10.08.11

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 168

• The Death of Zune, the Resurrection of WebOS & Kernel.org Returns

• Windows to Linux Considerations

  I have been asked by several people recently, both through here and privately, about the steps involved and the decisions to be made in converting a PC running Windows to Linux. After repeating the whole thing a few times, I decided to put it here for reference. These are based on my own experiences – anyone who has different, better or additional ideas should add them in the comments.

  - First, especially if you are starting with a new PC, make sure that you have complete Windows recovery media. This is even more important (and potentially tricky) today than it has been in the past, because a lot of new systems today do not come with Windows installation CD/DVDs included, they only have a “recovery partition” on the hard drive. In this case make sure that you use whatever the manufacturer’s “recovery media creation utility” might be to create yourself a set of disks – it will usually be about 3-5 DVDs. Yes, I know, we all hate Windows and we will be glad to see it getting wiped from the disk, never to return… but you never know what is going to happen to that PC, and perhaps someday you will want to sell or pass it along to some poor schmuck who insists on running Windows…

• How to Build a Compact, Energy-Efficient PC

  Ideally, I’d be able to skip the Windows fee entirely by installing Ubuntu or another user-friendly Linux distro. However, the other family members would probably throw several small objects at me if I tried to foist Linux on them. But other households might be different, so a good Linux distro like Ubuntu could be a good fit.

• Kernel Space

  • Kernel Developers Share Security Tips

    As most folks know by now, a security breach affecting kernel.org was discovered in September. While that didn’t affect kernel sources, it did get Linux kernel developers to thinking about their personal system security–and it might not be a bad idea for others to do the same.

  • A Plumber’s Wish List for Linux

    We’d like to share our current wish list of plumbing layer features we are hoping to see implemented in the near future in the Linux kernel and associated tools. Some items we can implement on our own, others are not our area of expertise, and we will need help getting them implemented.

• Applications

  • The Best System Monitor for Linux

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to install Gnome Shell in Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

    • Running phpMyAdmin On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04

    • What do Different Directories mean in Ubuntu

    • Google Chrome now Sports an FTP Client

    • How To Migrate Mailboxes Between IMAP Servers With imapcopy

  • Wine

    • Alexandre Julliard Wineconf 2011 keynote

  • Games

    • Scoregasm

      Charlies Games has released his shmup Scoregasm today. Scoregasm is available on Windows, Mac and Linux priced at a respectable $10

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • activities

      Several years ago now I had a minor epiphany while doing field research in the offices of friends and work associates on how people use their computers. The ideas led to the concept of “Activities”, which I originally called “Projects” (we changed the name because it was about more than just things we could call a “project”).

      [...]

      So it was that the beginnings of Activities were as different widget layouts in Plasma Desktop. You could zoom out and see each collection of icons and widgets and switch between them. It let you, for instance, open different folders in a folderview for different projects you were working on. Some people got it right away and started using Activities. Most people didn’t, and I don’t blame them at all: it was very hard to communicate something that was new to me as well and which we had only the basic sketches of implementation to demonstrate.

    • KDE’s October Updates Improve Kontact Performance

• Distributions

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • October 2011 Issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine

    • PCLinuxOS Magazine October 2011 – Issue 57

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Is A Prudent Play On Open Source

      Red Hat (RHT) is a leading provider of open-source and cloud solutions to enterprises around the world, including Europe. It is true that some companies will be less profitable because of Europe. Not Red Hat. On its conference call, CFO Charlie Peters stated that “Europe for us was also strong. And as I said, all geographies were 25-plus percent growth. I would say we had company-specific growth in Europe, which maybe is different than what others are experiencing, but not only the growth, but really the pipeline looks good.” Red Hat’s subscription-based model provides the company with a stable, dependable revenue stream.

    • CloudLinux to Show How to Increase Server Efficiency

      CloudLinux Inc. makers of CloudLinux OS, the only commercially-supported Linux OS (operating system) made specifically for shared hosting, will advise attendees at the upcoming annual Automation Bootcamp cPanel conference in Austin, Texas from October 10-12 how they can become more efficient by switching to CloudLinux. The director of operations at A Small Orange will lead a session on how the company converted to CloudLinux.

    • Red Hat will wait on Progress

      Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said the Linux software company can afford to delay its move into one of Progress Energy’s two downtown Raleigh buildings while the utility overhauls its merger plans with Duke Energy.

      In August, Red Hat announced it would shift its headquarters from N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus to downtown Raleigh, where Progress plans to exit one of its buildings in conjunction with its merger with Charlotte-based Duke. But a glitch emerged last week when federal regulators sought assurances that the merged company won’t manipulate electricity rates.

    • Fedora

      • Fedora 16 Review: A Big Change or A Little Editing? (With Screenshots)

        Unwilling to wait for Fedora 16 final to come out, I went ahead and installed Fedora 16 beta. So much has been fixed in Fedora 16 that was wrong in Fedora 15 I can hardly see why this is called a beta. However, there are a few things I’ve noticed that go awry with Fedora 16 that will hopefully be fixed by the time the final release comes out.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Powers HP Public Cloud

          Today our CEO Jane Silber announced at the OpenStack Conference in Boston that HP has chosen Ubuntu as the lead host and guest operating system powering their Public Cloud. HP and Canonical are working closely together during the current private beta to make certain that we provide the most secure, scalable, business-class cloud to companies of all sizes. We are excited to join with HP in recognizing that open and interoperable cloud infrastructure and services are critical in delivering the next generation of cloud-based services to developers, ISVs and businesses. Both companies share a common commitment to open source and both embrace the OpenStack community. With over 117 member companies the momentum behind OpenStack is truly game changing and promises to position it at the center of the next wave of computing.

        • Ubuntu Server Trenches, The Big Picture

          Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 is shaping up to be a fantabulous release from the server team! I’m starting early celebrations for Oneiric by pushing out a series of Ubuntu Server from the trenches articles. Get to know all the hot new features landing in Oneiric server, as well as the people behind them! I start by interviewing Robbie the Ubuntu server team manager. Robbie is just great, always fun to be around! Ahmed Kamal (AK) will be asking Robbie to introduce the newest features of 11.10 as well as shed some light on the way forward. Let’s get started

        • From ‘Warthog’ to ‘Pangolin’: Up Close With Ubuntu Linux Mascots

          If you’re a fan of Ubuntu Linux, there’s a good chance you’re among the many who have been wondering in the last day or so what, precisely, a pangolin is.

        • Ubuntu 12.04 will not be a Perky Penguin

        • An Update On The Linux Power Situation In Ubuntu

          While I was away for three weeks, there was an update on LP bug #760131, the infamous bug report on the power consumption being raised significantly higher in Ubuntu Natty. This bug report of high importance now indicates a fix being committed to Natty and a fix being released for Oneiric, but what has changed? Here is an update.

        • Indian Supreme Court Replaces Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Ubuntu in More than 17,000 Courts

          Indian Supreme Court has given a customized DVD of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to more than 17,000 courts across the country. All the systems in these courts were running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for last 4-5 years and now it will be replaced by Ubuntu.

          Many helpful links and materials are being provided to these courts. An SMS channel has also been setup which will provide helpful Ubuntu tricks and information to these courts.

        • Ubuntu Powers HP’s Public Cloud

        • Ubuntu 11.10 Will Feature ARM Support, Ships Soon

          This week during the OpenStack conference in Boston, Canonical CEO Jane Silber revealed several new features that will be included in the next version of the company’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, Ubuntu 11.10. She also announced that both the desktop and the server editions will be released next Thursday, October 13.

        • From ‘Warthog’ to ‘Pangolin’: Up Close With Ubuntu Linux Mascots

          That, of course, is because Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth just declared Precise Pangolin the nickname for the next Ubuntu. I’m betting there’s been a sudden surge in Google searches on the term since the announcement was made.

          Keeping up with the Dr. Seussian name choices for Ubuntu mascots is never easy, so to make matters more clear for all of us, here’s a brief history with pictures of all the mascots Ubuntu has had so far. The only question now is, what will it be for Ubuntu 12.10: Quirky Quail, Quahog, Quarterhorse or Queen Bee?

        • Ubuntu 11.10 to Feature Arm Support, Cloud Orchestration

          The next version of Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, to be released next week, will be the first to run on the Arm architecture, as well as the first edition to offer a new cloud service orchestration engine, called JuJu.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Want to Revive an Old Netbook? Try Lubuntu

            Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: You bought a netbook a couple years back, thinking it would be your go-to travel PC, but quickly became dissatisfied with its sluggish performance–and stuck it in a closet.

            Hey, that’s a perfectly good PC you’ve got in there. It just needs a better operating system, one that fares better with less horsepower. Last year I wrote about Joli OS (formerly known as Jolicloud), which accomplished that very goal–but with a somewhat unfamiliar-looking interface that didn’t appeal to everyone.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Putting the QNAP T-1079 Pro NAS to the test

    Just to remind you: The QNAP TS-1079 Pro is a desktop-style NAS device that runs an embedded version of Linux on a dual core Intel i3-2120 Processor at 3.3 GHz with 2GB of DDR3 RAM. It has 10 drive bays allowing up to 30TB of storage set up as JBOD (that’s “Just a Bunch Of Disks”) or in any of the usual RAID configurations.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Samsung and Google Will Unveil Android/Linux 4.0 on Tuesday, 11 October, 2011

        It has been a long wait but the combined version of Android/Linux suitable for tablet or smart phone or any PC, for that matter, will be released on 2011-10-11. Specs on the device are pretty cool:

        * 1280×720 screen (curved, too)
        * dual core ARM 1.2gHz
        * 1080p video capture

      • Samsung Galaxy Nexus full specs revealed; Verizon Wireless exclusive

Free Software/Open Source

• What community?

  Wow! That’s a diverse target audience, and a very wide ranging list of ways you can help out. But is it really helpful to scope the project so wide, and try to cater to such a wide range of use-cases from the start? And is the project at a stage where it even makes sense to advertise itself to some of these different types of users?

  I have talked about the different meanings of “maintainer” before, depending on whether you’re maintaining a code project or are a package maintainer for a distribution. I have also talked about the different types of community that build up around a project, and how each of them needs their own identity – particularly in the context of the MeeGo trademark. I particularly like Simon Phipps’s analysis of the four community types as a way to clarify what you’re talking about.

• Why free software really isn’t (and shouldn’t be) free

  If you’ve looked into buying software licenses, you know that they can be expensive. Big Guns from Big Corporations charge a lot for their work – the work of their programmers, the marketing department, and so on.

• The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache TomEE Certified as Java EE 6 Web Profile Compatible

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Chrome OS: the verdict

      Is Google’s “web only” OS ready to take on Windows, Mac and Linux? We give it a real-world road test

    • 20 of the best Chrome OS apps

      Google uses a rather woolly definition of the word “app”: many of the so-called applications that you’ll find in the Chrome Web Store are nothing more than bookmarks to websites that you can use from pretty much any internet browser.

• SaaS

  • Akamai Joins OpenStack Community to Add Global Application Performance, Scale, and Availability Experience to Open Source Initiative

    Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading provider of cloud optimization services, today announced the company has joined the OpenStack™ community. Akamai plans to provide the OpenStack community with advice and guidance on best practices for platform design and architecture to help overcome the availability, delivery, performance, and scale challenges inherently faced by globally distributed cloud infrastructures and applications.

  • CloudBees Open Source Choice

    CloudBees is made up of Open Source veterans. Sacha Labourey was the CTO of JBoss, Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the Founder of Jenkins and Hudson, Michael Neale, Adrian Brock, Ryan Campbell, Paul Sandoz, Harpreet Singh Vivek Pandey, and many others have spent most of their careers developing open source software. On the business side, David Skok and I are two well known advocates for the open source business model.

  • Reality Check: Contributions to Apache Hadoop

  • OpenStack Foundation Breaks Corporate Ties

    OpenStack is set to begin the second stage of its existence as an open standard with the formation of a non-profit-making foundation which will solely be in charge of the intellectual property and the management of development projects.

    The OpenStack Foundation was announced at the organisation’s conference in Boston, Massachusetts, today and it is hoped to officially open for business in 2012, though an actual date has yet to be set.

  • Rackspace to spin off cloud standards-setting OpenStack project to foundation

    NASA and Web hosting company Rackspace jointly launched a new cloud computing project last year called OpenStack. The goal is to produce a standardized set of open source software components for building out self-hosted elastic cloud computing environments.

  • Rackspace Opens Up OpenStack With Planned Foundation

    During the course of the past year, the OpenStack open source cloud project has grown significantly from its origins as a joint effort of Rackspace and NASA.

• Databases

  • Overview of the Oracle NoSQL Database

    Oracle is the clear market leader in the commercial database community, and therefore it is critical for any member of the database community to pay close attention to the new product announcements coming out of Oracle’s annual Open World conference. The sheer size of Oracle’s sales force, entrenched customer base, and third-party ecosystem instantly gives any new Oracle product the potential for very high impact. Oracle’s new products require significant attention simply because they’re made by Oracle.

  • Google Cloud SQL: your database in the cloud

    One of App Engine’s most requested features has been a simple way to develop traditional database-driven applications. In response to your feedback, we’re happy to announce the limited preview of Google Cloud SQL.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • DTrace for Linux

    Even among Oracle employees, there’s uncertainty about what was announced. Ed Screven gave us just a couple of bullet points in his keynote; Sergio Leunissen, the product manager for OEL, didn’t have further details in his OpenWorld talk beyond it being a beta of limited functionality; and the entire Solaris team seemed completely taken by surprise.

  • Oracle Brews a Stronger Cup of Java

    Oracle put the focus on Java recently with previews of developments yet to come. “I would say that Java is in better strategic shape on several levels,” Al Hilwa, a research director at IDC, told TechNewsWorld. “The most important aspect is unblocking some of the politics and moving forward with the [Java] SE 7 and SE 8.”

• Education

  • What newsrooms can learn from open-source and maker culture

    “Newsosaur” blogger and media consultant Alan Mutter some time ago suggested that journalism has become a lot more like Silicon Valley. Newspapers are too risk-averse, he said, and so they “need some fresh DNA that will make them think and act more like techies and less like, well, newspaper people.”

• Business

  • SugarCRM: The open source customer relationship management software

    SugarCRM is the world’s largest open source CRM (customer relationship management) software. Founded in 2004, over 7,000 customers and more than half a million users rely on SugarCRM to execute marketing programs, grow sales, retain customers, and create custom business applications. These custom business applications can be used in a multitude of ways, such as to power sales teams, run customer support organizations, and manage customer information databases.

• Public Services/Government

  • Bristol Council gets open source go-ahead after CESG discussions

    Bristol City Council has been cleared to build an IT infrastructure using open source software after a visit from CESG, the cyber security arm of the UK intelligence services.

    Complaints about CESG’s obstruction of open source software were branded “folk-law” at a meeting the security body held in Bristol yesterday with council leader Barbara Jenke and others including Bristol IT chiefs Paul Arrigoni and Gavin Beckett, and executives from the Cabinet Office.

    The security body, an arm of GCHQ, denied its Code of Connection (CoCo) and guidance on information assurance prevented public bodies using open source software.

    The meeting heard how CESG rules, by which public bodies determine what systems they should use, were being interpreted incorrectly.

    Liam Maxwell and Bill McCluggage, Cabinet Office directors of ICT futures and ICT policy respectively, joined the meeting to tackle what they believed was a misperception that had been thwarting their policy to increase the use of open source software in government.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Hardware

    • Getting to Know Arduino

      Have you ever spent time with Arduino? It’s an open source electronics platform based on a microcontroller and microprocessor with I/O capabilities that allow it to drive many kinds of inventions. We’ve covered the platform and the community that creates with it before. The project has come a long way in recent years, and here are some of the highlights as they stand now.

Leftovers

• Health/Nutrition

  • Readers respond: Control is an issue for open source pieces of DoD/VA joint EHR

    The massive undertaking to create a dual-agency EHR that serves both DoD and VA patients with a system woven from existing proprietary and open source components might demand something to which the federal government is largely unaccustomed.

    “The government tends to have this view of, ‘We’re the ones in charge here,’” said John Scott, author of the report “Open Technology Development for Military Software,” a member of the Military Open Source Software (Mil-OSS) community and senior systems engineer and open technologies lead at RadiantBlue Technologies.

  • Wisconsin Judge Rules Against Food Rights

    Wisconsin dairy farmers are appealing a state judge’s ruling that they do not have the right to own a dairy cow or drink the unprocessed milk from their own cows.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Wisconsin Becomes Part of Gas Industry’s Land Grab

    The methane gas industry is snapping up land across the United States, and it’s not only regions with gas reserves its after. Part of the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which has become big business in the nation, requires a fine silica sand. The sand is most easily accessible in the state of Wisconsin, which means the industry is looking to scrape the Midwestern state of it’s rolling hills by extracting its sand. This new scramble for sand mining has local residents concerned about the health and environmental impacts on their communities.

• Finance

  • Why #OccupyWallStreet Doesn’t Support Obama: His “Nothing to See Here” Stance on Bank Looting

  • “We are the 99%,” but the 1% Buy Elections, Reports Show

    As the “Occupy” protests spread across the country with the slogan “we are the ninety-nine percent,” two reports released this week demonstrate how the top one percent are playing an increasingly outsized role in American elections.

• Copyrights

  • Time zone database axed by astrology

  • Bill C-11: Locks, Limits, Levies, Litigation & Now RIP “Rip, Mix & Burn”

    If laws about digital locks like Bill C-11 had been in place in 1980, we would have never seen the astonishing evolution of the “Rip, Mix and Burn” zeitgeist that Steve Jobs created. Not only has Apple gone from the brink of bankruptcy two decades ago to become the world’s very most valuable company at various recent times on the stock exchanges. It’s also incontrovertible that Steve Jobs changed the world in the process – and much for the better.

    “Rip, Mix & Burn” became an iconic mantra. Laws like Bill C-11 would have made much of what “rip, mix and burn” was all about illegal. Here’s the transcript of a brilliant and prescient 2004 lecture by Princeton’ celebrated Prof. Ed Felten about “Rip, Mix and Burn”, and efforts to stifle the notion through copyright law. He makes a number of references to Apple. And when he talks about the promise of a future with a “universal media machine”, just substitute the term “iPad”. Prof. Felten asks in 2004 whether society should embrace the change that could come from the “universal media machine”, and the spirit of the “Magna Carta” Betamax US Supreme Court decision of 1984, or whether we resist it.

  • Astrology outfit takes time-zone database down

  • Publisher Claims Ownership of Time-Zone Data