Center.
In the last days, more game studios have announced that their “still in development” games will have native support for the Linux platform.
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For those of you who are chomping at the bit, biting your nails and ruthlessly washing your cars over and over again in anxious anticipation of Steam for Linux, we’ve got good news for you.
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Desktop Environments
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The Xfce Project has published earlier today, September 9th, the release schedule for the upcoming Xfce 4.12 desktop environment.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Desktop Linux has had four years of upheaval. Since 2008, KDE, GNOME, and Unity have all faced vocal criticism from users, creating an opportunity for other desktops like Xfce, LXDE, Mate and Cinnamon to gain popularity.
But, in all the discussion, one question has never been discussed: how did KDE, the first desktop environment to suffer a revolt, manage to live through the experience and continue to prosper?
The question is not just one of historical interest. Because KDE’s revolt was the first in desktop Linux, it is further along than those that GNOME and Unity continue to face. Mostly, criticism of KDE has faded to a matter of personal choice, and the project enjoys almost the same popularity that it did before the revolt.
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GNOME Desktop
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I’m more excited about this release than any since 3.0. The list of major updates is impressive: new message tray, updated Activities Overview, lock screen, integrated input sources, accessibility on by default, new Nautilus. Then there are all the small changes: new style modal dialogs, bags of improvements to System Settings, a new Empathy buddy list, SkyDrive support, natural scrolling, new backgrounds, an overhauled Baobab… the list goes on and on.
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The first beta version of the upcoming 4.5 release for the popular personal accounting software has been released a few hours ago and it comes with many additions and improvements!
HomeBank has been under development for over 14 years now so it is naturally a very mature, internationalized project that uses the GTK 2 toolkit on 6 different operating system platforms.
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Beth Hadley is one of the 29 students that worked for Gnome components on this year’s Google Summer of Code. She did a great job in adding a set of music learning activities that enrich the magnificent GCompris children education and playing software even further.
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Gnome MPlayer is a GTK2/GTK3 interface for one of the most popular media players on Linux. This easy to use interface gives you the ability to configure the powerful MPlayer in whatever way you like and get the desired results as easy as possible.
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Mageia Foundation released the first Alpha version towards to Mageia 3 (March 2013) three days ago, with UsrMove! If I am not wrong Mageia is just the second popular distro (after Fedora) that migrates to UsrMove, and that shows that the people there, chancing the optimal solutions.
Speaking of popularity, Mageia’s market trend grows rapidly and by taking into consideration that Mageia 3 is a huge improvement from version 2, it won’t be long till Mageia will look Ubuntu in the eyes.
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You may think or imagine that customizing GTK themes requires special knowledge and a lot of time, but with my new tool it just got easier than ever!
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Clement Lefebvre, father of a lot of Linux technologies used in many of today’s distributions, including Linux Mint, has announced earlier today, September 4th, the features of the upcoming Cinnamon 1.6 desktop environment.
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Last week saw the release of Qubes, a Linux-based operating system that’s aiming to make a virtue of sandboxed security.
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I will be honest: I had never heard of this distribution until I received an e-mail 2 weeks ago. That was a request to review the Emmabuntus 2 Linux distribution from its developers’ team.
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One of the best things about Linux is that its distributions come in all shapes and sizes. There’s a distro for every taste and skill level.
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New Releases
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I am in a very interesting situation. Some time ago, I promised myself to stay away from LXDE-based distributions. At the same time, I wrote about three of them in the last 6 weeks.
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State Institute of Information Technologies and Telecommunications (Informika) and JSC ALT Linux have developed and released a set of distributions Informika 6.0 School that includes:
* Informika 6.0 School Server
* Informika 6.0 School Teacher
* Informika 6.0 School Junior
* Informika 6.0 School Master
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What I didn’t know until very recently was which Linux distribution Facebook was using. I caught up with Amir Michael, Server system lead at Facebook the other week at LinuxCon and I asked him.
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The Chakra Development Team, through Anke Boersma, proudly announced last evening, September 8th, the immediate availability for download of the Chakra GNU/Linux 2012.09 operating system.
Chakra GNU/Linux 2012.09 is dubbed Clair, and it is dedicated to the memory of Claire Lotion, a KDE contributor. This release includes the latest KDE 4.9.1 desktop environment, as well as the latest LibreOffice and Calligra office suites.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Anne Nicolas has announced earlier today, September 7th, that the first Alpha version of the upcoming Mageia 3 Linux operating system is now available for download and testing.
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Mageia is my favourite operating system. I have never hidden this fact. It became #1 in my personal rating soon after the release of their version 1 in June 2011, and was the sole holder of that place until about November 2011. Although it shares the first place now with Xubuntu, I currently run version 2 and still like it a lot.
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Red Hat Family
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Storage Live Migration is one of the major improvements that Red Hat has introduced with the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.1, which is now available for testing. The feature allows administrators to migrate virtual machine (VM) disk images between storage arrays without having to shut them down first.
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Urs Beyerle announced last evening, August 26th, that the final version of the Scientific Linux 6.3 Live CD/DVD operating system is now available for download on mirrors worldwide.
Scientific Linux 6.3 is now based on Red Had Enterprise Linux 6.3, powered by Linux kernel 2.6.32, and features XOrg Server 1.7.7, IceWM 1.2.37, GNOME 2.28, Firefox 10.0.6, Thunderbird 10.0.6, LibreOffice 3.4.5.2 and KDE Software Compilation 4.3.4.
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Fedora
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Those of us that follow +Fedora on Google Plus got a handy dandy invitation to Fedora 18 Test Day – Power Management. On October 11th, those who have accepted this invitation are invited to use there laptops and report their experiences back to the Fedora team directly in an attempt to socially corral bugs and improve the Fedora experience.
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Fuduntu Linux has been around since November 2010 and was initially a Fedora remix distribution. In November 2011, however, the codebase was forked and is now an independent distribution. Overall, there are over 30,000 users accessing the repositories. While any distribution takes work and a dedicated team, an independent distribution takes even more work than a remix.
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Debian Family
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Klaus Knopper announced a few days ago, on August 26th, the immediate availability for download of the KNOPPIX 7.0.4 operating system.
KNOPPIX 7.0.4 brings lots of new features and updated packages, such as LibreOffice 3.5.4, Chromium 21.0.1180.75, KDE Software Compilation 4.7.4, GNOME 3.4, Wine 1.5.10, VirtualBox 4.1.18, qemu-kvm 1.0, and much more.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical published a few minutes ago, September 12th, the top 10 app downloads for August 2012, from Ubuntu Software Center.
On the paid apps chart, it looks like last month’s first place Braid game has been dethroned by a new tool, MC-Launcher, a Minecraft mod installator launcher, followed closely by some of the best games from the Humble Indie Bundle V, Bastion and Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
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Slowly but steadily, Ubuntu is catching up with its competitors. The Canonical-made distro is getting better and better with every release. Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” managed to silence some of the Unity critics to a large extent. And though, work still needs to be done to take on the mighty warriors at Redmond, it seems that Shuttleworth’s untiring endeavors have started coming to fruition. Ubuntu 12.10 recently baptized as Quantal Quetzal is already looking promising.
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Ubuntu for Android (UfA) is a special form of the popular Ubuntu operating system which runs on top of Android so the user can run Anrdoid apps and desktop Linux applications at the same time. It blends desktop Linux with Android in the perfect manner so both touch-oriented and mouse-and-keyboard applications can be used perfectly and in their natural environment.
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Ubuntu is innovative, forward thinking and the most likely LINUX distribution to have any hope of taking on Windows, MacOS and ChromeOS on the desktop. Ubuntu also has aspirations of taking on the mobile and tablet market dominated by Apple and Google.
So many other distributions are derived from UBUNTU including the distribution that is competing for the honour of top dog in the LINUX world, MINT.
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Flavours and Variants
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David Tavares, the developer of Pear Linux, has announced yesterday, September 13th, on Twitter, that the first Alpha version of the upcoming Pear Linux 6 operating system is now available for download and testing.
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Before I start I would like to point out that this is not another review of Peppermint Linux 3 because I have already reviewed Peppermint Linux 3 (http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2012/08/peppermint-linux-3-mint-with-no-holes.html).
Peppermint Linux 3 has introduced the concept of the “Site Specific Browser” (SSB). This enables you to run web applications as if they are normal desktop applications. To turn a web application into a desktop application simply run the ICE program and enter the web address and the name of the web application and choose a suitable icon and application menu to hang the application from.
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With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as its underpinnings, Linux Mint 13 (Maya) was recently released in three versions, KDE (new), Xfce, and Gnome-Cinnamon. We tested each version separately and while we still like Mint, we’re accumulating a nagging list of bugs — some of which are the fault of Ubuntu, and some are the twists that Linux Mint takes on its own.
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That’s Raspberry Pis — no “e.” If you can build a supercomputer with raspberry pies, do let us know. We mean those super-small Linux PCs cooked up by some brainy researchers in Britain. Yes, you’ll need Legos too — and maybe some help from the closest 6-year-old.
That’s how Simon Cox and a team of engineers at Britain’s University of Southampton built their supercomputer, and they’ve the published instructions so that you can build one too. The total cost was about £2,500 — or $4,031 U.S. — not including network gear, but you can build a smaller version with four Raspberry Pis for just a few hundred dollars.
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There seems to be no end in sight to the march of the tiny, sub-$100 Linux PCs arriving on the market this year, and recently two more contenders were added to the mix.
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Phones
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Android
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The Cloud Broadband is a hybrid device — part tablet, part all-in-one desktop and part HD television. It’s being tested in China and there are no plans as of yet to introduce the device or something like it in the United States. Still, the thing — whatever it is — is generating a good deal of interest.
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Motorola has rolled out an Android-powered desktop in China – complete with an 18.5-inch LED touchscreen (1366×768 @ 60Hz, 16:9), keyboard and mouse.
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The NexPhone is an Ubuntu for Android powered smartphone that connects to tablet, laptop, and PC docks so that you can have all your data in one device wherever you go
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Now an official division of Google, Motorola has introduced the three newest entries in its RAZR line of smartphones. Far from the flip-style RAZRs of times past, these handsets boast large screens and a multitude of Google services, running the Chrome browser and Google Maps under the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Toys”R”Us, the toys retailing giant, just announced a tablet computer for kids that will go on sale on October 21 (2012). I did not pay too much attention to the announcement until I began to wonder what a tablet computer for kids that will cost USD $149.99 has to offer?
Based on its specs, plenty, if you consider that Tabeo is designed for kids ages 5 and up. For one, it has a few features that Google did not even consider for the Nexus 7. The “few features” I am referring to are an HDMI port and a microSD slot.
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I had the opportunity to test drive a friend’s Asus (Google) Nexus 7, the latest entry into the tablet space. It has an attractive price point, a clear display and most of the tools that you would expect from a tablet. But despite this, there are some serious limitations that might have you think twice about adopting this device as your go to tablet. But like most devices, one man’s limitations are another man’s benefits. So let me lay out for you what I liked and did not like and we can take it from there.
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For those of you that slept through chemistry in high school, spectrometry (also known as spectroscopy) is the process of measuring the spectrum of light that either passes through, or is reflected off, of an object. As different chemicals and compounds have different spectral emission patterns, the wavelength of the light entering the spectrometer can be used to determine the makeup of the substance being tested.
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As the remaining founders of Diaspora hand the project over to the community, Glyn Moody asks what lessons we can learn from the success and failure of a free software project and considers the importance of thinking about what happens next.
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Planning on building the next Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr? Forget what you know about the LAMP stack, SQL-based databases, and web hosting. The building blocks for the modern web app are independent, shared-nothing, infinitely scaleable, and cloud ready. This is no longer the way of the future, it’s the way of right now.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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For better or for worse, the modern web relies on JavaScript. That’s why JavaScript engines are critically important in modern web browsers. For years, browser vendors have competed on JavaScript benchmarks (originally just SunSpider) and apparently they will for years to come.
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Firefox OS is put through its paces in this video showing off browsing the web and photos, as well as phone functionality and other features
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Enterprise users were never really fans of Mozilla’s insanely rapid release cycle for the open source Firefox web browser. So, in order to help out enterprise users, Mozilla launched the ESR (Extended Supported Release) with Firefox 10. That ESR is still maintained with security updates as Mozilla updates the mainline branch currently at Firefox 15.
Mozilla developer Alex Keybl has now detailed the plans for how Firefox ESR 10 users will migrate (or not) to the next ESR release. The plan is for the next ESR to be based on Firefox 17 which should be out around November 20th.
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The final stable release of Mozilla desktop and Mobile browser version 15 is now available to download. Mozilla Firefox 15 brings several improvements for the desktop and mobile, which will allow you to have a better web browsing experience in desktop and mobile as well. Check the key features and installation instructions of Mozilla Firefox 15 down below.
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Web developers will be able to drive Firefox from the command line thanks to one of the new features that has appeared in Firefox 16, which has just arrived in the Firefox Beta channel. The Developer Toolbar sits at the bottom of the browser’s window and provides quick, keyboard-driven access to many of the developer features in Firefox.
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Although Firefox has managed to stake out a sizable chunk of Web browser market share, it’s long been regarded by many users as something of a memory hog. Firefox aims to put those gluttonous ways behind it in the browser’s latest version. Firefox 15 includes a new memory management system, along with several other new features.
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SaaS
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Databases
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The new release of PostgreSQL, version 9.2, has arrived, four months after the appearance of the first beta version. The new release includes read and write performance boosts, index-only scanning, new web-oriented functionality, and support for range data types. As shown in the beta, the new version promises to be much faster than its predecessor primarily thanks to index-only scanning, which allows searches to avoid reading the underlying tables and instead search only indexes. This new feature is used automatically, though there are caveats as to how effective it can be all situations, but where the required data is already indexed, for example in “big data” scenarios, the boost in performance can be huge.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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In the spirit of full-disclosure, let me first tell you that I love VirtualBox. I use it every day and it is a core component of my workflow and my digital life.
The new VirtualBox 4.2 release out today is now going to make my life, a bit easier. The new release enables the grouping of VMs, which is a simple, yet great idea. So now on my test box I can group multiple versions of a given Linux distro together for example, instead of scrolling through a (massive) list.
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The first quarter/half of 2013 will be the most exciting period for Linux Desktop – ever(!?) so far. This has to do mostly because many major distros are going to drop XServer for the shake of Wayland.
While GTK3 port in Wayland is expected to be complete and stable by 3.8 around in March, some popular applications like Gimp, Libre Office, Firefox, VLC isn’t sure if they make it.
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Alasdair Lumsden, the project lead of OpenIndiana (OI), resigned from the project a few days ago. Following proper protocol, he announced his resignation in an email to the OI developer mailing list.
If you do not know what OI is, it is a desktop-cum-server fork of OpenSolaris, which itself is an open source fork of Solaris. For a time, the guts of OpenIndiana was based on that of OpenSolaris, then it was recently changed to that of illumos. And, of course, illumos is a fork of OpenSolaris. Ok, this is the last use of the word fork in this paragraph, hopefully in this article.
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CMS
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This week, Badgeville announced a partnership with Acquia, the enterprise Drupal integrator, to bring Badgeville gamification to Drupal installations.
Badgeville uses gaming principles to drive positive user behavior. Peter Guagenti, vice president of products at Acquia, sees this as a logical partnership for his company. “Badgeville’s gamification platform is a natural extension of our Drupal Commons social business software, or any web experience built in Drupal,” he said.
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Healthcare
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ICT team at NHS trust roll out next phase of open source patient record system developed in-house
Moorfields eye hospital NHS foundation trust has said that it has added three new modules for prescribing, operations notes and correspondence to OpenEyes, its open source (OS) e-patient record system.
OpenEyes was developed by an in-house team, led by consultation surgeon and former medical director at Moorfields, Bill Aylward. He told Government Computing that the trust needed to replace its existing e-patient record system and decided to develop new software itself because of the lack of a suitable commercial system.
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Funding
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Google has contributed $20,000 to the Eclipse Foundation for hardware to assist in the task of performance testing the foundation’s integrated development environment (IDE). The extra contribution from Google’s Open Source Programs Office is over and above Google’s membership, and comes after the Eclipse community raised concerns about the faltering performance of Eclipse 4.2 especially when compared to Eclipse 3.8.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Linux has come on leaps and bounds in recent years. Many companies are now thinking about making the move to Linux, but the lack of compatible software is still proving a barrier. But is it really all that difficult? For example, what kinds of solutions exist for accounting on Linux?
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Project Releases
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The Samba developers are moving forward with their plans to deliver the next version of the Windows file, print and directory server and have announced that the first release candidate for Samba 4 is now ready. Version 4 of the free Windows services server has been in development for some time, and now includes a directory service that is compatible with Microsoft’s Active Directory. The developers point out that this version continues to be unsuitable for production use, but that it can now be tested by interested Samba users.
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Licensing
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Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk has argued that the “infrastructure stack” needs an Affero LGPL to prevent the dreaded fragmentation. Do we? I’m not convinced that it’s necessary, desirable, or likely to catch on at all.
Donnie’s argument is that an Affero LGPL (as opposed to AGPL) would be workable because it would allow businesses add proprietary bits that link to the stack, but be forced to open up their changes to the actual infrastructure stack itself.
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I will not change the license of Mayan EDMS. I will also continue to work on the software as scheduled. There were never plans for Mayan to go closed source or to stop being released under the GPL. Still, I gave the benefit of the doubt regarding the license choice and the opinion of the community echoes mine. My only concerns were for those that were not following the terms of the GPL license and that were infringing on my copyrights. I was not insinuating any type of adverse action against those complying with the GPL license. I understand your concerns regarding Mayan EDMS, and appreciate the fervor with which you have defended it. Rest assured knowing that Mayan EDMS is and will continue to be released under the GPL.
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It’s been an interesting few days for the Mayan Electronic Document Management System (EDMS). Mayan’s developer, Roberto Rosario, made quite a stir when he spoke out against forks of his software which he believed to be violating the GPL. Reactions over Roberto’s claims and his resulting actions have been varied, and give interesting insight on the application of the GPL in the real world.
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Openness/Sharing
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Last week I took something of a trip back through time. The transition began somewhere over the dark Atlantic, on my way to Brussels via Heathrow, when the person sitting next to me struck up a conversation. Improbably, I found myself discussing ODF – the OpenDocument Format – with a former Sun engineer who had followed the ODF–OOXML contest with great interest back in 2005 – 2007. I was sorry to tell him, and he was sorry to hear, that things had not gone so well in the years that followed, and that many of the bright hopes of those that had supported ODF remained to be realized.
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If you’re reading this site, we can safely assume you’re a supporter and user of open source software. If you’re a serious about it, you may even drive an open source car. But are you hardcore enough to drink open source beer?
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Programming
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After the release of version 0.6.1 early this year, we were hoping that our next release would be 1.0. Unfortunately, implementing compiled module caching (a featured we deemed critical for 1.0) proved to be more difficult than expected, and we’ve ended up doing several big coding sprints interspersed with lots of other smaller scale improvements without ever quite making it happen.
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I was busy at home for the last two weeks with many people coming and going; plus, I never had any other reason to post much else. Well, now I’m into the last few days of my break at home before getting back on campus and there haven’t been as many people coming and going, so I’ve gotten some time to do a review. On DistroWatch, I read of the release of Manjaro Linux 0.8.0, and while I initially didn’t think about it further, I saw quite a few articles reviewing it and other press about it, which convinced me that I should review it as well. That is what I’m doing now.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Maqetta HTML5 user interface (UI) designer has been given a visual styling makeover for the new Release 7. The Dojo Foundation-hosted project offers an IDE-styled environment for the creation of HTML5 UIs, whether for the desktop or for mobile devices. Release 7′s makeover also includes new collapsible palettes of elements on the left and right side of the in-work user interface design, a streamlined HTML file creation interface and redesigned toolbar. The update comes with a number of performance improvements in both the page editor and the preview-in-browser mode, which now incorporates Dojo’s Zazl for server-side rendering.
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The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced that it has joined OASIS (Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), the international standards development consortium which focusses on ebusiness and web service standards, as a Contributor. According to Document Foundation director Italo Vignoli, TDF will primarily focus its efforts on the Technical Committees for the Open Document Format (ODF), representing the open source productivity suite LibreOffice which it sponsors and governs.
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Looking at the Apple iPhone App Store, if I spend 30 seconds reading about each App to decide whether I wanted it or not, it would take me 150,000 minutes, or 2,500 hours or 104.17 days to go through them all.
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Finance
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The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption. People on the outside have speculated and come up with dozens of possible reasons, some plausible, some tending toward the conspiratorial – but there have been very few who’ve come at the issue from the inside.
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Censorship
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It seems that today you can’t spit in the wind without hitting a story about some US drone killing a bunch of people in a country somewhere overseas. Every known drone strike is accompanied by news reports of the location and the number of people killed. Yet, even with all these stories about drone strikes, it can a daunting task for those interested in following them to keep up with them all. So what is a drone enthusiast, or someone just appalled by the frequency of the strikes, to do?
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Copyrights
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One of the reasons why we live in such an innovative society is that we’ve (for the most part) enabled a permissionless innovation society — one in which innovators no longer have to go through gatekeepers in order to bring innovation to market. This is a hugely valuable thing, and it’s why we get concerned about laws that further extend permission culture. However, according to the former Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, under copyright law, any new technology should have to apply to Congress for approval and a review to make sure they don’t upset the apple cart of copyright, before they’re allowed to exist. I’m not joking. Mr. Oman, who was the Register of Copyright from 1985 to 1993 and was heavily involved in a variety of copyright issues, has filed an amicus brief in the Aereo case (pdf).
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Federal prosectors added nine new felony counts against well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz, who was charged last year for allegedly breaching hacking laws by downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database via an open connection at MIT.
Swartz, the 25-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. He surrendered in July 2011, remains free on bond and faces dozens of years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted.
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WHEN Stephanie Lenz in Pennsylvania put a video on YouTube of her 18-month-old son bopping to Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy” she did not expect a lawsuit. But four months and 28 views later, the musician’s recording company, Universal, howled that the 29-second “performance” infringed its copyright and demanded that YouTube take it down.
That was in 2007. Since then computers, smartphones and the internet have made copyright law look even more obsolete. But the response so far has been not to update the laws but to widen their scope and stiffen the penalties. In January websites including Wikipedia briefly shut down in protest against tough anti-piracy laws promoted by the entertainment industry in America and elsewhere.
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Suppose I could offer you a choice of two technologies for watching TV online. Behind Door Number One sits a free-to-watch service that uses off-the-shelf technology and that buffers just enough of each show to put the live stream on the Internet. Behind Door Number Two lies a subscription service that requires custom-designed hardware and makes dozens of copies of each show. Which sounds easier to build—and to use? More importantly, which is more likely to be legal?
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Send this to a friend
09.30.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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1. Linux is not windows
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Linux Foundation events are studded with Linux and open source community leaders, as well as some eccentric personalities. What better place than one of these events to sit down and talk to the people who are making innovation happen in software development and cloud computing?
We took advantage of this unique opportunity at LinuxCon North America where we were able to talk to folks like Amir Michael of Facebook and the OpenCompute project; Josh Berkus with PostgreSQL; Sam Ramji, former Microsoft executive and today VP at Apigee; Erica Brescia, CEO at BitRock; and Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier of CloudStack, among others. We asked each of these insightful people what they’re working on, what inspires them about Linux and open source software, and to which technologies or trends they’re paying particular attention.
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Recently, we compared Raspberry Pi, Allwinner and CuBox Linux hardware boards. Then, some folks from our open source community shared with us their experiences with Raspberry Pi and Makey Makey. There is much enthusiasm over turning ordinary items into new inventions and doing mundane tasks in completely new ways.
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The launch of the Raspberry Pi has been a huge success story, and promises to get cheap computers into the hands of kids and hobbyists around the world. But it has also had another effect–it has inspired others to look into alternative methods of developing cheap computing platforms.
One company taking inspiration from the Raspberry Pi Foundation is Adapteva, which focuses on semiconductor technology and has developed a very efficient multicore microprocessor architecture. Now they intend to use that architecture to offer up a $99 supercomputer with the help of Kickstarter.
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The Parallella is a new pocket sized computer based on the Epiphany multicore chips developed by semiconductor start-up Adapteva.
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The automotive industry took a major step forward in its commitment to open source yesterday, as announced by the Linux Foundation. The Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup (AGL) is a new group that will facilitate industry collaboration for Linux development.
Major automotive companies like Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan and Toyota are some of the first carmakers to participate in AGL. Other members include Aisin AW, DENSO Corporation, Feuerlabs, Fujitsu, HARMAN, Intel, NEC, NVIDIA, Reaktor, Renesas, Samsung, Symbio, Texas Instruments Incorporated, and Tieto.
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To sound this clever yourself, check out the aptly named nonsense. In essence, nonsense is a clever generator of, well, nonsense. Just extract the archive bundle into a directory of your choosing and you are ready to go. No compiling and no nonsense (pardon the circular reference). Nonsense is a Perl script that works with a collection of templates. If you look in the directory you just created, you’ll see an executable file called nonsense and a number of data files as well as a few HTML templates.
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Desktop
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The Cr OS developers announced on September 14th, that the Chrome OS Linux has changed its name and it will be known as Cr OS Linux from now on.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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While Reiser4 isn’t mainline in the Linux kernel tree, it can at least now be patched to work on the Linux 3.5 kernel. Previously this controversial file-system would work on the Linux 2.6.39 kernel, then ported to Linux 3.2, and now it’s wound up compatible with the Linux 3.5 kernel
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Linux 3.6 can cut off the power to PCIe chips and ATA ports. A new userspace driver framework is designed to provide faster access to individual PCI/PCIe devices for virtualised systems.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced last night, September 14, the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.5 kernel series.
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Graphics Stack
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There’s new improvements within the wonderful open-source APITrace utility for better profiling OpenGL games/applications.
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According to reports from ITworld and ZDNet, Intel has said that it is now planning a variant of the Atom Z2760 (code-named Clover Trail) System-on-Chip (SoC) that will run Linux or Android-based operating systems. The chip was originally designed specifically for Windows 8 tablets. However, the company hasn’t provided any further product details or intended target markets.
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Applications
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The top utility will need little introduction to seasoned Linux users. top is a small utility that offers a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It allows users to monitor the processes that are running on a system. top has two main sections, with the first showing general system information such as the amount of time the system has been up, load averages, the number of running and sleeping tasks, as well as information on memory and swap usage. The second main section displays an ordered list of processes and their process ID number, the user who owns the process, the amount of resources the process is consuming (processor and memory), as well as the running time of that process. Some versions of top offer extensive customization of the display, such as choice of columns or sorting method.
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Learning a new language can provide life changing opportunities and enjoyment. There are so many reasons to learn a foreign language whatever your nationality, to improve employment potential, intellectual curiosity, make travel more enjoyable, sharpen cognitive and life skills, make lifelong friends, and many more. Whilst it is widely acknowledged that it is easier to begin learning a second language at a tender age, starting a new language at any age is eminently worthwhile.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Most of you probably think about Source as only a game engine – but Chris Smith is actually working on a web series called “Aura” that is made with Source SDK and other tools such as Faceposer – which is used for the lip syncing onto character models, Garry’s mod – for backgrounds and Sony Vegas for editing.
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Hey! Great news! 4 games have been added to the Humble Indie Bundle 6! As always, if you already bought the bundle, you can download those new games immediately! Some of those games have already been included into previous bundles. Let’s take a look at these “new” games!
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Listen as your minions clash with the heroes in the fight between Good and Evil.
Orcs are grunting. Villagers are screaming. Slimes are…sliming.
The biggest change is the addition of sound, which brings the real-time battles to life. Every clink of treasure collected, every clash of a knight’s swords, and every cry of anguish from your vanquished foes no longer requires your imagination. And with catchy music by the talented William Riordan, this easy-to-play strategy game is even more enjoyable.
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Faster Than Light (FTL) is a spaceship simulation and roguelike game. The player have to manage a spaceship, survive and explore vast galaxies.
FTL was on Kickstarter and it raised more than $200k back in April. The actual target was mere $10k but the level of interest was so much that they manged to get about 2000% funding.
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Desktop Environments
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I get why they called it Gigolo. It’s the Xfce utility that “mounts anything without complaining.”
The things it mounts include ftp and sftp over the network, WebDAV and Windows shares. I’d rather not use it at all, but in Xfce’s Thunar file manager, you still need Gigolo to access these remote filesystems.
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GNOME Desktop
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As part of a facelift, the Nautilus file manager has gained and lost a number of features. The Boxes VM tool and the GNOME Disks utility, which are also of interest for Cinnamon and Unity, have matured. The account manager now allows programs to access Facebook friends and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.
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The user observation hackfest was an attempt from the part of Gnome developers to learn more about what users want.
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This distribution we chose to show you today sure is an interesting combination. According to their Distrowatch page, it’s a combination of features from Mandriva, on which is based, Fedora and Ubuntu, and can be used at school, work or home. Are these rather bold statements true? Stay tuned to find out. You don’t need to have any special knowledge, just 10 minutes of your time is all we’re asking. If you have questions on how to try blackPanther or you already tried it and have an opinion, please visit our linux forums and share!
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After reading a comprehensive review at dedoimedo.com on the latest release of Voyager 12.04 I decided to do a short video review of this Linux OS Distribution. I chose to install this distribution to my hard drive. I have always been a great fan of Xubuntu, so I was excited to see what Voyager would look like and compare it’s performance to Xubuntu.
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Finnix is a live CD rescue distro, and it’s one for the CLI-junkies because it doesn’t come equipped with a desktop.
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First released in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, Linux is an open-source operating system derived from the UNIX OS. The philosophy of such open-source operating systems is that they are community-driven; Linux evolves to meet the demands and wishes of its users. There are many great Linux distributions to choose from, each boasting their own advantages and niches. Some designed to be very user-friendly, others intended to give power users greater control over their systems. Here are five of the most highly rated Linux distributions on offer today.
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New Releases
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Slackware 14.0 is has been released. A post on slackware.com said, “the long wait is finally over and a new stable release of Slackware has arrived!” The official announcement said, “We are sure you’ll enjoy the many improvements.”
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The developers behind the Superb Mini Server (SMS) Linux server operating system proudly announced earlier today, September 18th, the immediate availability for download of the Superb Mini Server 2.0.0 release.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The ancient alchemists tried to turn iron into gold. While they didn’t succeed, they did leave us with a wonderful metaphor. Last week I experienced something akin to alchemy when I installed Fedora 17 onto a donated Dell Dimension 3000 tower computer.
I then created two extra users for this computer, grabbed some spare USB keyboards and USB mice, and plugged an extra keyboard and mouse into each of two Plugable multiseat devices (which sell for $65 each). With bated breath, I plugged each Plugable device into a USB port on that free computer. Voila! Like magic, a computer that had no value to someone else suddenly turned into a fully-functioning three-seat computer.
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Get your first taste of the Spherical Cow, and help test the new features expected to come to Fedora 18, such as a new Hot Spot feature and updated Samba
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The Alpha release of the upcoming Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) Linux operating system has been announced earlier today, September 18th, featuring KDE 4.9.
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Debian Family
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It’s an ominous name for an ominous fruit: the black raspberry. As the owner of a new Raspberry Pi, I realized that I was going to have to, at some point, open the box and do something with it.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical announced today, September 18th, that the Ubuntu Open Week for Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) will take place between 24th and 26th October, 2012, on the usual Ubuntu IRC channel, #ubuntu-classroom.
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Along with RedHat, Rackspace and many others, Canonical has been steadily marrying its cloud strategy to the open source OpenStack platform. In February of last year, we discussed how Canonical was deepening its relationship with OpenStack, and it has kept doing so. Now, in a new blog post, Canonical’s Mark Baker notes that Canonical has released the Cloud Archive for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server, an online software repository from which administrators can download the latest versions of OpenStack, for use with the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu.
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Cinnamon, the GNOME Shell fork used by default in Linux Mint 13 (Cinnamon Edition), has reached version 1.6, getting many new features: a new 2D session, workspace OSD, new applets and lots more!
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Ubuntu 12.04 includes a desktop interface that is a strong departure from previous versions. One of the most striking differences upon logging into the system is the launcher. The launcher is a vertical bar that, by default, resides along the left side of the screen. It is similar to the dock in Mac OS X and aims to make your user experience more efficient and intuitive.
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Canonical has reminded folks that Ubuntu 11.04 will no longer be supported after October 28th, 18 months after its launch
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Dear Ubuntu users, the time has come to say goodbye to the Natty Narwhal release of the popular Ubuntu operating system, Ubuntu 11.04, as on October 28th it will reach end of life.
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Flavours and Variants
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Pear Linux is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu, but unlike its parent distribution, which uses the Unity desktop interface, Pear Linux features a modified GNOME Shell called Pear Shell decked out to look like a MacOS X desktop. Not that it is a succeeded, but it is good attempt. Apple has nothing to worry about. The latest edition is Pear Linux 5. Code-named Sunsprite, it is based on Ubuntu 12.04, using (Linux) kernel 3.2.
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Semiconductor start-up Adapteva has announced plans to create an open-source experimentation board with a massive amount of parallel processing power, and it’s found a novel way to raise the funds it needs: Kickstarter.
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Phones
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Following the roadmap laid out back in January, HP has delivered Open webOS 1.0 to the masses as planned. Last month saw the release of two betas, one for desktop Linux and the other for assorted devices thanks to OpenEmbedded integration, and today we’re seeing the finalized versions of each. Improving on the last go around, the OpenEmbedded version (Open webOS OE) now has a user interface to match the the Linux-style Open webOS Desktop, which itself has the same user interface as webOS 3.0 on the HP TouchPad.
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An alpha release of the Tizen 2.0 SDK with source-code was released this week.
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Android
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The flow of notable new Android apps quietened down a bit on the Google Play store this week, which is why this post has dropped down to a list of 10 rather than 20 – see the note at the bottom for a bit more on that.
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An Android control code vulnerability originally reported as a Samsung problem in fact appears to affect most smartphones and UMTS tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich (version 4.0.x) or earlier versions of Android. Google updated the dialling software code in version 4.1.1 so that control codes are no longer executed automatically.
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A look at Recon Instruments’ MOD Live Heads-Up Display and the ease of creating and programming useful, on-person computing devices.
If you had the chance to watch (or were even one of the lucky attendees at) the Google I/O 2012 opening keynote, you may recall the exciting moment when Sergey Brin proclaimed the arrival of the Google Glass prototypes to the attendees. Alas, Glass prototype pre-orders cost a cool $1,500 for some future delivery date. This led many developers, including me, to reassess their desire to build an Android-centric, HUD-based application.
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Motorola Mobility has just launched a fairly interesting Android powered computer over in China that hosts a ton of different home entertainment options. The “HMC3260″ boasts of a 18.5 inch LED touchscreen that will be able to play TV shows, movies, games, browse the web, and with it being powered by Android, it will be able to run Android apps as well. Motorola had apparently partnered up with a cloud service provider called WASU to load the Android computer up with content.
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I had the privilege of working with David Tilbrook almost 25 years ago. He was the first person with whom I ever worked that clearly articulated proper software construction discipline for collaborative endeavours and captured a summary of it under the title, Washing Behind Your Ears: Principles of Software Hygiene.
David articulated these practices pre-World Wide Web. We weren’t yet living in a world where the Web had so completely removed the friction of time and space from sharing and collaborating on software that even the early Internet enabled.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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As mainstream users came to equate Internet Explorer’s logo with the Web, Microsoft worked to lock in its advantage with increasingly proprietary technology like ActiveX. It surely would have done so, too, but for the seemingly futile Mozilla browser, née Firefox. Born in the ashes of Netscape’s failed browser business 10 years ago this month as Phoenix, Firefox 1.0 is arguably the most important technology developed in the last 50 years.
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This year’s Mozilla Festival will gather more than 800 passionate people with diverse backgrounds and skill-sets. The goal: push the frontiers of the open web, learn together, and make things that can change the world.
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Databases
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The new MariaDB release numbers are explained in this article.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Some forks die off quickly. Other linger and a precious few actually prosper and excel beyond their origins. I personally would put the LibreOffice project and its masters in the Document Foundation in the latter category.
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The two key developers of OpenOffice — Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice — are opening up a wee bit about their next versions. And yes, Office 2013, the cloud, social networks and tablets are on the minds of the open source office suite developers.
Apache OpenOffice 3.5, slated for delivery in the first quarter of 2013, will offer better interoperability with Microsoft Office 2007-2013 XML formats, as well as enhanced performance, stability, usability and more language support, according to the OpenOffice.org blog.
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MartUX is a new OpenIndiana/Illumos-based Solaris distribution for reviving SPARC hardware support.
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CMS
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The Joomla developers have released version 3.0 of their open source CMS. The major version jump is justified as Joomla 3.0 offers many new features along with standard templates for the web site and administration interface that comply with the responsive web design guidelines, producing good results on large screens as well as on mobile devices. The basic Joomla platform was updated to version 12.2 and the web-based install has been reduced to three steps and is now simpler to use. It also includes several sets of sample data that are now available during installation.
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Healthcare
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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It is good to have your architectural decisions validated by someone else, even better when that validation blows you out of the water. If you’ve chosen to go with NGINX for your load balancing needs, give yourself a pat on the back. WordPress.com made the same decision, and is now pushing 70,000 transactions per second and over 15 GBs through their NGINX load balancers, as explained by a guest post on High Scalability by Barry Abrahamson from Automattic.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html). You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.
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Project Releases
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Developer Sebastian Bergmann has released new versions of his PHPUnit utility and related tools. The open source unit testing framework for PHP has been updated to version 3.7.0, while the PHP_CodeCoverage, PHPUnit_MockObject and DbUnit components were made available as version 1.2.0.
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Public Services/Government
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The move to free and open source in public administrations requires political support, a committee from the German Parliament was told last Friday. Peter Hofmann, project leader of the move to free software by the city of Munich, said politicians need to be aware of the benefits of this type of software. He and other experts called for a national policy favouring its use.
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This project aimed to encourage the distribution of Ubuntu Linux instead of FreeDOS on new low-cost computers in order to provide consumers with free and open source software and thereby also reduce piracy. Many low cost computers that do not include Microsoft Windows are instead distributed with an operating system that is called FreeDOS which is free clone of the 30+ year old pre-Windows operating system, MSDOS.
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The Gigabit City Summit is set to host a diverse, dynamic range of speakers on the topics of open government, big data, and innovation on Tuesday, September 25, 2012 from 7:00 am to 9:00 am CDT.
Co-chairs for this session are Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Officer for the City of San Francisco, and Nigel Jacob, from Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics.
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What’s it like to work for your state government? What kinds of software are approved for use? How far do you think openness in government trickles down?
I’ve been asked questions likes these as a Geographic Information Systems Technician with the State Department of Health and Human Services in North Carolina, where I spend most of my day looking at maps. And currently, open source solutions are not approved for use in my department, but there does appear to openness in my midst.
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Two news items over the last week signalled to me that the benefits of open source, open data, and other artifacts of the meshed Internet society are making it through to policy makers. A new section of the White House website and a speech by a European Commission political prove that progress is under way. But when it comes to legal support, both stop short of advocating real open innovation.
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Openness/Sharing
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Blender movies have always amazed us all with its interesting little stories and sophisticated visual graphics. While Elephants Dream was of sci-fi kind with mind-bending ideas and graphics, Bug Buck Bunny was a light-hearted comedy. The third one, Sintel, also had splendid graphics to back-up its unique storyline (watch all the official Blender movies till date). Tears of Steel is different though. It is not a full-fledged end-to-end animation movie per se like its predecessors. Tears of Steel is more like a normal movie with impressive visual effects.
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Following a highly successful Kickstarter project and over a year of development, HexBright, billed by its creator as the “world’s first open source Arduino flashlight,” is now in production with initial shipments planned for December.
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Peak hurricane season is always a reminder that natural disasters are never easy to handle. If there’s anything we can take away from them it’s that planning and preparedness can save the lives of those risk. The World Bank and OpenGeo find themselves at the unique cross section of disaster management and enabling technology. OpenGeo’s software is built to share information on on the web, which is a critical component of any disaster management plan. Various implementations of our software have been used to facilitate strategic disaster management planning.
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For people wanting to learn about Creative Commons and its application in different sectors, there is a sea of materials available online. In particular, Creative Commons international affiliates create a huge number of educational resources that cross language and cultural boundaries.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my work sorting through some of these resources to identify some of the best, focusing on Creative Commons license use for public sector information, for publishing content on a variety of digital platforms, and for generating revenue. As promised, today I’ll highlight some of the resources I’ve discovered.
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HFOSS, Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software, is a movement inspired first by the December 2004 Asian tsunami, and then by other humanitarian needs in the health, civic, finance and academic sectors (especially for women and people of color).
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Open Data
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In July this year, two UNC-Chapel Hill professors trained 16 motivated Congolese students in the art of beat making. They called their group The Congo Beat Making Lab and collaborated with Yole!Africa to strengthen a larger goal they all share: to connect people (including musicians) around the world.
Apple Juice Kid (professor, producer, DJ, and drummer) and Pierce Freelon (professor and MC), developed the Beat Making Lab curriculum at UNC-Chapel Hill to connect students with music and students with students. They took this curriculum to Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo and the results were remarkable—this short documentary features a full song and video the group produced using free, open source music-making software.
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It’s very easy to ascertain that ‘open is good’, but is there a clear business case for opening up your data? That’s been a key question at the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, and not one with easy answers.
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Open Hardware
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Open hardware platforms like the Arduino have turned device development into a hobbyist enterprise in recent years, but the $20 price tag of a microcontroller board seems a lot less tantalizing when one adds in the costs of testing and debugging it. At LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego, David Anders addressed this issue and offered some guidance on finding and selecting tools for open hardware development, the majority of which are open hardware themselves.
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Programming
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While Onyx Neon still occupies a lot of my attention, I’ve been working with a local company called Big Blue Marble to develop small web-based businesses. This has taken me through a crash course in things like search engine optimization and statistics that I hadn’t figured I’d ever need to know.
(Half the fun of small business is realizing that there’s something you should have started doing months ago, that no one available has any experience with it, and that one of you has a week to get to a basic level of competence with it before you move on to the next crisis. The other half is realizing that the next time you tackle a problem like this, you’ll be that much better at it.)
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JSR 310, the long-running Java Specification Request for a date and time API to replace the existing complex and hard to work with date and time support, has been added to the feature list for OpenJDK 8 and Java 8. Expected to arrived in January 2013′s milestone 6 release, the inclusion of JSR310 in Java 8 is the result of work done over the summer to simplify and refine the API so that it could be included.
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Slashdot has been sold again. Dice Holdings, the company behind the Dice.com career site, announced today that it had purchased Slashdot, as well as the SourceForge and FreeCode websites, from Geeknet for $20 million in cash. According to a statement from Geeknet—the company formerly known as SourceForge, VA Software, and VA Linux—the sale price was approximately equal to what the three sites have brought in over the last year.
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Standards/Consortia
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Earlier this month, the IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society, and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) signed a joint agreement to affirm and adhere to a set of principles that establish what they call The Modern Paradigm for Standards.
For those who have lived in the technical standards world, you will find nothing overtly revolutionary in the Paradigm affirmed by these leading standards development organizations (SDOs). Indeed, the principles appear almost boilerplate from prior descriptions of voluntary, industry standards.
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The W3C web standards consortium has presented a first Public Working Draft for integrating a Web Cryptography API into browsers. The JavaScript API will provide features such as hashing, key generation and verification, as well as encryption and decryption. For example, it will enable web applications to check a user’s identity in more secure ways than are currently possible between browsers and HTTP servers.
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Shiver me timbers! If it be doughnuts ye be craving, head to yon Buford Krispy Kreme on Sept. 19 and jabber like a pirate.
Krispy Kreme is celebrating the international Talk Like a Pirate Day by giving away a free doughnut to anyone who comes into the store and talks like a pirate. Anyone who dresses in full pirate regalia will get a dozen free doughnuts.
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Finance
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Two Associations (the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association) sued the CFTC stating that position limits on the number of contracts would damage their business. A federal judge ruled against the CFTC.
It is passing strange that those who brought down the financial system in 2008 still cannot see why they should be regulated so that another crisis will be averted.
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Censorship
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Google’s added The Pirate Bay to its Instant and Autocomplete search blacklist, meaning that users need to type the words out in full before the search engine lists the site.
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Privacy
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Civil Rights
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As one reads the letters from victims of TSA patdowns released last week, strong patterns emerge. Nearly every letter uses one of these turns of phrase: demeaning, degrading, dehumanizing, humiliating, violated, traumatized, sexually assaulted.
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Business iPad users beware. Your halcyon days of loading whatever the heck you want onto your tablet may be coming to an end.
Apple is set to introduce a couple of new features that will give corporate IT new ways to lock down the iOS 6 operating system, which powers the iPad and the iPhone, according to Zenprise, a mobile device management company that was briefed on the features by Apple.
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Send this to a friend
09.28.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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After four years of continuous efforts, Satyasheelan developed Linux Intelligent OCR Solution (LIOS), involving a scanner connected to a computer, which helps blind people read books, newspapers or any printed or web content. It runs on Ubuntu operating system, a Linux- based open source software available free of cost. His son Nalin Sathyasheelan, a BSc Computer Science student supported him in the endeavour while professionals of IIT, Hyderabad, helped him to get Malayalam OCR (Optimised Character Recognition) for LIOS.
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Google turns 14 today. Yeaah, I know it really doesn’t seem all that long ago when Google was the ‘new kid’ on the block and we all used AltaVista (or at least I did…).
Like millions of others I first noticed Google because of its use by Yahoo. The bulky Yahoo portal page of 14 years ago was a mess so I just started going to Google directly (like millions of others). Back then Sergey and Larry were also a lot more accessible than they are now. I remember emailing about a result error and getting a personal reply (and a T-shirt) back in response.
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There were quite a few words on the death of Linux on the desktop lately, but people have been saying that for a long time now. Even I talked about it at one point. In some ways Linux is dead, if you judge a liveliness of a platform by how much relevance it has to the mainstream consumer. That doesn’t, however, mean that a revival isn’t possible. And amidst all these death proclamations a few key trends are emerging that could actually signal a rebirth.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds announced yesterday, September 23rd, that the seventh Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.6 kernel is available for download and testing.
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Graphics Stack
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The latest achievement within the Wayland camp is wlterm, a native terminal emulator.
This wlterm project is another terminal-related project by David Herrmann, the open-source developer that wrote KMSCON as a DRM-based terminal emulator, the FBLOG driver, and previously proposed Wayland virtual terminals.
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This morning you may be seeing a number of performance previews on AMD’s Trinity APUs for the desktop, while the full embargo covering these latest Fusion products has yet to expire. Phoronix tests of Trinity under Linux are forthcoming.
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Intel has been working on a tablet shell for Wayland’s Weston compositor. Work on this reference tablet shell continues to move forward.
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Applications
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Although we all are technology enthusiasts and like to spend a significant amount of everyday time in front of our computers, we also don’t forget to stay fit and exercise regular for a healthier body.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many sports tracking applications available in Gnome, so chances are that you either using Windows to do this, or you are not tracking your athletic activities at all. The recently updated SportsTracker could be the solution to this.
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Reinventing the wheel is often cited as a barrier to the adoption of open source software. Critics point out if developers combined forces on projects, instead of duplicating software that already exists, this would help to alleviate the problem of an overwhelming amount of choice that faces users when installing new software. By reducing redundancy and duplicated effort, enhanced cooperation between developers would actually help to progress the development of established open source projects. There is an element of truth that development time is wasted, and it is not hard to identify examples of developers reinventing the wheel in their code, rather than contribute their development skills to projects with broadly similar objectives.
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Proprietary
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Here at “The Powerbase“, we usually report on software, hardware, or services which are open source. That’s sort of the whole point of this little thing we do. Someone browsing through our site could get the impression that the world is overflowing with open source projects, and everyone and everything is sharing data.
Unfortunately, that’s not exactly the case. While there is no question that open source has moved from niche to mainstream, there are still some big players who can’t seem to get their act together.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Valve’s much-ballyhooed expansion of the Source engine and Steam to the Linux world just took a major step forward with the announcement of a private external beta. If you’re running Ubuntu, you could be one of the lucky 1,000 users to take Steam and a Valve game for a spin sometime in October. Of course, if you’re really lucky, you’re probably gearing up for the private internal beta, which starts next week.
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A new game – ‘Sacred Gold’, described as a ‘classic RPG’ – has been added to the Ubuntu Software Center.
Its arrival marks the beginning of a ‘new relationship’ between Linux Game Publishing and Canonical, which the games company says will ‘bring the greatest Linux ports of your favourite games to Ubuntu’.
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Imagine if a bunch of flight-sim enthusiasts got together and spent years assembling a free, open-source, constantly updated flight simulator. Wait actually, you don’t have to imagine that: It’s a real thing, and it’s called FlightGear. The open-source simulator has been around for years.
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The game was released in 1994 for DOS and Amiga and it was open sourced in 2003. Since then it has been ported to many platforms using ScummVM. The game is available in repositories of many Linux distributions.
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YoYo Games’ popular 2D game engine GameMaker will soon have an option for exporting games to Ubuntu. Similar to what Unity 4.0 game engine is doing, developers will be able to export their games to Linux platform.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop
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With Gnome 3.6 still being on beta (3.5.90), the discussions about the features of the upcoming 3.8 have already begun. It is not surprising that the first feature that is under examination is Fallback Mode.
Fallback seems low-maintained and not lot of people using it.
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Gnome Files 3.6 is far from completed and is more like an experimental version of what is coming next, in 3.8. Overall, I think it is an improvement over 3.4 but this has to do in what way you’re using it.
Some things are done faster in new Files and some things are done slower. For common tasks? It is lot lot faster!
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The 1.4 branch of KDE’s music player Amarok is admittedly the best music player that ever existed Unfortunately, the Amarok developers decided that it was too good to be true and they destroyed it with version 2.0, but Clementine did the trick by forking 1.4 and evolving into an even greater music player. Clementine uses Qt though, and we don’t prefer this toolkit in our system…so what about an Amarok 1.4 “clone” that uses GTK?
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Today after reading a great review of SnowLinux 3 E17 Crystal from mylinuxexplore.blogspot.ca I decided to do a short video review of this Linux Distribution. After downloading the amd64 ISO, I spun it up to take a look.
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The developers of the multimedia Live CD distribution GeeXboX have released a new version of their software which adds live TV functionality. After one year of work and the addition of up to 140MB of additional firmware and drivers to the distribution, users of GeeXboX 3.0 are now able to watch and record live television from DVB sources.
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Today I created a short video on Sabayon Linux 10 XFCE. Sabayon comes in many flavours of desktop managers. XFCE is probably one of the lightest, so I decided to look at it. I have to admit, I have always had issues with Gentoo, Sabayon is based on Gentoo and from what I have read helps Noobs like me come to grips with Gentoo. As far as Sabayon’s ‘Out of the Box’ theory it is basically sound as installation, although different from other distributions I have played with was flawless.
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New Releases
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“After nearly three years of work, I have the pleasure to announce that Qubes 1.0 has finally been released,” Joanna Rutkowska, Founder and CEO of Invisible Things Lab, announced today.
Qubes OS is a “stable and reasonably secure desktop OS”, she writes, explaining that she cannot call it “secure” or “unbreakable” unless it is formally proven that the whole design and implementation are 100% secure.
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Robert Shingledecker has announced earlier today, September 25th, the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core and Tiny Core Plus Linux operating systems.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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According to its financial results for the second quarter of its 2013 fiscal year, US-based Linux distributor Red Hat has seen increased demand for its open source applications. The company has reported quarterly revenues of $323 million (approximately £199 million), an increase of 15% compared to the previous year. Its subscription software revenues rose by 17% compared to the same quarter last year to $279 million. The company posted a fall in net profits to $35 million, 12.5% down on last year’s figure of $40 million; profit per share for this quarter was $0.18.
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Fedora
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In Linux and other UNIX-like computer operating systems, the root account is the administrator account. A user with root privileges can perform many tasks that a standard user account cannot. In current editions of Fedora 17, the idea of a disabled root account is a foreign one.
But come Fedora 18, the next stable release, the root account will be disabled by default. It is one of the many new features of Anaconda, the Fedora system installation program. That at least is what you see in the just released Fedora 18 Alpha.
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Debian Family
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I bit the bullet and did some repartitioning of my Debian Wheezy-running laptop to give myself more space on the Linux side, taking it from the seldom-used Windows side of my dual-boot system.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Running stable software often means sacrificing the latest and greatest software features — especially in the open source world, where development cycles tend to be rapid and bleeding edge code is available to anyone who dares run it. If you want to build a cloud infrastructure on Ubuntu, however, you no longer have to choose between stability and features, thanks to a new OpenStack archive from Canonical. Here’s the scoop.
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The Orbital Desktop Flickr user Jonathan Quintana loves to customize desktops, and this Ubuntu setup is his first linux desktop. It looks sharp, offers some useful information, and still has plenty of room to work and get things done.
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Canonical generated significant excitement earlier this year when it announced its Ubuntu for Android plans, which included dockable smartphones that can launch the full Ubuntu Linux desktop.
No specific names were mentioned at the time regarding manufacturer partners, but recently a new concept project appeared that seeks to bring that vision to life.
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Ubuntu users might already be familiar with the upcoming Shopping Lens function: the Home Lens, somewhat similar to Windows’ Start menu, will automatically search for products similar to your search term on services like Amazon. That means that typing something like “Photoshop” into your Home Lens will not only display search results for “Photoshop” in your applications, but display search results from online stores as well, giving you quick access to pages where you can buy the Photoshop software package.
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Quantal Quetzal won’t properly launch until October 18th, but a tentative timeline for Ubuntu 13.04 has already appeared on the horizon. Come December 1st, the as-of-yet unnamed version will hit its first alpha and transition into its second testing stage on February 7th.
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Canonical is working on a toggle to let Ubuntu users block Amazon-stocked products from appearing in their desktop search results.
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Say you’re performing a local search on your computer for the word “Thompson” to locate documents about one of your clients. The last thing you likely want or need alongside the list of relevant files is a list of random products available on Amazon (as well as music in the Ubuntu One Music Store) that happen to include the search term. Yet that hasn’t stopped Canonical, maker of the popular Ubuntu, from desperately defending its plan to add that very “feature” to the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.10, dubbed “Quantal Quetzal.”
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Canonical has reversed its decision to drop Ubuntu’s GRUB 2 bootloader in favor of EFILinux on systems using Secure Boot, which prevents the loading of drivers or OS loaders that are not signed with a certain digital signature, after the Free Software Foundation (FSF) stepped in and said it will help find a workable solution for Linux installations.
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Canonical’s Linux based Ubuntu distribution has courted a lot of controversy in the past two years during its move from the Gnome desktop to Unity, and now the outfit is set to once again raise the ire of longstanding users. Canonical will include Amazon search results when users initiate Dash searches.
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The new version of Ubuntu Linux slated for release in October introduces a feature that some users claim is at worst a violation of privacy or, at best, generally annoying. Ubuntu 12.10 introduces search results from Amazon into the Dash. That means you could be searching for a file or application on your computer and get shopping results under a “more suggestions” section after your general results.
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While some are calling it a tempest in a teapot, Ubuntu loyalists are expressing fury that the next version of Ubuntu includes shopping suggestions from Amazon directly in desktop search results. Version 12.10 is imminent, and many Ubuntu users feel like the Amazon inclusions are nothing more than adware. What does Canonical get out of this arrangement, and will the company reverse its decision? Mark Shuttleworth has weighed in.
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Steve Langasek from Canonical announced a few days ago, on August 27th, a proposal to drop the Alternate CD ISO images starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.
Four days later, on August 30th, the Alternate CDs were gone from the daily builds and will not be available at the launch of Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1.
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Ubuntu developer Canonical is making a push to establish itself as a force in the Linux server and cloud computing markets.
The company, which has long been known as a champion for the expansion of Linux into the consumer and developer markets, said that Ubuntu will also play a part in the next generation of cloud computing platforms.
Speaking in a keynote address at the 2012 LinuxCon North America convention in San Diego, Canonical vice president of cloud Kyle MacDonald told attendees that the company sees itself performing particularly well in the scale-out server market.
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Take a quick look around the Ubuntu forums and IRC channels and you can miss the pattern: it’s mostly men. That is not to say that there is no diversity in the open source community, only that you need to look a little deeper to find it.
According to a recent survey, only 12% of professionals in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are women. So I felt especially lucky to “sit-down” with Ubuntu Women members Elizabeth “Lyz” Krumbach and Cheri Francis over a Google+ hangout to discuss the work they are doing with the organization.
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Canonical announced today, September 27th, that the second and last Beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system is now available for download.
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An interesting bug report cropped up on Launchpad a couple of days ago. Apparently, it is quite easy to bring up search results for sex toys, pornographic materials and other adult-related merchandise in Ubuntu 12.10 via the Dash.
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Unity 6.6.0 has just been uploaded to the Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal proposed repositories, bringing some polish for various aspects like the Dash Previews, animations, 2 new default lenses and more.
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Flavours and Variants
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Last week I posted an article about Linux Mint 13 using the Mate desktop. The machine I used as the host for the Mint 13 Mate desktop is a fairly basic laptop with not much in the way of graphics rendering capabilities.
This article is a review of the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 13. Now obviously it would be unfair to use the same laptop to do the Cinnamon review because clearly the laptop is not up to the task of running Cinnamon.
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From standard feature upgrades to controversial integration with Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), we’ve already surveyed the highlights of the desktop version of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 release. But what do Ubuntu server users have to look forward to Oct. 18? Read on for a round up of the new bells and whistles set to make their debut in the backroom version of one of the world’s most popular open source operating systems.
Since Ubuntu Server 12.10 is not a longterm support (LTS) release, which means its lifetime of official support from Canonical will be relatively short, it’s not likely to see significant implementation in production environments. But that also makes it a ripe testing ground for Ubuntu developers to roll out new server features and get some real-world feedback in time to smooth out the kinks before the next LTS release.
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I have been running Bodhi Linux on my Acer Aspire One Netbook for most of this year but today I finally decided to upgrade to the latest version.
The screenshots of Bodhi 2.10 that I had seen looked great and the version I had previously been running was just brilliant.
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has performed testing on the effects of overclocking and overvolting, and is now providing what it calls a “turbo mode” for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer. While the Foundation has always supported these kinds of modifications, they have in the past voided the customer’s warranty for the product – a sticky bit in the BCM2835 chip makes sure this operation cannot be performed undetected. The turbo mode option enables users to get more performance out of their Raspberry Pis without having to be afraid of affecting their warranty.
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Phones
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The source code and the SDK for Tizen 2.0 alpha has been released. Tizen is a Linux distribution for mobile platforms cobbled together with parts from the MeeGo project, Moblin and Maemo (all three are now defunct). Tizen’s development is overseen by the Tizen Association, a non-profit organization supported by power-house companies in the industry
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Android
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Several Phoronix readers have written in about libhybris, a way to load Android libraries while overriding some Bionic symbols with those symbols from glibc.
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SAN DIEGO. It’s no secret that Google’s Android mobile operating system has had its share of security flaws. But what is less well-known is that the U.S. government’s National Security Agency (NSA) is among the teams working to improve Android security.
Speaking at the LinuxCon North America 2012 conference, NSA developer Stephen Smalley detailed how the NSA is working to make Android more secure for everyone.
The NSA is no stranger to the world of Linux and open source security. In 2004, the NSA began to work on something known as SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux). SELinux provides mandatory access control and granular application level controls to Linux. SELinux is now baked into Linux and is a key component of its overall enhanced security.
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The theory that Android smartphone users don’t buy apps is wrong, according to new data that shows 93 per cent of Android phone owners are buying apps rather than just downloading free ones.
In a recent survey by Android keyboard developer Swiftkey, the data reveals that twice the number of Android owners own more than 20 apps compared to users last year.
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SAN DIEGO. Twitter has become one of the most pervasive forms of real time social media interactions in recent years and it’s largely powered by open source technology. That’s the message coming that Chris Aniszcyzyk, the open source manager at Twitter, delivered today at the LinuxCon conference.
Twitter’s infrastructure runs on open source technology using the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and the Scala programming language. Aniszcyzyk noted that Twitter was first built with the open source Ruby on Rails framework, but ended up moving away from Rails for performance reasons.
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Just over two years after their now-famous Kickstarter fundraiser that generated ten times the amount of funds they were seeking, the founders of Diaspora have announced they will shifting control of the project to the Diaspora community.
Diaspora is one of the flashy success stories of the social media age. Conceived by four NYU students as an open source, distributed answer to Facebook, the project received a lot of media and hacker attention in 2010, just as the apex of concern for Facebook’s data privacy policies was being reached.
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Twitter seems to have a somewhat cynical approach on how to treat developers these days. The news that Twitter is joining the Linux Foundation comes just days after the microblogging company angered many in its development community with tighter restrictions on its APIs.
The timing for joining the Linux Foundation seems rather suspect–observers have already called Twitter on trying to spin the negative response it received when the company announced the changes to version 1.1 of the Twitter API on August 16.
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“What a crazy week,” said Eric Gundersen, CEO of MapBox, a cloud-based digital map publishing company, in an interview with TPM.
Gundersen’s point is well taken, given his small 25-person startup, based in Washington, D.C., just won a $575,000 grant from the journalism innovation nonprofit the Knight Foundation.
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Events
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I participated in a panel discussion at LinuxCon today with other journalists who cover Linux and open source goings-on, including our own Alex Williams. One of the questions that was asked was “What was the most important story for you this week?”
The answers from my peer journalists were interesting, and reflect the diversity in interest (and beats) between us all. From Google’s admission to using — and paying for support for — Ubuntu on the desktop, to Linus’s revelation of a Linux 4.0 release within the next couple of years, the things that piqued our various interests covered the spectrum of what happened this week.
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The Australian national Linux conference appears to be becoming a victim of its own success, with no team putting up a bid to host the event in 2014.
But the sponsor, Linux Australia, has no choice but to keep finding an organising team – the conference serves as its main source of funds. Else, it would not be able to spread its wings as it has.
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It’s not as easy a question as you might think. For me, I used to (perhaps naively) believe that any license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is open source. Those licenses are all supposed to conform to the Open Source Definition.
Speaking at the LinuxCon conference, Red Hat lawyer Richard Fontana led an awesome session that really illuminated by view of the whole discussion.
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The fourth annual LinuxCon conference is getting underway this week here in Sunny San Diego. Over the last four years, LinuxCon USA has emerged as one of the preeminent Linux events on Earth, bringing together the best and brightest in a weeklong Linux love-in.
LinuxCon filled the gap that was left behind after the collapse of LinuxWorld (remember that show?) as a vastly superior, technology focused show. The 2012 event by all indications will be another epic bonanza for Linux aficionados. While there have always been co-located conferences at LinuxCon, this year the Linux Foundation is co-locating its newest conference CloudOpen with LinuxCon.
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the speaker lineup and program for Apache Con Europe 2012 which is taking place 5 – 8 November at the Rhein-Neckar Arena in Sinsheim, Germany. According to the ASF, the conference is mostly targeted at “technologists currently developing Apache-based solutions, as well as those interested in committing code to an Apache project, contributing to the Apache Incubator, or enhancing their Open Source products and community practices.”
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Pitched as a browser for searching and browsing fast, with accelerated page loading, adjectives like “quick” and “speed” gave me the impression I was in for a Web-based speed record. That was not to be the case. I experienced sticky page scrolling at the image-heavy CNN website compared to scrolling on the stock browser.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla officially released the Mozilla Thunderbird 15.0 email and RSS client to the world on August 28th, 2012, bringing a few interesting new features.
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The Mozilla Foundation is out with a public beta of Persona, a browser-centric system for logging in to online sites that could do away with managing lots of usernames and passwords. Mozilla has been working with the idea of Personas online for a long time, ranging from schemes to customize browser skins and the like to streamlining online log-in processes. Mozilla claims that the new public beta can do a lot to simplify online identities.
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Mozilla has been waging a multi-year battle against memory bloat in its open source Firefox web browser. With today’s Firefox 15 release, Mozilla is firing a major salvo in that battle, claiming a reduction in memory usage.
The memory reduction comes by way of plugging memory links in the way that third party add-ons consume memory.
In a blog post detailing the memory fix, Mozilla developers estimated that the memory improvement could be as much as a 4.8x improvement over the previous Firefox 14 release.
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Today, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation announced eight winning ideas that offer a glimpse of what the internet of the future might look like. Next up: invite developers everywhere to make these and other big ideas a reality.
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SaaS
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The Linux Foundation wrapped up its CloudOpen conference this weekend at the Sheraton Hotel & Marina in San Diego.
Billed as “the only” conference providing a collaboration and education space dedicated to advancing the open cloud, but what kind of taste did it leave in our mouths?
Can we say unequivocally that ALL open source cloud computing is ALL good news?
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Rackspace has announced that it is handing over the management and assets of the OpenStack project to the OpenStack Foundation. Members of the project had worked to set up the foundation since Rackspace’s original announcement of it in October 2011 and, according to Rackspace, the course had been set since the very founding of the project.
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Databases
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In an effort to improve how MongoDB supplies its data to external applications, MongoDB keeper 10gen has extended the open source data store’s query language, providing developers with more sophisticated ways to extract and transform data.
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The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released updates to the 9.2.x and 9.1.x branches of its open source relational database. According to the project’s developers, these updates fix two critical bugs that could lead to potential data corruption and which were accidentally introduced “as a side effect of performance optimisations and new features, mainly Unlogged Tables”.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle CIO Mark Sunday has a lot of users he needs to support and he’s using Linux to do it. The tech leader took the stage at the LinuxCon conference this morning to discuss how Oracle uses and develops Linux.
“Linux is our platform of choice across a wide variety of services,” Sunday said. “It is how we build products and how we provide services to our customers.”
Oracle is a massive organization of over 125,000 employees spread across 49 countries and according to Sunday, they all depend on Linux. Linux is the core technology that powers Oracle’s core collaboration, including email and its primary systems.
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If the accusation Oracle is incrementally withdrawing MySQL from open source is FUD, as an Oracle VP claimed this week, then it’s time for Oracle to take concrete steps to prove ‘open’ is their chosen path.
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A startup has pledged to deliver for Java what the brains of Larry Ellison’s mighty Oracle and the entire Java community cannot: cloud scalability – now.
It also hopes to spread the love to Java-hating sysadmins.
Waratek is planning the general release of its Cloud VM for Java at JavaOne next week. The Cloud VM product is a virtualisation engine built by Waratek to deliver multi-tenancy and elasticity for Java apps. It will also release APIs that let you build for Cloud VM for Java at the event.
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Oracle has announced two new Java products for embedded systems, with the aim of getting the object-oriented language running on as wide a range of devices as possible, including ones with very limited resources.
Tuesday’s new addition to the database giant’s Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) lineup, Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 shrinks Java’s footprint down to levels that are almost unthinkable in the modern PC era. Derived from the version of Java ME that runs on feature phones, it supports devices with ARM processors and as little as 130KB RAM and 350KB ROM.
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CMS
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Doesn’t it give you a warm feeling when you’re asked to do a week’s work in twelve hours or less? It should. It should give you a warmer feeling when you can do it in far less time. Give your C-Level suitors this one in under an hour and they’ll think you’re as magical as Mr. Scott aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. Mr. Scott often surprised the always demanding Captain Kirk with his ability to fix just about anything within the very tight time constraints placed on him. Instead of dilithium crystals and altered phaser electronics, you’ll have to work with Ubuntu and Drupal.
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Support for featured images and all-new stats are the most notable features in the recent 2.2 release of the WordPress for Android mobile application. This new version now lets users set Featured Images from directly within the app; previously this could only be done using the web interface. After adding an image to the post, users can enable this option by tapping on it and selecting “Use as featured image”; the developers note that this requires WordPress 3.4.1 or later.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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While the new AMD Trinity APUs are what’s exciting and being benchmarked at the moment, here are some updated compiler tests from earlier this month on an AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer system.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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An interview with one of the talented people behind NASAs Open Government initiative.
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Openness/Sharing
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Winston Churchill was known as a charismatic leader and statesman, able to rally his country to great things when they needed it most. He was also fond of the occasional salty outburst when needed—I won’t repeat one of his more famous ones here, except to paraphrase it a bit…
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In his recent post, Glyn Moody asks an important question: “Can open source be democratic?” He describes how free software emerged as a distributed, bottom-up system of writing code. The central defining aspects of that culture are a uniquely open process not just of programming but also of its organization, and a close relationship between programmers and users. Effectively, users and programmers together were both contributors, they collaborated on the project. Glyn goes on to explain how this community effort changed over time to become more institutionalized, more corporate and more dull—”becoming a ‘Firefox Affiliate’, hardly something that sets the pulse racing.” Ordinary users no longer play an important part in open source projects.
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Open Hardware
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Perhaps you read my, “No iOS 6 for my original iPad? Now, I’m an Angry Bird” post that describes, in detail, my irritation with Apple for no longer supporting my iPad 1. If you haven’t, you should so that you’ll understand this post. Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you to finish before I continue.
Now, that you’re back, I’ve come up with a solution to this overt obsolescence dilemma facing tens of millions of disappointed customers–not only from Apple but from other companies as well. Just read the comments from the original post and you’ll see that we all face this, “Buy our newest stuff” marketing ploy regardless of your device source.
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Programming
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Of course I went out to re-read both the open source and free software definitions so I could prove him wrong…but I can’t. He is right, the definitions of both free software and open source software say nothing about being developed in the open, but as those of you who have attended one of my workshops (or read my book) know, I disagree.
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If you’ve been curious about GitHub then this short tutorial in the Open source Java projects series is for you. Get an overview of the source code repository that has changed the way that many developers work, both individually and collaboratively. Then try GitHub for yourself, using common Git commands to branch and commit your own open source project.
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I recently wrote that to master technology, you must master software. It is software that differentiates one device or computing experience from another. And since nearly all software today is built using open source projects and code, knowing how to collaborate and contribute to an open development community is a requirement for any developer or company regardless of industry.
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Stephanie Taylor from Google’s Open Source Programs Office has announced the launch of the company’s third Code-in contest for pre-university students. The annual event is open to students aged 13 to 17 from around the world and is designed to introduce them to open source software development.
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Standards/Consortia
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The chairs of the W3C’s HTML Working Group have presented a plan to approve a stable HTML5 specification before the end of 2014. The plan proposes to formally define a stable set of features as HTML 5.0, but when the HTML Working Group will approve this plan is as yet unknown. Features for which no stable specification is available by then could be moved to an extended “HTML 5.1″ set of features that could be completed by 2016.
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Security
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Finance
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A lawyer for a former Goldman Sachs programmer charged twice with stealing secret computer code from the bank sharply criticized both the bank and the government in New York State court on Thursday.
“He left Russia for freedom, justice, and the American way and he got Franz Kafka and Goldman Sachs,” said Kevin Marino, the lawyer for Sergey Aleynikov, the former programmer.
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Civil Rights
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The ‘midata’ agenda is an attempt by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to empower consumers through a right to request their personal data back from businesses. BIS describe their approach as ‘a partnership between the UK Government, businesses, consumer groups, regulators and trade bodies to create an agreed, common approach to empowering individuals with their personal data.’
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The Sharing of Costs Order basically sets out who pays for what bits of the setting up and running of the obligations under the Digital Economy Act. After an initial consultation in summer 2010, Ofcom eventually produced a revised Order in summer 2012. Their consultation on this ran until September 18th.
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