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05.08.11

Links 8/5/2011: SimplyMEPIS in the Headlines

Posted in News Roundup at 8:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Why Not Linux?

    I am always amazed that Linux isn’t more popular. It is a free operating system, is more reliable than Windows, and has many of the advantages of Macintosh. To be sure, Linux used to be more difficult to install and use than the other “big two” operating systems, but that is no longer true. Anyone who has used a recent version of Ubuntu Linux or any of several other versions of Linux will attest that those Linux distributions are now even easier to use than Windows, especially when installing new programs. Installation is a breeze. For instance, Ubuntu Linux does a better job of discovering my networking and sound boards than does Windows. Ubuntu Linux is significantly faster and easier to install than Windows; it even asks fewer technical questions during the installation process.

    Not only is Linux faster, but it is also impervious to viruses and most other forms of “malware” that plague Windows computers. If you have ever dealt with a Windows virus, you already know why Linux is better. Linux users don’t even install anti-virus software as they have no need for such protection.

  • No Linux support? An offer I can refuse

    Now, as I pay my bills online, paying one or two bills does not represent any benefit to me if it’s the same amount anyway. There is a major consideration for switching, nevertheless. This issue is support: The government agency sent a technician to help my mother once. Given the fact that this unsuspecting techie did not chicken away when he saw that my mother uses Pardus GNU/Linux and solved the problem to the best of his abilities, I decided to ask a question to the overly friendly representative on the line to assess the real service that they were offering me.

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • 2.6.39 kernel will drop 686 flavour
    • Client Side Decorations For Wayland

      Besides OpenWF support in Wayland being talked about and on the roadmap, another item that’s been hotly discussed the past couple of days is about client side decoration support for the Wayland Display Server.

    • Graphics Stack

      • There’s An X.Org Driver For Nested X Servers

        Announced just hours ago on the X.Org development mailing list is recent work to create the xf86-video-nested driver. As implied by the name of the driver and the title of this news post, this is an X.Org video driver designed to run nested X.Org servers. In other words, X.Org on top of X.Org.

      • Speeding Up The Linux Kernel With Your GPU

        Sponsored in part by NVIDIA, at the University of Utah they are exploring speeding up the Linux kernel by using GPU acceleration. Rather than just allowing user-space applications to utilize the immense power offered by modern graphics processors, they are looking to speed up parts of the Linux kernel by running it directly on the GPU.

        From the project page: “The idea behind KGPU is to treat the GPU as a computing co-processor for the operating system, enabling data-parallel computation inside the Linux kernel. This allows us to use SIMD (or SIMT in CUDA) style code to accelerate Linux kernel functionality, and to bring new functionality formerly considered too compute intensive into the kernel. Simply put, KGPU enables vector computing for the kernel.”

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Dark, light and Openbox

      I have suffered an inordinate number of real-world issues over the last week or so, which is why I am doing such a poor job of keeping this page updated.

      I apologize for that. But in the little free time I have, I have not been idle. Here are two distros that both focus on lightweight desktop arrangements with Openbox.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 1st May 2011
      • On Stability

        KWin has been known as a rock-solid window manager in the KDE 3.5 times. I was wondering how the situation is nowadays with focus no longer on window managing but on compositing. Currently we are experiencing a major problem in combination of Intel/Mesa drivers with either fullscreen flash videos or OpenGL screensavers. Since the release of Kubuntu Natty we receive two to three new duplicates each day. In case you are experiencing this issue: do not report! Neither to us, nor to Mesa nor to (K)Ubuntu. It is a known issue and Upstream is working on a fix! As a workaround, do not use Flash to watch Youtube videos and do not use OpenGL screensavers. The issue is the most often reported bug against KWin of all time, now.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • Virtual Box OS Distribution

      Using virtual Box from Oracle or any other Virtualization Software we can run one operating system inside another Operating System. For example, my computer runs on Debian Stable and I have Virtual Box in it. So I log into Debian and run the virtual Box program and install in it other operating systems, in virtual Disk Drives created by virtual box.

      This is fine, but to have more fun somebody should configure a linux, or opensolaris, or bsd distribution that opens directly into a Virtual Box Graphical User Interface. Just like the ChromeOS opens directly into the Chrome Browser, in a similar manner the Virtual Box Distribution should have Virtual Box running on top of the linux (or BSD or solaris) kernel.

    • New Releases

      • Xange 2011.06
      • Última versión estable: Canaima 3.0
      • Alpine 2.2.0 released

        The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce immediate availability of version 2.2 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

        This release introduces several new features:

        * A new Linux kernel branch based on 2.6.38 with all of the Alpine patches either rebased or included in upstream Linux sources.
        * New support for the x86_64 architecture. Alpine 2.2 is able to efficiently take advantage of modern x86 processors supporting all available general purpose registers

      • PelicanHPC 2.4

        03 May 2011. v2.4 is available on the download page (see below). This version adds support to run better as a Virtualbox guest. Octave is at v3.4.0, added dsh, updated tutorial, general sync to Debian. Serious users should read the pelican_config file, which is in /home/user after booting up.

      • Clonezilla 1.2.8-37
      • VortexBox 1.9 released

        We are pleased to announce the release of VortexBox 1.9. This release adds updated versions of many of that packages that make VortexBox work so well. This version includes a new kernel for better hardware support. The DVD ripping package has also been improved and of course we added the latest version of SqueezeBox Server (7.5.4).

      • Scientific Linux release 4.9 has been released for i386 and x86_64.

        Scientific Linux 4.9 has been released. We want to thank all those who have contributed time helping us build and test this release. Scientific Linux 4.9 contains almost 2 years of security and bug fixes. There are no new features or packages, but it is a nice stable release.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat OpenShift Express & The Leafy Miracle

        Red Hat made a lot of awesome announcements this week at The Red Hat Summit, one of which being OpenShift.

        I had the opportunity to play with the internal beta for a little while now, and I must say that as a developer I am extremely impressed with the service. Just being able to git push my code into to the cloud drastically simplifies large-scale software deployment, and makes it so I don’t even have to leave my development environment.

      • Videos: Red Hat Summit 2011

        Red Hat held their annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World conferences in Boston from May 3-6, 2011. I’ve yet to be able to attend a Red Hat Summit but I do search the web for information and videos from it.

        Red Hat announced a number of new developments including OpenShift (Platform as a Service) and CloudForms (Infrastructure as a Service). Basically Red Hat continues to sponsor development on a large number of open source projects and bundles them together into more comprehensive solutions. I haven’t yet done enough reading to speak intelligently about either of those… but give me some time… although they do seem primarily oriented towards the “enterprisey” folks.

      • The Tale of Red Hat’s Name!

        Version Three!

        While Marc wore a red hat in his university he became known by it. If any of his mate encountered problems in computer they used to ask Marc for help. The people who did not know him asked “Who is Marc?” and they received replies “The one in red hat!”. Therefore red hats become synonymous with technical expertise!

    • Debian Family

      • SimplyMEPIS

        • Review: SimplyMEPIS 11.0

          Yesterday, the MEPIS developers released SimplyMEPIS 11.0, a year after the release of SimplyMEPIS 8.5, which I have reviewed before. (I went back and read that review and had a pretty good laugh at how short and shallow it was. Please feel free to do the same. That said, if you feel like doing the same at this review, please explain why in the comments.) In that review, I liked that it included many codecs and useful programs out-of-the-box along with the MEPIS tools, which were basically the Linux Mint tools before Linux Mint existed. I didn’t like that Synaptic Package Manager refused to work.

          [...]

          And finally, I’ve also seen comments on reviews of software that didn’t work complaining that I didn’t talk about the nuts-and-bolts of the software or show pictures or stuff like that. If I review a piece of software that works, I post pictures of my time with that software to prove that I really did use it. If I don’t post pictures, that means the software didn’t work for whatever reason. It’s as simple as that. So from now on, if I review software that doesn’t work and you want to see pictures or read release notes, go to the software’s website, because I’m not going to post pictures here. If you want to know whether the software might work for a newbie or whether it might work on your computer’s hardware, then do come here; having used Linux for two years, I’m not a novice anymore per se, but because I’ve stuck with the newbie-friendly Linux Mint through those two years, I’m still only epsilon above novice level, so when I do reviews, it’s still from the perspective of the newbie, not from the perspective of the experienced pro.

        • SimplyMEPIS 11.0 Screen Shots – MEPIS website
        • SimplyMEPIS 11 Final Released

          As the release announcement says, “Making it your own is simple, too”. The KDE desktop and SimplyMEPIS itself are easily and extensively configurable, and whether you prefer the standard KDE desktop or the KDE Netbook desktop, a few tweaks like this can make it just right for you to use. Because MEPIS is derived from Debian, the repositories contain a vast array of applications, utilities and other software. It all adds up to a really excellent distribution.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • 8 Really Useful Ubuntu Unity Quicklists

            One of the useful features in Unity (Ubuntu Natty) is the adding of quicklists to the application icons in the launcher. For example, you can right click on the Google Chrome icon and access the option to open an incognito window, or right click the Gmail icon and select “Compose New Email” option. For those who came from the Windows background, this is very similar to the Windows 7′s taskbar jumplist.

          • All the Icons on Unity Launcher will be Movable in Oneiric, Including Lenses
          • Ubuntu 11.04: Great Promise, Quirky Execution

            It has been my experience for a number of years now for a new Ubuntu release to show lots of promise, and then disappoint. It always looks and feels great, but try and push it across a few delicate limits and it will show its real quirky face, and sometimes it doesn’t even need a push.

          • Bye, bye Ubuntu Ready – Hello Ubuntu Friendly!

            Instead of just removing Ubuntu Ready, we would like to start a non-commercial new hardware validation programme, created by Canonical, and with co-ordination with the rest of the community. This new programme is called Ubuntu Friendly (although the name might change).

          • The Good, the Bad and the Ugly About Unity

            We’ve talked about Natty and its features in our previous article (see: Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’: To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade?); however, we didn’t touch upon Unity much. Unity, the brainchild of the Canonical team was an out-of-the-blue decision which surprised and even shocked many users and developers alike. The shocking part of it was the decision to part ways with the GNOME desktop, which had been part of Ubuntu for so many years. The move has left many GNOME loyalists changing clans. However, there are also many users who have welcomed the changes. One reason why Unity works is because it brings something completely fresh to the user as opposed to the traditional GNOME desktop, which was getting too old-school to compete with Windows, Mac and even KDE4. Unity also relies heavily on the trusted Compiz window decorator, thus making the switch relatively smoother as compared to the one with GNOME 3 and Mutter. Furthermore, the GNOME 2.x series was a desktop that had not gone any major visual changes for years, and thus it failed to keep up with many of the modern desktop usability standards. For example, GNOME 2.x included two panels, one at the bottom and one at the top which consumed a lot of space. Also, the menus were too outdated when likened to modern desktops like Windows 7 and KDE4. Furthermore, the tray, the menubar, and indicator applets made the panels look way too crowded and tacky.

          • Thoughts on Ubuntu and Unity

            I have been giving a lot of thought to Unity and Ubuntu 11.04. I have to admit that I was, at first, very hostile toward the changes implemented in this latest release of the most popular Linux distribution.

          • Ubuntu CTO Matt Zimmerman leaving. Good Luck and thanks for all the fish.
          • My Week with Ubuntu Natty Narwhal

            So here’s the end of my little rant. For anyone out there interested in trying Linux for the first time I would still heartily recommend Linux Mint, or if you really want lots of apps and bells and whistles pre-installed, Pinguy OS is quite groovy, too.

            If you’ve been around the block with Linux a bit, also try Bodhi Linux with the Enlightenment window manager. It’s light, gorgeous and configurable to the nth degree. And in my opinion, makes Unity look old and crude in comparison.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Kubuntu 11.04 review

              Final Thoughts: Given the lukewarm reception to Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment, Kubuntu presents an option that you might want to explore. It is still the same Ubuntu, but with a different and better desktop environment. If Kubuntu does not appeal to you, try Chakra, another KDE-based distribution that was just reviewed here.

            • Will Linux Mint outdo the popularity of Ubuntu?

              It is raining new releases this month as a result of the domino effect caused by the release of Ubuntu 11.04. The latest in line is Linux Mint. Team Mint has always managed to come up with a distro that improved the strengths of Ubuntu many fold while remaining true to the original one. However this time the scene is completely different. The team had recently announced the release of Linux Mint 11, codenamed Katya. Although, its usual to give a feminine name to each Mint release, this one seems to have a meaning. Katya which means “pure” In Russian seems to hint subtly that the Mint team is upto something.

            • Sabily 11.04 Is Based on Ubuntu 11.04, Has Unity

              The Sabily developers proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the new and improved Sabily 11.04 operating system.

              Dubbed Al-Badr, Sabily 11.04 is now based on the recently released Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system and features the new Unity desktop interface. The release includes lots of new applications and various system improvements.

            • Sabily 11.04 released!

              The Sabily team is proud to announce the release of the new version of Sabily 11.04, codename “Badr”.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • $25 computer is barely larger than the average USB stick

        The Raspberry Pi is one tiny computer that’s actually functional enough for modern use. It doesn’t get any more barebones than a little circuit board with a 700MHz ARM 11 processor, a USB port, an HDMI port and an install of Ubuntu Linux.

        Designed by game developer David Braben and his friends, the Raspberry Pi’s basic structure was created to encourage schoolchildren to hack and mod it to unlock its true potential. On the stock Raspberry Pi, all one needs to do is plug in a display through the HDMI port and a keyboard through the USB and it’s good to go — getting online requires another adapter.

      • Phones

        • Sony Encourages Linux On Their Phones

          neokushan writes “Sony has been in the news a lot lately — from the PSN downtime and the identity theft issue that came with it, to the numerous court cases launched to try and quell the PS3 hacking scene. It may come as a surprise to many, then, that Sony’s mobile smartphone division has taken an almost polar-opposite approach — they’re actively encouraging developers to create, modify and install customized Linux kernels into their latest lineup of phones, including the Xperia Play, the device that was once known as the ‘PlayStation Phone.’”

Free Software/Open Source

  • GOEPEL electronic supports open source Initiative

    During Technology Days UK GOEPEL electronic announces the accession to the open source initiative goJTAG. The networking founded by various universities and the Company Testonica Lab pursues the goal to provide the industry JTAG/Boundary Scan tools and knowledge based on an independent and non-commercial platform, sustainably accelerating the wide adoption of standardized IEEE 1194.x test methods. The centre piece of GOEPEL electronic’s engagement is the provision of free hardware and respective reference designs.

    goJTAG is the first university-driven open-source project aiming at providing a full package for a JTAG/Boundary Scan newcomer including training materials, slides and exercises. The software includes a simulation component that fully reveals every single bit movement along the scan chains with a single TCK precision. The user can directly step-wise control TAP states and observe system’s reaction in a real time as an on-screen simulation. Using PicoTAP controller, all actions can be synchronized on the hardware attached. Such a fine-grain illustration of JTAG test principles has never been possible so far.

  • Cassidy: Lotus founder Mitch Kapor sets his sights on fixing education

    Kapor is a tech icon, for starting Lotus, for cofounding the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for being the first chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, which supports Firefox and other open source projects. He’s a San Francisco-based venture capitalist now and he’s done well for himself.

    But he has always had a wide progressive advocacy streak. Born in Brooklyn, he worked as a rock disc jockey, taught Transcendental Meditation and worked as a mental health counselor before making his name in the tech field.

  • The case for developer driven open source governance

    Disregarding the developer community in developing an open source governance policy is just bad policy. Many times developers are well versed in the issues relating to open source governance: legal risks, IP leakage, security vulnerabilities, etc.

  • Open Source`s Greatest Hits

  • Events

    • LinuxFest Northwest 2011 Report

      The end of April… is LinuxFest Northwest time. This was my 5th year attending and it was their 11th annual conference. As usual, I took my camcorder along and recorded all of the presentations I attended. Oddly no one from the BozemanLUG nor the BillingsLUG were able / interested in going with me so I was all by myself.

  • Web Browsers

    • PhotoFloat — A Web 2.0 Photo Gallery Done Right via Static JSON & Dynamic Javascript

      I don’t really like database driven photo management software, and prefer instead to manage my photos in a good old no-nonsense directory structure. For this reason, I was particularly attracted to Zenphoto as a means of getting my photos online, as it works on directory structures. Unfortunately, Zenphoto is horrible; it’s riddled with bugs, inconstant, a cluttered architecture, and most of all, it’s extremely slow. Every time it runs, it re-scans directories and makes a bazillion SQL calls. The viewer interface is also outdated and clunky, having a different html page for each photo. So I went back to the drawing board and considered how to make things better.

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4 — a major update

        Mozilla Firefox 4 was released out of beta on March 22 and is a significant update from Firefox 3.6 as it is, apparently, the company’s attempt to stay ahead of the competition that’s nipping at its heels and gain ground on Internet Explorer.

      • Mozilla Firefox 4 Review: A powerful browser in the making

        What’s the big deal about web browsers anyway? They’re only here to make life easier for internet users, right? But those who spend eons of time rambling through the virtual world seem to care a lot judging by comments posted across the web about some browser or the other. We might venture to say that Internet Explorer has always been the most used web browser by default due to the fact that it’s been coming with Microsoft’s Windows OS since forever through a large part of the PC revolution time zone. But there were always going to be cult favorites and when Firefox seemed to rise like a ‘Phoenix’ from the ashes, a lot of people started checking it out. Firefox is the second-in-command when it comes down to browser market share wars at present. Our fresh review of Mozilla Firefox 4 for Windows should give you a better idea of what makes the browser tick for the large number of users who resort in order to access the web.

  • SaaS

  • Healthcare

  • Funding

    • Crypto Currency

      The Internet has left plenty of dead and maimed paper-based institutions in its wake. If Gavin Andresen and his underground cadre of cypherpunks have their way, another archaic slice of pulped tree may be next: the dollar.

      Bitcoin is a grassroots nonprofit project that seeks to fashion a new currency out of little more than cryptography, networking and open-source software, and Andresen is the closest thing the project has to a director. Bitcoin is not, he explains, just a new way to digitally spend dollars, pounds and yen. That’s been tried before. Remember Beenz and Flooz?

  • BSD

    • FreeNAS 8 – Released.

      The release of FreeNAS 8 includes major architectural optimizations, a django-driven user interface, and ZFS – lending us some useful features like thin provisioning, periodic snapshots, LDAP and Active Directory authorization along with the most popular platform sharing protocols.

    • FreeNAS 8.1 Roadmap

      In the last 48 hours FreeNAS was downloaded ~43,000 times. That is like 890 downloads an hour, every hour. With stats like that it is no wonder how we’ve gotten so much feedback from the community!

      According to “the cloud” the community needs UPnP, iTunes, DAAP, RSYNC, and Bit Torrent support before they can use FreeNAS 8. This is on our Roadmap for 8.1…

    • PCBSD 20110502

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Introducing Stuffed Baby Gnu
    • FSF announces publication of two new books by Richard Stallman

      The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has just released in tandem the second edition of its president and founder Richard Stallman’s selected essays, Free Software, Free Society, and his semi-autobiography, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution.

    • Righting Wrongs by Re-writing Ebooks

      One key property of printed books is that it is very hard to modify them. Digital books, by contrast, are trivially easy to re-write – provided they are released under a licence that permits that.

      One early enlightened example of a book that does allow such modification is Free as in Freedom, a biography of Richard Stallman that came out around the same time as Rebel Code.

      Although Free as in Freedom was based on extensive interviews with him, Stallman was not entirely happy with certain aspects of it; he has therefore taken advantage of the GNU Free Documentation Licence it was published under in order to offer his own gloss on the text and facts [.pdf]:

      I have aimed to make this edition combine the advantages of my knowledge and Williams’ interviews and outside viewpoint. The reader can judge to what extent I have achieved this.

      I read the published text of the English edition for the first time in 2009 when I was asked to assist in making a French translation of Free as in Freedom. It called for more than small changes. Many facts needed correction, but deeper changes were also needed.

      …

      The first edition overdramatized many events by projecting spurious emotions into them.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Facebook’s HipHop Can Now Build Grimstad

      Announced to the public last year by Facebook was HipHop, an open-source project that transforms PHP code into highly-optimized C++ and then uses the GCC C++ compiler to produce a native system binary. Facebook’s original numbers showed that by using this transformer/compiler on their servers the CPU usage went down by about 50% and they were able to supply around 70% more traffic on existing resources since the PHP code is no longer being dynamically interpreted. Here’s a look at Facebook’s HipHop during some of our first tests.

    • Perl and Python float on open source VMware cloud

      PHP might dominate the web LAMP stack, but ActiveState is taking steps to fluff the two other dynamic languages that put the “P” in LAMP: Python and Perl.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

      It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.

Leftovers

  • Adobe Faces Antitrust Monopoly Class Action

    Adobe Systems bought Macromedia to remove its competitor FreeHand from the professional graphic illustration market, and to force users to switch to Adobe’s more expensive, and inferior, Illustrator software, graphic designers say in a federal antitrust class action.

    The class claims Adobe “has engaged in unlawful, willful acquisition and maintenance of monopoly power in the market for professional vector graphic illustration software.”

    Vector graphic illustration software uses mathematical formulas plotted by the graphic designer.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Are Health Insurers Writing Health Reform Regulations?

      One of the reasons I wanted to return to journalism after a long career as an insurance company PR man was to keep an eye on the implementation of the new health reform law. Many journalists who covered the reform debate have moved on, and some consider the writing of regulations to implement the legislation boring and of little interest to the public.

      But insurance company lobbyists know the media are not paying much attention. And so they are able to influence what the regulations actually look like — and how the law will be enforced — with little scrutiny, much less awareness.

    • Tobacco Companies Secretly Added Appetite Suppressants to Cigarettes

      A recent study of tobacco industry documents reveals that cigarette makers added appetite-suppressing substances to cigarettes and strategized on how to enhance the appetite-suppressing and weight-reducing effects of smoking.

  • Security

    • Sony issue apology after personal details of 100m customers stolen
    • Sony President Apologizes for Breach, Offers Free Identity Theft Protection
    • Sony and “friends” Or transparent damage limitation open letter style?

      The Sony hack has been very well documented and probably one of the few times when I have seen “average users” taking an interest in tech issues. True, this interest may have been merely selfish, but as a testament to the popularity of the PS3 I have had numerous “non-tech” folks engage me in conversation about their lack of PSN access and its ramifications.

      I’ve said on numerous occasions that I think Sony products are excellent and to that, I stand by my view completely, however I am very quick to jump on the shortcomings of others and it would be nothing short of hypocritical should I not do the same for Sony in light of this attack.

      Recently Howard Stringer (Chairman, Chief Executive and President of Sony Corp) posted an open letter on the Playstation blog, giving one of those “update with no update” type responses to the millions of customers who by now are probably very irate at having no PSN for a considerable time.

    • The PSN hack and open source

      I’m one of the people who has recently (perhaps in an excess of caution) cancelled their credit card because of the security breach of the Sony Playstation Network. Now you might wonder what this has to do with open source, but bear with me. Back in 2004 I went to a conference in The Hague about open source in the secondary software sector (meaning industrial sectors where software was a part of their product but not the core offering). One of the companies there was Sony Computer Entertainment. The presenter explained that Sony was a very open source friendly company, and that within the development division in Japan Linux desktops were the norm. The presenter also pointed to the Linux installation kit that Sony had released for their then-current games console the Playstation 2 (PS2), and advised us to look out for more Linux-related tie-ins in future games consoles. True to their word, two years later the Playstation 3 launched with the facility to install Linux in the basic model. True, you could not access most of the consoles advanced hardware via this ‘Other OS’ option, but it was a nice gesture, and generally appreciated by the open source community.

    • Critical hole in the Exim Mail server closed

      A missing format specification in a logging function of the free Mail Transfer Agent Exim has been identified by the developers as offering an attacker a chance to execute arbitrary code on the server. The particular line of code wrote a string directly to the logfile. An attacker could exploit this by adding particular formatting instructions into the DKIM information string in an incoming email which would allow them to inject their own code and run it with the rights of the mail server. Although no exploit is known to exist, the developers believe that an experienced attacker would not find an exploit hard to construct.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Pensioner arrested for feeding pigeons

      Neighbours had complained that the birds were blighting their lives, as hundreds flocked to feed from Monica and Janet McIntosh’s garden in High Harrington, Cumbria.

      The residents claimed they were unable to go outside and that the sky would

    • Drivers to be fined for littering even if they didn’t do it

      Ministers are considering a change in the law that would see motorists issued with £80 fixed penalty notices for littering – whether they are responsible for it or not.

      The change would be inserted into the Localism Bill which is currently progressing through Parliament.

    • Protests in Benton Harbor follow Martial Law Enforcement

      The stripping of all power of the local government in Benton Harbor, Michigan has brought the national spotlight to the tiny town on the shores of Lake Michigan. The first city to be declared in a “financial emergency” by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, CMD reported that Emergency Financial Manager (EFM) Joseph Harris was assigned to the city back in 2010 by then-Governor Jennifer Granholm. But it wasn’t until March of this year that Harris essentially disbanded the local government and boards.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Don’t Be Duped by the Sewage Sludge Industry’s “Compost”

      That company calls its Kellogg brand “quality organics” and deceptively labels bags sold at the garden store as “garden soil” made from “compost” — with no mention which are made from industrial and human waste that contains tens of thousands of contaminants. That’s why federal law bars the use of sewage sludge-based products in organic gardens.

    • “I Never Promised You an Organic Garden”

      She asserted that her organization never claimed the gardens were organic. Then, in the next week, EMA removed the word “organic” from its webpage about its school garden program … but left it in on some pages. (See screenshots here.) EMA referred to the gardens as “organic” in a fundraising form, leading donors to believe they are contributing to organic school gardens. Ironically, in 2003, EMA gave an award to King of the Hill for its episode titled “I Never Promised You an Organic Garden.” Talk about foreshadowing.

  • Finance

    • Blue Cross, Blue Shield Getting Richer, Like Corporate Insurers

      I’ve written frequently in recent weeks about the eye-popping profits the big, publicly-traded health companies have been reporting. Last year — as the number of Americans without health insurance grew to nearly 51 million — the five largest for-profit insurers (Aetna, CIGNA, Humana, UnitedHealth and WellPoint) had combined profits of $11.7 billion.

    • Big Bank Backlash: From Coast to Coast People are Moving their Money

      As the economy continues to sputter and new unemployment claims surge to an eight-month high, it hasn’t escaped the notice of people on Main Street that the folks on Wall Street are back in the black.

      According to Fortune magazine, profits of the 500 largest U.S. corporations have surged 81 percent this past year. Fortune’s editors write, “We’ve rarely seen such a stark gulf between the fortunes of the 500 and those of ordinary Americans.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • 60 Plus Association Ads Mislead Public About GOP Budget Plan

      Association, a front group that FireDogLake reported in 2009 is “almost fully funded by the pharmaceutical industry,” started running 60-second radio ads in 30 Congressional districts thanking Republicans for voting for House Budget Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which would phase out the current Medicare program completely for those under 55 years of age.

    • Deep pockets behind school choice

      Students First grabbed headlines in 2010 when its political action committee, largely bankrolled by a trio of ideologically driven wealthy Philadelphia-area businessmen — Jeffrey Yass, Joel Greenberg and Arthur Dantchik — poured millions of dollars into the gubernatorial campaign of state Sen. Anthony Williams, D-Philadelphia. Williams made school choice the cornerstone of his failed bid for the Democratic nomination.

      Williams is a co-author, with Senate Education Committee Chairman Jeffrey Piccola, R-Dauphin, of the vouchers bill now before the Senate.

    • Blackwater (Xe) Hires John Ashcroft as an Ethics Adviser

      Xe, the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater, has hired former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft as an ethics adviser.

    • Another Big Business Win in the U.S. Supreme Court

      Because the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) requires arbitration agreements be enforced according to their terms, Justice Scalia wrote, state laws that strike down contractual class action bans are preempted. Even though California’s Discover Bank rule applied equally to all contracts, the Court held it did not fall under the FAA exemption permitting non-enforcement “upon such grounds that exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract.” Additionally, the Court’s majority held that it not only is impermissible for states to prohibit bans on class action lawsuits, states also cannot prohibit bans on class action arbitrations.

    • Skin Care Company Tries to Get “Newsvertising”

      A skin care company that claims to have a cure for acne, psoriasis, folliculitis and other disorders is contacting Virginia media outlets and offering to pay them $100 for each person who sees the company’s press release and signs up to get treatment. The company asks editors to “consider running our press release as a win-win project.”

  • Censorship

    • AT&T’s broadband data caps start today

      Starting today, AT&T will begin restricting more than 16 million broadband users based on the amount of data they use a month. The number-two carrier’s entry into the broadband cap club means that a majority of American broadband users will now be subject to limits on how much they can do online or risk extra charges as ugly as video store late fees.

      The new limits—150 GB for DSL subscribers and 250 Gigabytes for UVerse users (a mix of fiber and DSL)—come as users are increasingly turning to online video such as Hulu and Netflix on-demand streaming service instead of paying for cable.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Tattoo Artist Claims Copyright Over Mike Tyson’s Tattoo – Sues Warner Bros.

      The Plant Patent Act of 1930 was the first step towards creating property rights for biological innovation: it introduced patent rights for asexually-propagated plants. This paper uses data on plant patents and registrations of new varieties to examine whether the Act encouraged innovation. Nearly half of all plant patents between 1931 and 1970 were for roses. Large commercial nurseries, which began to build mass hybridization programs in the 1940s, accounted for most of these patents, suggesting that the new intellectual property rights may have helped to encourage the development of a commercial rose breeding industry. Data on registrations of newly-created roses, however, yield no evidence of an increase in innovation: less than 20 percent of new roses were patented, European breeders continued to create most new roses, and there was no increase in the number of new varieties per year after 1931.

    • The Rate and Direction of Invention in the British Industrial Revolution: Incentives and Institutions

      During the Industrial Revolution technological progress and innovation became the main drivers of economic growth. But why was Britain the technological leader? We argue that one hitherto little recognized British advantage was the supply of highly skilled, mechanically able craftsmen who were able to adapt, implement, improve, and tweak new technologies and who provided the micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative. Using a sample of 759 of these mechanics and engineers, we study the incentives and institutions that facilitated the high rate of inventive activity during the Industrial Revolution. First, apprenticeship was the dominant form of skill formation. Formal education played only a minor role. Second, many skilled workmen relied on secrecy and first-mover advantages to reap the benefits of their innovations. Over 40 percent of the sample here never took out a patent. Third, skilled workmen in Britain often published their work and engaged in debates over contemporary technological and social questions. In short, they were affected by the Enlightenment culture. Finally, patterns differ for the textile sector; therefore, any inferences from textiles about the whole economy are likely to be misleading.

    • Copyrights

      • Mike Tyson’s Tattooer Sues Warner Bros.

        The tattoo artist who did Mike Tyson’s face claims Warner Bros. “pirated” his work to advertise its movie, “The Hangover 2.” S. Victor Whitmill wants a federal judge to bar Warner Bros. from using the tattoo in its promotions, and damages for copyright infringement.
        Whitmill says he created and applied the tattoo to the upper left side of Tyson’s face on Feb. 10, 2003.

      • LimeWire and Labels Face Off Over Damages

        Attorneys offered competing explanations of how major record labels view file-sharing software as opening arguments kicked off the damages trial against former LimeWire CEO Mark Gorton on Wednesday.

        Industry insiders paint the phenomenon in biblical terms of “Thou shalt not steal.” An attorney for the labels said LimeWire’s operations invited “the biggest theft of music in the history of the world.”

        But Gorton’s defense attorney Joseph Baio claims that, behind closed doors, label execs spoke candidly about how peer-to-peer downloading could benefit their businesses, if they only adapted to changing times and technologies.

Clip of the Day

Unity Without Unity – Ubuntu 10.10


Credit: TinyOgg

05.07.11

Links 8/5/2011: Many New Linux Devices and ODF 1.2 Facts

Posted in News Roundup at 8:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • PSN was running on unpatched Apache server with no firewall

      Few gamers will be feeling sorry for Sony and the mess caused with this PSN hacking debacle. But if you were just annoyed by what has happened, be prepared to now start getting a bit angry.

      Dr. Gene Spafford, CERIAS Fellow and professor of Computer Science at Purdue University, has been talking at a hearing about the PSN security breach held by the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade. He explained that independent security experts monitor Sony’s systems such as PSN, Qriocity, and SOE and report in an open forum Sony employees view about anything they find.

  • Ballnux

    • Samsung Android phone features 4G, 4.5-inch screen

      Samsung and AT&T announced new details on their 4.5-inch Android 2.2 smartphone, said to be just over a third of an inch thick. The Samsung Infuse 4G will be available May 15 for $200 plus contract, and features a 1.2GHz Hummingbird processor, HSPA+, an eight-megapixel camera, and (possibly) the ability to load apps from third-parties.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux File Systems in the Cloud @ Linux Collaboration Summit 2011

      As tech lead of the Google Linux Storage Team I get to see how Linux runs on tens of thousands machines in Google’s cloud. Over the last year our team migrated this super system from ext2 to ext4, an educational and exciting experience to say the least. We learned a lot about the impact of the Linux file system on Google.

      Our team is often bombarded with questions from both within and outside of Google about why we chose ext4, and if the local file system even matters. The Linux Collaboration Summit with its audience of both kernel hackers and business folks interested in Linux deployments seemed like a good forum at which to present on this topic.

    • LinuxCon Japan keynote speakers announced

      The Linux Foundation has announced the keynote speakers for its LinuxCon Japan 2011 conference taking place from 1 to 3 June 2011 at the Pacifico Yokohama in Yokohama, Japan. The welcoming remarks will be presented by Noriaki Fukuyasu, Director at Linux Foundation Japan, and followed by a keynote from Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who will discuss the 20th anniversary of the Linux operating system.

      The premier Linux conference in Asia will also include presentations by Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation Executive Director; James Bottomley, Linux SCSI subsystem maintainer and Distinguished Engineer at Novell; and Mark Charlebois, Director of Open Source Strategy at Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), who will discuss the role of Linux in mobile development and innovation.

    • Linux 2.6.39 -rc6
    • Filesystem hierarchy standard 3.0 process begins
    • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.39 (Part 3) – Architecture and infrastructure

      In 2.6.39, the Big Kernel Lock (BKL) disappears for good. The kernel can now process interrupts, which reduces latency. The Xen code now has a network backend needed for Dom0 operation, but it doesn’t look like the storage backend will be coming anytime soon.

    • Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra
    • Linux-ready MIPS64 SoC targets LTE infrastructure

      NetLogic Microsystems announced a new scaled-down member of its MIPS64-based XLP family, aimed at LTE mobile infrastructure. The XLP316 system-on-chip (SoC) offers four cores clocked to up to 2.0GHz, features a 16-issue, 16-threaded, superscalar processor architecture with out-of-order execution, and supplies 4MB of L3 cache and over 6MB of fully coherent on-chip cache for demanding control-plane processing, says the company.

    • More Ways to Get to LinuxCon: Submit Your Video

      We need you! And, we want you to join us at LinuxCon. That’s why today we’re announcing that we will give away one free LinuxCon pass per 20th Anniversary of Linux Video Contest entry.

      Our annual Video Contest is one of the only ways that individuals can promote Linux as they see fit and enter it to be considered for high-level visibility and promotion as the annual winner. And, with this year’s focus on the 20th Anniversary and with Linus judging, that visibility should be bigger than ever.

    • Graphics Stack

      • There’s An X.Org Driver For Nested X Servers

        Announced just hours ago on the X.Org development mailing list is recent work to create the xf86-video-nested driver. As implied by the name of the driver and the title of this news post, this is an X.Org video driver designed to run nested X.Org servers. In other words, X.Org on top of X.Org.

        When using the xf86-video-nested driver, it’s possible to run a new X.Org Server within a program window, similar to running a xorg-server nested within Wayland, but this is still on top of pure X.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Process RAW Files in digiKam

        digiKam usually does a decent job of decoding RAW files using the default settings. But if you prefer to have complete control of how the application processes RAW files, choose Settings » Configure digiKam, switch to the RAW Decoding section, and enable the Always open the Raw Import Tool to customize settings option.

      • KDE SC 4.6.3 Is Available for Download

        The KDE team has just announced a few minutes ago the third maintenance release for KDE Software Compilation 4.6. This is a minor update, focusing on bug fixing and translation updates.

        KDE Software Compilation 4.6.3 is the third in a series of monthly bug fixing releases to the KDE Software Compilation 4.6 series, which brings various translation updates and improvements. Everyone should update their existing KDE SC machines running version 4.6.1 or earlier (see a short tutorial below).

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Summit and JBoss World Slated for June 2012
      • Red Hat looks to stand out with open APIs

        The ability to scale out to third-party vendors without worrying about vendor lock-in, as well as the ability to move virtual workloads between different environments, are benefits of open application programming interfaces (APIs) that Red Hat has been espousing for a while now.

        Dirk Peter van Leeuwen, the open source software vendor’s Asia-Pacific vice president of sales, shared that Red Hat’s Linux-based systems currently power the cloud platforms of vendors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), NTT, Fujitsu and IBM. With APIs that straddle these cloud infrastructure providers, van Leeuwen said customers need not worry about finding compatible cloud vendors to scale out to when they run out of resources.

      • Red Hat Debuts CloudForms and OpenShift for Cloud Deployment

        Red Hat is moving beyond its Cloud Foundations effort to deliver new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions.

      • Cloud schmoud: Red Hat fans just want to lose Windows

        For all the sales pitches on CloudForm and OpenShift “open” cloud initiatives, Red Hat Summit attendees were far more interested in more prosaic (ie useful) things. First and foremost, they love that the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) will rid them of the much-derided Windows Server requirement for managing their VMs.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 Ships to Key Partners
      • Red Hat Expands Technology Partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison

        Red Hat (News – Alert), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced the expansion of its technology partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) to establish the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) as the first Red Hat Center of Excellence Development Partner. Moreover, Red Hat unveiled that it has considered the UW-Madison CHTC as the first recipient of its Red Hat Cloud Leadership Award for its advancements in cloud computing based on the open source Condor project and Red Hat technologies.

      • Red Hat Inc. (RHT) EVP, CFO Charles E Jr Peters sells 26,352 Shares
      • Videos: Red Hat Summit 2011

        Red Hat held their annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World conferences in Boston from May 3-6, 2011. I’ve yet to be able to attend a Red Hat Summit but I do search the web for information and videos from it.

        Red Hat announced a number of new developments including OpenShift (Platform as a Service) and CloudForms (Infrastructure as a Service). Basically Red Hat continues to sponsor development on a large number of open source projects and bundles them together into more comprehensive solutions. I haven’t yet done enough reading to speak intelligently about either of those… but give me some time… although they do seem primarily oriented towards the “enterprisey” folks.

      • Red Hat Summit: The opensource.com panel highlights

        For those who joined our panel at the Red Hat Summit this morning, below are the promised links to the things we talked about. (And for those who weren’t there, consider this a nice pointer to some of our favorite stories.)

      • Red Hat Summit recap: RHEL 6.1, cloud platforms, and a new openness
      • Open Virtualization Advances into the Enterprise with Red Hat And IBM
      • Red Hat Introduces JBoss Enterprise Data Grid
      • Red Hat Revolutionizes the Private and Hybrid Cloud Market
      • Red Hat Delivers the Platform-as-a-Service Cloud for Open Source Developers

      • Fedora

        • #fedora – You are always wrong
        • Take a breath, then respond

          That said, Jeff accurately points out a situation that has been a sticking point, and one that is being addressed and corrected, in the Fedora Project around the types of caustic responses that sometimes come up in #fedora. Also, while I don’t frequent the channel and usually find answers to my questions elsewhere — a good practice (and more on this later) — I can say that it’s something that has caused some of us in the Fedora Project some concern.

          However — and you knew that was coming — just as an observation on my part, it appears Jeff shot from the hip on this one rather than giving it some thought before writing.

          Believe me, I am not casting the first stone against this “sin” — I speak from experience here: lots of experience in which I have fired off unretractable words that a walk in the redwoods or shooting a few hoops would have tempered into something more reasonable and justifiable.

        • Fedora 15 Beta, GNOME 3

          The whole system feels very stable indeed and I’m using it on my production machine quite happily even though, really, I shouldn’t be!

        • ActiveState Stackato Delivers Perl and Python to the Cloud

          Although Red Hat sees OpenShift as being an open platform for the cloud, ActiveState doesn’t see it the same way.

          “It’s not Open Source and our current view is it is more limited in the range of languages, language versions and frameworks supported,” Mueller said. “It’s basically Red Hat in the cloud, which isn’t enough to satisfy customer needs we have seen.”

          Red Hat itself has admitted that OpenShift is not entirely open source. Isaac Roth, PaaS master at Red Hat said during a press conference this week that there are certain parts of OpenShift which are not yet open source, like the UI code for example.

    • Debian Family

      • MEPIS antiX M11 Screenshots
      • The GNOME 2.30 environment in Debian Squeeze – surprisingly productive

        In the case of Debian Squeeze I’m talking about GNOME 2.30. Now that we’re in the GNOME 3 era — and very early on — I can only hope that the dust will settle and GNOME will be just as functional, if not more so, in the year ahead.

      • Debian rolling discussion on -devel@

        Here is my attempt at a summary of the rolling discussion currently happening on debian-devel@. It might not be complete, it’s probably a bit biased, but I hope that it’s still better than nothing. It was also posted on debian-devel@.

        If you are involved in Debian development, please discuss it on debian-devel@, rather than in the comments of this blog.

      • People behind Debian: Steve Langasek, release wizard

        Steve Langasek has been contributing to Debian for more than a decade. He was a release manager for sarge and etch, and like many former release managers, he’s still involved in the Debian release team although as a release wizard (i.e. more of an advisory role than a day-to-day contributor). Oh, and he did the same with Ubuntu: on the picture on the left, he just announced the release of Ubuntu 10.04 from his Debian-branded laptop. ;-)

      • SimplyMEPIS 11.0 Released, Looks Good

        The MEPIS Website was updated just a bit ago to reflect the new release. The homepage splash says that MEPIS 11 is fast, fun, powerful, gorgeous, and ready-to-go. Well, there ya go, I can’t add much more to that.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • The Perfect Desktop – Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) (With The Ubuntu Classic Desktop)
        • Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Reviewed: This is My Favorite Ubuntu EVER!

          Having said that, I never really had any sort of major technical issues with any Ubuntu releases so far. All my hardware drivers including that of wifi and graphics ones are enabled automatically and Compiz has always worked like a charm. From the mails I have been receiving, one common factor I noticed above all, are issues somehow related to Compiz. Maybe the smooth Compiz rendering itself is the primary reason why I like Ubuntu 11.04 so much. But the Unity factor cannot be ignored.

        • After Natty Narwhal, now begins the wait for Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

          Ubuntu follows a unique two-term nomenclature for all its two releases each year. The first term is an adjective from the English alphabet series followed by animal name from the same alphabet. Ubuntu release is named by the year first followed by the month of release. Therefore, the just released, path-breaking Ubuntu was 11.04 with a tradename Natty Narwhal. The following Ubuntu release slated for October release is called Ubuntu 11.10 and will be called Oneiric Ocelot.

        • Unity Just Became More Fun To Use

          While testing and playing with the desktop effects on Unity (if your video card can handle it) i found out that some effects still can be used. The window animations (the effects when you open/minimize/close a window) and wobbly windows can still be used. I found a manual to enable the desktop cube on Unity on the omgubuntu website but i didn’t test that yet.

        • Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal review – A great surprise

          You will notice I have not tried to install Natty on my high-end laptops. That’s right. There’s a reason for that. And we will soon get to it. But let me first complete the thought cycle and explain why Ubuntu 11.04 is a great surprise.

          I was expecting a slow, buggy, crashing system that can’t be used. Instead, I got a very well polished, well integrated, visually pleasing, and extremely stable and fast distro that does what it is supposed to do. This is indeed a great surprise. Natty surpassed my fairly pessimistic forecast.

          Comparing to Gnome 3, Unity is ahead, but then, it had a lot of time to mature, just like KDE4 eventually did. If you recall my initial reviews, I gave Unity 2.5/10. Today, that grade is more like 7.5/10. This is a tremendous improvement. This clearly shows that early, initial impressions can be deceiving, as well as the fact that things can get better after all. Unity may be aiming at the lowest common denominator, but it has enough to sway even the more hardcore Linux users.

          Natty is actually quite usable. Will I run it as my primary production system? No. I will not, not just yet. This is why I did not commit the distro to my production machines. But is there any sense, logic and use for this Ubuntu? Definitely. I can actually see the common user running this. Even power users with only a spoonful of personality disorders can relate to Natty. Hating Unity is terribly easy, but it did offer 80% of what I needed. Of course, it’s the 20% that make the big difference, but the experience was pleasant, simple, functional to a very high degree.

          Spring 2011 brings an interesting new beast to the software zoo. Unity is far from being a failure, far from being for smartphones only, far from being Mac. It needs more time to grow into something that even professional photographers, architects, Web developers, and posh people driving Fiat 500 will want to use. As to the rest? Well, they should definitely give Natty Narwhal a spin.

        • Negative Community Reaction Development

          The user in the quote is frustrated that development on Unity has seemingly come out of nowhere to crush all the familiarity they used to have and in order to continue to use the latest and greatest Firefox and OpenOffice they’ll be forced to put up with design decisions that will be against their own personal internal aesthetic. They’re not wrong in their concern, but of course this is a risky move that their distribution is attempting; a massive coarse correction which delves deep into the bowls of the ship we’re all sailing in and is tinkering with the engine and reshaping the hull to see if it’ll make the thing go faster.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Pinguy OS 11.04 Will Be Based on Ubuntu 11.04

            Antoni Norman proudly announced a few days ago, May 1st, that the Beta release of the upcoming Pinguy OS 11.04 operating system is available for download and testing.

          • Linux Mint 11 To Use Gnome 2.32

            This was somewhat expected since Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and the only way to use GNOME 3 in Ubuntu 11.04 is by using a PPA.

          • Linux Mint 11 (Katya) Preview and Testing Version Released!

            With that said, and on an internal, Ainer.org note, I have been waiting to write my upcoming Couch Potato guide, as well as waiting to update my RAID and SABnzbd+ guides (at very least) until Linux Mint 11 reaches release candidate or final status. So, for any that have been itching to get an updated SABnzbd+ guide for the 0.6 release, or and updated and expanded RAID 5/6 guide, stay tuned!

          • #! CrunchBang 10 “Statler” Review

            After all those rich desktop Environment saw in Ubuntu, Chackra or Gnome 3 in general i needed a desktop minimalistic and comfortable, so today I’ve done some test on #! Crunchbang 10, it’s a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution with a lightweight desktop Environments: Openbox and optionally XFCE.

            I’ve tested it with a virtualmachine on Virtualbox, installation made at 32 bit with Openbox.
            Short story : i loved this Debian 6 in black and white, with custom Kernel and a minimalistic approach.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Wind River releases secure Linux distro and updated Simics simulator

      A day after celebrating its 30th anniversary, Wind River announced the availability of Wind River Linux Secure — said to be the first commercial embedded Linux platform to achieve EAL4+ certification using the GP-OSPP profile. Wind River also announced version 4.6 of its multicore-oriented Wind River Simics virtualization and simulation software, adding new debugging, collaboration, and target system visualization features.

    • NAS devices offer SSD support, cloud storage

      The Linux-based devices include the px4-300d and px6-300d — desktop models with a a dual-core 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 and respective capacities of 12TB and 18TB — and the rackmount, 12TB px4-300r, using a dual-core 2.2GHz Celeron E1500.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Evernote for Android Gets a Major Update
        • PXA300 reference platform gains industrial-focused Android BSP

          E-con Systems announced an Android board support package (BSP) for its Marvell PXA300-based eSOM300 module and related Alioth baseboard reference platform. The company says it added to Android’s hardware abstraction layers with blocks that support non-mobile, industrial-focused peripherals including RS232/RS485, CAN, GPIO, ADC, and various sensors.

        • Motorola and Sprint reveal two business-focused Android phones

          Motorola Mobility and Sprint announced two enterprise-focused Android smartphones with 3.1-inch touchscreens, exposed QWERTY keyboards, and five-megapixel cameras. The Motorola Xprt is a 1GHz Android 2.2 phone with enterprise security features and international roaming, and the ruggedized, Android 2.1-based Motorola Titanium makes use of Sprint’s Nextel Direct Connect Push-to-Talk network, says Sprint.

        • Sony Ericsson cranks up Xperia Mini line with 1GHz CPUs

          The Snapdragons enable the phones to run the five-month-old (but still hard to find) Android 2.3, and in the case of the Mini, play and record 720p video. The Xperia Mini is said to be the smallest phone to do so, measuring only 3.5 × 2.0 × 0.6 inches.

        • Droid Charge may be best Droid ever, says review

          Is an Android smartphone worth $300 plus a two-year contract? In the case of the Samsung Droid Charge, which offers Verizon 4G bandwidth, a beautiful 4.3-inch Super AMOLED display, and an eight-megapixel camera, the answer is just maybe, says this eWEEK review.

    • OLPC-esque

      • ARM11 Linux educational computer aims for $25 pricetag

        U.K. games developer David Braben has launched an OLPC-like foundation called Raspberry Pi, hoping to sell a tiny ARM/Linux computer aimed at K12 computer education for as little as $25. Braben demonstrated a single board computer (SBC) prototype running Ubuntu 9.04 on a 700MHz, OpenGL-enabled ARM11 processor with 128MB SDRAM, HDMI, USB, and SD connectivity, supporting 1080p video.

    • Tablets

      • Quanta building E Ink-based Android tablet for Amazon?

        Quanta has received OEM orders from Amazon.com to build its much-rumored Android tablet, expected to sell in quantities of 700,000 to 800,000 units per month, DigiTimes claims. The tablet is said to use Fringe Field Switching display technology from E Ink — presumably a version of E Ink’s Triton color e-reader display.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Make open source mapping and location tools work for you
  • Top 5 Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Exchange

    Are you tired of overpaying for the Microsoft Exchange messaging server? The Linux and Free/Open Source world is cram-full of robust, capable alternatives that won’t drain your bank account. This tasty assortment ranges from free with community support, to full commercially-supported products.

  • 6 Free Open Source Shopping Cart Software Options

    Open source shopping cart software is a big deal for a new merchant (or online retailer). One of the most alarming factors when starting your online retail business is the cost associated with commercial and proprietary shopping cart software.

    While you can pay a few extra dollars for shopping cart software when signing up for a hosting Web server account, these subscription-based plans don’t always offer the shopping cart functionality or design options that meet business needs. For the budget-strained new start-up, this is where open source software comes in to play.

  • Ever wondered, what is the motivation of Open Source Community?

    Open Source software development has drawn increasing attention as its importance has grown. Open source communities have been able to challenge and oftenopensource–t outperform proprietary software by enabling better reliability, lower costs, shorter development times, and a higher quality of code. But the question/fact that “why would skilled programmers, devote their time, effort and knowledge for an opensource project, where they might not get any reward interms of money?” So what are the motivations? Continue reading!

  • Puppet Labs Announces Faces API

  • Web Browsers

    • The Tor Project Eyes A New Browsing Model for Anonymous Surfing

      Even as Mozilla finds itself wrestling with sticky privacy and censorship issues raised by a U.S. Department of Homeland Security request to remove a Firefox add-on, the movers and shakers behind the Tor project–one of the primary resources for those who want to surf the web anonymously–are evaluating a new privacy-centric browser. Developer Mike Perry has put up a blog post discussing dedicated browser bundles that do away with the familiar Torbutton, and seamlessly allow users to surf completely anonymously. There could be room for this highly differentiated browser model, despite crowding in the browser market.

    • Mozilla

      • I started using Firefox Sync — and it doesn’t pose a potential (and probably real) privacy problem like Google Chrome sync

        Now that I’m running Iceweasel (aka Firefox) 4.0.1 on my Debian Squeeze laptop and Firefox (not aka Iceweasel) on my Windows XP box, I decided to use the newly built-in Firefox Sync to have my bookmarks, history and such track across my two instances of the browser.

      • A Firefox Tor Fork? I don’t think so

        The Tor onion router, privacy project is planning its own version of Firefox.

        Some people may call this a fork – I don’t.

        Tor as an onion router (or set of chained, private, maybe-anonymized proxies, if you’re lucky) is implemented in Firefox by way of the Torbutton add-on.

      • Tech Comics: “The Internet, 1999 vs. 2011″
      • Firefox 6 Should Sort Out Linux GPU Acceleration

        Mozilla Firefox 4.0 was released in March with many new features, including GPU-based acceleration, but on the Linux side this support was disabled. The Mozilla developers found the Linux GPU driver support to be a problem, even with the open-source solutions. It looks like though by Firefox 6 the Linux GPU acceleration will be in better standing.

      • Why We Need Firefox

        And thus, to date, Mozilla has not removed that Mafiaafire add-on.

        This response is notable not just for its robustness, but the fact that it shows Mozilla willing to question the whole rationale behind such requests. In doing so, it is playing an important, wider role of challenging developments that are extremely dangerous for freedom and the Open Web. That is, true to its mission, Mozilla is looking at the bigger picture here, and not just worrying about its bottom line as most companies do (and are required to do if they are public companies.)

        This, then, is the real reason to stick with Firefox: because the priorities of its designers are fundamentally different from those behind other browsers. Even if there are odd glitches from time to time – often resolvable, as my experience showed – it is important to keep this central fact in mind. Without Mozilla, the online world would be far less open – and we would be less free.

  • SaaS

    • Why Cloud Is Forcing Cisco to Embrace Open Source

      Cisco’s cloud computing ambitions might be judged by outsiders as being centered around selling servers and networking gear to cloud data centers, but recent developments show that such an assessment might not be entirely fair. The networking giant has been forced to reassess its business in a major way lately, and, at long last, it appears as if Cisco understands that open source software will be critical to its cloud success.

    • Syncsort Aims to Extend Hadoop’s Big Data Capabilities
    • CloudBees Opens Up Java Platform as a Service to Private Clouds

      CloudBees, the innovation leader in cloud computing for Java, today announced RUN@cloud Private Edition, which extends the company’s rapid-deploy, instant-scale, no-IT-headaches Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) to private cloud environments running on OpenStack™ or vSphere. With this new offering, CloudBees expands choices for customers on the CloudBees platform: choice in deployment (public, private or hybrid cloud) and choice of underlying infrastructure (Amazon, OpenStack or vSphere).

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Acquia Announces Record First Quarter 2011 and Rapid Expansion

      Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal, today announced a record first quarter, increasing revenue 300% as compared to the first quarter of 2010, and more than 20% over the previous quarter. Enterprise adoption of the Drupal social publishing platform and Acquia’s cloud hosting has fueled the rapid expansion of Acquia’s business.

  • Business

  • Money

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Google Web Toolkit 2.3 arrives

      Google has announced new versions of its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE). Version 2.3 of GWT, a Java-based open source development framework for Ajax applications, brings improvements in support for the latest version of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) and associated HTML5 features, including the ability to access Web Storage allowing local storage of data by web applications.

    • [PacketFence 2.2.0 released]
    • Infoblox Delivers IPv6 with DNS64

      Infoblox has a set of appliances that delivers DDI services running the Infoblox NIOS software. Liu noted that the core underlying operating system is a stripped down version of Linux, though he added that Infoblox is able to take advantage of some of the IPv6 capabilities in Linux.

  • Licensing

    • Relicensing Puppet to Apache 2.0

      As most of you realize by now, Puppet 2.7 was released under the Apache 2.0 license instead of under the GPL, and Facter has already been released under the Apache license. My goal in this post is to explain why, and what effects you might expect to see as a result.

      We’ve been talking about the possibility of this change for about two years, but it was only in the last six months that it’s been solidified as the right plan. For the vast majority of people, this change won’t affect you at all—Puppet is still open source, and under one of the most open licenses available. For a few of you, however, this license change will make it easier to embed Puppet into your software, ship it as part of a solution you’re building, or contribute code to it.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Ten Things You Didn’t Know About ODF 1.2

      #
      # ODF 1.2 has been out for public review a total of 210 days.
      # The ODF TC resolved 1,822 public comments while working on ODF 1.2. We read every one of them.

    • Questioning the future of OpenOffice.org and ODF

      There’s a time for answers, and a time for questions.

      Last month’s announcement from Oracle that it would be discontinuing commercial development on OpenOffice.org definitely means it’s time for questions, a broader one being “what the heck does Oracle’s announcement mean?”

      For now, the status of OpenOffice.org is in a bit of limbo: work on OpenOffice.org 3.4 continues at the Hamburg offices where much of the core OpenOffice.org development takes place. At this moment, despite a few rumors that proved to be wrong, those developers are all still gainfully employed by Oracle. This may be a deliberate decision on Oracle’s part, or the fact that German hiring laws are different than those in the US, and don’t typically permit immediate layoffs. But beyond that, there is very little known about Oracle’s exact plans for OpenOffice.org.

Leftovers

  • 3 Professional Reasons For Computer Professionals To Attend Science Fiction Conventions

    Most people who attend science fiction conventions have plenty of social reasons for going, such as to have fun, make friends with like-minded literate people, or to see favorite authors and artists. Whether you attend a smaller con like PhilCon or a larger one like Atlanta, Georgia’s DragonCon (“the largest multi-media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film”), you can buy books, find an excuse to travel, or actively participate in SF singing (“filking”), costuming, live-action role-playing games (LARPS), and other activities.

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs May Make ‘Near-Term’ Management Changes, UBS Says

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), accused of misleading clients by a U.S. Senate inquiry, is likely to make management changes in the “near-term,” said William Tanona, an analyst at UBS AG.

      “Any turnover will concern investors despite the firm’s deep bench,” Tanona, who worked at Goldman Sachs from 2005 to 2008, wrote today in a note to investors. “GS’s management team is very strong; however, missteps on the public relations front have further tarnished the firm’s reputation.” Managers will remain under strain after lawmakers sent findings to the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, he said.

    • Blankfein Could Still Leave

      Start the clock counting down the days until Lloyd Blankfein steps down as the chief executive of Goldman Sachs.

      Blankfein has reportedly told the company’s board members that rumors of an impending retirement are not true. He plans to stay for another year, according to a report in the New York Post Tuesday.

    • At Goldman Meeting, Pay Is Likely to Rule the Day

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Lloyd Blankfein may have to defend the firm’s compensation policies, including a combined $69.6 million 2010 payday for its top five executives, when he faces shareholders at the bank’s annual meeting on Friday.

    • Goldman Sachs report referred to investigators

      A US SENATE report that said Goldman Sachs misled clients about mortgage-linked securities has been formally referred to the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are reviewing its findings.

      Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn, the Democratic chairman and senior Republican on the permanent subcommittee on investigations, have signed a referral letter asking the agencies to examine the panel’s report.

    • DoJ reviews Goldman Sachs report

      US prosecutors are reviewing the findings of a Senate report that found Goldman Sachs misled clients buying mortgage-related securities, Eric Holder, the US attorney-general, has told a congressional committee.

    • The Real Reason Goldman Should Be Freaking Out About The Volcker Rule In One Word

      Why should Goldman Sachs be “freaked out” by the Volcker Rule, and lobbying hard to debilitate it?

      One word: Glencore.

      It turns out that contrary to prior statements by Goldman top brass, the bank is actually a little freaked out by the Volcker Rule.

      The firm has been spending millions to sway lawmakers in Washington against severe interpretations of the new regulation, and has assembled an all-star team to do so. Even Blankfein is getting in on the lobbying action.

    • Why Is Goldman Sachs Holding Its Shareholder Meeting In New Jersey?

      As you may have heard, Goldman Sachs will hold its annual shareholder meeting tomorrow. Unlike the past 12 years, in which the event has been held in New York, Friday’s meeting will go down in the Garden State. The bank has not explained the move, and while it does have a building across the river, one would hope you’re not falling for that.

      The real reason more than likely has little to do with real estate. Legitimate possibilities include:

    • Goldman Sachs lobbies hard on Volcker Rule

      The mantra for Wall Street firms when it comes to Dodd-Frank should be “never say never”. Dodd-Frank may be the law of the land, but the specifics are still being worked out by a resource-challenged SEC. For Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), the biggest issue still to be decided is the Volcker Rule.

      In general, the Volcker Rule sought to prohibit banks from engaging in risky proprietary trading with their own capital and from investing directly in hedge funds and private equity funds. The rule has already had a big impact on banks, including Goldman, which has disbanded at least two prop trading units.

    • Religious Groups Question Goldman on Pay

      When Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executives and shareholders gather Friday morning for the company’s annual meeting, the room might look a little like a house of worship.

      A coalition of religious groups headed by a nun, a priest and the CEO of a Jewish organization will be there to press Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to evaluate whether it’s paying executives too much. Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein will have no choice but to listen. The group has won a coveted spot on the annual meeting agenda.

    • Claiming Fraud in A.I.G. Bailout, Whistle-Blower Lawsuit Names 3 Companies

      The first known whistle-blower lawsuit to assert that the taxpayers were defrauded when the federal government bailed out the American International Group was unsealed on Friday, joining a number of suits seeking to settle the score on losses related to the financial crisis of 2008.

      The lawsuit, filed by a pair of veteran political activists from the La Jolla area of San Diego, asserts that A.I.G. and two large banks engaged in a variety of fraudulent and speculative transactions, running up losses well into the billions of dollars. Then the three institutions persuaded the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to bail them out by giving A.I.G. two rescue loans, which were used to unwind hundreds of failed trades.

    • Claiming Fraud in A.I.G. Bailout, Whistle-Blower Lawsuit Names 3 Companies

      The lawsuit, filed by a pair of veteran political activists from the La Jolla area of San Diego, asserts that A.I.G. and two large banks engaged in a variety of fraudulent and speculative transactions, running up losses well into the billions of dollars. Then the three institutions persuaded the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to bail them out by giving A.I.G. two rescue loans, which were used to unwind hundreds of failed trades.

      The loans were improper, the lawsuit says, because the Fed made them without getting a pledge of high-quality collateral from A.I.G., as required by law.

    • Wall Street Bankers Share Blame for Europe Crisis, Berkshire’s Munger Says

      Charles Munger, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK/A) holds $5 billion of options on Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) stock, said the role of investment bankers in helping to mask Greece’s financial troubles was “perfectly disgusting.”

      “Wall Street to some extent is deliberately trying to profit from sin, and I think it’s a mistake,” Munger told reporters yesterday after Berkshire’s annual press conference in Omaha, Nebraska. “Why should an investment banker go to Greece to teach them how to pretend their finances are different from what they really are? Why isn’t that a perfectly disgusting bit of human behavior?”

    • Banks Illegally Foreclosed On Dozens Of Military Borrowers, Federal Investigators Say

      Two of the nation’s largest mortgage firms illegally foreclosed on the homes of “almost 50″ active-duty military service members, according to a Thursday report by the Government Accountability Office.

      The report does not identify the two mortgage companies. GAO investigators attributed the finding to federal bank regulators, who recently completed a three-month probe into allegations of improper foreclosures carried out by the nation’s 14 largest home loan servicers.

    • Senate GOP: We’ll block consumer protection nominee

      Forty-four Republican senators sent a letter to Barack Obama Thursday threatening to vote down whomever the president nominates to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless the administration overhauls the agency’s regulatory powers.

      The new agency — which GOP lawmakers have opposed since it’s inception — has been without a permanent head and is in the process of being set up by special adviser Elizabeth Warren. If a director is not appointed by July, the agency’s one-year anniversary, the bureau will lose certain powers, including the authority to supervise non-bank lenders.

    • Two Madoff Cases Reach Federal Court

      In one case, a federal judge has granted a request by JPMorgan Chase to decide whether the firm’s trustee, Irving H. Picard, has the right to sue the bank for $6.4 billion over claims that it aided Mr. Madoff in his Ponzi scheme.

      The judge, Colleen McMahon of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, said that she would release an opinion in the coming weeks that explains why she agreed to hear the case.

      She also gave JPMorgan a deadline of June 3 to file documents asking that the case be dismissed, and scheduled a hearing for late July.

    • Fannie Mae seeks $8.5 billion more in federal aid

      Fannie Mae asked the government Friday for an additional $8.5 billion in aid after declining home prices caused more defaults on loans guaranteed by the mortgage giant.

      The company said it lost $8.7 billion in the first three months of the year. Those losses led Fannie to request more than three times the federal aid it sought in the previous quarter. The total cost of rescuing the government-controlled mortgage buyer is nearing $100 billion – the most expensive bailout of a single company.

    • After Bust in Ireland, Ordinary People Make Do With Less

      Brian and Rosie Condra grew up poor. But as prosperity washed over Ireland in the first decade of the 21st century, they managed to buy a modest house, start saving for their children’s future and, for once, do more than simply make ends meet.

    • A Chart to Explain Confusion on Jobs

      But now look at the very end of the chart. Do you see how the blue line dips, leaving it closer to the red line? That is today’s jobs report. It doesn’t mean unemployment actually rose last month.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Ed Vaizey and lobby groups

      More concerning is their conclusion that Ed Vaizey is the “most lobbied minister” in the UK in the period May-Dec 2010. This is, we think, in large part because Ed Vaizey likes to meet large numbers of people at once, in ‘round table’ meetings. Not a bad thing in itself, but very disappointing that no meeting with any consumer or rights group took place in that time. Those views were effectively excluded from these discussions.

  • Censorship

    • Facebook political takedowns: Burying bad news?

      News has broken today that a number of activist groups pages and user accounts on Facebook have been deleted, mostly from the anti-cuts movement.

    • Corporations may not protect your free speech and privacy

      This ought to be the lesson we learn from the Internet and digital revolution. Over twenty or more years, we have had a huge rebalancing of power towards citizens, as we are able to communicate and network with each other much more easily. We are able to directly influence political discourse. No longer do a handful of media and political organisations act as gatekeepers to the public. They no longer act as exclusive mediators.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • What Will Canada’s New Majority Government Mean for Copyright Reform?

        Monday’s re-election of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in Canada to a majority stronghold means that there will be fewer impediments to get its legislation passed. One bill, which died March 26 when the general election was called for May 2, was C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act. A new bill, assigned a new number, is expected to be introduced by the end of the year.

      • Von Finckenstein tells broadcasting industry to lobby Tories for regulatory change

        CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein laid out new details in his call for an overhaul of Canada’s communications regulatory framework Thursday and called on the broadcasting industry to form a new organization to lobby the Conservative government for change.

      • The future of electoral reform in the UK

        Our failure, both as a party and as individual campaigners, was to not properly inform voters of the choice in front of them, or indeed why it mattered at all. The same criticism applies equally to the No campaign. On 5th May I was still explaining to people on the doorstep that they were going to be asked to vote in a referendum in addition to casting their council ballots. It is a sad day when, after months of campaigning on an issue as vital as electoral reform, voters were still unprepared to answer a simple yes/no question at the ballot box.

      • Campaigns: looking back, looking forward

        As mentioned earlier, we’re not currently doing well at getting the party name out there. Our campaigns are being hampered by the fact that a relatively small proportion of those who would vote for us have heard of us — despite the coverage we received in the wake of the Wikileaks controversy. Perhaps we didn’t effectively leverage the media interest that we received then?

      • UK Music Publishers Association Tries To Hide CopyFraud

Clip of the Day

Swing 42 – Django Reinhardt


Credit: TinyOgg

05.06.11

Links 6/5/2011: GIMP 2.8 Nearer, KDE 4.6.3 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 5:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Big Changes Afoot in the Linux Market

    The biggest change and impact to the Linux landscape and market to date has been the advent of cloud computing. True, this does build from the spread of virtualization and use of VMs on Linux, but cloud computing has meant deeper changes in the players, uses and communities that matter most. There is now a very different presence for various distributions, some of which might surprise those who would have you believe the OS market is boring right now.

    [...]

    Despite all of these previous, significant changes, the biggest change and impact to the Linux landscape and market to date has been the advent of cloud computing. True, this does build from the spread of virtualization and use of VMs on Linux, but cloud computing has meant deeper changes in the players, uses and communities that matter most. We now see a very different presence for various distributions, some of which might surprise those who would have you believe the operating system market is boring right now.

  • Kernel Space

    • Scanner support

      Out of pure curiosity, I plugged the scanner into my Linux laptop. A few clicks in “System – Administration – Add/Remove Software” and I had installed Sane and the plugins for Gimp. So about 2 or 3 minutes.

      Sure enough, the scanner works! I scanned a few test images, whatever I had around the office, and loaded them directly into Gimp. Works great! Another example where Linux support is ahead of the competition.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3 and beyond

        Personally, I use GNOME 3 on my Desktop and Netbook for some weeks now, both with Fedora 15 Alpha/Beta. It took me some minutes to get used to the concept and reorganize my workflow a bit but overall the experience was quite good. I especially like the way multiple monitors work, so I can always have empathy with IRC and chat on my secondary monitor. This is particularly useful as I definitely use much more work-spaces now than before to organize my tasks. There are still some rough edges, especially when it comes to all the “Finding and Reminding” stuff and the chat integration. Actually, I really don’t want to have both empathy and the shell displaying my chat messages and I don’t want to have the “Contact List” around all the time. But luckily some discussion started on desktop-devel-list to improve the situation. The point annoying me most is that I always have to press Alt/Meta key to switch off my computer as I have connected it to a plugbar to save the energy consumed in standby normally by the computer and the monitors and my secondary monitor doesn’t go into sleep mode when connected via HDMI. Another reason for not using standby is that I cannot sleep when the blinking “Standby-LED” of my desktop is lighting the room. I want a “Power Off” menu item – Period!

        [...]

        The rest was a lot of noise in the style “I don’t like it”, “Fedora vs. Ubuntu”, “GNOME vs. Unity vs. KDE”

  • Distributions

    • 5 “Uncommon” Linux Distributions

      Not long ago has been released Ubuntu version 11.04, someone loves it, others dislike the new graphical environment or something else that has been changed in this release, but at the moment it seem that everyone is talking about Ubuntu.

      So let me say clearly: Gnu/Linux is NOT only Ubuntu, there are many good distributions that can be perfect for some computers or goals, let me introduce you some uncommon distributions, for uncommon i means not in the top 15 of distrowatch.com.

    • OpenRC and baselayout 2 will be stabilized on May 8

      OpenRC, the replacement for Gentoo’s current services system (known as baselayout), will be stabilized on May 8. It replaces the previous bash-only rc system in baselayout with an rc system that has a C-based core and uses only POSIX-compliant shell code.

      [...]

      Failure to follow all of these steps will result in an unbootable system.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Summit 2011: Top five takeaways

        1: Red Hat is pitching itself hard as the “open” cloud player. It’s new CloudForms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering promises to let users (buzzword alert) “leverage” existing technologies–virtual servers from Red Hat or VMware, public clouds by Amazon, IBM, and others; and on-premises or hosted physical servers.

        Then there’s Red Hat OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which, Red Hat said, will support Java, Python, PHP and Ruby languages and Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Zend, Django, Java EE and other frameworks.

      • Red Hat platform-as-a-service cloud targets open source developers

        Red Hat is trying to differentiate itself among other cloud computing choices by flexing its flexibility muscle—something it says it can do because of its foundations in open source.

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Iceweasel/Firefox 4 in Debian Squeeze — I make the leap

        I contend that it’s not necessary nor even desirable to upgrade an entire Linux distribution or BSD installation just to get some shiny newness like Firefox 4.

        It’s still a “selling” point for free operating systems: “Upgrade and you’ll get the new Firefox/OpenOffice/Thunderbird, etc.”

      • Linux kernel wonder patch hits Debian Squeeze

        The patch is also reported to improve web page load times with a busy CPU, by non other than… Linus Torvalds.
        Now if only I weren’t such a slacker my CPU might be busy enough to test this, but no…. CPU usage at about 5%.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Full Circle Magazine – Python Special Edition #02

          Many thanks to Robin (podcast) Catling for creating these with his PDF magick.

        • LoCo Directory: Next Steps

          I love the LoCo Directory. The site provides a fantastic way to browse the global list of Ubuntu LoCo Teams, organize events and more. What is more, it is almost entirely a community-driven project; the site has a series of developers who actively work to improve and refine it.

        • Ubuntu 11.04, Unity Released to Mixed Reactions

          Ubuntu 11.04 was released on April 28 with a brand new interface and a couple default application changes. But all the talk is about Unity, that brand new interface. As one might predict, reactions are all over the spectrum.

          The Unity interface has taken design cues from popular mobile systems with the focus being on saving screen space and making everything readily accessible from within that limited space. It appears designers were shooting for easy and beautiful, but some users are finding adjustment during these early days a bit challenging.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Will kubuntu natty stabilize? Ever?

            First off, let me tell you something before I start my rant on kubuntu: I’ve been a kubuntu user for 6 years now… and I don’t intend to switch to gnome (ubuntu) or xfce (xubuntu) or any other of the other variants anytime soon. I like KDE and I’m willing to put up with the nag that I have to go through in order to continue using it

          • A Sneak Peek at Upcoming Linux Mint 11

            Linux Mint today published a preview of the upcoming release of its popular Ubuntu derivative, a move not often shared by other distributions. For those not enjoying Ubuntu’s Unity or looking forward to Fedora’s GNOME 3, Linux Mint offers a comfortable old blanket of security.

            One of the most noteable features of version 11 will be the retention of GNOME 2.32. It will be the foundation for the same desktop layout users know and love, including Compiz and Metacity.

            Despite that, version 11 will contain a few changes. Like in many of Mint’s counterparts, OpenOffice.org will be replaced with LibreOffice. Rhythmbox will be replaced by Banshee and gThumb will replace F-Spot.

            [...]

            A release candidate should be released about mid-month…

          • iQunix OS 11.04 Is Now Based on Ubuntu 11.04

            · Linux kernel 2.6.38.4;
            · XOrg Server 1.10.0;
            · Mesa 7.10.1;
            · Intel IPS (Intelligent Power Sharing) support;
            · Btrfs, EXT4 and XFS filesystem optimizations;
            · XInput 2.1 (a multitouch input extension);
            · Preload.

Free Software/Open Source

  • The open source why

    Some of my collegues at Red Hat have been working for some time now on a book/wiki titled The Open Source Way. It is aimed at answering the very important questions of “How?” for a given set of Whats, and its a very important resource for those who are ready to roll up their sleeves and to start putting open source principles to work. But, why would anybody want to do that?

  • Collaborating with the Open Source Legal Community: Insights from the European Legal Network Conference

    The European Legal Network Conference was held last month in Amsterdam. Organized by the FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe), it is designed “to allow legal experts to discuss the future of Free Software licenses and associated best practice in this field.”

  • How SOS Open Source Evolved in its First Year

    SOS Open Source few days ago completed its first year of life, a good time to look back and and see where we have been and to recognize methods and technologies that have helped us on our journey.

  • Do not say “Closed Source” or “Proprietary Software”….instead say “Legacy Software”

    I was at the Red Hat Summit in Boston yesterday and while I was sitting in a session about “Open Source” I started thinking about some of the terms the community uses.

    Words are very powerful, of course, and many marketing campaigns have been based on a catchy phrase, or a turn of words.

    [...]

    Most importantly, no one really likes constantly being reminded that the software they are using is “legacy software”, and that it should be replaced with “Free Software”.

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • Big Banks Face Criticism For Speculative Role In Global Food Crisis

      Today, rising food prices are wreaking havoc in the developing world. While some blame overpopulation, and others ethanol, another culprit has emerged of late: banks and the role of speculative commodity indexes.

      The primary danger of the indexes, according to a new article by Frederick Kaufman in Foreign Policy, is that they fundamentally alter the food market by transforming key stapes into a financial asset that performs more or less like a stock. So while billions worldwide scramble to find money pay for food, food prices are often subject to intensified distortions of supply and demand from speculative markets.

      Since 1999, when the government first deregulated the commodities market, Kaufmann explains, investors have flocked to investing in food. The basis for that excitement is a Goldman Sachs-developed innovation known as the commodity index. Today, Kaufmann says, it’s a tool that has been replicated throughout the banking industry.

  • DRM

    • Free Software Foundation organises “Day Against DRM”

      On its DefectiveByDesign.org campaign page, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced that 4 May (today) will be this year’s “Day Against DRM”. With this day of action, the organisation wants to focus the public’s attention on the risks of what it considers to be an anti-social technology. The FSF has created a wiki page which allows users to swap campaign banners and event ideas.

Clip of the Day

Links 6/5/2011: Linux-powered Android Phones Take Majority Share in the US

Posted in News Roundup at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A 15 pound computer to inspire young programmers

    The result, a working computer running on a Linux operating system for very little, and a device that will, like the kit computers of the 1970s and 80s, encourage users to tinker around under the bonnet and learn a bit of programming. And it’s a yearning to return to those days that is driving Braben and the other enthusiasts who are working to turn this sketchy prototype into a product that could be handed to every child in Britain.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • FLOSS Weekly 164: Buildbot

      Buildbot is software that automatically configures and tests your software packages for you.

      Guest: Dustin J. Mitchell

  • Kernel Space

    • FHS Refresh

    • Graphics Stack

      • OpenWF Working Group Offers Hand To Wayland

        While not a huge item as no work has yet been rendered, the Khronos Working Group responsible for the OpenWF standard have offered their support to the Wayland Display Server project.

        OpenWF 1.0 launched in 2009 as an open, cross-platform API designed for composited windowing systems that is hardware independent. OpenWF is broken down into Composition and Display components with more technical details behind this hardware-independent API being available at Khronos.org. The Khronos Group is, of course, the entity also responsible for OpenGL, OpenVG, etc.

      • First steps with Wayland

        Wayland seems very interesting, specially from the perspective of having a clean codebase and architecture to work with unlike X.org. The main advantage is that the compositor acts as the display server, allowing it to be aware of the input events and avoiding round trips between processes.

        [...]

        To start my journey I had to read a bit about EGL and GL, coming from a high level/clutter/cairo/mostly 2D wonderland it was an interesting read and I’m starting to pick the basic concepts around it.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Let the user decide if in doubt

        If it comes to decisions there is always the aim to just do the right thing. In a lot of cases there is the one right thing. In quite a few cases there is no right thing but the consequences are small enough that it does not really matter which decision one takes. And then there are those use-cases where the only right thing to do is to ask the user because any other decision would just be guessing and lead to RAM and CPU wasting.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME marketing contract: final report

        My marketing contract with the GNOME Foundation finished last week. The final weeks of the contract gave me the opportunity to work on some more general marketing tasks that I didn’t have chance to in the run up to the release itself. So, in the final weeks of the contract, I…

  • Distributions

    • Ubuntu and Slackware, two of the most important distributions released new versions last month
    • Some of the faces behind the distros

      When I first migrated to Linux, I bought a nice set of stickers and one of them depicted many smiling penguins. As a heading, you could read “The friendly face of Linux”. Today, as I saw anticaptalista’s encouraging comment in Megatotoro’s blog, it suddenly struck me that there is an element that I have been enjoying since the moment of my migration, something subtle, but powerful. You see, as an ex-Windows user, although I could identify Bill Gates’ face (and even Ballmer’s), I never received any tangible support from Microsoft. Windows was merely a business.

      Linux, on the other hand, has represented an unmatched opportunity to learn and grow because of the intense human interaction of its vibrating communities. For example, as soon as I joined Mandriva’s community forum, I was received as a human being, not as a number. The same happened when I posted my first question in Mageia’s blog: the prompt reply giving me direction was refreshing. And I cannot describe the feeling I experienced yesterday when I opened my email to find a follow-up message from a Mageia developer taking care of the bug I reported.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat bashes Microsoft, VMware while pitching new cloud software

        Microsoft and VMware are the enemies of interoperability, and only open source software can prevent cloud lock-in.

        That, at least, is what Red Hat wants customers to believe, as the open source vendor unveiled private cloud software and a public cloud service while offering its usual screed against proprietary technology.

        At Wednesday’s Red Hat Summit in Boston, vice president of products and technologies Paul Cormier declared “We’ve changed the world,” and mocked VMware’s “Cloud Developer’s Bill of Rights” and its statement about preventing customers from being locked in to specific products.

      • Red Hat and University of Wisconsin Expand Technology Partnership and Cloud Leadership
      • Red Hat launches CloudForms IaaS, OpenShift PaaS platforms

        Red Hat introduced two new cloud products – CloudForms and OpenShift — at its annual summit Wednesday.

        CloudForms, which is based upon the company-sponsored DeltaCloud project that is now part of Apache– offer sophisticated resource management, application deployment services and Infrastructure-as a Service offerings that help IT adminstrators implement private and hybrid clouds.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • The Post Penguicon Unity Unification Story

          I still don’t really care for Unity, but I’ll admit the panel was very helpful in my attempt to deal with it. Here are some highlights. Please note the questions and responses are based on my recollection of the panel, so I’ve taken some liberties.

        • Ubuntu 11.04: Is Natty Narwhal the best Linux desktop ever?

          I have to say that I came to Ubuntu 11.04 not at all convinced that I’d like it. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Unix and Linux user. While I’m not so hide-bound that I consider the Bash shell to be the be-all and end-all of desktops, I do like getting to the engine of my operating system so I can tune it just the way I want it — and that’s not what Unity is all about.

          Somewhat to my surprise, I found that I liked it a lot. And, better still for what Canonical has planned for Ubuntu, I found that people who’d never used Linux before actually liked Ubuntu. Mind you, they couldn’t tell it was Linux under the hood, but I think that’s the point. This is Linux for non-Linux users, and as that, I think it’s a great success.

          Is it good enough to get Windows users to switch? I don’t know, but I do know, that as users switch more and more to tablets and smartphones, they’re certainly more open to new possibilities and that’s exactly what Unity is. It’s not just a new take on the desktop, it’s a new take on the interface for all devices. I fully expect to see Unity-based tablets sometime soon. And I think Ubuntu just might be the first Linux to gain a large number of ordinary users.

        • Ubuntu 11.04: Too Natty for Its Own Good?

          Do we love it? Well, many of us do, it seems. Then again, many of us aren’t so sure. The new Unity interface, in particular, has created more than a few furrowed brows.

        • 10 things to love about Ubuntu 11.04

          Today is a good day, as I dine on a dish of crow — served gladly by the ladies and gentlemen of Canonical. In Ubuntu 11.04: Small issues, big win, I explained how my opinions changed about Ubuntu 11.04 and the most recent release of the new default Ubuntu desktop, Unity. After installing the beta 1 release, I realized that my fears were pretty much misplaced. And now that I have the final release up and running — and despite its installation problems — I’m still convinced that there’s plenty to love about the latest Ubuntu release. Let’s take a look.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Ubuntu 11.04: The ultimate educational desktop?

            I’ve been using Ubuntu 11.04 since it was in Alpha testing and it’s my primary OS for the various netbooks I have floating around my house. Regular readers will know that I’ve used Ubuntu for quite a while, whether as a server or desktop OS. I spend a lot of time nowadays on my Mac, which is great, but I can’t help but feel that this latest version of Ubuntu just might be the ultimate educational desktop for a lot of reasons.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android phones account for half of U.S. market share; 4G is King.

          There has been an abundance of reports in the recent months noting that Android is the leading smartphone platform. Canalys echoed that main sentiment once again in its Q1 2011 analysis, but it discovered something pretty interesting: almost half of smartphones shipped in the United States last quarter were powered by Google Android.

        • Motorola Atrix With Android/Linux Available

          The world’s most powerful smartphone is available now for the price of a subscription to service. That will sell like hotcakes. It will be head-to-head competition for iPhone. In Canada, Atrix is slightly less expensive than the iPhone.

        • Archos 32 Android media player

          Archos is calling the 32 an Android tablet, but I have trouble convincing myself that anything with a 3.2in screen is really a tablet so it makes far more sense to review it as a touchscreen media player.

        • Most tablets doomed to fail says YouGov study

          UK market research agency YouGov believes most tablets launched this year are doomed to failure unless they can hit the magic price point for wider adoption: £250.

          Russell Feldman, Associate Director for Technology and Telecoms Consulting at YouGov, made the prediction as he commented on the pollster’s latest TabletTrack survey.

          “At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, earlier this year, over 80 tablets were announced for launch later in 2011,” said Feldman. “YouGov expects most of these tablets to fail to achieve widespread distribution. However, our analysis clearly demonstrates that if the pricing is right and the device is marketed at the correct audience, then there is significant latent demand.”

Free Software/Open Source

  • Why Teleplace went open source

    Earlier this week, Teleplace announced that it was releasing the current version of proprietary virtual world software to the open source community as OpenQwaq. The next generation of its software won’t be commercially available for three to six months.

    The Teleplace software normally runs for $50 per user per month for the hosted version and $100 per user per month for the on-premises software — and the company says it has hundreds of corporate clients with “thousands” of users.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome 11: The Best Browser?

        Was it only a few weeks ago, that we were looking at the latest crop of Web browsers? Why, yes, yes it was, but now Google has released yet another newer, faster, better, and more feature-full version of its Chrome Web browser: Chrome 11.

    • Mozilla

  • Databases

    • Former MySQL boss: Code ‘in better shape than ever’ under Oracle

      Despite concerns that Oracle would be unfriendly to open source projects acquired through the merger with Sun, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos says the MySQL code base is in fantastic condition.

      In an interview this week, Mickos said Oracle may not understand or care much about open source and the task of fostering community involvement, but Oracle seems committed to the products themselves and he has no complaints about Oracle’s technical expertise. Version 5.5 of the MySQL database “probably is the best MySQL version ever produced,” and the upcoming version 5.6 is looking strong as well, Mickos said.

    • MySQL successor, Drizzle, reaches maturity

      Brian ‘Krow’ Aker, MySQL’s former director of architecture, brings us up to speed on the first stable GA release from the Drizzle database project designed for web applications and cloud computing…

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Tech at Night: Net Neutrality, FCC, Patents, Copyrights, Sony, Anonymous

      No, the patent issue isn’t going away. the fight between Google and Oracle over the Java technology incorporated in Android. One does wonder, if Google really is as arrogant about copyright and patent as Oracle says, just how much litigation is ahead surrounding the growing Android platform. I’m not so sure Google is in the right with respect to Java, as I’ve previously in this space called their tricks pretty sneaky and perhaps too clever, but I won’t mind if the process spurs software patent reform.

    • Oracle has to toss 129 patent infringement claims in Google lawsuit

      Oracle filed the lawsuit against Google last year claiming that Google’s immensely popular Android operating system infringed Java patents that it acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems. Oracle submitted a total of 132 claims in seven patents and court documents reveal that Google identified “hundreds of prior art references”. But US District Judge William Alsup said, “This is too much.”

      Judge Alsup ordered a considerable narrowing of the claims to ensure “only a triable number of these items” will be placed before a jury in October. He cut Oracle’s initial 132 claims to just three and allowed only eight prior art submissions by Google. Oracle will have to surrender 129 of its patent infringement claims against Google and Judge Alsup shut the door against Oracle refiling those claims in subsequent legal action unless it is against new products. Basically Oracle will have to completely drop 129 claims of patent infringement against Google’s Android operating system.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • Francis Maude outlines Public Data Corporation plans

        The government intends to have a data policy framework in place by autumn 2011 as part of its preparations for the Public Data Corporation (PDC), according to Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.

        Maude was responding to a parliamentary question from Conservative MP Mark Pawsey about the government’s plans for the PDC, aimed at bringing together data from government bodies into one organisation. The government has said it wants to open opportunities for developers, businesses and members of the public to generate social and economic growth through the use of data.

    • Open Hardware

      • Massive launch of tablet PCs may result in excess inventory for players

        Non-Apple tablet PC players are at high risk of facing excess tablet PC inventory in the second half of 2011 as first-tier smartphone and notebook vendors as well as second-tier vendors are all ready to enter the tablet PC competition with their devices, according to market watchers.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • OASIS To Promote Interoperability of SOA Repositories with S-RAMP

      OASIS, the international open standards consortium has garnered support from leading SOA vendors and users to address a critical interoperability issue for SOA repositories. A new OASIS committee will work on a standard for sharing data across SOA repository products from multiple vendors for cloud and on-premise environments

Leftovers

  • OpenDNS offers IPv6 Internet DNS services

  • Security

    • Anonymous Faces Identity Dilemma Over Sony Hack
    • Anonymous: Sony is incompetent (and we don’t steal credit cards)

      Sony yesterday singled out Anonymous for its role in the PlayStation Network data breach, but Anonymous has its own view—namely, “Sony is incompetent.” As for the evidence against them, the group believes it is being targeted by a “false flag op.”

      Back on April 22, parts of the amorphous hacker collective Anonymous were already denying responsibility for taking down Sony’s PlayStation Network. “For Once We Didn’t Do It,” proclaimed their manifesto.

    • Security Expert: Sony Knew Its Software Was Obsolete Months Before PSN Breach

      In congressional testimony this morning, Dr. Gene Spafford of Purdue University said that Sony was using outdated software on its servers — and knew about it months in advance of the recent security breaches that allowed hackers to get private information from over 100 million user accounts.

      According to Spafford, security experts monitoring open Internet forums learned months ago that Sony was using outdated versions of the Apache Web server software, which “was unpatched and had no firewall installed.” The issue was “reported in an open forum monitored by Sony employees” two to three months prior to the recent security breaches, said Spafford.

  • Finance

    • The Global Economy’s Corporate Crime Wave

      The world is drowning in corporate fraud, and the problems are probably greatest in rich countries – those with supposedly “good governance.” Poor-country governments probably accept more bribes and commit more offenses, but it is rich countries that host the global companies that carry out the largest offenses. Money talks, and it is corrupting politics and markets all over the world.

      Hardly a day passes without a new story of malfeasance. Every Wall Street firm has paid significant fines during the past decade for phony accounting, insider trading, securities fraud, Ponzi schemes, or outright embezzlement by CEOs. A massive insider-trading ring is currently on trial in New York, and has implicated some leading financial-industry figures. And it follows a series of fines paid by America’s biggest investment banks to settle charges of various securities violations.

    • U.S. Joins Whistleblower Suit Against Education Management

      The U.S. Justice Department joined an employee whistleblower suit against Education Management Corp. (EDMC), intervening for the first time in the student recruitment practices at for-profit colleges.

      The suit alleges that Pittsburgh-based Education Management, 40 percent owned by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) funds, illegally paid recruiters based on the number of students they enrolled, the company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing today. The government, in most cases, forbids such incentive compensation for colleges accepting federal aid because of concern the practice will encourage companies to enroll unqualified students.

    • Goldman Sachs Has A Way With Words, and Deeds

      Below is Kaufman’s reply found in FP (Foreign Policy):

      Frederick Kaufman replies:

      Instead of working to undo the damage Goldman Sachs and other banks have done by transforming our daily bread into nothing but a financial product, and instead of elucidating the murky world of over-the-counter swaps and baroque derivatives, Lucas van Praag has chosen to offer up yet another example of the fact-twisting and blindness that have unfortunately become the 21st century banking industry’s norm.

      My article “How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis” did not accuse Goldman of introducing speculation to the commodity markets. To the contrary, the editors at Foreign Policy allowed a great deal of space for the history of American commodity markets, including an explanation of the traditional role of bona-fide hedgers and speculators. Of course, it is not traditional speculation that has sparked the historically unprecedented rise in the price of food, but the demand-shock Goldman and their industry followers introduced to the markets with their long-only Goldman Sachs Commodity Index fund — the two-decades-old food, energy, and precious metals derivative that has come to be widely imitated throughout the financial industry.

      Regarding the role of Gary Cohn, we need only review his testimony to Congress in September of 2008, in which Goldman’s president articulated the ideas and concepts that lay behind the birth of the GSCI: “There was no natural long in the market,” Cohn explained to the Senate. “The consumers are so fragmented that they don’t amalgamate to a big enough position. So we actually, as a firm, came up with the idea in the early 1990s to create a long only, static investor in the commodity markets.” In other words — and contrary to van Praag’s assertion — the traditional buy/sell or sell/buy activity of the commodities futures market did not satisfy Goldman, nor allow them nor their largest clients (in this case, multinational oil firms) the market position they desired, a position which had little to do with the long-standing price discovery function of the futures market. Long-only indexes subsequently hijacked this role from this market.

      Van Praag’s assertion that the index funds were created to help “pensioners, who seek to protect the value of their savings against inflation and rising food prices” is a classic case of Wall Street posing as Main Street. Spurred by the institutional sales force of Goldman and other banks, the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars of new money from hedge, pension, and sovereign wealth funds has pushed up the slope of the agricultural price curve. Meanwhile, the contango markets caused by the demand shock the long-only indexes themselves introduced have created a negative yield for investors — who lose money five times a year as commodity prices surge and the price-insensitive funds buy. The regular, 5-times-a-year “roll” of long futures has given commodity insiders the opportunity for immense profit at the expense of investors, and it is simply misleading for van Praag to compare the unnatural, subversive market behavior of the banks to a responsible property owner who regularly renews her home insurance policy.

      While the OECD study has turned a blind eye, both the United Nations and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs — in their investigation of the role of long-only index funds as a threat to interstate commerce — concluded that these funds must bear some of the blame for the rising cost of food. Of course, supply and demand matter, as do monetary policy, climate change, and nationalistic policies of protectionism. But despite all protestations of innocence, the long-only index funds have added regular doses of kerosene to the commodity conflagration that has come to mark the new millennium. No surprise, then, that both the U.S. Commodities Future Trading Commission and the G-20 agricultural ministers have put long-only index fund speculation near the top of their lists of the most egregious financial abuses.

    • How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis

      It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there’s value, there’s money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI).

    • How Wall Street Thieves, Led by Goldman Sachs, Took Down the Global Economy — Their Outsized Influence Must be Stopped

      If we don’t bust up Big Finance, there soon will be another financial crisis that will destroy what’s left of our middle-class way of life.

  • DRM

    • Is Defective by Design getting any traction at all?

      What if they gave a protest, and nobody came? The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is calling May 4 the “Day Against DRM,” but is it getting any traction? From the look of its 2011 wiki page, not very much.

      You’d think that an anti-DRM day would be a pretty easy sell. Digital Restrictions Management (the entertainment industry would call it “Digital Rights Management,” but I’ll side with the FSF here) is tolerated at best — and hated by many. I’ve never talked to anyone, no matter how computer literate or illiterate, who thought a scheme to lock their content to specific devices so it couldn’t be shared or transferred to different devices was a great idea.

    • It’s Time to Give Digital Rights Management the Boot

      Today may be “Star Wars” Day thanks to its lispy slogan, “May the 4th be with you,” but it’s also a day the Free Software Foundation has chosen to call attention to a tech-enabled problem. Specifically, by designating May 4 as its Day Against DRM, the organization hopes to draw attention to the high costs of digital rights management.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Generic drug firms cry foul as Israel returns to U.S. blacklist

      Israel is on Washington’s list of trading partners whose protections for intellectual property rights it considers inadequate largely because of Israel’s failure to comply with benchmarks it agreed to in February 2010.

    • Copyrights

      • Federal Court Ruling Shows Fair Dealing Fears Greatly Exaggerated

        While concern over Bill C-32′s digital lock rules has garnered the lion share of attention, the other major issue in the bill is the extension of fair dealing to cover education, parody, and satire. I have characterized those changes as a reasonable compromise – not the full “such as” flexibility that would have been preferable, but helpful extensions that attempt to strike a balance. Some writers groups have reacted angrily to the changes, claiming it will cost them millions in revenue and arguing that it amounts to an “expropriation of property.”

      • Court rules Internet IP addresses are not people

        “I am not an IP number, I am a free man!” OK, so that’s not exactly what actor Patrick McGoohan said in the classic TV show, The Prisoner, but Number 6 would have agreed that people aren’t numbers, and they certainly aren’t their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. And, now a U.S. District Court has ruled that an IP address is not the same thing as a person’s identification.

      • ACTA

        • Hollywood presses European Parliament to sign ACTA

          A letter that has all the hallmarks of the Motion Picture Association lobbying machine has been circulated to members of the European Parliament, calling on them to agree to sign ACTA without delay. It appears to be an attempt to stall the Parliament from seeking a legal opinion on ACTA.

          The letter follows a move by the Green group, initiating a move to ask the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for an Opinion on the compatibility of ACTA (Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement) with the EU Treaties. ACTA establishes an international IP enforcement regime and threatens to impose measures on Europe which may be either incompatible with the existing EU legal frameework or will impose new provisions, especially in relation to the Internet and online enforcement.

          The lobbying letter appears to be trying to heavy the Parliament into signing ACTA without seeking further legal advice. It suggests that any attempt to seek an ECJ Opinion will substantially set back the
          final adoption and implementation of ACTA in Europe, and postulates the threat that such a delay would “weaken the position of the EU viv-a-vis its international trading partners”.

Clip of the Day

Exclusive working Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 Hands On


Credit: TinyOgg

05.05.11

Links 5/5/2011: Linux Back on PS3, New AntiX

Posted in News Roundup at 6:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Returns To PS3 Through Custom Firmware Update

    Homerbrew developers have released a custom firmware update for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video game console that reactivates the OtherOS functionality that was blocked the company more than a year ago.

    The OtherOS++ firmware, which installs the Linux operating system along side Sony’s PS operating system, is described as ‘one small step for devs, one giant kick in the nuts for Sony’.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • New Looks for Desktop Linux

        The GNOME Foundation, which has overseen the development of the default graphical environments for the Linux- and Unix-based operating systems from Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and others, has diverged from the consistent look and feel that marked its namesake desktop environment for years, with its new GNOME Shell interface.

      • GNOME Shell and Ubuntu Unity both offer new looks

        With the release of GNOME 3.0 and Ubuntu 11.04, the face of the Linux desktop environment is changing. This eWEEK review finds there’s a lot to like in both the GNOME Shell and Ubuntu Unity desktop environments, although both will take some getting used to.

        With GNOME 3.0, the GNOME Foundation has diverged from the consistent look and feel that marked its namesake desktop environment for years. The new GNOME Shell interface represents a new desktop approach intended to make applications easier to access, limit workspace distractions, and make more use of modern desktop and notebook hardware.

    • Xfce

      • In the Linux Garage, Xfce Is Your Tough, Reliable Jeep

        If the more popular Linux desktop environments out there are the cushy sport sedans of the open source world, think of Xfce as a rugged, reliable Jeep. It’s a feature-rich yet lightweight desktop environment that’s anything but underpowered. It’s a long-haul computing workhorse whose only noticeable shortcoming is a very forgivable lack of eye candy.

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat’s thin client revival

        If you’ve been in the IT industry for a couple of decades you might well remember when thin-client technology was big news. In particular you might remember when Oracle chief Larry Ellison sang the praises of thin-client technology. You might also remember when, in the late 1990s, Ellison again proclaimed the virtues of thin-client computing.

        Today thin-client computing is no longer sexy. Many companies use it successfully but there aren’t that many vendors that will trumpet thin-client systems as a way to sexy-up their sales material.

        [...]

        Now Red Hat is hoping to give Linux on the desktop a boost with its new virtual desktop infrastructure plans.

      • Welcome to KVM virtualization – Thorough introduction

        If you’ve been reading my Virtualization section, you know that my focus so far has been mostly on VMware and VirtualBox, with a tad bit of cloud stuff and image remastering. Well, time to branch out. Today, I’d like to formally begin a whole new era of tutorials with KVM. Later on, there will be Xen and other weird beasts, but for now, our topic is KVM.

      • Red Hat, Inc. And IBM Corporation Announces Partnership
      • Red Hat Revolutionizes the Private and Hybrid Cloud Market

        By incorporating comprehensive application lifecycle management, Red Hat CloudForms allows organizations to benefit from the elasticity and flexibility of cloud computing while retaining the ability to control and govern their application portfolio in the cloud.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 15 First impressions

          So, most of my recent use of Linux has been on Linux Mint, a distribution based on Ubuntu. I currently have a dual-boot set up, and installed the new Fedora 15 (beta) to give it a spin. I have not used Fedora very much. I am used to the GNOME 2 desktop but the upcoming Fedora – which will be released on May 24 – is using the brand new GNOME 3 with no ability to return to GNOME 2. This is something Windows users wouldn’t be expecting – the same “desktop” but implemented differently. In Ubuntu and Fedora, the main taskbar is at the top. In Mint, and some other distributions of Linux, it is at the bottom, as Windows users usually see it.

          [...]

          I was much more impressed with the new Fedora than I expected.

    • Debian Family

      • MEPIS based antiX M11 Screenshots

        I’ve taken some screenshots of the MEPIS-based antiX M11 release that came out yesterday. This is an extremely lightweight distribution designed to run on as little as 64MB of RAM. I found using the live cd, installing antiX and performing basic tasks to be a breeze. Here are some screenshots of antiX M11. You can download antiX here or buy Linux CDs in our cart.

      • Congratulations, antiX! Well Done!
      • antiX M11 is Still Quite Impressive

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Debunking FUD: “Ubuntu restricts you, Ubuntu spies on you”

          This is the latest line used by people some people in the free software community in Venezuela to talk down on Ubuntu. This is not just a casual comment.This comes from the people that organize a nation wide 12 city tour to talk about free software.

          I have already commented on how we have been excluded by censoring us, they require us to say ubuntu is propietary software just like mac and windows, they claim ubuntu users are as naive as those using the previous mention propietary systems.

        • Fighting with Ubuntu 11.04 (Unity)

          Ubuntu 11.04 is one of the most expected releases this year. Yes, there were lots of pre-release discussions, reviews, controversy and so on. Finally, it was released.
          As you may know, my laptop is quadro-boot. One of the systems I had there was Ubuntu 10.10, which was upgraded from 10.04.
          Of course, such an event like Ubuntu 11.04 release could not be bypassed by me. This time I decided to go through fresh install route and replace my Ubuntu 10.10 with Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity desktop. Before going for final installation, I ran it in Live mode from Live USB. First impression was positive, so decision was made to go on.

        • Ubuntu 11.04 review

          Ubuntu 11.04, code-named Natty Narwhal, is the latest version of the popular Linux distribution. Released on April 28, 2011, Natty Narwhal is the first Ubuntu release to ship with the Unity desktop interface, replacing the GNOME 2 desktop. This release also marks the end of a separate Ubuntu Netbook Edition (UNE). So if you are running Ubuntu 10.10 Netboot Edition, you will, like every other Ubuntu user, be using Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop.

        • Top 6 Quicklists for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty to Enhance Unity Launcher Functionality

          Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal has been a revelation of sorts in terms of UI improvements it brought to the table. One of the highlights of the new Unity UI is the launcher that sits on the left side of Ubuntu 11.04 Unity desktop. Now I can access my most favorite apps much more faster and my desktop will remain clean at the same time. But I didn’t noticed the limitations of Unity launcher until I implemented the following quicklists which further enhanced the Ubuntu Unity launcher functionality. I am pretty darn sure that you are also going to love these awesome Unity launcher improvements as I did.

        • UnityFox: Integrate Firefox With Ubuntu Unity Launcher (Extension)
        • Change Login Screen On Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”
        • [How to] Run KDE Plasma Widgets in Ubuntu Unity

          We all like a bit of desktop bling on our otherwise standard looking desktops, and despite the recently-revived Screenlets project boasting a noble, if belated, entry there is still no competitor to style and variety of KDE’s “Plasma widgets”.

        • Ubuntu Linux: A User-Friendly, Desktop Operating System

          Last week, Canonical — the open-source development firm — released a new version of its Ubuntu Linux operating system, seemingly aimed at offering casual Windows and Mac users a feature-rich alternative.

          Although it is certainly a bit of hyperbole to say that Ubuntu 11.04 will send Apple and Microsoft packing, ecommerce merchants may find that this new desktop operating system — which is free — is a viable alternative that may save money, improve security, and even provide a better environment for some kinds of web development and maintenance.

        • Install CompizConfig Settings Manager And Enable Desktop Effects Ubuntu Classic 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”
        • Canonical Introduces ‘Ubuntu Friendly’ Open Hardware Validation Program

          Victor Palau, Platform Services Manager at Canonical, announces a new open hardware validation program being developed at the upcoming UDS-O in Budapest called “Ubuntu Friendly”.

          “We are planning substantial change to our Self-testing hardware validation programme at UDS-O. Mainly, we are discontinuing the commercial Ubuntu Ready programme and replacing it with a community programme that has the working title “Ubuntu Friendly”,” writes Palau.

        • Manual disk partitioning guide for Ubuntu 11.04

          Advanced or manual disk partitioning is available for those that want to create a custom set of partitions for installing Ubuntu 11.04. For whatever reason or reasons you choose to use the advanced disk partitioning tool, this article gives a step by step guide, with detailed explanations, on how to do it.

        • How To Use Standard GNOME Notification Bubbles In Ubuntu
        • Speak to me!
        • [How To]: Enable Icons In Menus For Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal
        • 4 Terribly Easy Steps To Move Away From Unity In Ubuntu 11.04
        • Three Alternatives To Unity For Ubuntu 11.04

          A couple of days back, Ubuntu 11.04 was released. As expected it had the new Unity user interface. Unity has divided the Ubuntu users into two groups – those who like it and those who hate it.

        • Mark Shuttleworth talks Windicators, changes for Unity in Oneiric, and whole lot more…

          For one hour in the week following the release of the latest Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, the ‘founder’ of Ubuntu, holds a question and answer session as part of ‘Ubuntu Open Week’.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Welcome to the future.

          Welcome to the future. On the left is the first AndroidNoG phone that I’ve actually played with.

          [...]

          It’s exactly how Baidu expects to dominate search on Android in China and is reportedly the basis for the Facebook phone.

    • Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • OSR Group Thesis: Open Source Collaboration Codified (in English)

    Abstract: When using mailing lists as a collaboration tool, (open source) software developers are following various usage patterns. In order to improve the efficiency of open source collaboration, this thesis tries to identify these existing patterns by analyzing the mailing lists of popular open source projects, then proposes an annotation schema to codify these patterns. A mailing list archiver application is also implemented, which applies the codifications to handle email messages, provides tool supporting for the improvement.

  • Events

    • 20 Years of Linux at the ForumPA, 9 May 2011, Rome

      The Linux operating system is 20 years old, and the Open Source Focus Group for public administrations will run a dedicated event on May 9 at FORUM PA 2011, a workshop hosted by IBM to talk with experts and enthusiasts about Linux’s history and the state of the art.

    • The Linux Foundation Announces LinuxCon Japan Keynotes, Support for Tsunami Relief

      News Highlights

      • Linux creator Linus Torvalds tops LinuxCon Japan agenda, will share his thoughts on the 20th Anniversary of Linux

      • A dedicated day titled, “Open Forum: Power of Collaboration in Crisis,” will facilitate collaboration among open source project leaders working on technology to address crisis

      • The Linux Foundation to donate program funds to tsunami relief efforts

  • SaaS

    • The IT Reform Agenda: ‘Cloud-first’ and mainstreaming of open source

      I attended the latest briefing at the White House complex, where Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Performance Officer Jeff Zients, and other Executive Branch officials reported on implementation of the Administration’s IT Reform Agenda.

    • Legal challenges could hold back cloud computing

      Want to store your digital songs, movies, TV shows, books and video games on a computer or mobile device? No problem. The real trick these days is pushing all that content onto the Internet so it can follow you from device to device, eliminating the need for storage altogether.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle Donates Open Source Hudson To Eclipse Foundation

      Oracle is donating the Hudson open source code that came with Sun Microsystems to the Eclipse Foundation Wednesday. Hudson stirred up controversy in late January when the project’s founder declared that it should be forked to create a branch free of Oracle’s control.

      The project’s founder, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, while at Sun created what’s called a continuous-integration tool in order to simplify agile Java development. A continuous integration tool automatically manages all the changes to a software system as it’s developed. Hudson became a Duke’s Choice award winner for top Java software at the 2008 JavaOne Conference, and was widely adopted by Java programmers. Kawaguchi still has a claim on some developers’ loyalty and they have followed him into his next project, Jenkins.

    • The Apache Software Foundation Subpoenaed to Produce Documents in Oracle America vs. Google

      The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has received a [United States District Court subpoena] requiring the production of documents related to the use of Apache Harmony code in the Android software platform, and the unsuccessful attempt by Apache to secure an acceptable license to the Java SE Technology Compatibility Kit.

    • Oracle, Google move to streamline Java lawsuit

      Google and Oracle each submitted proposals on Friday to reduce the number of claims in their Java patent infringement lawsuit, which could help bring the case to a speedier conclusion.

      Google and Oracle each submitted proposals on Friday to reduce the number of claims in their Java patent infringement lawsuit, which could help bring the case to a speedier conclusion.

      Oracle sued Google in August, claiming its Android mobile operating system infringes on seven of Oracle’s Java patents. Google has denied all wrongdoing.

    • Oracle Ordered to Reduce Claims Against Google From 132 to 3

      So, 132 Oracle claims down to 3, and the rest are deep-sixed forever, not to be seen again. That obviously will also cut back on any possible damages. Methinks this judge has a clue.

    • Governing Board Minutes: 2011/4/28

      The OpenJDK Governing Board met via conference call on Thursday, 28 April 2011 at 15:00 UTC with the following agenda:

      1. Use of the Chatham House Rule
      2. Status update on Oracle legal work
      3. Cadence for approving and publishing meeting minutes
      4. Observers

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Selfless behaviour brings success for all

      One possibility to spur people on to save energy: people punish selfishness more when their group is in competition with others

      That which motivates a football team to committed teamwork could also benefit climate change. The members of a group act in a particularly selfless manner and for the benefit of the group, especially when their community is in competition with others. They are then more likely to accept disadvantages themselves in order to punish members of their group who behave selfishly. A research group headed by the economics researcher Lauri Sääksvuori at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena has gained this insight by conducting investigations involving game theory. This could result in a way of spurring people on to save energy.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Crippled class suits may put new watchdog to test

      It’s a joyful spring in corporate America thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court. It has ruled that companies can stop customers or employees from banding together to sue. But as directors celebrate, consumer advocates and trial lawyers are mobilizing to overturn the decision. One of their best hopes of an ally may be Elizabeth Warren’s new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection.

      The decision came in a challenge to AT&T’s requirement that cellphone customers resolve claims one-by-one in private arbitration. Lower courts struck down the class-action ban, but the high court reversed, saying federal law favors arbitrations over litigation and class actions make them too costly and slow.

  • Censorship

    • Alarm over EU ‘Great Firewall’ proposal

      Anti-censorship campaigners compared the plan to China’s notorious system for controlling citizens’ access to blogs, news websites and social networking services.

      The proposal emerged an obscure meeting of the Council of the European Union’s Law Enforcement Work Party (LEWP), a forum for cooperation on issues such as counter terrorism, customs and fraud.

    • China Makes Internet Censorship More Efficient

      China formed a new State Internet Information Office on Wednesday, consolidating its disparate offices that oversee the Internet into a single agency.

      The office will “direct, coordinate and supervise online content management and handle administrative approval of businesses related to online news reporting,” the government said in a notice posted to the official government Web site.

      Leading the office will be officials from the State Council’s Information Office as well as two vice ministers, Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology Xi Guohua, and Vice Minister of Public Security Zhang Xinfeng.

  • Privacy

    • Jennifer Stoddart’s Shot Across the Privacy Bow

      By virtually every measure, 2010 was a remarkably successful year for Canadian privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart. Riding the wave of high profile investigations into the privacy practices of Internet giants Facebook and Google, Stoddart received accolades around the world, while garnering a three-year renewal of her term at home.

    • WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange: Facebook an ‘appalling spying machine’

      “Facebook, Google, Yahoo, all these major US organizations have built-in infaces for US intelligence,” he said. “It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena, they have an interface they have developed for US Intelligence to use. Now, is the case that Facebook is run by US Intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US Intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure to them. It’s costly for them to hand out individual records, one by one, so they have automated the process.”

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • What a Conservative majority means for tech & telecom

      Well, that certainly was an exciting election! Not many people expected a Conservative majority to emerge and even fewer saw the NDP forming the official opposition. I’ll save the general political punditry for the… er… political pundits, but I can add some thoughts on what this might mean for tech, science and telecom in Canada over the next four years.

    • Digital Agenda: Commission and European industry join forces to build the Internet of the Future
    • AT&T Caps Have Arrived

      Back in March we exclusively were the first to report that AT&T would be imposing usage caps and overages on their terrestrial broadband users. Those caps have officially arrived, with DSL users now facing a 150 GB monthly cap, and U-Verse users now facing a 250 GB monthly cap. Both DSL and U-Verse users must pay $10 per every 50GB above the cap they travel. As our original report noted, only users who exceed the new usage cap three times — across the life of your account, not per month — will be forced to pay these new per byte overages.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The US Intellectual Property Watch List: The Canadian Perspective

      To the surprise of absolutely no one, the U.S. has again placed Canada on its Special 301 Priority Watch List, implausibly claiming that Canada’s intellectual property laws are seriously deficient and on par with countries such as China and Russia. The U.S. “analysis” is short and to the point:

      Canada remains on the Priority Watch List. The United States continues to urge Canada to implement its previous commitments to improve its legal framework for IPR protection and enforcement. Unfortunately, Canadian efforts in 2010 to enact long-awaited copyright legislation were unsuccessful. The United States encourages Canada to make the enactment of copyright legislation that addresses the challenges of piracy over the Internet, including by fully implementing the WIPO Internet Treaties, a priority for its new government. The United States encourages Canada to provide for deterrent-level sentences to be imposed for IPR violations, as well as to strengthen enforcement efforts, including at the border. Canada should provide its Customs officials with ex officio authority to effectively stop the transit of counterfeit and pirated products through its territory. U.S. stakeholders have also expressed strong concerns about Canada’s administrative process for reviewing the regulatory approval of pharmaceutical products, as well as limitations in Canada’s trademark regime. The United States appreciates the high level of cooperation between the Canadian and U.S. Governments, and looks forward to continuing engagement on these important issues.

    • Israel returned to the US Special IP Report Blacklist

      This development is not surprising. I don’t think the position adopted by the US is a more moral position or an objectively better balance between free market competition and patentee’s results, nor do I think the amendment is warranted. I see this as simply an example of US protectionist bullying.

    • Trademarks

      • Department of Commerce Releases Worthless Report on Trademark Bullying

        Given its apathetic nature, the report doesn’t make the logical jump that any intellectually curious person would instantly make: if the “duty to police” might be driving trademark owners to be (over)zealous in their enforcement efforts, maybe we should fix the duty to police. After all, this “duty” isn’t in the statute at all; it’s barely in the caselaw; and it could be easily remedied with a statutory clarification that might very well be welcomed by both trademark owners and secondary trademark users because it might eliminate ambiguity plaguing both communities. C’mon, guys–that conclusion isn’t exactly rocket science.

    • Copyrights

      • Moral Bankruptcy of the Copyright Industry

        As anyone who has followed the area for a while learns, the copyright industry has an extraordinary sense of entitlement. It seems to think that it has a right to demand that governments around the world preserve its outdated business models and existing profit margins – and that it should be granted any kind of extraordinary legal protections for its monopolies to ensure that, whatever the concomitant cost to society.

      • Judge Lets Latest Righthaven Lawsuit Move Forward

        Even though controversial copyright enforcer Righthaven has already lost two lawsuits on fair use grounds, not every defendant that chooses to fight back is going to get a quick win. A lawsuit against an Urdu-language web forum over its copy of the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s “Vdara death ray” illustration will move forward, following a judge’s ruling.

        Righthaven sued Azkar Choudhry back in December, saying that an image at his website, GupShup forums, was illegally copied from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper that sells its copyrights so that Righthaven can file lawsuits. Choudhry responded, arguing that his site’s use of the image—which was an “in-line link” automatically added via an RSS feed—is fair use.

      • CNET Accused of Copyright Infringement for Distributing LimeWire

        CBS Interactive, the owner of CNET, is being sued for facilitating “massive copyright infringement” for distributing the LimeWire software, a file sharing service a federal judge ruled illegal last year.

        A lawsuit brought by rappers and others accuses CBS of profiting from distributing 220 million copies of LimeWire on CNET’s download.com site since 2008, or 95 percent off all LimeWire downloads.

Clip of the Day

Les Paul Trio – “Over The Rainbow”


Credit: TinyOgg

05.04.11

Links 4/5/2011: KDE Publishes 2010 Report, Red Hat Eyes $1 Billion in Revenue

Posted in News Roundup at 5:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux skills: A hot commodity for job hunters

    While only a few years ago Linux skills were just one in a series of possible assets for job applicants looking to stand out, in today’s fast-paced, highly competitive workforce, it can actually be a make-or-break element. In fact, a quick search of job sites shows more than 8,000 technical jobs requiring Linux. Add to that recent reports showing demand for Linux skills has exceeded Unix for the first time ever and this is one trend IT professionals need to be aware of.

  • Switch Off Windows, Tune Into Linux And Drop Out

    For me Linux/Ubuntu (the operating system I use) reminds me of America in the sixties. Linux is the free love movement, the hippies, the switch off, tune in and drop out people, flower power, smoking joints and dropping acid.

    While Microsoft/Apple are corporate America, drudgingly ploughing forth in their slow, monotonous way towards profits and percentage points, working your way up the corporate ladder, teams of lawyers to protect everything you make, say or do.

  • Linux as Social Justice Symbol – I Think Not

    Linux and Open Source is a meritocracy. To move up the food chain in Open Source development, you have to prove your coding prowess. Everyone has the opportunity to contribute, but only the gifted or those that work hard succeed. It does not mean that everyone born can contribute. Linux and Open Source under the various GPLs offers FREEDOM not free of cost.

    [...]

    Linux is about freedom – freedom to choose which components to use, freedom to alter the source code as desired, and the freedom to redistribute for profit or not.

  • Does Linux need third-party anti-virus?

    Tasmania’s Department of Education has gone to market for anti-virus software for its 40,000 desktop PCs and 1,000 servers, specifying solutions must be able to secure not only Microsoft Windows, but also Mac OS X and Linux, in a move that has once again raised the question of to what degree the alternative platforms require dedicated security software.

    In a request for tender document issued last week, the department said it required anti-virus/anti-malware protection software for its environment, for the “Microsoft Windows, Macintosh and Linux-based operating systems”.

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • [Interview with Linux Torvalds]

      LinuxFR : You’ve been doing Linux for about 20 years now and it’s a hard job. Is it still fun ?

      Linus Torvalds : Oh, absolutely. It’s still fun. And partly exactly because I’ve been doing it for 20 years, I wouldn’t call it “hard”. It’s still challenging and interesting, but I think I’m good at it.

      LinuxFR : Why did you choose to switch the kernel from his original non-GPL copyright to the GPL licence ? Was it an ethical or a practical choice ?

      Linus Torvalds : Practical. I think my original license contained the ethical parts I cared about, but it turns out that it was too strict about that whole “no money” thing, and it also wasn’t well enough known. Moving to the GPL fixed the problems that people had with my original license, and had the advantage that it was a known entity and also a lot more likely to stand up in court than the short blurb I had written originally.

    • How Linux Was Announced to the World in 1991 [pic]
    • GL Announces Linux Drivers & APIs

      GL Communications Inc. announced today the release of Linux Driver Support for Universal T1 E1 and OC-3/12 STM-1/4 Cards. Speaking to newsmen, Mr. Vijay Kulkarni, CEO of the company said,” The Internet as we know it today would not exist without “open source software”, a model based on collaborative software development available free to anyone. Its roots are in academia, colleges, and universities where open and free exchange of ideas (and software) is a way of life. The Internet is powered by open source, like Linux, Apache, TCP/IP, DNS, PHP, the list is endless.”

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE e.V. Publishes Final Report for 2010

        The report summarizes KDE activities in the last three months on 2010, including sprints and trade shows attended by KDE contributors with the support of KDE e.V. It features the individual supporting membership campaign ‘Join the Game’, and how KDE benefits from it. There is a showcase for community artwork, including the report itself. New KDE e.V. members are presented, as is an overview of KDE e.V.’s finances.

  • Distributions

    • GParted Live: A Boot Disk ISO You Can’t Afford to Be Without

      If you ever need to partition or edit the partitions on your hard drives without an existing OS on the computer, then GParted Live should be in your PC toolbox. The free GParted Live is based on a live version of Linux, (i.e. one that will boot from a disc or USB drive), and the Gnome Partition Editor, a.k.a. GPartEd, or more commonly GParted. GParted Live boots quickly, and handles virtually any partition type, including nearly all Linux, OS X, and Windows types.

    • Reviews

      • #! CrunchBang 10 “Statler” Review

        When I see distributions like this one or Bodhi i always start with a positive feeling, others distro have used me to install everything and more and then i spend time to remove stuff that I did not had requested.
        In this case, CrunchBang install the minimum indispensable and discreetly asks if you want extra things, and then I have at my disposal the repository of Debian so I can really have fun and install anything.

    • New Releases

      • Tiny Core Linux 3.6 brings improved installer
      • antiX MEPIS 11 is Available for Download

        After one year of development, antiX MEPIS 11 has been released earlier today (May 3rd) on mirrors worldwide (see download link at the end of the article), available for 486 and 686 architectures).

        Dubbed Jayaben Desai, the antiX MEPIS 11 operating system is a light, fast and very complete/flexible desktop Linux LiveCD based on SimplyMEPIS and Debian Testing distributions. This version defaults to a completely customized icewm-Rox desktop environment.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat to hand off Enterprise Linux 6.1 RC1 at summit this week
      • Momentum Grows for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced momentum for the adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization by North American channel partners as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Accelerator Program. Launched in June 2010, the Program has driven the adoption of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio through training and support of virtualization-certified Red Hat channel partners.

      • Nimbula Partners With Red Hat to Support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Deltacloud

        Today at the Red Hat Summit, Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, announced that Nimbula Director will support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, which provide a strong foundation for today’s cloud deployments. Nimbula will also work with the Deltacloud community to ensure support for Nimbula Director in the Deltacloud project.

      • Red Hat CEO predicts $1 billion revenues within the year

        Linux giant turns increasingly competitive to protect profits. Rory MacDonald investigates…

        Enterprise Linux champion Red Hat announced record fourth-quarter earnings this month following the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). As many companies closed up their financial year, the world’s most profitable open source company announced that its revenues for the financial year (FY) 2011 were up 22 percent at $909.3 million.

      • Red Hat Summit: Linux Meets Cloud and Virtualization

        At Red Hat Summit this week, CEO Jim Whitehurst will attempt to turn a rare triple play. Indeed, Whitehurst and the Red Hat team will strive to more clearly connect the dots between Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) and Cloud Foundations — a set of educational tools that can help channel partners get started with cloud computing. Here’s the update.

      • Fedora

        • FUDCon North America 2012 will be in Blacksburg, VA

          I am pleased to announce that the FUDCon conference in the North American region in 2012 will be held from January 13th through 15th, 2012 on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA. We had two excellent bids for the North American FUDCon (Blacksburg, VA and Needham, MA) and both were excellent proposals. It was a
          difficult decision to make, and I’d like to personally thank all those who took the time to submit bids and to help in the decision-making process.

    • Debian Family

      • Five Debian Based Alternatives to Ubuntu 11.04

        I made a post last month outlining some of my thoughts on the Unity desktop Ubuntu rolled out with it’s latest 11.04 release. If you are one of the many that has mixed feelings about the Unity desktop then odds are you may be looking for alternatives to the latest Ubuntu release. The following is a round up of alternatives that won’t leave you feeling completely lost as they still use the apt-get package manager.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Natty Narwhal: the First Linux for Newbies?

          Whenever a new version of an operating system is released, it’s common to see a wave of reviews following on its heels, assessing how the software compares with what came before it and weighing its new pros and cons.

        • DO NOT Install GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty from GNOME3-Team PPA, For Now Atleast

          Do not try to install GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal from GNOME3-Team PPA, at least for now. I was trying to do just and ended up with a completely unusable Ubuntu now. Even PPA-Purge was not able to fully recover my Ubuntu 11.04. I should have really read this warning before trying to install GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.04.

        • Debugging with X11Vis

          Recently on the Xorg-Devel mailing list, Michael Stapelberg, who is the author of the i3 window manager posted a new tool, which presents a nice alternative to both xtrace and xscope called x11vis. This tool allows you to monitor every single X Request and have a report on what your program is doing, much like strace will tell you what’s going on with IO and valgrind will tell you what’s going on with memory. It’s especially important for window manager authors like myself since a lot of the bugs that we face are often complicated X11 related timing issues, race conditions, requests that don’t get processed or mysterious events that seemliness’s come out of nowhere.

        • Indicator-Sensors Displays CPU / Motherboard Temperature On The Panel Using An AppIndicator [Ubuntu]

          These days we’ve got a lot of comments requesting for a temperature monitor applet with Ubuntu AppIndicator support that displays the CPU / Motherboard temperature, Fan speed, etc. on the panel.

        • Natty Refreshed, Slackers Rejoice and More

          It is Linux distribution releases that make the Linux Planet go around. This past week was a big week for releases, with two very different distros releasing their latest and greatest offerings. It was also a big week for browser releases with new Firefox and Chrome browsers for Linux.

        • What Is The Target Audience For Natty Narwhal?

          Tired of learning all those difficult technical terms like “Applications” and “System” just to get to your favorite porn site or play another online game of Slash Your Neighbor?

          Well, relax. You can just install our new word-free desktop, Nasty Nonwhale, and you’ll never need words again. You’ll use pictures for everything, pictures that are as simple and limited in what they can do as the ones on your phone. In fact, we’ve reduced the functions you can access to the point that less than a dozen big, colorful icons will show you everything you’ll ever be able to do with your computer.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint XFCE Roller Coaster

            I have been trying to use Broadcom 4311 WiFi card on most Linux distro I have tried so far. This card is built into my Compaq C300 laptop. I think it became my idee fixe at some point. Especially when I was taking Debian-based systems for review.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux signage PC enables programmable waiting-room content

      Jayex announced a Linux-based digital signage computer aimed primarily at waiting-room applications. Available with multimedia and client call software, the “Web Media M4″ is built around a dual-core Intel Atom D510 clocked at 1.66GHz and offers 1GB of RAM, 250GB of storage, HDMI and VGA ports, as well as Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and USB connectivity, says the company.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Databases

    • PostgreSQL 9.1 Gets Synchronous

      The open source PostgreSQL database is gearing up for a major new release.

      PostgreSQL 9.1 is now available in beta, introducing a number of new features. Among the new features is support for synchronous replication for the database.

  • CMS

    • Putting Drupal to Work

      Last week, you installed Drupal and were left hanging at the point of basic configuration. This week, you’ll take the short path to Drupal setup. Of course, you’ll only see a fraction of Drupal’s capabilities in this tutorial but you’ll have enough information to discover the rest on your own. For those of you who don’t know, Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) that powers some of the Internet’s most high profile sites. Do a Google search to find out who but trust me, you’re in good company.

  • Business

    • Thinking open source: How startups destroy a culture of fear

      Software engineers of corporate America are wired in a way that promotes fear. It hurts creativity and growth. And open source is finally changing that.

      Let’s try the following exercise: Write down three things that come to mind when you see the following email subject from your company’s CEO in response to your new open source project announcement.

    • Don’t Sell Your Love Cheap: How To Successfully Earn a Living with FOSS, Part 3

      There’s also a third aspect. Perhaps the IT professionals have not even bothered to understand their true worth in the industry; or are just too lazy to seek a job that offers dignity and delight. In fact, some of the most exciting and demanding jobs in the industry today are based around FOSS, and all such jobs are offered by the top companies.

      So, if you feel you’re stuck, and being exploited in a low-paying job in the FOSS industry, here’s what I think you should do. Get to know your true worth by applying to another FOSS-based company, and then confront your employer with the written offer made to you. If your employer refuses to give you a fairer deal, you should quit. It’s about time FOSS companies that exploit freedom-loving employees get a wake-up call.

      If there are no FOSS companies that offer you a similar job description and/or package, then definitely apply in other companies. Yes, I mean in proprietary-software companies. You should know your true worth, and should know whether you really do have desirable and marketable skills. Once you become aware that you do, you’ll find it’s very difficult to let yourself continue to be exploited.

  • BSD

    • OpenBSD 4.9 adds support for NTFS file system

      Six months after version 4.8 arrived, the OpenBSD project development team has announced the release of OpenBSD 4.9, its free BSD UNIX-like operating system. According to developer Bob Beck, version 4.9 is the 29th release on CD (30th via FTP) and includes a number of new drivers, performance improvements and new features.

      The x86 and amd64 versions of OpenBSD 4.9 now feature read-only support for the NTFS file system and a vmt(4) driver for VMware tools support as a guest OS, both of these are now enabled by default. Other changes include the ability to boot on machines with up to 64 cores, support for AES-NI instructions found in the latest Intel CPUs, and further improvements to suspend and resume.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • BBC executives still paid too much, says Lord Patten

    Lord Patten, the new BBC chairman, has admitted that some of the BBC’s executives are still paid too highly and that not being able to pay top dollar for talent is something the corporation “has to live with” in return for not having to “flog advertising and subscriptions”.

    Speaking on Radio 4′s Today programme, Patten said that the corporation was working through a series of cuts that would scale back the number of senior executives by about a quarter. “In some circumstances, yes [pay is too high],” he said.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • After literature and MP3: Baidu’s encyclopedia accused of copyright infringement in China

        Baidu’s open online encyclopedia Baidu baike (“Baidupedia”) was accused of copyright infringement by unofficial members of Chinese Wikipedia recently.

        The infringement involves quoting and modifying Wikipedia’s content without specifying author or source, sharing not in accordance with Wikipedia’s CC-by-sa-3.0 license, and without permission from Wikipedia.

Clip of the Day

Sarah Vaughan: I Can’t Give You Anything But Love


Credit: TinyOgg

05.03.11

Links 4/5/2011: New PCLinuxOS Magazine, Firefox Fork, Linux Preinstalled on ARM

Posted in News Roundup at 8:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 10 Reasons Why the Linux Desktop is Still Flapping its Wings

    A few weeks ago, the Linux Foundation chief Jim Zemlin openly said that bashing Microsoft is ‘like kicking a puppy’, every Linux user saw some amount of truth to that. If some disagree, they can always look at Android, Amazon’s Kindle, and a bucket load of Linux-based gadgets that have sprung up in the market recently. Also, when it comes to servers, Linux has managed to beat Microsoft hands down. The conformation came straight from the horse’s mouth when Steve Ballmer admitted that Linux’s server share is 60% as opposed to Microsoft’s 40%. Having said all that, Linux desktop’s market share stands at a meager .71 % in the United States, which is even less than Apple iPad’s userbase. So, what are the reasons why the Linux desktop is still far behind its server counterpart? Why the Linux desktop still isn’t winning? Let’s take a deeper look at the problem.

  • PC, or Not PC, That Is the Question for Linux Users

    It may be true that “the clothes make the man,” as the old saying goes, but can anything similar be said of a user’s computing preference?

    Indeed it can, at least if a recent Hunch survey is anything to go by. Mac users are generally a much more interesting bunch, according to Hunch’s “Profile of a self-described Mac person vs. PC person,” which was published recently as an infographic.

    In fact, Mac users are younger, more liberal, more urban, more educated and more likely to eat Shawarma than PC users are, according to the report. Oddly, they’re also more likely to consider themselves “computer-savvy gearheads.”

  • Desktop

    • 10 Ubuntu 11.04 Pre Installed Laptops and Netbooks

      Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is released finally and it is getting some rave reviews from around the web(Recommended read: top things to do after installing Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal). Eager to buy a laptop or a netbook pre-installed with Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal? Here is a quick list of Ubuntu 11.04 pre-installed laptops and netbooks from prominent manufacturers.

    • Trim-Slice, compact Tegra2 Desktop, now released for $199

      Here’s a powerful super compact Nvidia Tegra2 ARM Cortex-A9 Dual-core 1Ghz based Desktop box, for now seems to run something like Ubuntu 11.4 (ARM netbook edition?), but the software support is a process that is a work-in-progress. Their pricing starts at $199 for the basic model, I will try to get a review unit, what do you think about this type of compact ARM Powered desktop?

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Splash screens and QML

        If you were to pass by Sebas’ house these last few days of Tokamak 5, you’d see a window full of post-its that contained tasks that we plan to do (can be seen on Kevin’s blog).

        [...]

        The theme is rather simple – black/white KDE logo with rotating gear that fades into the logo that can be seen in the screenshot. If you are wondering why the text says ‘Friday’, it is because we are recognizing the fantastic song made popular by our idol Rebecca.

        Tokamak 5 is approaching the end – only Marco and I still linger around (and Sebas, naturally) – and that is going to end tomorrow around noon.

      • KDE: Unity Setup

        How to-ish:
        Basically you add the Window Menu bar widget to a panel. Then you move the panel to the top. You add a second panel to the left with a task bar widget in it. Tweak the size and make it autohide. Also, notice that the Title Bar disappeared in the full screen window. Well you can do that with any window manually but with a little handy work, you can actually have kwin hide the title bar when you maximize the window. (This is one of the areas that would require work to reach unity’s level of functionality though as no window controls go into the panel.

      • The next step: Coisceim

        In the old KDE PIM Platform applications owned the data and provided a scriptable access interface to it over D-Bus. In the new platform however, applications only provide a user interface to the data, and the data interface is provided by Akonadi. That makes the applications themselves far smaller, making it easy to split them up and create more purpose-built applications to fit with what the user wants. Newspeak centerward make easy newapplications indeed.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • On pointer control

        GNOME 3 has been designed to ensure that it can be used by those who have a low level of pointer control, either because they are not well practised at using pointing devices or our software, because they might not have good control over the hand and fingers, or because they are using low quality hardware. This is one way in which GNOME 3 is easier to use than GNOME 2.

      • Adventures in Gnome 3 part 2: The Wifening

        My wife has a Dell laptop that normally runs Windows 7 on it. I don’t push or whine about that, it’s her machine and she can run whatever she wants. I very very rarely have to do tech support on it, which is a good thing because at this point all of my Windows skills are gone. However, a minor catastrophe recently caused her hard drive to go bad (she dropped it), and Windows would constantly warn her, then BSOD, then the machine wouldn’t even boot and the BIOS would say it couldn’t find the internal hard drive. In short: it was totally screwed.

      • GNOME Panel Dock

        When GNOME 3.0 was released some weeks ago, I finally switched to gnome-shell by default. Performance is quite good in my laptop, so the only problem was getting used to the new user experience.

  • Distributions

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • May 2011 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine released

        The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Andrew Strick and Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

      • Mageia 1 Beta 2 – Almost Ready for the Big Day

        A while ago we had a poll here and a review of Mageia came second just after Scientific Linux. Mageia is a new distribution and this is only the second beta, but it’s due for release in around 30 days so I thought we’ll take a sneak preview now. No doubt there will be more reviews coming all over the web once this is out.
        The old Mandrake Linux, before it became Mandriva which of course Mageia is a fork of, was the first Linux distribution that mostly worked for me. The first actually was Corel Linux 1.0 (the one and only), but it was slow on a 266MHz Pentium 2. So I’m approaching Mageia with a lot of good will and high hopes but realistic expectations.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Names its 2011 Certified Professional of the Year

        Red Hat has announced Director of Open Source Consulting at Emergent LLC Quint Van Deman as the 2011 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year.

        The award recognizes and honors the hard work, skills and creativity of those holding Red Hat certifications.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News – May 2nd, 2011
      • Debian Women Offers Building Packages from Source Tutorial

        Are you enthusiastic about Debian and thinking about contributing? We want to guide you in the basics.

        We are convinced that there are a lot of people out there that want to get involved with Free Software but don’t know where to start. For Debian, the most common task you’ll do as a contributor is rebuilding a package.

      • Debian May Begin Rolling Release Branch

        A discussion has begun in the quiet corner of Debian testing about offering a rolling release branch in addition to its current line-up. Well, sort of. Lucas Nussbaum has posted details of the intriguing discussion on his blog.

        Nussbaum recognizes that rolling releases are quite popular and offers the numbers of those using Debian testing and the growing popularity of Arch Linux as evidence. Some others may remember PCLinuxOS as well. He states that many users find the software in stable Debian perhaps a bit too stale or old. So a rolling release could be possible with little extra effort based on the testing branch.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Hints on installation of Ubuntu 11.04

          Ubuntu 11.04 comes with a new theme namely Unity. It is a 3D theme that requires 3D display driver.

        • Ubuntu 11.04: Installation stumbling block and post-install impressions
        • 16 things we’d change about Ubuntu

          Ubuntu is a popular Linux-based distro but, like everything in life, it isn’t perfect.

          There’s plenty that could be improved, both in terms of software and the way it goes about doing things.

          Here’s what we think would improve it.

        • Ubuntu Unity – A New Direction No-One Expected. Also, Custom Launcher How-To

          Ubuntu Natty Narwhal is here, yep, 11.04 has landed. (Is it just me or is there less Internet fanfare than before?) Along with Natty came the much discussed, loved-hated, maligned-adored, yet universally greatly expected Unity Interface.

        • Will Ubuntu 11.04 Bring Unity?

          Last week, Canonical released the latest version of its desktop Linux operating system, Ubuntu. Affectionately nicknamed “Natty Narwhal,” Ubuntu 11.04 is notable not just for being the most recent step along the company’s six-month development cycle, but it could very well also be the one that catapults Ubuntu—and Linux itself—into the same pantheon of popularity as Windows and Mac OS X.

        • My Impressions of Ubuntu 11.04

          This was a big week for Ubuntu Linux with the release of new version 11.04, ‘Natty Narwhal’ of the popular GNU/Linux operating system. There’s been loads of discussion over the last few months leading up to this, primarily over the decision to use the new Unity desktop interface instead of Gnome Shell. Some people like it; some hate it. Well, I just had to see for myself what all the fuss was about. I tried out Ubuntu 11.04 Beta about a week ago and found it a little too simplistic and not easily configurable. The final release just came out a few days ago, so I decided to install it on my experimental HP Compaq computer. I believe the only way to really see how an operating system works is to install it and use it for a while. Here are my impressions of ‘Natty Narwhal’ after two days.

        • Ubuntu’s New Unity Interface Makes Linux Friendly For The Mainstream

          A few days ago Canonical Ltd. released the newest version of the company’s popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu 11.04. featuring a completely new user interface called “Unity.” The Unity interface is aimed at mainstream computer users, not just Linux geeks. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical founder, says that the Unity interface’s beautiful graphic design elements represent a new direction for Ubuntu and, hopefully, one other free software developers will follow. This Linux has long been one of the more aesthetically-pleasing distros, but Unity takes it up a notch. Is tempting mainstream users the only motivation, though?

        • Ubuntu 11.04 is a free operating system with a cool new interface

          This alternative to Windows has a strong identity of its own that is easy to use and makes good use of widescreen monitors

        • Ubuntu’s new face

          The newest version, 11.04, features a radically different interface called Unity that had its roots in the now-discontinued Netbook Edition. With 11.04, also known as Natty Narwhal, everybody uses the netbook interface by default.

        • Ubuntu Linux 11.04

          The latest edition of Canonical’s free operating system brings a new front-end to the popular Windows alternative

          A new edition of Ubuntu arrives every six months, bearing a new zoological codename. The latest is version 11.04 (reflecting its April 2011 release), known to its friends as the Natty Narwhal.

          You’ll notice one change before you even download the installer: the Netbook Edition has been retired, so there’s now only one ISO for all home computers. It’s a wise move; one standard installation makes life easier for beginners and developers alike.

        • Ubuntu gets a dock a decade late [Mac zealot warning]

          When Canonical last week issued the stable Ubuntu Linux 11.04, the build has brought out a bunch of new features and interface tweaks that’ve freshened up the overall aesthetics while improving usability. One of the most striking changes is the new Unity desktop environment (requires 3D acceleration) that puts a Dock-like application launcher to the left edge of the screen.

        • Can Ubuntu finally give Windows a run for its money?

          Microsoft isn’t exactly the most-loved company in the world, and part of that arguably has to do with its dominant position in the OS market. Its flagship product, Windows, has improved recently, but frustrations caused by its checkered past are, for some, hard to forget.

          For years, many computer industry professionals have hoped that strong Windows alternatives would emerge. Much of this hope was based on the idea that highly-polished GUIs for Linux-based operating systems could offer consumers Windows-like experiences and give Microsoft a run for its money.

        • no background wallpaper problem after upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty

          Ubuntu 11.04 has come out for few days, if you choose to upgrade from a previous Ubuntu edition you may encounter no wallpaper displaying problem in Unity. There’s only a white background and wallpaper chosen in Appearance window won’t display any more.

        • My thoughts on Ubuntu Unity

          Over the weekend, I made the painful mistake of upgrading to Natty Narwhal 11.04, the newest release of Ubuntu Linux. I was previously running 10.04 and realized I was stuck with Qt 4.6 and I desperately needed a feature in 4.7. After starting the upgrade process, I realized I actually had missed the last upgrade 10.10, which was required before upgrading to 11.04. I installed that and realized it contained Qt 4.7. I could have stopped there and be content, but I didn’t.

        • Unity – Banshee Radio Stations

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Ubuntu 11.04, Natty Narwhal: Successes and Failures

            Few releases of any distribution have received as much attention as Ubuntu 11.04 (codenamed Natty Narwhal). Most of the buzz is about the switch to the new Unity desktop — and deservedly so, since it is radically different from the GNOME desktop it replaces. However, Natty also features some changes to widgets, the installer, and the Ubuntu Software Center, many of which — like Unity itself — reflect Ubuntu’s ongoing concerns about usability and design issues, while having mixed levels of success.

            This concern has always loomed large in Ubuntu. However, it became even stronger several years ago, when Shuttleworth decided that usability and design were areas where Ubuntu and its corporate arm Canonical could “make a significant contribution” to open source software. Since then, Ubuntu has introduced such innovations as the app indicators, the repositioning of title bar buttons, and a new color-coded default theme reminiscent of Apple’s.

          • Ubuntu Unity not all that unifying

            Ubuntu’s new Natty release is out but does the new Unity interface live up to its billing?

            Right now I am at a loss as what to think of Unity, Ubuntu’s new desktop interface.

            Like many long-time Ubuntu fans I was eagerly awaiting Ubuntu Natty, the latest release of Ubuntu. Most of all I wanted to try out Unity, the new interface that Mark Shuttleworth has been promoting as the next big step forward for Ubuntu Linux. I’d tried various versions of Unity during its development but was mostly disappointed, a fact I put down to it being early testing software. When Natty was released Unity would so much better, I rationalised.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Sandia’s mini supercomputer runs Linux on 196 Gumstix ARM modules

        Sandia National Laboratories is demonstrating its latest mini supercomputer at ESC Silicon Valley this week, incorporating 196 TI OMAP3530-based Overo Tide modules running Linux. Being used for botnet research as part of Sandia’s MegaTux project, the “StrongBox” product combines 28 Gumstix Stagecoach boards, each with seven Gumstix Overo Tide computer modules.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Mozilla

    • The Day I Nearly Dumped Firefox

      So, as the result of an extremely small, unforeseen glitch, I find myself a satisfied user of the Chromium browser. Despite my initial frustration, I still have Firefox on my machine, and it’s still my main browser, but the experience has made me wonder how many other people hit these apparently small obstacles, and are driven to download Chrome or Chromium, say – and like it so much that they do switch? Could that explain the current rise of Chrome, and the gentle decline of Firefox’s market share?

      Obviously, Mozilla can’t test every add-on when it upgrades Firefox. But perhaps there is something that can be done to the architecture so that this kind of thing simply doesn’t happen for such minor upgrades. Alternatively, maybe there should be a roll-back feature so that you can always undo such upgrades when you find they have problematic consequences.

    • 13 features that make each Web browser unique

      Many cynical users assume Web browsers do little more than dutifully render HTML. The content is the most important part, they say, so it makes little difference which browser you use.

      This may be true for basic tasks, but for all their similarities, browsers differ in subtle and significant ways, thanks to the hard work of vendors looking to establish any edge that might attract more users to their stack of code. There are even some features that make each browser unique, and in the technology world, unique functionality often points the way forward.

    • Firefox 4 Breaks the 10% Mark
    • First Firefox 5 Beta Build Posted

      Mozilla is trying to establish a new 6-week product cycle for its Firefox web browser and has just posted the first build of Firefox 5, not quite six weeks after the release of Firefox 4, which crossed the 10% market share mark over the weekend.

      It feels as if Firefox 4 was just released, at least if you did not crawl along the seemingly never ending beta process of the browser last year. The next version is already knocking on your door and due for a first beta release on May 17. The first build has made its way out of the Aurora channel and was promoted from version 5.0a2 to 5.0 beta (build1).

    • Firefox 4.0.1: Firefox is out (of memory) !

      I’ve been running various builds of Firefox 4 on Linux since the betas were beginning, months ago. They were very stable. And then 4.0.0 was released, and recently 4.0.1, and with both I’ve had a lot of crashes.

    • Early reaction to Firefox 4.0.x — I can feel the speed

      While Firefox 4.0 is no faster than the Google Chrome web browser, 4.0 is certainly faster than Firefox(es) 3.5 and 3.6, all of which I’ve run extensively on both the Linux and Windows platforms.

      And while there’s a lot to like about Chrome/Chromium (I run the one in Windows, the other in Linux — currently Debian Squeeze, if you want to know), I lean toward Firefox/Iceweasel because one of my key web-accessed applications not only prefers it but pretty much demands it. (It could be worse; the same app used to prefer Internet Explorer and begrudgingly work in Opera).

    • To Toggle, or not to Toggle: The End of Torbutton

      In a random bar about two years ago, a Google Chrome developer asked me why Torbutton didn’t just launch a new, clean Firefox profile/instance to deal with the tremendous number of state separation issues. Simply by virtue of him asking me this question, I realized how much better off Chrome was by implementing Incognito Mode this way and how much simpler it must have been for them overall (though they did not/do not deal with anywhere near as many issues as Torbutton does)…

      So I took a deep breath, and explained how the original use model of Torbutton and my initial ignorance at the size of the problem had lead me through a series of incremental improvements to address the state isolation issue one item at a time. Since the toggle model was present at the beginning of this vision quest, it was present at the end.

      I realized at that same instant that in hindsight, this decision was monumentally stupid, and that I had been working harder, not smarter. However, I thought then that since we had the toggle model built, we might as well keep it: it allowed people to use their standard issue Firefoxes easily and painlessly with Tor.

    • Firefox4: Change Minimum Tab Width [Quick Tip]

      In Firefox 3.x, there used to be an option in about:config called “browser.tabs.tabMinWidth” which you could change to specify the minimum tab width. And changing that to “0″ would allow you to have all the tabs visible at all time, without having to scroll through them.

    • 10 Reasons why I will not upgrade from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4!

      This trend was observed in stats revealed by StatCounter Global stat for Browser usage in April 2011. The graph shows that in April 2011, the usage share of Firefox 4 is less than half of Firefox 3.6; despite that Firefox has been around for more than a month!

    • A new and improved AwesomeBar for Firefox by Mozilla

      Mozilla is working on a number of improvements for Firefox that they are developing as extensions, some of which might actually make it into the Firefox code in the future. Some previous Mozilla add-ons to have received this treatment are Personas, Panorama and Sync.

      Firefox has maintained a distinction between the search bar and the location bar till now because of the privacy implications of having a combined bar, and Mozilla’s staunch pro-privacy stance. However the advantages of having a combined bar are quite clear.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Cory Doctorow: Techno-optimism

      Herein lies the difference between a ‘‘technology activist’’ and ‘‘an activist who uses technology’’ – the former prioritizes tools that are safe for their users; the latter prioritizes tools that accomplish some activist goal. The trick for technology activists is to help activists who use technology to appreciate the hidden risks and help them find or make better tools. That is, to be pessimists and optimists: without expert collaboration, activists might put themselves at risk with poor technology choices; with collaboration, activists can use technology to outmaneuver autocrats, totalitarians, and thugs.

    • British Telecom: please include freedom in your new music service

      British Telecom is a leader of telecommunication and digital content markets, and has a reputation for product innovation. Plans recently reported for a new not-for-profit music download service [1] for BT’s 5.5 million broadband customers have sparked much discussion, and once again placed BT at the fore of the future of digital content delivery in the UK.

      Amongst those speculating about the nature of the new service are the growing number of BT customers who use Free Software [2] web-browsers, operating systems, and multimedia players. Currently these and other Free Software users are unable to enjoy many popular content delivery systems such as Spotify, Steam, and iTunes, because they are not compatible with Free Software, or require the waiving of users’ rights and freedoms in order to use them [3] [4] [5]. The nature of BT’s new service, and the extent to which it respects the freedom of it’s users, are therefore of particular concern.

  • Project Releases

    • Speed dial, private browsing, user agents

      So Midori is going full speed ahead, we support the new libSoup cache now (WebKitGTK+ 1.3.11 or greater required) which supersedes the old extension, support for F6, F7 and Ctrl(+Shift)+Tab and Tab in completion and a faster speed dial, which is still in the middle of even greater improvements, so stay stuned for more goodness in the future.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Electronic resurrection through open source

        Over at Make: Online last week, Phillip Torrone posted “If You’re Going to Kill It, Open Source It!”–his wish list of dead products that he’d like to see given to an open source community for new life. It’s a great suggestion–freeing the knowledge that went into a product gives it a little life after death and could give a unprofitable or seemingly useless project a better reason for existence.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

  • Security

    • Re: Botnets exploit Linux owners’ ignorance

      After Flaming retort, I have another rebuttal. Another piece of scaremongering, with overhyped drama and sensationalism, wrapped in tech lingo to make the crowds shudder with fear and reverence. While the general rule says: don’t feed the trolls, as in I’m merely bringing attention to an article that does not merit any, I think it’s important to show the other side of the spectrum.

      Today, I want to talk to you about a short article called Botnets exploit Linux owners’ ignorance, which presents a grim picture of botnets actively engaging in cyber warfare against Linux [sic] and its owners. Naturally, there’s always the not so subtle hint that the solution is in your pocket. Let’s digest the original report, see what it says and what it means, and how thing relates to the average computer user.

  • Cablegate

    • Another attempted attack on opposition radio station journalist

      Arnulfo Aguilar, the director of Radio Uno, an educational radio station based in San Pedro Sula, narrowly escaped an armed ambush outside his home on the outskirts of the city on the night of 27 April which he blames on the army. A station that supports the opposition National Front for Popular Resistance, Radio Uno has often been targeted by the security forces since the June 2009 coup d’état.

      Ten masked gunmen were waiting for Aguilar as he arrived home after leaving the station. After spotting them, he managed to elude them by taking a different route into his house. Some of the gunmen nonetheless got into the yard but fled after hearing him call his neighbours and the police for help. The police reportedly waited more than an hour before responding.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

  • DRM

    • Interview with Leo Babauta

      2) Since August 2009 you joined Identi.ca, the free microblogging platform. Social networks can be overwhelming due to their great amount of messages and friends. How do you manage to stay updated without burning up?

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Berlin Wall artists sue city in copyright controversy

        The East Side Gallery is one of Berlin’s most popular tourist attractions, a 1.3km-long brightly painted stretch of the wall which divided east and west for almost 30 years.

        But now the outdoor exhibition space is embroiled in an expensive copyright controversy after Berlin council destroyed some artworks painted on the wall and reproduced others without the permission of the original artists.

        The city of Berlin, which owns the wall and the land around it, is being sued by 21 artists over the way the council handled recent renovation of the gallery.

Clip of the Day

Unity Interface – Craptastic Mac Wannabe – Ubuntu 11.04


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 3/5/2011: OpenBSD 4.9, Firefox 6 Prioritising GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Tassie education dept wants Mac, Linux anti-virus

    Tasmania’s Department of Education has gone to market for anti-virus software for its 40,000 desktop PCs and 1,000 servers, specifying solutions must be able to secure not only Microsoft Windows, but also Mac OS X and Linux, in a move that once again raises the question of whether the alternative platforms require dedicated security software.

  • Server

    • GNU/Linux Marches On

      Netcraft reports that, of the top 40 hosting providers, one used F5-big_IP, 6 use FreeBSD, 24 use GNU/Linux, 2 use 2003 and 2 use 2008. I believe the market has spoken. GNU/Linux provides great performance/price. The same advantages seen running applications on the server present themselves running applications on the personal computer: low price, reliability, ease of administration, less malware, etc. Use Debian GNU/Linux.

  • Google

    • Is Today’s Google Really Open?

      With the current raging controversy over the delayed release of the source code to Android Honeycomb by Google, many an analyst have questioned whether the Google of today is really as opened as they’d like us to believe. As a stauch Google fanboy, I set out to find out what the meaning of “open” is in the first place, and what better place to seek that answer than from Google itself.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Kernel Boot Statistics: 2.6.24 To 2.6.39

      A clean installation of Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS was done on two systems and the boot time of every Linux kernel release from 2.6.24 to present (2.6.39-rc4) was measured using Bootchart. The kernel was the only change made each time to the system.

  • Applications

    • 5 RSS Feed reader on linux

      If you follow news sites or blogs probably you are using some online service or a program to aggregate all the news into one more convenient point. This is doable thanks to RSS feed.

    • 9 of the Best Free Linux Data Mining Software

      This article focuses on selecting the best free software for performing data mining. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who needs to make strategic decisions when confronted with large amounts of information.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Gaming with Trine

        In conclusion, I think Trine is a great game. It’s flexible in that a person can spend just ten minutes bashing undead foes or get lost in an hour of solving puzzles or pass the time exploring. The controls are intuitive and the difficultly curve is gradual. The levels are varied and well laid out and I’ve encountered no serious problems with the game play. In short, Trine is a lot of fun.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Distributions

    • GParted Live: A Boot Disk ISO You Can’t Afford to Be Without

      If you ever need to partition or edit the partitions on your hard drives without an existing OS on the computer, then GParted Live should be in your PC toolbox. The free GParted Live is based on a live version of Linux, (i.e. one that will boot from a disc or USB drive), and the Gnome Partition Editor, a.k.a. GPartEd, or more commonly GParted. GParted Live boots quickly, and handles virtually any partition type, including nearly all Linux, OS X, and Windows types.

    • Reviews

      • Is there a blue pill for Qubes OS?

        Those who regularly follow the Black Hat briefings probably remember Joanna Rutkowska who presented a novel attack against Windows Vista (and any Operating System running on an x86 architecture, in general). She was the first researcher to demonstrate a piece of malware (bluepill) that could run in root or host mode in a current x86 architecture and push the Operating System one layer (ring) below.

    • New Releases

      • 29/04/2011 — SMS version 1.6.0 Released!
      • [Tiny Core Linux] v3.6

        Much improved Tiny Core Installer, now offering a GUI for both USB and frugal hard drives. Updated critical system module, squashfs. Many updates to improve error handling, large files, and auditing / updating the extensions. Many user interface improvements and additional supported options in: ab, appbrowser, appsaudit, cpanel, flrun, fluff, mousetool, tc-install, tce-load, and wallpaper.

      • [OpenBSD 4.9]

        The current release is OpenBSD 4.9 which was released May 1, 2011.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Distro fatigue keeps me in the Squeeze of Debian

        I tried out the Fedora 15 Alpha. GNOME Shell wasn’t working on my hardware for some reason. I also tried Ubuntu 11.04, and Unity does work. OpenBSD 4.9′s release is imminent.

      • bits from the DPL: the start of the term

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • 5 things I like in Ubuntu 11.04 (Unity) and 10 things which I don’t

          Here we are! Long awaited and much discussed version of Ubuntu is here. It is Ubuntu 11.04.
          This version was long awaited because of one 2 main reasons:
          1) As of 11.04 Canonical stopped free distribution of CDs with Ubuntu via partner Shipit. It’s a pity, because that was a way how I got my first ever Ubuntu CD.

        • Ubuntu-running dual-core ARM desktop ‘Trim-Slice’ goes on sale
        • CPU Frequency Scaling applet in Unity
        • Nice themes for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal
        • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Release Schedule
        • Are You Afraid Of The Dark Ubuntu Unity?
        • Ubuntu 11.04

          Summary Table:
          Product: Ubuntu 11.04
          Web Site: http://www.ubuntu.com/
          Price: Free
          Pros: New Unity interface; user ratings and reviews in the Software Center; easy install routine that includes the ability to upgrade from the Live CD.
          Cons: Unity interface is a “love it or hate it” affair that will either bring people to Ubuntu or drive them away, the jury is still out on that and we won’t know for a while which way things will go.
          Suitable For: Beginner, intermediate and advanced Linux users.
          Rating: 4/5

        • Ubuntu Insistant Upgrades & Testing
        • Can Unity create first consumer-class Linux distro?

          Yesterday, I read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ discussion with Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth on the merits of Unity, and saw an interesting point that Vaughan-Nichols raised, but did not follow as far as I would have gone. Citing another blog lamenting GNOME 3.0, the “official” new GNOME shell that’s out and about, as “Defective by Design,” Vaughan-Nichols states:

          “GNOME 3.0, like too many Linux/Unix interfaces, was designed by software developers for software developers..”

          Unity, on the other hand, was built with Canonical’s usability testing and performance goals in mind. Which is why, we have heard Canonical reps explain ad nauseum, Canonical chose to take a different path with Unity rather than stick with a pure GNOME 3.0 environment for Ubuntu.

        • Linux desktop interface evolves

          No, this is not going to be a post about Ubuntu 11.04′s specific implementation of the Unity desktop. I’ll be trying 11.04, but not for a little while. Rather, this is about the Linux desktop in general, and how it’s maturing.

        • Are You Afraid Of The Dark Ubuntu Unity?

          Ubuntu Natty 11.04 is officially released! Some of us have already upgraded either during the development stages of natty or now after the stable release. However there are still a few who would like to hang on to their dear old gnome 2.x.

          This could be either due to fear of the new Unity interface or a general tendency to stay in the comfort zone of Maverick Meerkat. However I hope this article would help change that.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Kubuntu lets me down again

            I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not going to fight with Kubuntu or KDE to try to make it stable the way Gnome is. At this point it’s fairly obvious that the problem relates to the Nvidia proprietary drivers, but I’m using the same drivers with Gnome, and having no trouble. If the current Nvidia driver breaks Kubuntu, then Kubuntu’s not ready.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • How Free Software Brought Motorola Back From Graves

      Those who question the relevance of open source or Mukt (free) Software need to look at Motorola, a company which was broken down by the attack from corporate raider Carl Icahn.

      The company was forced to split its business. But is now back as one of the giants of the mobile world. The credit goes to only and only one element — Linux. It was Linux-based Android which saved the company.

      Motorola has reported its financial results registering net revenues of $3.0 billion, up 22 percent from first quarter 2010.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Google Talk Enables Video Chat On Android Smartphones

          Google recently launched Google Talk with video and voice chat for Android phones. With the service, users will be able to video or voice chat with their friends and family directly from an Android phone. Calls can be placed over 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi connections. According to Google, the new features will first roll out to the Nexus S phones over the next few weeks as part of the Android 2.3.4 over-the-air update. Google Talk with video and voice chat will launch on other Android 2.3 and higher devices in the future.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • Saturday at LinuxFest NorthWest

      First day of LFNW is going well. We gave away lots of CDs and DVDs. Lots of positive feedback on Gnome 3. Jesse, Adam, Tom and Robyn all stopped by to help. OLPCs were a hit. One of the cool thing about the OLPC was when a five year old complained about speak not pronouncing her brother’s name correctly, I noticed her mother was speaking a foreign language, so I set speak to use that language and it pronounced the brother’s name correctly! The mother got real interested in the OLPC and explored Scratch while her daughter moved on to mazes.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Review – SeaMonkey 2.0.14

        All in one solutions can be very appealing. Since I have multiple communication methods online and SeaMonkey is touted as an “all in one Internet solution”, I simply had to put it to the test against my browser of choice and the associated packages I use. With the release of 2.0.14 what better time?

        I’m sure SeaMonkey will be available for many in their respective repo’s, but since I wanted the latest version and wanted it now, I downloaded direct from the site. The comparison for this review will be with Chromium 11.0.696.25 (and I suppose X-Chat & Thunderbird too) which are currently installed on my system. Presently I am also running Compiz with the desktop cube effect, I have 4 available desktop spaces with each desktop space being given to Chromium, Thunderbird and X-Chat. The remaining workspace is left empty for anything else.

      • Firefox 6 For Linux To Be As Fast As Firefox Currently Is On Windows (And Less Sluggish)

        As linux users ourselves, we have been frequently fed up with the sluggish nature of the Firefox browser on Linux. Some time back,we told you about Opera 10 which was a bit less sluggish on Linux but then Google Chrome changed everything. However, for many Linux users Firefox is still the most preferred web browser and things are gonna change for sure for Firefox on Linux.

        Mozilla’s Mike Hommey has announced on his blog that his team at Mozilla has finally managed to get the Linux builds of Firefox to use GCC 4.5 with aggressive optimization and profile guided optimization enabled. All this simply means that we can now expect a faster and less sluggish Firefox browser on Linux (both 32 bit and 64 bit systems). The experience is going to be much closer to the Windows builds of Firefox.

      • The Best Firefox Security Add-Ons

        One of the biggest features and strength of the Firefox web browser is its extensions engine and the support it receives from the Firefox community. Users find thousands of different add-ons for virtually any purpose in the official extensions gallery over at Mozilla. Mozilla tries its best to promote popular and interesting add-ons, but the sheer amount makes that attempt more or less futile.

        The best Firefox security add-ons is a guide for Firefox users who want to improve their web browser’s security and protection from attacks on today’s Internet. That does not necessarily mean that you need to install all of the add-ons to protect your browser from malicious attacks, as some may only be useful if you visit specific websites or types of sites regularly.

        The list concentrates on security related add-ons, not privacy related. Only extensions that are compatible with at least Firefox 4 have been included in the list.

      • Why is Firefox slower on Linux than Windows?

        Have you tried Firefox 4 on Linux and then tried Firefox on a friend’s Windows 7 PC? The experience isn’t the same and that’s not good news for Linux users.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Programming

    • PHP Dependency Injection Creates More Maintainable Code

      Although not originally conceived as such, PHP has over the years evolved into a very capable object-oriented language, with countless enterprise projects and a number of powerful frameworks such as Symfony taking full advantage of these mature features. Of course, the advantages of object-orientation can only be fully exploited when implemented in conjunction with best practices such as encapsulation and inheritance. One such “implementational” best practice is dependency injection, a design pattern that facilitates the decoupling of otherwise dependent components.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • UK Government Open Standards Survey

      Government must be better connected to the people it serves and partners who can work with it – especially small businesses, voluntary and community organisations. Government ICT must play a fundamental role in making life easier and I want to ensure that it does.

      One of our first goals is to organise Government data and systems using an agreed set of standards that make our ICT more open, cheaper and better connected.

Leftovers

  • Federal govt goes shopping for new search service

    Requirements for the service including conforming to the OpenSearch protocol and support for compressed and uncompressed versions of non-HTML documents like PDF, RTF, CSV, Microsoft Office formats and Open Document formats.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Osama bin Fragged: a review of terrorist propaganda games

      It’s rare that the president addresses the country without giving any details about what will be discussed, but the topic of last night’s address became known well before President Obama spoke. The military forces of the United States had finally found Osama Bin Laden, we were able to put boots on the ground, and in a firefight that lasted 40 minutes, the world’s most wanted terrorist was killed. In an often ill-defined war on terror, this was a dramatic win.

  • Cablegate

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Peak Oil – April 2011 Update

      The US Energy Information Administration’s January oil production figures are out, and they show record oil production. Where are we headed from here?

  • Finance

    • Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World, By William D Cohan

      n the 1860s, when the clothing merchant Marcus Goldman offered cash, at a suitable discount, for bills yet to be paid by others, he used to stuff the accumulated IOUs under his top hat.

      Goldman’s clients could tell how busy Marcus was by the tilt of his headgear, a degree of transparency that would not always be displayed in the decades that followed.

  • Privacy

    • South Korea, Europe start iPhone location tracking investigations

      South Korea’s Korea Communications Commission is now asking Apple questions about the location data being stored on iPhones and iPads and backed up to users’ computers. South Korea joins the governments of France, Germany, and Italy, which late last week notified Apple that they also had questions about location data collection. These investigations follow stern letters from US Sentaor Al Franken (D-MN) and US Representative Ed Markey (D-MA), both of whom asked Apple to answer why the data is retained on users’ devices, how it is collected, and what Apple does to protect users’ privacy.

      Last week, a news firestorm started after the public revelation by researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden that iPhones and iPads keep a log of location data based on cell tower and WiFi base station triangulation in a file called consolidated.db. The news led many to believe that Apple was using or could use the information to track iPhone and iPad 3G users, and raised privacy concerns that the information could make it into the wrong hands.

    • Sony apologizes, says 10 million credit card accounts may have been exposed in network attack

      Sony has revealed that 10 million credit card accounts may have been exposed two weeks ago when a hacker broke into the company’s computers in San Diego and stole data from 77 million PlayStation Network accounts.

      During a news conference in Tokyo on Saturday, Kaz Hirai, Sony’s executive deputy president, offered the company’s first public apology by an executive and promised to compensate customers.

    • Privacy Lost: The Amazing Benefits of the Completely Examined Life

      Your iPhone’s tracking you. Your game network just surrendered all your personal data. And your mom is posting your potty-training videos on Facebook. Like many of us, you’re laboring under the delusion that privacy matters–that there’s such a thing as too much (public) information. It’s time to get over it! Soon we’ll all recognize the positives of exposing every aspect of our lives. What a relief it will be when we’ve finally revealed everything and have nothing left to hide. Herewith, the potential benefits of our upcoming, privacy-free utopia:

      • Better security, plus entertainment, 24/7: Tune into the airport security “Grope-cam” channel.

  • Civil Rights

    • Wisconsinites Get Revved up for Worker’s Rights

      Hundreds of Wisconsinites lined Madison’s Capitol Square Saturday to welcome bikers from all over the Midwest and to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attack on Wisconsin unions. Just when Walker thought he had memorized all the chants and signs, Wisconsinites revved it up a notch.

      Every kind of bike, from Harley-Davidsons to Huffys, descended onto the Square from Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd and South Hamilton Street. Eric Hartz, the organizer of the event, complemented the thunderous entrance with songs from the Raging Grannies, a social justice organization made up of older women. Other speakers included Sen. John Erpenbach, Sen. Mark Miller, Rep. Cory Mason, Rep. Peter Barca, Milwaukee Public School Teachers and the City of Middleton Fire Fighters.

    • May Day March Unites Workers

      May Day, or May 1st, became International Workers’ Day in 1886, when it was the beginning of a multi-day general strike in Chicago in which workers demanded an eight-hour work day. On May 4, 1886, the strike ended in what became known as the Haymarket Affair.

  • DRM

    • Day Against DRM – Two Days Away

      Clear your schedule for a worldwide day of action against DRM. On Wednesday, May 4th, we will be taking action to raise the stakes and increase awareness about the threats of Digital Restrictions Management — in a very significant way!

      Awareness is a key part of defeating DRM. Whether protesting outside Apple Stores in Hazmat suits as we have done in years past, handing out leaflets in front of public libraries, or sending direct complaints to senior executives at Sony, action gets attention, and creates space for change.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Judge Slams Copyright Troll Lawyer John Steele’s Latest ‘Fishing Expedition’

        The mass infringement lawsuit shakedown plan is looking shakier and shakier these days as more and more courts keep hitting back on these cases. More and more judges (with one notable exception) are recognizing that these lawyers are just using the court system to pressure people into paying up… and they don’t seem to like it very much. The latest involves Chicago divorce lawyer-turned-porn P2P shakedown lawyer, John Steele. Steele has already had some trouble with judges buying his arguments. Steele is also the guy trying to set these lawsuits up as reverse class actions — a strategy that failed miserably the first time around.

        However, despite that loss, Steele has tried again for another reverse class action. Earlier, the judge denied Steele’s motion for expedited discovery. Expedited discovery is a pretty standard thing that almost every court grants as a matter of course, but we’ve now seen a few courts in these mass infringement lawsuits refuse, after realizing the only purpose behind expedited discovery is to get the names/addresses of people in order to hit them up with settlement offers. In this case, the judge specifically ordered the court clerk not to issue subpoenas in the case, to stop Steele from getting the info he needed to pressure people into settling. Steele still pushed forward, trying to get the court to approve things so he could send out the subpoenas and get the names.

Clip of the Day

Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal uses Unity Desktop by Default! [UDS N Day 1]


Credit: TinyOgg

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