09.27.12
Posted in Microsoft, Open XML, OpenDocument at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft makes it abundantly clear that its closed formats and Fog Computing will be used to deny people choice
In its corrupt pursuit for OOXML standardisation Microsoft ensured that real standards get suppressed. We covered many such stories about four years ago. Mr. Pogson found a new blog post where Microsoft implicitly admits failure to implement ODF support for a long time. As Pogson puts it: “The following statement was released 2012-08-13, promising finally to implement an open standard M$ foisted on the world but did not follow since 2007, five years ago. Deliberately choosing to break an open standard is reprehensible and possibly illegal restraint of trade. The means M$ used to impose that open standards was also questionable. Why bother with a company that offers future standardization when you can have it now with LibreOffice?”
In other news, Microsoft is now forcing users into an even worse lock-in, leading even Microsoft boosters into a mode of dissent. And in Germany, as in several other places, Microsoft tries to halt adoption of ODF. Advocacy groups complain and to quote one report: “The board of the German city council of Freiburg should disclose the analysis that underlies its move back to proprietary office software, say the Open Source Business Alliance, the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Bundesverbands Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie. In an open letter published this morning, the three organisations also call on the city board to keep the Open Document Format as the default.”
Microsoft used German public institutions to promote OOXML. Wherever there is real choice there is no Microsoft. █
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Posted in Microsoft, Mono at 11:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Yet more evidence that Team Mono is in Microsoft’s pocket
Miguel de Icaza’s latest rantings against GNU/Linux have gotten so much attention. Even CNN covered it, via Wired magazine. Our daily links contain links about it and these include good rebuttals. But many were missing some context; de Icaza was never much of a friend of GNU philosophy; he was more into the Microsoft mindset and his current company is no exception.
Xamarin recently announced yet another Microsoft collaboration. Quoting The H, “Microsoft has announced that it is open sourcing the software development kit (SDK) for its Azure Mobile Services backend for Windows Store applications. The company has also said that it will partner with Xamarin to expand the SDK to support the iOS and Android platforms.”
Xamarin got cash from former Microsoft executives, so this makes business sense. Eventually, the main beneficiary is Microsoft. █
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09.26.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Last night my son was trying to install something called Tekkit which has something to do with Minecraft.
I am not really savvy when it comes to Minecraft and I had no idea what Tekkit was. My son asked whether he could download and run the Tekkit Launcher and if so could I help him install it.
The first thing I noticed when visiting the site is that there is a download button on the right hand side for both a launcher and a server. What is lacking however is any real information about what Tekkit is, how to install it and how it works.
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In the Linux world, there are dozens of companies and security researchers that constantly run scans over the entire ecosystem of software in their repositories – not just the software they’ve developed themselves.
Open source code also tends to lend itself to re-use. In the Linux world, devs are not even going to be tempted to go implementing a security-centric feature like SSL libraries themselves, when there are perfectly working ones available for their open source apps to use for free. Having that code open, such that they can step their debugger into and fix any underlying bugs themselves, is a great asset.
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Dice and The Linux Foundation have published an infographic which shows the state of Linux jobs in current market. The report looks interesting, and hopefully will encourage more people to choose Linux as their career. The infographic is posted below:
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This is the last interview of the trinity series and in this interview we spoke with Laura Lucas Alday the woman power behind the latest release of Cheese. She was responsible for enhancing cheese to support svg overlays. Laura finds GNU/Linux better than Windows.
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The campaign office in Staten Island of the Republican Congressman Michael Grimm has been vandalized, the computer hard drives were erased, and a Linux operating system was installed.
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GNU/Linux has come a long way and continues to grow. It is one of the great operating systems and a great cooperative project of the world. It is something to celebrate, to use, to enjoy and to be thankful for all the good people who contribute their time and resources to produce.
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Desktop
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No. GNU/Linux on the desktop is thriving. MacOS is catching up if anything. GNU/Linux is used everywhere from US military to Hollywood on desktops and servers. MacOS? Not so much. The main reason? Cost.
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This should allow Lenovo a bigger share of Brazil and perhaps South America where PCs are a growth industry and GNU/Linux is popular.
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In 2004, it was reported that 47% of servers in schools were GNU/Linux but only 3% of PCs were running GNU/Linux.
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Lately we’ve been treated to (or bombarded by) a slew of articles and blog posts proclaiming the failure and/or the death of Linux on the desktop. I could describe what I really think of these articles but my language would be a bit more colorful than would be appropriate. Suffice it to say it’s all bunk as far as I am concerned.
I have written about why I believe Linux remains under 10% of the desktop market: the lack of preloaded systems available in stores and the slow uptake of Linux on the enterprise desktop. The enterprise desktop is critical if Linux is to make progress on the consumer desktop without a presence in big box stores. People use what they know and like. If they use and like Linux at work they may well want to use it at home as well.
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Here’s a promising site. It’s in German but it seems to be about sports and has good volume with 64K unique visitors and so on. There are thousands of visits per day and hundreds of thousands of hits per day. According to Netcraft it runs on GNU/Linux, from 2004 to 2011 with Suse and then with CentOS. The result?
* 81% That Other OS,
* 8.1% */Linux, and
* 7.6% MacOS
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That’s the question of a poll I found on a German site, Pro-Linux.de. The answer they found?
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Everyone is excited for the new slate of Windows 8 Ultrabooks to arrive in a few weeks — everyone, that is, except for Linux devotees. With the new ZaReason UltraLap 430, they finally get an Ultrabook of their own.
The UltraLap is the first laptop that ships with Linux and could fall under Intel’s Ultrabook platform specs. The base model features a 14.1-inch, 1,366×768 LED-backlit screen, Intel Core i3-3217U processor, Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics, 4GB of RAM, 32GB solid state drive, and your choice of Linux flavor: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, or Fedora (or no OS pre-installed at all). If the base model isn’t powerful enough for you, you can upgrade to a Core i5-3317U CPU for $49, 8GB or 16GB of RAM, a larger SSD and/or a hard drive, and additional warranty protection beyond the standard one year.
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Only one of well over 150 technical sessions is directly related to the desktop, a polished version of which SUSE releases under the name SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED).
This session, Use Cases for SUSE Linux Desktop, was held yesterday by Stefan Behlert, senior project manager, and Jan Weber, product manager (both pictured above).
Additionally, there is one session devoted to LibreOffice, the office suite that is part and parcel of most Linux distributions, and an additional session on openSUSE, the upstream of the enterprise distributions, which could be considered to be revolving around the desktop as well.
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In fact, RedHat which is doing very well on the server has lots of clients using GNU/Linux and OEMs are shipping millions of units.
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In all other respects, these three models of Acer’s Veriton N are identical. The logical conclusion is that other OS costs $50 or $100 depending on the level of lock-in you desire…
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Server
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In 1995 M$ was just beginning to have a presence on the web. When Lose ’95 was inflicted on the world, M$ bundled its browser with the OS and did anti-competitive actions to boost its presence. It’s web server, IIS, rapidly grew to ~22% by 1998, when US Department of Justice went after them for their illegal war on Netscape. After the complaint in 1998, IIS levelled off and except for a few bumps where they bribed large customers to use IIS for periods of time, and reached 36% at most, IIS has declined gradually ever since.
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Kernel Space
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You can easily notice that many in-car infotainment systems are custom-built by their manufacturers, and locked down completely. The Linux Foundation is trying to change this concept and wants our cars to take up the open source route that we would find in an Ubuntu box.
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Graphics Stack
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If Wayland’s adoption takes off and that it indeed is being widely used by tier-one Linux desktop distributions and the future direction of Linux is clearly with Wayland over X11/X.Org, the necessary pieces will fall into place within the NVIDIA binary graphics driver for supporting Wayland. That was heard while having dinner with a certain individual last week in Germany.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Cortex Command is a 2D side-scrolling action game developed by Data Realms.
In the game, the player takes the role of a disembodied brain, who controls various clones and robots to achieve his aims. Missions contain tasks such as retrieving a control chip in a cave filled with zombies to defending the brain from attack. As the brain is weak, the player must manage his resources carefully, protecting the brain, mining gold and fighting off enemies. The game includes the ability for players to create mods (additions and changes to the game) with the built in Lua programming applet, and simple scripting.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Users using the KDE desktop in Ubuntu, or using the Kubuntu distro, will now be able to update to KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.8.5. This is the last release in KDE 4.8 series. This release mostly consists of bugfixes and stability enhancements.
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The past weeks the Kolab Community has been busy working on the upcoming release of Kolab 3. We had people trying out fresh Kolab installs, or upgrading their existing installs to Kolab 3 alpha following the growing documentation. Also community members Michael Kiefer and Paul Klos worked on Debian packaging while Johannes Graumann is still testing their work. Jeroen van Meeuwen was working on making our awesome PHP LDAP capabilities generally available and wrote about why your system should have a proper FQDN. He also wrote a little script that assists users with migrating their Kolab 2.3 LDAP data to Kolab 3. This script still needs some feedback. So if you have a Kolab 2.3 server running, please check it out!
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GNOME Desktop
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The Gnome Foundation have announced the release of Gnome Shell desktop environment version 3.6. This is a test version not suitable for enterprise and business environments. Install it on your own risk.
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A release candidate of Gnome 3.7 is already out and Gnome 3.6 stable release is scheduled on September 26. However, development never stops in Linux world, and the developers are already making plans for the next releases. Currently, you can suggest some features for future Gnome releases as we announced earlier, and Gnome 3.8 feature freeze is on October 22nd this year.
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Last time when I reviewed Manjaro 0.8.0 XFCE, I really liked it. I didn’t feel it wasted too much of RAM while using it, but there were criticisms from some corner. Possibly, I haven’t really used it that much as Manjaro was never my primary distro. But, it is good that the developer, Roland Singer, came up with another version 0.8.1 XFCE, which LXDM instead of LightDM and built up a really good looking theme over LXDM. Once I read the release note at Distrowatch, I was quick to download it. I download the 32-bit version and there is a 64-bit version available as well.
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New Releases
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Robert Shingledecker has announced earlier today, September 25th, the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core and Tiny Core Plus Linux operating systems.
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Red Hat Family
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For the quarter ended Aug. 31 (Q2), Red Hat met expectations on revenues and missed estimates on earnings per share.
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Red Hat reported second quarter fiscal 2013 results late Monday that continues to show revenue growth.
Growth isn’t just coming from Red Hat’s core Linux business, it’s also being fueled by the company’s expanding portfolio, which includes middleware, cloud and storage technologies.
For the quarter, Red Hat reported revenue of $323 million — up by 15 percent year-over-year. Net Income came in at $35 million or $0.18 per share, which is a decline from the $40 million reported for the second quarter of 2012. Moving forward, Red Hat provided third quarter guidance for revenue in the range of $336 million to $339 million.
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Fedora
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As Fedora is one of the “pure Gnome” distributions, it is very possible that it concerns a large part of our readers so here are some good gaming news for you!
Mumble RPMs can help you with the popular Humble Indie Bundle game collections that don’t include an rpm package, thus not integrating well under your distribution (not taking care of dependencies, not offering easy install/uninstall option etc).
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Red Hat’s testing ground and all around number 2 Linux distribution Fedora, turns 9 today. A post by Fabian Affolter reveals on planet.fedora the historic day in which the project’s homepage was first registered.
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Red Hat sponsored and community maintained Fedora Project has turned 9 years. This was just a few days after the upcoming Fedora 18′s alpha was released with some major changes and desktop overhaul.
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Debian Family
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In short, APT is absolutely fabulous and alone is reason enough to use Debian GNU/Linux for all your IT. For those unsatisfied with the speed of the web an organisation can keep a local repository mirror or cache to transfer software to computers at the speed of a LAN. That’s awesome.
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Bill Allombert announced today via the Debian-devel mailing list that the X86_64 version of Debian has now surpassed all of the other supported architectures by a narrow margin. The most surprising part of this announcement however, and accompanying info-graphics provided on the Debian Popularity Contest page, is that this was not already true.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Recently there has been some concerns about the privacy of the new feature we recently added to the dash in which it can query external resources to provide related results. I just wanted to follow up with some further details about how these searches are performed, the privacy protections that are put in place, and further work going on.
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Gwibber is a powerful and full-featured social client for Ubuntu, and though it supports a wide range of social services, its slow, buggy and also has occasional crashes. The good news is that developers have taken a note of users’ mishaps and the backend is being completely rewritten. So hopefully we will see a faster, sleeker and robust Gwibber in Ubuntu 13.04.
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Unity already has a hell lot of lenses that makes the Unity desktop just wow. But one of the lens that is most helpful for new Ubuntu users is definitely the help lenses.
The lens searches your query from both online (AskUbuntu, AskLibreoffice) and offline(man pages) sources. A set of results are displayed in the dash itself and clicking on one opens up the relevant help document or web page.
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The New York Times has an interesting post up that caters to Windows users who have no Linux experience but would like to dip their toes in the water. It’s a short “Linux on a Stick” post that discusses how to use a Flash drive to begin using Ubuntu. We’ve covered the topic before at length, and if you happen to be a Windows user who wants to give Ubuntu a spin, here is a complete set of resources for doing it quickly–and you don’t have to ditch Windows to do it.
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Now that we’re all waiting for the final version of the Ubuntu 12.10 (Qantal Quetzal) operating system, due for release on October 18th, we can take a look at the release schedule for the next major iteration of the OS, Ubuntu 13.04.
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For me, the ability to jump from one Linux desktop to another depends on whether the applications I depend on will be available to me. Luckily for me, the applications I rely on for productivity are readily available from the Ubuntu Software Center.
In this article, I’ll share my top twenty productivity picks with you, and explain how they lend themselves to a more productive workstation environment.
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Canonical has been very busy raising the profile of Ubuntu internationally for a couple of years now. As we’ve reported, Dell Computer has been a significant partner in this effort, helping get PCs pre-loaded with Ubuntu into the hands of users in India and China. Jane Silber, Canonical CEO, has discussed the companies’ plans to bring Ubuntu systems to 850 retail outlets in India. Now, Canonical is making a big push into the educational system in, of all places, Spain. There, 220,000 Ubuntu-based systems are being deployed for students.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint founder and lead developer Clement “Clem” Lefebvre has provided further insight into his team’s decision to create Nemo, a fork of GNOME’s Nautilus file manager, and their plans for the new project. In a new blog post, Lefebvre says that he and his fellow developers chose to fork Nautilus because of the recent controversial design changes in version 3.6 of Nautilus, calling it “a catastrophe” as it “removes features we consider requirements”.
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Phones
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It was pretty exciting stuff when HP introduced WebOS a while back. Quickly they abandoned WebOS for unknown reasons but promised to open the source code. Now they have delivered:
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As promised, HP has shipped the beta release of Open webOS, the open source version of the web standards–based webOS mobile platform that was the last hurrah of the former Palm before HP absorbed it in 2010. More surprisingly, however, HP actually seems to be staffing up its webOS development team – an odd reversal of recent trends.
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Android
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Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said that his company now sees approximately 1.3 million Android devices activated per day, up from 1 million in June. Schmidt was speaking at Motorola’s press event in New York City yesterday where the Google subsidiary was launching three new Android-based smartphones. Looking back to the end of 2010, Google was activating just 300,000 Android-based devices each day; in May of last year that number rose to 400,000. Of those 1.3 million daily activations, Schmidt said that around 70,000 were for Android tablets, and he put the installed base of Android devices at around 500 million devices.
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The Android landscape is vast with 1.3 million device activations per day. The target audience is big enough to obtain success with good app development, but only if apps get noticed by customers. Given the difficulty in getting an app noticed in the huge Google Play Store, a good alternative is writing apps for the Kindle Fire and releasing it first in the Amazon Appstore.
More: Amazon’s gadget as a service theme: Hardware becomes irrelevant soon | Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD family: The highs and lows you need to know | Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD will give Apple’s iPad fits | Amazon just put Android tablets on notice with the Kindle Fire product line | Amazon changes the game in tablet market with Kindle Fire HD pricing | CNET: Amazon’s new Kindles: Everything you need to know | First take | Full coverage | Amazon statement
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So, Amazon doesn’t exactly highlight this, but all of its Kindle Fires are Androids on the inside. Amazon slaps a heavy skin on top, so it’s not at all recognizable, but it’s Android all the same. Great, so you get access to all of the Android apps, right? Not exactly.
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The growing popularity of tablets within the pantheon of end-user computing devices has helped drive BYOD and cloud projects within the enterprise, made cell-phone networks a common remote-access option and brought relief to laptop-lugging road warriors worldwide. They’ve also made an even more fundamental change in the mix of devices for which corporate networking gurus are responsible, and, with Android, have given Microsoft the first really credible competitor to a major new version of Windows in more than a decade.
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Quickoffice is a very important tool for hundreds of thousands of Android users that allows them to open, edit and save to Microsoft’s Office files compatible with many Android devices. Some would even say it’s currently the best in its class. It provides a plethora of useful features from the ability to create new documents to the ability to sync to many popular cloud storage options and many more options in between.
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Interestingly of the 88 items, 15 are reported to have an operating system:
“Operating System
* Google Android (14)
* Windows OS (1)
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Retail sales were up 2.8 per cent in volume and 11 per cent in value in comparison to July 2011, pointing to a big fall in sales through other channels, which benefit less than shops do from shiny new items like tablets and e-book readers.
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Archos has built a decent business making budget Android tablets, so I suspect the word ‘merde’ echoed loudly around the Igny HQ when Google pulled the rug asunder with its low Nexus 7 pricing. Archos hasn’t given up though and has now released a new device pitched as a budget alternative to the Asus Transformer Pad.
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Following the release of Source Sans Pro Last month, Adobe has released another font as free in SourceForge named Source Code Pro. This is mainly because of high response of last font which was downloaded over 68 thousand times and appreciated by the community, mainly Linux users and free software lovers.
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We’ve seen open source hardware architecture grow significantly within the last eighteen months as well as open technology development even touching areas like car design.
No surprise then that the sky is the limit (ouch! sorry for that!) and that open source should also extend to planes.
MakerPlane says that its mission is to create innovative and game-changing aircraft, avionics and related systems and the transformational manufacturing processes to build them.
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Quick: name one big difference between Linux and Android. And no, penguins and robots don’t count.
The truth is, there are lots of differences between the two platforms, despite their common connection to the Linux kernel. But the one that’s most on my mind today?
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With Netflix running so many services on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) cloud, it needs to be able to find those services easily so that it can balance loads and manage failover. The video-streaming specialists have now open sourced Eureka, the software they use to meet that challenge. Eureka includes a REST-based server that allows servers to register with it when they come up and detects when they are down, and a client which talks to that service and does basic round-robin load balancing. Netflix has more sophisticated balancers in-house designed for their own needs.
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During my keynote at LinuxCon, I showed a picture of five smart phones from five different manufacturers with their screens blacked out. Think you could tell them apart? Without a UI they are all virtually indistinguishable from each other. When their screens are enabled, it’s easy to tell the difference between Blackberry’s and iPhone’s, Samsung’s Android devices and Nokia’s Windows based machine. My point? Software is where the heart of differentiation lies.
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The government of the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura considers the use of open source as strategic and as a requirement for technological sustainability. The region will continue to overhaul its IT environment, switching to open source software where possible.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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After a long delay and a rumor that Chromium browser is being unmaintained, Canonical pushed an update of the browser silently today. Previously, Ubuntu 12.10 users had the old Chromium 18 browser running on their machines.
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Four years ago, Google launched Chrome. At the time, I wrote a commentary piece that it wasn’t likely that Chrome would kill IE.
As it turns out, I was (mostly) right. IE still exists, though it has its lowest share in years, thanks in no small part to Chrome’s growing share.
Chrome however isn’t just growing entirely at IE’s expense. It has also had an impact on Mozilla’s Firefox too.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has always been respectful of user privacy. But they also have to somehow get information from user’s browser to improve the product.
Since at least Firefox 7 with something called Telemetry, Mozilla has had an opt-in mechanism for monitoring the performance of the open source browser on user machines. Telemetry is opt-in.
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Canonical’s global marketing expert, John Bernard has left Ubuntu to join Firefox. The news was reported by marketingmagazine.co.uk. Benard is among top ten marketers in UK and has a track record of working with big companies like Sony Ericsson and LG.
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SaaS
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The OpenStack Foundation is almost officially alive. The open source group that will have oversight over the OpenStack cloud platform project was first announced nearly a year ago and is now ready to launch.
The Board of the new Foundation had its first full meeting at the CloudOpen Summit in San Diego last week. In an interview with Datamation, Jonathan Bryce one of the founders of the OpenStack effort at Rackspace detailed the road ahead.
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Databases
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The open source PostgreSQL 9.2 database is being officially released today, providing database administrators with new levels of scalability and performance.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Tietokone IT magazing did a poll which shows that LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org combined have a bigger share than M$’s office suite and LibreOffice has 33% share. Not too shabby… Did they poll readers about GNU/Linux? Nope, but they did ask about FLOSS in government.
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CMS
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Google has decided that building course websites is something they can help the world do. They have developed a method that requires knowledge of HTML and JavaScript… That cuts out about 90% of teachers, likely.
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Education
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Google has announced its Code-in contest will begin this November, introducing pre-university students to the world of open source development.
From late November to mid January, students will be able to work with 10 open source projects on a variety of tasks, says Google. The contest starts November 26, 2012.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The 25 sets of results were recorded, and can be browsed, sorted, and searched below.
Six audio tests succesfully passed (24%), as did five video tests (20%). Mumble was the most successful client, passing 100% of tests (audio only, video is not yet supported). XMPP passed four out of 14 audio tests, whereas SIP passed only one out of ten (both vide and audio). Of nine apps tested, only Mumble, Pidgin, Jitsi, and Google Talk’s we client achieved passes.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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France’s Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, signed a guideline favouring the use of free and open source software by the country’s public administrations, last Wednesday. Switching to this type of software lowers costs, increases flexibility and increases competition in the IT market, the Prime Minister writes in his introduction to the policy.
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On 7 August, a law was passed by the Italian Parliament that requires the use of open source software by public administrations where possible. Article 68Italian language link of the Italian Digital Administration Code (Codice dell’amministrazione digitale) states that, from 12 August, public administrations looking for a new software solution must either use an application which they have already developed in-house, develop their own new program, use open source software, or any combination of these.
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Parliaments around the world are only slowly increasing their use of free and open source solutions, according to the World e-Parliament Report 2012, published last week. Most parliaments (80 %) now use at least one open source application. In most cases this type of software is used to run servers (50 %), for webpublishing (36 %), databases (31 %) and email (31 %).
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I just checked, and my State government’s website here in Australia has 43 pages with the message that Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed if I want to view the page’s downloadable PDFs.
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According to a report in Business Daily, the migration away from proprietary systems will see related costs go down by 20% initially but by as much as 80% within three years of the move having taken place.
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A workshop promoting self-reliance and increased comfort with FLOSS took place on 4-5 September 2012 at the Multipurpose Hall of the Ministry of Rural and Regional Development, Putrajaya.
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Yes, she can do the maths. Migration to GNU/Linux is a little short term pain for long term gain. For databases on servers etc. there is always a way to migrate the data and the computers can do most of the work. When it’s done, you are running FLOSS and never have to pay another round of licences. The same advantages apply to the client systems. Good news from Kenya.
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The document is rife with references to things I like in IT like re-use and efficiency. Lock-in to monopoly is not associated with either of thse things. The result will be better IT for the money with all the good benefits of FLOSS: interoperability, openness, performance and freedom to use IT the best way possible. Having restrictions placed by EULA or lack of interoperability is going the way of the dinosaur. It’s about time. More governments should adopt such policies.
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This happened after Italy’s new law on software procurement clearly stipulating that the use of Free Software is to be prefered upon other alternatives.
This text is mainly based on a report from the cross-ministry IT services. Its main idea rests on their consideration of Free Software as an “educated choice” that must be spread among all the ministries.
The introduction acknowledges Free Software’s advantages for public administrations such as: “costs, flexibility or the balance of power with software editors”.
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Openness/Sharing
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Now, fine words butter no parsnips, but there could be real money involved here, which would make things rather different. Let’s hope Kroes follows through and does get 5% allocated to supporting open, disruptive innovation in ICT – and that she continues to push harder for openness and a more sensible approach to intellectual monopolies.
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Security
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The hackers who breached the defenses of Google and at least 34 other big companies three years ago have unleashed a barrage of new attacks since then, many that exploit previously undocumented vulnerabilities in software from Microsoft and Adobe, a new report has found.
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This is characteristic of spaghetti-code. The stuff is running every which-way and off the plate… That the application does something for no reason/illogically/for no benefit, and that action causes the application to melt shows that the code was hidden under the spaghetti somehow.
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Microsoft has detailed a method users of Internet Explorer can use to secure their computers from the recently discovered exploit allowing malicious code to run on a PC.
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Finance
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If you feel like justice was thwarted during the financial crisis, if you feel like the market’s been rigged for the insiders and there’s no check on it, you’ve got an ally in Jeff Connaughton.
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For today I had intended to write another installment on what happens when the Republicans get their way and the so called “free market” is left to regulate itself. Then, a picture on Facebook caught my attention (the picture to the left) and it reminded me of a much more immediate problem. I was planning to discuss the South Seas Company founded in England in 1711. I’ll come back to it in a later article.
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New bank regulations and capital requirements are “structural” changes to the industry that are more to blame for declining profits than the U.S. economic slump, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) analysts said.
“The operating environment is unlikely to change any time soon, and we see shareholders of challenged banks becoming more demanding in asking management teams to lay out a path to unlocking value in the near term,” analysts led by Richard Ramsden in New York wrote in a report published today.
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A last-ditch effort by federal and state law enforcement authorities to hold Wall Street accountable for nearly bringing down the U.S. economy is unlikely to lead to any criminal charges against big bank executives, according to a source close to the investigation.
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Goldman Sachs is at last getting its comeuppance over conflicts of interest. The bank is forfeiting a $20 million fee after playing both sides of Kinder Morgan’s $21 billion El Paso deal. It’s peanuts compared with Goldman’s other profits from the transaction. But on the heels of a similar outcome for Barclays, Wall Street is getting an education about skewed incentives in terms it can understand.
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The Fed did something on Wednesday: it announced a new program of open-ended quantitative easing, and it announced that it likely won’t pull back on the new round of monthly asset purchases once the economy begins to recover more strongly, but will keep the purchases going for some indefinite period of time afterward. After what exactly was left unsaid. The Fed apparently has a target it intends to overshoot, but hasn’t said exactly what the target is. But whatever it is, we have been given forward guidance that the reaching of that unspecified target won’t stop the asset purchases – at least not right away.
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Tougher regulation of financial institutions and higher capital ratios at banks are necessary in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the head of Goldman Sachs on Wednesday, even as he acknowledged that such safeguards carried some costs.
Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of the largest U.S. investment bank, said he sees financial regulation evolving now just as it did in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
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The roar of the crowd, the flashbulbs, the excitement, the spirit of competition the… corporate logo-addled uniforms?
One might be describing a NASCAR event, or perhaps even an NBA game in the near future if NBA commissioner David Stern gets his way. Or, one could be describing a political campaign rally, if Congress was as willing as the NBA and NASCAR to proudly display the logos of the big corporations that finance them.
We recently launched the Suits for Sale campaign (suitsforsale.org) to bring attention to the dominance of big money in politics. It’s no secret that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, super PACs have flooded campaigns with more money than ever before. So what better way to inform voters of who they are really voting for then to adorn our elected officials with the very corporate logos that brought them to power?
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In the piece, he interviews Nassim Taleb, who has some choice words for Rubin, President Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary and former Citigroup executive.
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Plaintiffs are purchasers of Goldman’s common stock between February 5, 2007 and June 10, 2010 (“Plaintiffs”). Defendants are Goldman Sachs & Co (“Goldman”), Goldman Chairman and CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman CFO David Viniar and Goldman COO Gary D. Cohn (“Individual Defendants.”) Plaintiffs claimed that Defendants made misstatements and omissions about Wells Notices the company received from the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), and about the conflicts of interest arising out of Goldman’s role in structuring the CDOs known as Abacus, Hudson Mezzanine Funding (“Hudson”), Anderson Mezzanine Funding (“Anderson”) and Timberwolf I.
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Censorship
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A leaked document from the CleanIT project shows just how far internal discussions in that initiative have drifted away from its publicly stated aims, as well as the most fundamental legal rules that underpin European democracy and the rule of law.
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Send this to a friend
09.25.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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When I was on an airplane several days ago, an entertainment screen broke. As it rebooted and printed the console debug information, I found out that these computers actually ran Linux. But the reboot didn’t finish properly…
There was nothing I could do about it, so I just watched it struggle. In this story I pour upon life and death in digital era, and how computers demonstrate human-like feelngs.
A couple of days ago I took a transatlantic flight on an Airbus A330. It is a large plane where each seat is accompanied by a computer named “Entertaintment System”. It contained games, movies, and stuff like inflight information (plane location mapped onto the world map, and flight progress details, which is kimda reassuring given that the flight lasts for 10+ hours.) A killer feature of such system is its USB port useful when you want to read/watch something on your mobile phone (or type this story, for instance.)
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Both the Linux Foundation and the Genivi Alliance have announced new open source initiatives at the Automotive Linux Summit, which is currently under way in Warwickshire, England. The Linux Foundation has founded the Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup with the goal of streamlining the development of software for automobiles, while the Genivi Alliance has said that it will concentrate all of its development on open source projects going forward.
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Desktop
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That’s essentially what the return on investment will be when hundreds of thousands–perhaps millions–of enterprise desktops get upgraded to Windows 8. Surely we can figure out something better to do with all that money, even if we have to move some cheese in the process.
And that’s where my inner finance child starts struggling with my tech self who’s committed to keeping things rolling along. I see my staff and users happily and productively ensconced in the Windows world. I want them to be happy and productive, but I want to get rid of unnecessary ongoing expenses, too, even if it causes temporary pain.
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Kernel Space
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“I just can’t buy Intel’s explanation for this, since it would be easy for Intel’s own Linux kernel developers to add the needed support to Linux,” said consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack. “There must be some other reason, and I bet that reason is that Intel is desperately hoping that Windows 8 will extend the Intel/Microsoft juggernaut from the PC market into the tablet market.”
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More than a few Linux distributions have pulled up their stakes in the decades old System V method of booting and quietly moved to a better way of booting. Better, faster, easier to maintain, and less prone to problems. I say “quietly” not to imply that there haven’t been announcements, banners waving, and proper cheers from some segments of the Linux user community, but to emphasize how little disruption has occurred and how little those of us who have been living in the slower-to-change Linux environments have had to pay attention. But the changes are nothing short of huge.
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The organisers of the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) 2012, which was held at the end of August in San Diego, have released videos, notes and presentation slides from the conference presentations. The talks are primarily concerned with Linux software that deals with the interaction between hardware and the user interface.
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Graphics Stack
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Good news for Linux users, NVIDIA is finally working on a new vesion of its’ non-free drivers for Linux which will bring support for its infamous Optimus technology. This technology is used in laptops to save battery life as it automatically switches the power of the GPU off when it is not needed and switching it on when needed again. Linux users were not able to take advantage of this technology due to lack of support by NVIDIA.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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“Pay as you like” game collection, Humble Indie Bundle 6 have crossed $1 million mark, and this is just in mere four days. Previous collections of games were also highly successful and considering the current trend of this release, it wont be surprising if this bundle becomes best of all bundles out so far.
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Long before Unity or the Unreal Development Kit, Torque was the engine of choice for indie developers with big dreams of making their own shiny 3D games, costing only $100 to license the tech behind Tribes 2. Now, 11 years later, maker GarageGames is preparing to set Torque 3D free and open-source it.
The source code will be released through GitHub under the MIT License, CEO Eric Preisz said in a blog post. Senior developer Dave Wyand noted that he hopes GG will work on improving performance and bringing the engine to Mac and Linux after the switch, though no plans are set.
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Desktop Environments
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After the release of Unity and Gnome Shell, XFCE gained more popularity, fans and support for being the reliable “traditional” desktop environment. Fast, modern, mature, light and beautiful, XFCE is naturally becoming the default DE on big distributions like Debian.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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“After one month since 2.8.0 release, digiKam team is proud to announce the digiKam Software Collection 2.9.0, as bug-fixes release. This will be the last 2.x release. Next one will be 3.0.0, currently under development, following GoSC 2012 projects, listed here.”
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GNOME Desktop
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The Gnome Foundation had earlier announced an operating system mainly focused for Gnome development, known as Gnome OS. The OS is still in early development stages and developers are currently busy in designing and planning phase. William Jon Mc Cann posted some insights as hoe the boot screen will look like in Gnome OS and its features in Gnome Live! Here is a screenshot below:
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This is the 4th post from the “Making GTK3 themes” series. The older posts can be found here, here and here.
Gnome 2 had some really great themes. And now we miss them with GTK3. Porting is not that much hard, but still, not that easy. But with some little tricks, you can ease porting GTK2 themes to GTK3.
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Extensions — plugins that add specialized bits of functionality to a Linux desktop — have helped many free software projects succeed, including Vim, LibreOffice, Firefox, and Amarok. Could they do the same for the often-beleaguered GNOME 3 release series?
The GNOME Shell Extensions site has been running for a little less than a year now. Technically, it’s in beta, but, if my experience is any indication, the problems are few.
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GNOME release manager Frederic Peters shares insight into the excitement surrounding the GNOME project…
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After a very busy month, I finally had some free time to try Vector Linux, a distro that a facebook friend told me to take a look at. For those of you that dont know, Vector Linux is a distro that has been around for quite a long time. It is based on Slackware, with Xcfe, KDE and LXDE as the available desktop environments. According to the official website, the aim of Vector is to keep the distro simple and small and let the end user decide what their operating system is going to be.
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New Releases
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The previous CrunchBang 11 “Waldorf” development images have now been replaced by some updated builds. The updated images include the Debian Installer 7.0 Beta2 release. Other changes have been kept to an absolute minimum. For more information and to leave any feedback, please see the forum announcement.
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Patrick Volkerding has announced last evening, September 19th, the immediate availability for download and testing of fifth Release Candidate of the upcoming Slackware 14.0 Linux operating system.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS distribution is an interesting creation. The project, originally based on the Mandriva distribution, is now an independent project with its own base, its own packages and its own vision. The project provides a rolling release distro which tries to balance being modern with being stable. It also attempts to balance modern software with a familiar look & feel. Finally, and perhaps most unusually, PCLinuxOS uses RPM software packages, but manages them with the APT package management utilities. It is a unique creation and all the more welcome in a world full of simple re-spins.
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Gentoo Family
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Fabio Erculiani proudly announced on September 13th, the immediate availability for download of the Sabayon Linux 10 operating system.
Sabayon Linux 10 is powered by Linux kernel 3.5.4 (with BFQ iosched), and it features the GNOME 3.4.2, KDE 4.9, Xfce 4.10, and the new MATE 1.4.1 desktop environments.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc (RHT.N), the world’s largest distributor of Linux operating software, reported a lower-than-expected adjusted profit as costs rose, and lowered the top end of its full-year revenue outlook on slow growth in its services business.
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A recent blog post from Red Hat raises some interesting questions about the paradox that exists between what large enterprises want in terms of their IT future requirements, and what the cloud is now able to offer. And perhaps the first question is whether one of the key drivers now in play is not the issue of what large enterprises want but the perception of established IT vendors as to what the large enterprises ought to want.
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Carnival Corp. third quarter net nearly flat to $1.33 billion. FactSet fourth quarter net jumped 19% to $48.5 million. Neogen first quarter net climbed 12%. Paychex first quarter net grew 3% to $153.1 million. Red Hat second quarter net declined 13% to $35 million. Vail Resorts loss narrowed.
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On Monday, Red Hat reported that while its revenues were up, its quarterly profit was short of analyst estimates as its cost of doing business rose. Buried within the report were several nuggets of promise for the first-ever billion dollar a year open source company, though. The company’s subscription support business rose 17 percent, and Red Hat has a beta version of an updated 5.9 release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The new release will greatly expand RHEL’s support for newer hardware, among other enhancements.
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Not every enterprise updates to the latest version of new software from Linux vendor Red Hat, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be updated.
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There was a time when x86 was the only major chip architecture Linux vendor Red Hat cared about. That time has now come to an end as the Linux giant is now taking a serious look at ARM.
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Red Hat is the most successful pure play open source company on the planet, generating over $1 billion in revenue a year. Its success is rooted in a strong legal basis and understanding of how open source software works.
Red Hat is using its open source expertise to its advantage in a new legal battle over alleged storage patent infringement with the Gluster filesystem. Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011 for $136 million. The Gluster technology is now the cornerstone of Red Hat’s Storage technology, which recently hit its 2.0 release.
Backup storage vendor Twin Peaks Software filed a complaint in July with United States District Court, Northern District of California, San Jose Division, alleging patent infringement. The alleged infringement deals with United States Patent Number 7,418,439, (the ’439 patent), titled “Mirror File System,” which Twin Peaks owns.
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Shares of the Raleigh, N.C.-based company are up 35% year-to-date, and Whitehurst said that the stock’s performance is based on strong growth and solid guidance provided in March. Wall Street analysts have been predicting that Red Hat’s organic growth would eventually slow to that of GDP growth, currently at 1.7%. Red Hat, however, has been able to continually deliver growth of 20% or more on a constant currency basis. “Our job is to beat the fade,” Whitehurst noted. “If we can continue to grow 20% every year, that will drive the stock.”
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Debian Family
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With relatively little fanfare, Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 5 was released on Monday last week. It is a sign of the improving stability and maturity of this distribution that unlike previous Update Packs, this one brings only incremental updates — albeit lots of them — rather than the eagerly awaited and badly needed bug fixes and distribution changes that have come before it.
On the four systems I have updated so far, the download was between 900MB and 1GB, and it took quite a while to install — 30 to 60 minutes after the download completed. If you prefer to wait for updated ISO images incorporating this Update Pack, the Linux Mint teams said in their release announcement that those should become available over the next “weeks or months”.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Recently I have been working with David Planella and Michael Hall on my team around a new specification for empowering app developers to deliver their content in Ubuntu. This post provides some background information around this work and the problem it seeks to solve.
Like many of you, I am hugely proud of the progress we have made with Ubuntu over the years. We have worked together to create a simple, powerful experience underlined with the foundation of our core Ubuntu values of creating a free platform, available to all, in your language, irrespective of (dis)ability.
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While some are calling it a tempest in a teapot, Ubuntu loyalists are expressing fury that the next version of Ubuntu includes shopping suggestions from Amazon directly in desktop search results. Version 12.10 is imminent, and many Ubuntu users feel like the Amazon inclusions are nothing more than adware. What does Canonical get out of this arrangement, and will the company reverse its decision? Mark Shuttleworth has weighed in.
Version 12.10 of Ubuntu has a lot to like, and it has an updated version of the Unity desktop environment, Unity 3D, which includes a range of desktop effects achieved through hardware acceleration. However, Ubuntu fans of up in arms over the inclusion of Amazon results in the desktop search function, and many are concerned that their personal data will be picked up by Amazon.
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There’s some sort of push back going on regarding the Ubuntu shopping lens. It’s a neat little feature that I wouldn’t want to be in the home screen, but would like to have in it’s own category.
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According to my sources, it’s almost October, and that can mean but one thing: The debut of Ubuntu 12.10 is almost upon us. To prepare, here’s a look at some of the biggest changes to expect in the forthcoming release of one of the world’s most popular open source operating systems.
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With last night’s update, Canonical published a major update to the Unity interface of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system, due for release next month.
The improved Unity interface brings new lenses, such as a Shopping Lens for your online shopping needs and a Google Docs Scope for searching through your online stored documents. Also, price and user ratings ribbons were added on suggested apps – information taken from Ubuntu Software Center.
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At OSCON in 2008, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, challenged the crowd, “The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop. Can we not only emulate, but can we blow right past Apple?”
The challenge was a defining moment for desktop Linux, coming near the start of an era in which KDE, GNOME, and Ubuntu would all attempt to rethink the desktop.
Four years later, speaking again at OSCON, Shuttleworth implied victory. “We’ve leapt ahead of some of the competition,” he said, claiming that Ubuntu’s Unity desktop was now the second easiest to use after Windows, and showing specific elements in which he felt Unity surpassed Mac OS X.
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Flavours and Variants
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Marco Ghirlanda has announced a couple of days ago, on September 23rd, that the ArtistX 1.3 Linux distribution is available for download.
ArtistX 1.3 is based on the popular Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system and is powered by Linux kernel 3.0.0.
With over 2,500 open source multimedia applications on-board, this release of ArtistX features the GNOME 3.4 and KDE Software Compilation 4.8 desktop environments.
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The cloud era is coming. Some people can argue whether this is good or bad. Maybe that’s only the fashion. Maybe not. Although more and more people think of the cloud as if it were the inevitable future.
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Although Raspberry Pi (RPi) is not powerful enough for heavy-duty image processing, you can still put it to some photography-related uses. For example, as an amateur photographer, I take a lot of photos when I travel, and I upload the photos to my Raspberry Pi at home which neatly organizes and keeps them safe till I get back home.
To turn RPi into a photo station, I opted for the Debian Wheezy minimal image. The only thing I needed to install was the usbmount tool which automatically mounts and unmounts external USB storage devices. Although it’s possible to save photos on the SD card, I decided to keep them on a dedicated 16GB USB stick which usbmount tool mounts at /media/usb0. Since the minimal image comes with an SSH server enabled by default, I only had to configure my router to make RPi accessible from the Internet.
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Raspberry Pi’s can now shift into turbo by changing some configuration settings and getting a 50% power boost, all without voiding the warranty
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Phones
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Android
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Unlike an iOS update, which targets only three devices all made by Apple, releasing a new version of the Android operating system is a more complex process. There are different, often competing interests at play, from the software maker to the handset manufacturer to the mobile carrier. Often the result is a delay of weeks or even months.
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It’s been a very busy week for new Android apps on the Google Play store, so this weekly roundup is back up to 20 apps.
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Google plans to add new features to its Google Maps app for Android phones on Wednesday. Conveniently, it is the same day that Apple‘s latest mobile operating system is due to be released, the one that kicks Google’s maps off the iPhone and replaces them with Apple’s own mobile maps.
The Google Maps for Android app, which will be updated sometime Wednesday, will now make it easier to search for places on Android phones and personalize searches on maps.
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Two security vendor reports released last week point to the continuation of a longstanding problem with Android devices. The platform remains the prime target for malware, yet there’s no easy way for users to keep the software up to date with the latest patches.
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Tablets running on Intel’s upcoming Atom chip code-named Clover Trail could come with the Android OS, adding another OS option for the processor platform in addition to Microsoft’s soon-to-be-released Windows 8 OS, Intel said on Monday.
Intel for months has stressed that the Clover Trail chip was optimized for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8, which is due for release late October. Hewlett-Packard, Acer and Lenovo have already announced Windows 8 tablets based on Clover Trail, and Intel has said 20 tablet designs are in the works.
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Just five years after Google Inc.’s Android appeared on the market in 2008, IHS forecasts that cumulative global shipments of smartphones using the operating system since it was introduced will amount to more than 1 billion in 2013.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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KDE developer Aaron Seigo has announced that the release of the Vivaldi KDE tablet has been postponed for now. The 7-inch tablet will use the Mer Project’s Linux distribution as its operating system, and KDE Plasma Active as its default desktop user interface. However, the manufacturer of the originally chosen Zenithink C71 tablet has modified the system board of the device at short notice. Having made numerous adjustments to the Linux kernel to support the previous system board, the developers must therefore restart their development work almost from scratch.
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CIOs looking to replace legacy systems should consider open source options over proprietary software or public cloud services, according to a study by prominent British IT academic, Professor Jim Norton.
Norton’s study, released today and commissioned by travel industry processing giant Amadeus, assessed the role of open source software in critical transaction systems.
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Google has announced its third annual Code-in contest for high school students, an international contest introducing 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source software development. According to the announcement: “The goal of the contest is to give students the opportunity to explore the many types of projects and tasks involved in open source software development. Globally, open source software development is becoming a major factor in all industries from governments, healthcare, and relief efforts to gaming and large tech companies.” This looks like one of the better opportunities for young people picking up technical skills to differentiate themselves from the pack.
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The vast majority among the Linux community? Incredibly helpful. The minute minority? Less so, suspects Simon…
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We often think of open source as “free software.” That’s a good association. Many people follow the tradition, dating from the ’80s, of referring to software that offers users the liberty to deploy, study, modify, and distribute its source code as “free software.”
But that’s “free” as in liberty, not “free” as in beer. Like it or not, the idea of getting something for nothing still drives many customers to open source solutions — and can deceive them into into thinking it’s wrong to pay people for open source software.
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An interview with one of the talented people behind NASAs Open Government initiative.
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Big Data often requires “Big Hardware.” In other words, to process and analyze large stores of information, organizations usually need a lot of computing power, which brings with it its own set of demands and maintenance costs. Eying opportunity in this challenge, open source Big Data analytics company Pentaho has partnered with Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) to deliver a complete hardware and software solution for business analytics. Here’s the scoop.
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When Rackspace and NASA started OpenStack — a collection of open source tools for building Amazon-style clouds in any data center — Rackspace shouldered the responsibility for organizing the community.
But as that community grew, it became clear that the project needed a more neutral steward, and the company started taking steps to hand the project over to the non-profit OpenStack Foundation.
On Wednesday, that transition was completed, as Rackspace handed over the OpenStack trademark, and the foundation officially took over governance of the project. From here on out, the OpenStack Foundation is responsible for all legal, financial, marketing and operational management issues.
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Multimedia creation and consumption continue to be among the most common uses for PCs and mobile devices. Consider: According to recent research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 46 percent of U.S. Internet users have posted original videos or photos online. Seventy-one percent of online Americans have used a video sharing site like YouTube or Vimeo.
Recording industry trade association IFPI reports that more than half of record company revenues from the U.S. come from digital music, and those digital music revenues continue to grow every year. Global Industry Analysts forecasts that mobile entertainment, including video and music, will be a $67.6 billion industry by 2018.
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This year’s Best of Open Source Software awards includes a whopping 125 products in 7 categories. The real story is the technology leadership so many of these products display
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While Microsoft Office is the industry standard in terms of , integrated applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database management, email and desktop publishing. However, it’s important for small business owners to know that these types of office applications are also available in free and open source office productivity applications.
Open source office software has come a long way in recent years, so choosing free software over expensive proprietary software doesn’t mean you’ll lose features and support. Today’s open source office productivity software is feature-rich and provides ample access to online documentation and large communities of users and developers.
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While Facebook and Twitter is the core of the Internet’s social networking world, some companies and organizations may have reasons to set up their own social networking applications. For some companies, setting up their own social network is a good option because the public Internet may not be secure enough for certain conversations concerning sensitive proprietary information or customer contact information.
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Online education startups such as the Khan Academy, along with new efforts by MIT, Stanford, and Harvard have helped spur interest in and add legitimacy to the notion of remote learning. Now Google is lending its brainpower to the rapidly growing area by releasing a tool called Course Builder, open source software designed to let anyone create online education courses.
The Course Builder project came by way of another program Google ran earlier this year called Power Searching With Google. The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which attracted approximately 155,000 students from 196 countries, allowed Google to marry some of the practices now common to online instruction with the company’s robust array of collaboration and communication tools. A new Power Searching session begins in two weeks.
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Sage Weil started the Ceph filesystem as a research project. Today that research project is a bona fide enterprise option for Big Data and cloud storage purposes.
Ceph is now in the Linux kernel and Weil is the CEO of startup Inktank, which provides commercial support for Ceph.
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Events
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Linux Foundation events are studded with Linux and open source community leaders, as well as some eccentric personalities. What better place than one of these events to sit down and talk to the people who are making innovation happen in software development and cloud computing?
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Chinese telecom company ZTE will be launching smartphones based on Mozilla’s new “Firefox OS” mobile operating system. Based on open standards, the mobile OS is being aimed at primarily emerging markets around the world. With Qualcomm and Telefonica in place as existing Mozilla partners, the ZTE hookup implies that Mozilla’s play in the smartphone arena may have some real legs.
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Firefox is the third most popular browser in the world
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It’s no secret that Mozilla has been working on a mobile OS. Previously codenamed Boot2Gecko, the project focused on a purely HTML5 based system that worked in many ways like current mobile devices. As the project grew into Mozilla OS, the company has laid out a partnership with ZTE that will have real world devices in certain markets early next year. Testing for this OS had previously consisted of a compiled ROM that would be flashed over a handful of Android devices. Now, Mozilla has moved into full fledged product evaluation mode with their own custom developer phone.
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bout a month before the recent HP mobile pwn2own event, I told the event organizers that is extremely likely that the mobile vulns they find will be WebKit related.
As it turns it out I was right and I’m not surprised.
The iPHone 4S was hacked by way of a WebKit vuln and I strongly suspect the NFC attack on the Samsung Galaxy had a WebKit component too. WebKit vulnerability fixes also rank highly (by my count over 50 percent) for all security fixes made in the recent Apple iOS 6 update.
WebKit vulnerabilities also accounted for over 100 flaws fixed in Apple’s latest iTunes update.
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Enterprise users of Firefox should get ready for the next cycle of Firefox ESR, which will begin on 20 November 2012. The Mozilla developers have clarified their plans for the next release of Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release), the version designed for enterprises and other organisations that require a stable qualified version of the browser for inhouse deployment.
The process, as designed, sees a Firefox ESR release being cloned from the mainstream version of Firefox at a particular point in time, in this case the release of Firefox 17 at the end of November, to create Firefox ESR 17. Then, over the next two cycles of mainstream Firefox development, Firefox ESR is tested and bugs fixed in it creating versions 17.0.1 (alongside Firefox 18 on 8 January 2013) and 17.0.2 (alongside Firefox 19 on 19 February 2013).
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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At Unixmen, we were lucky enough to score an exclusive interview with former Project Leader of the OpenIndiana, Alasdair Lumsden.
Since Alasdair’s resignation, it has not only sparked discussion on the reasons of Alasdair’s resignation from OpenIndiana, but also generated a lot of interesting discussion on development and the future of OpenIndiana.
I want to really thank Alasdair for taking the time to chat with Unixmen and reveal all in this very intimate and honest view of OpenIndiana from the very inside of the project.
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CMS
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Moodle HQ has released updates to the Moodle open source learning management system. The new Moodle 2.3.2 and 2.2.5, available now, incorporate several minor fixes and enhancements and resolve a number of security-related issues.
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Semi-Open Source
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The SugarCRM roadshow came to town this week, as the vendor’s CRMAcceleration conference arrived in London as part of a triple-header European tour that also pitches up in Frankfurt and Paris.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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It is certain that with just some little errors that contains the form 35837 like the article 3.2.2 about the free software license are not another form of law, but international law for computers an industries and another error in the 3.2.6 which seems to misunderstood Free Software and Open Source.
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Project Releases
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With the recent release of version 2.6.0, the cross-platform Avidemux video editor has had all of its internals rewritten and now supports more scripting languages. Avidemux is a basic, open source video editing tool designed for simple tasks such as cutting, filtering and encoding; these tasks can be automated using project and job queues, or with Avidemux’s built-in scripting capabilities. Supported formats include AVI, DVD-compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, as well as a variety of codecs.
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Public Services/Government
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Free Software Foundation Europe and twenty Italian civil society organisations wrote a letter to the President of the Authority for the Protection of Personal Data, asking the agency to ensure that all documents published on its website can be read and used with Free Software programs.
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Licensing
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To some people’s surprise, even open-source software has a license attached to it. And with that license comes a description and agreement for what can and can’t be done with the source code of any particular product or service. What exact license the specific open-source software lies under is generally up to the developer(s) and/or current maintainers of the original code.
Open-source software licensing is not something that I have really taken particular notice of in previous and recent times. In fact, all code I have ever created or modified has been done so with no regard to what the license is. I am guilty, yes, as are probably a lot of open-source developers and programmers.
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Open source is one of the concepts that has taken off in a variety of implementations: hardware, cars, and… legal documents?
Sure, why not? Docracy, is a start-up that provides free, open-source legal documents to individuals and companies that need them, as well as a framework on which legal agreements can be negotiated and signed electronically.
As a freelance writer, I have used e-signing services myself to get contracts signed so I can get paid. So far, everything has all worked well, in the sense that I am getting paid. But I also wonder how well such electronic signatures would actually stand up in court should I or one of my vendors decide to get squirrelly?
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Baccus is an open-source robotic arm project aimed primarily at educators and researchers, but because it is seeking funding on Kickstarter, it also poses value to robotics enthusiasts or people who just want to see the latest and most unique crowdfunded scientific advancements.
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Programming
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The path from birth to death is filled with choices about where to work and what kind of work to do. Sometimes the world is nice enough to allow us some input. These days, developers have a lot more say in their employment, thanks to rising demand for their services.
Whether you’re an independent contractor or a cubicle loyalist with a wandering eye, programming want ads abound, each stirring its own set of questions about how best to steer your career. For some, this is entirely new territory, having fallen into employment with computers simply as a means to scratch an itch.
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Finance
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On September 4th, the French-German Television channel, Arte, will show a documentary based on the book The Bank: How Goldman Sachs Rules the World by London-based correspondent for Le Monde, Marc Roche. Last week I spoke with Mr. Roche and co-director of the film Jerome Fritel in London and Paris, respectively, about the new documentary. Every time I think I have heard enough of how bad the banks are and what new thing has been discovered on or off their books, and proven to be legal, if immoral, I am always surprised by how far certain players go to make a profit.
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A sort of joke making the rounds a few years back had (billionaire) Bill Gates walking into a working class bar. The joke was that the moment he did everyone in the bar on average became a billionaire. Understand—he didn’t give away any money or, other than possibly ordering a beer and paying for it, did any money change hands. But through the miracle of statistics the gargantuan difference in wealth between Mr. Gates and the other bar patrons was converted to faux equitable distribution under the measure of ‘average’ wealth.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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“People can invest what they want,” billionaire industrialist David Koch recently told Politico.
Koch wasn’t discussing the stock market or oil futures. He was talking money in politics: wealthy donors “investing” in elected officials, apparently with the expectation of getting a return. In total, donors like the Kochs, along with Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, and “outside” groups have pledged to raise a total of $1 billion this election to elect Republicans, particularly President Barack Obama’s opponent Mitt Romney.
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The consultation followed a code of conduct signed by the main UK ISPs in October 2011, in which they promised to give new customers a choice about whether they wanted parental controls set up on their account. Shortly afterwards, Claire Perry MP launched a campaign for more internet filtering, and ran an inquiry into the issue. The report, which was sponsored by Premier Christian Media, recommended that ISP level filtering be switched on by default.
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Censorship
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Thanks to an EDRi leak, European proposals for widespread action against “terrorism” were revealed last week, with press coverage in the Telegraph and elsewhere.
The project – Clean IT – moved swiftly to deny that they had been a closed project, which is partly true. They also tried to reduce the significance of the document they had produced, saying it was “for discussion” (even though page one of the leaked document suggests the contents are ‘detailed recommendations’).
The plans include measures for upload filtering, corporate censorship, plus procedures for flagging dubious content.
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Copyrights
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We’ve been seeing more and more judges reacting negatively to copyright trolls. What’s interesting is that they seem to be getting more aggressive in their statements against the trolls, and it seems clear that fewer judges are falling for their antics. The latest is from Judge Harold Baer in the Southern District of New York, who you could say is not impressed by some copyright trolling cases that have ended up in his court, coming from Media Products and Patrick Collins. He had allowed for expedited discovery, which is what copyright trolls want, but it seems quite clear that Baer regrets that decision and now seeks to reverse it. Expedited discovery basically gives the trolls what they want: it lets them subpoena ISPs to find out contact info of users based on the IP addresses they’ve collected. From that point on, they have no intention of ever proceeding with the actual lawsuit. They just want to start pressuring people into “settling.”
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Posted in Patents at 12:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Patent trolls do not want to be recognised as patent trolls
Mr. Tiller, a leading figure in Red Hat’s legal team, addresses the fact that patent trolls are a major issue in today’s technology sector. He cites a paper and writes: “A new report titled An Overview of the “Patent Trolls” Debate [PDF] is a balanced but ultimately devastating indictment of “patent trolls.” It was prepared by the Congressional Research Service for members of Congress, who could actually do something about the “troll” problem. It’s a useful primer for those new to the area.
“First, apologies to any who are offended by use of the word “trolls.” As the report points out, the problem is that the term is not only pejorative, but also somewhat vague. It notes the common use of the more polite term “non-practicing entities” (NPEs), but favors using instead “patent-assertion entities” (PAEs). These are entities that speculate by buying patents with a view to asserting them against parties that usually have independently invented, produced, and marketed the technology at issue. I’m fine with “PAE,” which really is clearer, and also points toward an irresistible pun: all a PAE does is make you pay.”
Trolls are a subject that is important to us because trolls used to attack this site and patent trolls we criticise try to discredit, using weasel words and quoting the messenger out of context. As one supporter of this site put it, “While Roy was away on his pre announced honeymoon in Cyprus, a patent troll decided to harass him. They paid for a press release to call him inaccurate, irresponsible and unresponsive. What trash bags.
“Ever heard of Pikigram? Neither has G+ as of this writing, “Sorry, we couldn’t find any matches.” They wrote up a psychobable press release about paradigm shifts breaking the loggjams of innovation with a photosharing app. They have no product or service but hired lawyers who are “pursuing patent protection”. If that’s the sum of their commercial activity, yes they are patent trolls.
“I never imagined a company (sock/troll) would pay for a press release to counter my blog posts,” I wrote in response.
Interesting stuff from the aforementioned thread says: “Here is a promo for the law firm, “legalteamusa”: Zeis, Widerman, & Malek [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LPAoEFOefY]
“They’ve been in business seven years. One of their lawyers created a webpage “IPWatchdog.com” and another called “tacticalIP.com”. They have interesting legal news in their tweets: http://twitter.com/LegalTeamUSA
“Until we can see the patent number to access it and read what it claims are…”
Quoting yours truly out of context and turning out to be connected to the pro-software patents groups/lobby (behind shells) only further validates the original claims against them. Patent trolls are without ethics and all they care about is money, regardless of the means by which to gain it. This is part of a wider issue and it is not only trolls, either. As this one new report puts it: “SK Hynix Inc., the world’s second-largest memory-chip maker by sales, said Sunday a U.S court imposed sanctions against Rambus Inc. in a patent dispute on dynamic random access memory chips that started in August 2000.
“A Californian court reversed its existing stance and said that Rambus illegally destroyed evidence regarding the patent-infringement case.”
Microsoft and Intel also destroyed evidence.
As a side note of site news, I have been slow to post new articles after I came back because I am testing various Android text editors to replace what I was using on Palm OS. Nothing can replace a physical keyboard; it’s rather horribly slow. █
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Posted in FSF, Ubuntu at 12:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Source: “Mono, the Trojan” (reused with permission)
Summary: Canonical decides to keep GRUB and stand up closer to the FSF
C
anonical had a bout of arrogance recently. Its founder Mark Shuttleworth labelled people who disagree on a technical and ethical matter “trolls”. This is not a new tactic from Ubuntu’s corporate backer; Mono and UEFI — not just Amazon — led to it. The so-called ‘peanut gallery’ just happens to be people capable of thought and not an Apple-esque herd mentality. So when we criticised Ubuntu’s approach to UEFI we were just not blindly accepting what Ubuntu eventually came to reject because “Ubuntu to Use Signed GRUB2 Bootloader for Secure Boot”, says the Ubuntu herd (OMGUbuntu folks).
Here are some related reports:
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Microsoft’s “Secure Boot” plans for Windows 8 have already caused no end of controversy in the Linux community, and certainly one of the more divisive announcements in recent months was Canonical’s decision to drop the GRUB 2 bootloader as part of its solution for Ubuntu Linux.
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Going back to Ubuntu 9.10, GRUB2 was used as the default boot-loader, albeit a pre-release of the long-awaited GRUB update. In late June of this year, GRUB 2.00 was officially released after many years in development. Meanwhile, in the Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal” repository up to now is GRUB2 v1.99-22ubuntu2 — one of the earlier development snapshots.
UEFI is being tackled in multiple ways now, depending on who takes action. Red Hat’s staff sites mention this too. MJG speaks of bootkits and concludes: “So this isn’t really a story about a surprising vulnerability. It’s a story about someone taking the logical step of implementing a bootkit on top of UEFI, which is what everyone should have been expecting all along. Computers that are configured to run arbitrary code will run arbitrary code, and if that arbitrary code happens to modify your kernel so your credit card details are automatically posted to pastebin, well, that’s a plausible outcome.”
Vista 8 already causes issues for GNU/Linux users. Here is a new example: “Yesterday, Megatotoro and I helped a colleague who wanted to dual boot her recently bought desktop PC. She wanted us to install Mageia 2 and we were confident because it is a process that we have done several times already.
“However, when we hit the key to get into the BIOS… Surprise! We were greeted by UEFI instead.”
UEFI further complicated dual-booting, yet nobody filed an antitrust complaint. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes to explain the role the FSF is playing: “Windows 8 PCs will come with Microsoft’s UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot. This “feature” will make it much harder to boot Linux or other operating systems. Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, is going to take a new approach to address this problem.
“Canonical and the FSF have talked their disagreement out and, continues Melamut, “the FSF has stated clearly that Grub 2 with Secure Boot does not pose a risk of key disclosure in such circumstances. We have also confirmed that view with our OEM partners, and have introduced variations to the Ubuntu Certification program and QA scripts for pre-installs to ensure that security and user choice are maintained on Ubuntu machines. Therefore, we have decided that Grub 2 is the best choice for a bootloader, and will use only Grub m,2 in Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04.2 by default.”
“In a statement, John Sullivan, Executive Director of the FSF, added, “We are pleased with Canonical’s decision to stick with Grub 2. We know that the challenges raised when trying to support true user security without harming user freedom—Secure Boot vs. Restricted Boot—are new for everyone distributing free software. This is the situation for which GPLv3 was written, and after helpful conversations with Canonical, we are confident the license does its job well, ensuring users can modify their systems without putting distributors in untenable positions.””
Debian followed the FSF’s footsteps right from the start. Canonical needed some pressure. It’s not “trolling” against Canonical. The FSF believes that UEFI should be illegal. █
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09.24.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Vehicles have been an emerging platform for Linux for some time now, with much of the momentum driven by auto makers and a few technology standards bodies, plus steadfast support for the trend from The Linux Foundation. Now, The Linux Foundation has announced the Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup (AGL). It will “facilitate widespread industry collaboration that advances automotive device development,providing a community reference platform that companies can use forcreating products,” according to the Workgroup announcement. News of it arrives amidst other news related to Linux in vehicles.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup (AGL). The Workgroup will facilitate widespread industry collaboration that advances automotive device development, providing a community reference platform that companies can use for creating products.
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Every year for the past four years, Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation gets in front of thousands of Linux developers and users at the LinuxCon conference to detail the success and the State of Linux.
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That’s something I’ve been wanting to happen for a while. Until recently, we were 2/3 the way there – with the laptops and mobile devices that my daughter and I use all running Linux or Android. But I finally got my wish of living in a completely Linux household a few weeks ago, all thanks to my wife’s laptop.
It all started one Saturday morning when my wife wanted to scan some documents. Her laptop went into rather scary boot-shutdown loop, and the hard drive started clicking. This had happened a few months ago, and as it turned out the particular model of hard drive used in her laptop (which the manufacturer replaced) is one that’s prone to failure.
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One of the strong points about Linux is its hardware detection at boot time.
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Desktop
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It’s the end of August, and in case you missed it, Google closed out the month by delivering a new stable release of Chrome OS that does a few things that many users have been clamoring for. As noted on VentureBeat, the update “…finally gives the browser-based operating system file management to match the original product vision: a thin layer on hardware that puts intelligence and storage in the cloud. Now, users will have the option to save a file directly to Google Drive, instead of being forced to save it locally and then upload it.” Indeed, the update solves long-standing file management problems that Chrome OS has had.
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This is a wise strategy from Google as it seeks to turn the enterprise into its next large market to conquer. Putting Chrome OS-based hardware in enterprises could be the final step in validating the operating system.
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I was reading the back-and-forth between Miguel de Icaza and Linus Torvalds (with special guest star Alan Cox) over the holiday weekend, and I was hardly surprised by the amount of finger-pointing going on.
In case you missed it, de Icaza got the ball rolling with a blog entry a week ago opining on What Killed the Linux Desktop. The fault, de Icaza stated, lay in the way that Linux developers would consistently deprecate APIs just to improve them, coupled with the myriad of configurations between each separate distro.
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The Gazelle Professional is the flagship laptop from Ubuntu computer maker’s System76.
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Linux history teaserLinux has been around for more than 20 years and serves happily in both desktop and server roles. But it didn’t show up overnight. Linux is the result of the collaboration of lots of people over the years.
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If you haven’t noticed, if you’re looking for a Linux distribution, you’re spoiled for choice. Sites like DistroWatch list hundreds of different Linux distros on the site. But where did they all come from?
Since Linux is just a kernel, as Richard Stallman is fond of pointing out, it’s not really that useful by itself, and regardless of how you feel about the GNU/Linux naming controversy, it really is a misnomer to call Linux an operating system. As a kernel, it just does basic things like storing files on a hard drive or accessing a network. It requires utilities to make it useful.
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Server
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vmwareMaybe I’m getting old. Perhaps that’s why I just don’t get it anymore when I see the direction of the virtualization industry, and specifically, VMware. The virtualization giant has been swinging around the buzzword, and of course, accompanying acronym, “Software Defined Datacenter”, SDDC for short, to explain their take on how VMware can be the center of the IT world. However, when I look at their latest offering, I see layers upon layers of complexity, hiding beneath the veneer of their slick GUI. I have a simpler solution, a programmable datacenter.
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How cheaply can you build a supercomputer? A group from the University of Southampton just made one using 64 Raspberry Pi ARM GNU/Linux boxes ($25 each) and Lego blocks. The machine, named “Iridis-Pi” after the University’s Iridis supercomputer, runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket and uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet.
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Cambridge University has joined the ranks of terribly prestigious universities giving computer science classes away online, releasing a 12-step course teaching how to create what it calls a “basic terminal Operating System” for the Raspberry Pi.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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After the Linux Kernel Summit was done, the Linux kernel panel had wrapped and the LinuxCon and CloudOpen keynotes were finished, there was only one thing left to do at last week’s event: Skate. You might have heard rumblings and seen pictures of the skateboards that were given away as speaker and VIP gifts at this year’s event (you might have even scored one). Well, on Friday we took them out to the curb and put them to work – - with a little help from Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman.
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How do the Linux and open source communities define the open cloud? Our Leaders of the Open Cloud series posed this key question, along with many others, to industry heavyweights in the 10 weeks leading up to the CloudOpen conference in San Diego last month. Here, we’ve distilled their answers into a slideshow to illustrate the range of participants and viewpoints as well as some areas of contention.
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Linus Torvalds took stage tonight at the LinuxCon conference in a panel discussion about the state of Linux. Lucky for me they took questions from the audience via Twitter – though apparently i was the only one that asked questions over Twitter…
I asked about the naming issue – many of us were almost caught of guard by how the whole Linux 3.0 name came about, with Linus pretty much saying at the time that the numbers in the 2.6.x series had simply just gotten too large. The last 2.6 kernel was the 2.6.39 kernel.
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As was the case in the beginning, Torvalds remains the leader of Linux and is responsible for maintaining the mainline kernel and pushing out its new leading-edge releases. One of the questions that has long been asked, and was asked again at the LinuxCon conference on Wednesday night, is the question of succession known as, “What if Linus gets hit by a bus?”
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Similarly to current versions of Mac OS X and Windows, Linux is now capable of a hybrid sleep state. The 3.6 kernel also provides improved randomisation and reduces the work load of EFI bootloaders.
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Graphics Stack
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While some want Linux multi-monitor support removed, others are looking for it to be improved. Multiple display support for Linux has improved over the years with X.Org and desktop environment advancements, it’s still generally less than ideal, especially for Linux gamers.
With the liaising earlier this week between a long-time Linux desktop developer (circa 1996) and a game company, besides talking about the AMD Catalyst driver being on his blacklist of junk, he had many thoughts to share on the state of Linux multi-monitor support.
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Kristian Høgsberg spoke this week at XDC2012 about Wayland and Weston. Here’s a short recap plus some videos that include new demos of this promising project.
Kristian began with a Wayland/Weston status and overview where he reiterated information about the desktop technology that has advanced in recent months — pretty much what’s already been covered by past Phoronix Wayland articles.
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The discussion was around providing a new Linux OpenGL ABI to better focus around today’s needs and technologies rather than sticking to a decade old ABI. Backwards compatibility, however, will be maintained. That article has more information on the background of the original proposal by NVIDIA for coming up with a new Linux OpenGL ABI.
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Applications
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We currently live in a brave new world of HTML5, AJAX and dynamic scripting. Most browsers, including those on low powered phones are able to render complex web page layouts and handle asynchronous requests and client side post-processing. But what if you were stuck on an old machine with nothing but a Lynx?
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You snap a bunch of pictures on your holiday, come home and find out that there’s something missing in them. Oh it’s not your beloved dog that’s missing, it’s just lacking some much-needed light. You open up your web browser, fire up Google, and start looking for some good photo-editing apps. Though there are a bunch of good online editors, none of them make the cut because offline apps are both convenient as well as fast.
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A release date for the Linux version of Editshare’s professional-grade video editor Lightworks has been set.
October 30th will see an alpha release of the editor made available for Linux users to download.
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Geometry is the branch of mathematics that is concerned with the properties and relations of points, lines, surfaces, and solids. H.M.S Coxeter succinctly described Geometry as:
“Geometry is perhaps the most elementary of the sciences that enable man, by purely intellectual processes, to make predictions (based on observation) about physical world. The power of geometry, in the sense of accuracy and utility of these deductions, is impressive, and has been a powerful motivation for the study of logic in geometry.”
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Valve has promised to release a Steam client for Linux “very soon”, but we can expect that only to be a beta release. The final release will ship next February, as per a report published by Phoronix. The initial Steam will feature Left For The Dead 2.
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Steam for Linux is coming, and Left For The Dead 2 will be the first game that will be supported in Linux. The good news is you can now vote for your favorite game titles in Steam community and get them included in the Steam Client.
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It’s becoming increasingly apparent that video game development and online distribution company Valve is serious about Linux. But desktop Linux has a 1 percent usage share. Surely there’s more to this development effort than meets the eye?
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Some time ago, we did o comparison of StuntRally and Speed Dreams, and analyzed how two completely different bases result in what you’d expect from their forks.
Although I found StuntRally very unfinished, buggy and “cheap” then, I was sure that as VDrift becomes more mature and more settled down as a project it would result into a better road of development for Stunt Rally. As version 1.7 was released a few days ago, I had to take a look and see what changed since 1.5.
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Humble Indie Bundle is an occasional collection of games from independent developers. Fans can pay any price that they want to get access to the pack. The games are also free of digital-rights management and are playable across multiple platforms like Windows, OS X, and Linux. The proceeds are then split between the developers, advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and charity Child’s Play.
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Multiplayer airship pirate game AirBuccaneers HD will have a Linux version.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Of course I was asked quite often about the current state of Wayland in KDE and I honestly replied which resulted in rather incorrect “news” postings about Wayland in KDE not happening “any time soon” (whatever that is supposed to mean) to “Wayland for KDE will be delayed” (given that we never had a schedule in the first place, it cannot be delayed).
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KDE, while extremely customizable, always lacked a tool which resembles the eye candy Ubuntu Software Center. One may argue that USC is not as powerful as plain Synaptic Package manager, yet it is polished enough to attract average user. KDE’s own Apper comes close but there are some missing features which keep it below the USC.
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Qt, a C++ GUI and application framework is up for a new major release. Lars Knoll announced the release of Qt 5 beta in the Qt Labs developer blog and this release has got some exciting features.
Among the major changes, developer will enjoy improved graphics and advanced UIs for apps written in QML and JavaScript. For those who wish to make their Qt apps more connected with the web, Qt 5 will be a blessing. High performance and better tools are also some major milestones achieved in this release.
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The sun has risen this morning to reveal the beautiful valley which a some 20 or so KDE community members have gathered to work on 3 main topics (multimedia, accessibility and Plasma). People were awake and hacking here in Randa until the early hours of the morning of our first day here. In the Plasma room we spent the day catching up with each other and what we’re working on as well as starting in on libplasma2, the next version of the underlying Plasma library, with the goal of having it in top shape for inclusion in the first release of Frameworks 5.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome 3.5.92 has been released few days ago and nothing more than translations and bug fixes will arrive till the stable release at September 26.
Gnome Shell and Nautilus were the two modules that received huge development from 3.5.91 to .92 and more development is expected in 3.6.1 version in October 17. Gnome Shell 3.6 brings major changes in optics and huge improvements underneath.
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Today I want to take a look at one of the bigger new features in the upcoming GNOME release, Input Sources. I have written some early code for this, but the credit for getting it all working and completed really goes to Rui Matos and Takao Fujiwara.
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A release candidate of Gnome 3.9 is already out and Gnome 3.6 stable release is scheduled on September 26. However, development never stops in Linux world, and the developers are already making plans for the next releases. Currently, you can suggest some features for future Gnome releases as we announced earlier, and Gnome 3.8 feature freeze is on October 22nd this year.
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Accessibility is an always important factor for Gnome designers/developers. All the people of the world should be able to use and contribute to our favorite desktop environment no matter their physical disabilities.
Two new accessibility oriented/related features are now discussed and initiating with the purpose of being ready for the 3.8 release. These are the color tinting in Gnome Shell and the focus-caret tracking.
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In Google Summer of Code this summer, Gnome apps and games got major enhancements and bug removals. One of the games that specially was given importance was Gnome Sudoku. Chris Baines has posted a screenshot on his blog about the final look of this game.
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The Activities Overview has seen some improvements too that Clasen says will make a big difference in one’s overall GNOME experience. He explains, “Applications can now be accessed using the grid button in the dash, rather than by clicking on the applications tab. This improves the layout of the overview, and enables us to highlight the all-important search bar. It also addresses an issue that we saw when observing people use GNOME 3, where the applications button sometimes went unnoticed.”
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A new version of Gnome shell is out. This version is mostly a bug fix release and will be merged with the 3.6 release cycle. As its quite unstable, its not recommended to be installed as default work environment. You can, however, install it to get a taste of Gnome 3.6 and report bugs to the Gnome team.
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With Gnome 3.6 release coming closer, a lot of visible improvements are arriving in the desktop front. Some applications have got some renovated looks, namely Nautilus, Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer, Empathy and the Gnome Message Tray. Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab) has got some visual improvements and looks cleaner now. Some screenshots below…
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Since GNOME 3 was released in April 2011, the criticism has often been harsh (and, yes, I contributed to it myself). Seventeen months later, it shows few signs of ending, and Linux Mint has released Cinnamon and Mate, two popular re-creations of GNOME 2, as an alternative. Yet aside from the occasional comment from individuals, the GNOME Project itself has refrained from answering.
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The GNOME development team shot another bullet in their foot when they removed some beloved features from the Nautilus file manager. Read Jack Wallen’s take on how this serves as the final blow to GNOME’s relevancy.
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Some great news come from Mint camp this month. First, Mint has been ranked “Best Distro 2012″ by Linux Format! Then, Mint is proud to have in his side one of the most talented hackers, the just 13 years old Esteban -esteban1uy- who was announced as the developer of the month (in Mint).
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Despite public perception to the contrary, GNOME developers pay a great deal of attention to the opinions of users, senior GNOME developer Vincent Untz told iTWire today.
Untz is in Orlando, Florida, to attend the first SUSECON, the first annual conference of the Linux company; the quiet-spoken Frenchman, who was on the GNOME Foundation board from 2006 till 2010, has been working for SUSE since 2008.
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There’s a new distro in town and it is not based on Ubuntu. In fact, almost the opposite – it’s based on and completely compatible with Arch Linux. Well, maybe not opposite because they aim to make Arch easy to install and use. The main version features Xfce 4.10, but they also offer GNOME and KDE DVDs. Best of all, it’s an install live CD/DVD.
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One of my first experiences with network security was building firewalls for small offices and Internet cafés. Our boss at the time was adamant that we use open source, and directed us to OpenBSD and “pf”, their packet filtering firewall. It was a good call. OpenBSD proved to be rock solid, and pf was easy to configure and easy to maintain. Fast-forward a little over a decade and I’ve just finished installing a new pf-based firewall, this time as an entire FreeBSD distribution called pfSense.
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One of my favorites is a quote from King Linus himself. “Everything would be easier if there was no choice.” That’s his way of saying freedom is messy. Many think freedom always results in more choice and that’s always a good thing.
The problem with Open Source Software and freedom is that sometimes no one chooses the difficult or seemingly boring and unappreciated aspects. However, many times someone comes along and improves the product, Magiea and LibreOffice are two prime examples. But sometimes they don’t, like Symphony OS. Ultimately, consensus seems to be that the benefits of Open Source minus the problems associated with it are still preferable to the disadvantages even with the advantages of popular but proprietary software.
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Warren Woodford is the man behind MEPIS, one of the first ever GNU/Linux distributions that tried to be more friendly to the user. In this quick interview he talks about the distribution market, the different strategies that are followed and his opinion on what all distributions should do in order for the Linux desktop to grow and prosper.
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SolusOS is a lightweight distribution which uses Gnome 2 as its desktop interface and it is geared towards novice Linux users or those who do not need a heavy distribution.
Coming off the heels of an impressive first release earlier this year, we are back with an updated version of this distribution. The main focus is still the same but it now has some updated offerings.SolusOS 1.2 now comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors which for those who have more than 4GB of memory can now access all of it making a huge improvement in performance and multitasking. This distribution still comes as a Live media so you can try it before installing it.
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After recently installing the Debian based edition of Linux Mint operating system on my home office desktop, I decided to take a look at another Debian based Linux distribution, SolusOS.
This is my first time trying SolusOS, so I dived in with an innocent fresh mind. Upon booting the LiveCD, I couldn’t help but notice how fast the SolusOS boot process is. Whether it has been tweaked by the developers or whether it is due the lightweight nature of the distribution, I’m not too sure.
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The world of preferred Linux window manager is dominated by Gnome, KDE, XFCE and LXDE primarily. About 90% of the new releases I see are based on either of the four desktops because of the extremely elegant graphical interfaces they offer. However, with changing priorities and a need to provide aesthetically pleasing visual effects, Linux world is also undergoing tremendous transformation, specially Gnome 3. Most of the today’s highly sophisticated Linux distros no longer run well on low resource environment or support desktops less than 512 MB RAM.
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New Releases
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The Linux world received two exciting announcements recently. Two popular distributions have released alphas of their next versions. Fedora 18 Alpha “offers a preview of some of the best free and open-source technology currently under development” and Mandriva 2012 Alpha sports “quality closer to what one would expect from a RC.”
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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To start with, I became a big fan of PCLinuxOS since February this year. First time, I used PCLinux (I am still a Linux n00b) when I downloaded the Feb’12 release and installed it in one of the systems I have. I am not a KDE fan but PCLinuxOS is different! I have used Ubuntu mostly in last 2 year or so and I could never successfully update Ubuntu – I had to do fresh install every time! PCLinuxOS is actually the first Linux OS which I could upgrade without breaking anything. Also, there’s a knowledgeable and helpful forum in place to help you out of issues like screen not displaying proper resolution and stuff like that!
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the September 2012 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. 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 Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Gentoo Family
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I used Gentoo for several years a while back, but I still remember the monthly screenshot threads. Gentoo users posted their screenshots to show off their customizing prowess or how minimal they could get. So, it always catches my eye when the Gentoo Website announces their official yearly winners. Today we found out the winners for 2012.
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Sabayon 10 was released recently bringing lots of updates and your choice of four different desktop editions. Fabio Erculiani said, “If you really enjoyed Sabayon 9, this is just another step towards World domination (yay!).”
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Gentoo Linux is one Linux OS I haven’t tried yet. But, surely this week I am going to try their 2009 Special DVD edition. The best feature of Gentoo is, it is version-less and once you make an emerge update, it has the most up-to-date packages. There are step-by-step guides available to install Gentoo and once I try it, I’ll know how complicated or easy it is!
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced it has acquired business process management (BPM) technology developed by Polymita Technologies S.L. The deal accelerates Red Hat’s entry into the BPM software segment and augments its JBoss Enterprise Middleware integration software offerings.
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) sent another wave of employees to downtown Raleigh this week and more Red Hatters will soon follow suit.
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Longbow Research initiated coverage on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) in a research note released on Thursday morning. The firm issued a neutral rating on the stock.
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The name Red Hat is becoming even more integrated with downtown Raleigh, with the software company now buying the rights to put its name on what has been the Raleigh Amphitheater.
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Red Hat’s Linux software products have become a foundation for cloud computing, a system that allows companies to store and access data and applications over the Internet. At the same time, Red Hat is moving into new areas, including software storage, which is also expected to become a major revenue driver for the company in the next few years.
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT)‘s stock had its “outperform” rating reiterated by investment analysts at Wells Fargo & Co. in a note issued to investors on Monday.
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That’s the question that Tim Burke, vice-president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, answered during a keynote address at the LinuxCon conference. Burke began by telling the audience that he originally came to Red Hat from the Unix world. Unix to Linux migration is a key starting point in the discussion about what an enterprise Linux is all about.
Burke said that the difference between Unix and Linux is that Linux enables user innovation, and provides freedom from vendor lock-in.
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The Community Enterprise Operating System is now at version 6.3. Is the upgrade to the Red Hat-based distro worthwhile?
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Fedora
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Fedora 18, Spherical Cow will be delayed by another week, due to some outstanding bugs that are blocking its release. Earlier this release was delayed by a week for the same reason. This makes a total of two weeks delay for the release.
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Mo Duffy is a senior interaction designer at Red Hat, a billion dollar company that is the world’s leading open source and Linux provider. I met Mo this past spring when we spoke on a panel at SxSW. I was struck by her insights into her profession and how those insights relate to all design professions. Not only does she get into the nitty gritty of the politics of the workplace and the realities of usability testing, but she is a passionate advocate for open source and the democratization of design.
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Debian Family
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Joerg Jaspert sent some bits from the FTP Team, announcing the ongoing sprint during which the team is working on optimising the current code behind the main archive, finalising a proposal for Debian Personal Package Archives (PPAs), and merging backports.debian.org into the main archive host. This year, participation in the Google Summer of Code initiative helped the team in implementing a true multi-archive capability, making it possible to merge separated parts of the Debian archive (like security and backports) into the main archive. Joerg also added a call for volunteers: if you are a Debian Developer and want to help one of the key teams of the Debian infrastructure, please consider joining them.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It’s here. We have been writing about the ‘official’ edition of Ubuntu Gnome for almost a year now and it’s finally here. The first ISO (alpha) images of Gnome Shell edition of Ubuntu is now available for download and testing, Jeremy Bicha just told me on Google+.
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As a long time Ubuntu user I was essentially a Gnome user but Unity changed everything. Unity did bring a new UI but it also enabled Canonical to drive the development of Ubuntu in the direction they wanted to increase the market share of Ubuntu. We are noticing the results in the market as Ubuntu’s adoption is increasing.
Unity is extremely rich when it comes to new features and services. You can keep an eye on OMG! Ubuntu or our Ubuntu section to see how Unity is shaping up. However, there are Gnome users who are still looking for the pure GNOME experience on top of the stability and app ecosystem of Ubuntu.
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Earlier this month fans of the good old GNOME 2 desktop environment got some exciting news when it became clear that a version of Ubuntu Linux featuring the classic desktop was in the works.
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As days advance towards the Ubuntu Quantal release, new and exciting features are being added to Ubuntu; the old features and bugs are being squashed and Canonical is making sure that Ubuntu 12.10 will be the best Ubuntu release ever.
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Canonical has decided to drop alternate Ubuntu installation CDs from the next Ubuntu release. This CDs were previously used to install Ubuntu with encryption and also configure RAID arrays for data storage. As per Ubuntu developer Steve Langasek, Ubuntu 12.10 default installation CD will support encrypted installations. Also RAID can be configured easily after installation.
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Ubuntu 12.04 is an alternative to the Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X operating systems. It features a functional and intuitive desktop environment.
Ubuntu’s Unity desktop has similarities to both Windows and OS X, meaning that users considering the switch to Ubuntu should not have much difficultly becoming familiar with this alternative operating system (OS), which is based on Linux, a popular open-source OS.
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Linux is the supreme software conquest for me, and one particular distribution has tormented my early adopter “lifestyle” — Red Hat Linux. It’s now long gone, abandoned by parent company Red Hat, though it was given a new lease on life through Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Ten years ago, I stumbled upon a magazine that came with a copy of Red Hat Linux 7, and I was so tempted to try it and see how it felt to run something other than the Windows editions of the day. My experience was less than ideal back then, but I’ve re-encountered Ubuntu and the spark has reignited…
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Any company that wants to save a bundle in software licensing fees and build a productive, stable and secure computing environment for its users should download a free workbook entitled “Five Golden Rules for a Successful Ubuntu Desktop Migration.”
Produced by Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, the book offers some pragmatic advice to companies that want to migrate from a proprietary system like Microsoft Windows to a free and open source platform.
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Now go ahead and try to install something via apt-get. Chances are, it’s working now! And that is awesome. Sadly though, Synaptic and the software center still aren’t working quite right. So let’s fix that issue next.
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The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Quantal Quetzal Beta 1 Release of Ubuntu 12.10 give you a preview of the next version of Ubuntu.
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The first beta build of Ubuntu 12.10 drops Unity 2D, retains Nautilus 3.4 and adds a new Dash preview, a Photo lens and new centralised Online Accounts management.
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For me one of my favorite things is listening to music and I use music as an aid to help make me more productive when working on projects. Luckily there are a variety of applications that “just work” on Ubuntu to help me get my music fix.
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I’ve been using Ubuntu 12.04 on my MSI netbook for about a week now. The netbook is a 10″ model with a 1.66 Gig dual core Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1 Gig of RAM and Intel Mobile 945GSE Integrated Graphics, 3 USB ports, VGA out, and Microphone and Headphone sockets, and an SD card slot.
I’ve been using Ubuntu 12.04 on my MSI netbook for about a week now. The netbook is a 10″ model with a 1.66 Gig dual core Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1 Gig of RAM and Intel Mobile 945GSE Integrated Graphics, 3 USB ports, VGA out, and Microphone and Headphone sockets, and an SD card slot.
I’ve been using it with Ubuntu Studio, with XFCE desktop and Audio applications, but became quite annoyed with it because it kept losing the network applet, and it never seemed to connect with the wireless network unless I was within a meter of the transmitter.
So as I had a copy of Ubuntu on hand, I decided to give that a go.
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Just a quick update on my experience running the pre-release version of Ubuntu (this time upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1!). Not a whole lot new to report – Beta 1 is basically the same as Alpha 3 but with the addition of an option to connect to a Remote Server directly from the login screen. Unfortunately the bugs that I have filed so far have yet to be resolved, but I’m still hopeful someone has a chance to correct them prior to release.
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When was the last time you paid any attention to the icons used inside Ubuntu’s window controls?
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The beta version of the next Ubuntu release – 12.10 Quantal Quetzal – is now available for testing. There are several new and interesting features added and whether you like it or not, the Unity desktop is here to stay and it is getting better with each release.
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You may have noticed that over the last year, I’ve spoken quite a lot about Ubuntu Unity. More specifically, I’ve become quite the champion for Unity being one of the most efficient desktops on the market. I thought it might be helpful to take you on a walk through of the default Ubuntu desktop to help you see just how it could be that a completely different desktop could possibly be so user-friendly and efficient.
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You’d think someone had just kicked some Ubuntu Linux fans’ puppy. Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, has added Amazon search results to the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 Unity Dash search function. Some users hate this and have declared Ubuntu to be adware. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, has replied that this response is FUD. Here’s what’s really happening.
First, yes, when you do a search from Unity Dash in Ubuntu 12.10, besides the usual search results you’ll also see a More Suggestions results box. This will contain, not ads, but search results from Amazon. This is part of the integration of Web apps into the Ubuntu desktop. In addition to the Amazon integration into Ubuntu search, there’s also a separate Amazon search app. More than 40 other “Web site apps” such as BBC News, Facebook, and Reddit also will be available.
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Flavours and Variants
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Before I get into my review this week I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge a good suggestion I received earlier this year. One of our readers pointed out that burning distribution images to CDs and DVDs was wasteful as, eventually, the discs typically end up in the trash. The reader suggested switching to a USB thumb drive in order to be more environmentally friendly. At the time I had been testing most distributions on two machines, one of which was old enough that it did not support booting from a USB device. This situation limited my options and was the main reason behind using optical media. Still, after some consideration I decided that reducing my environmental footprint is more important to me than testing distributions on hardware which I rarely use any more.
With that in mind, I have switched to using a (second hand) USB drive in place of optical media. It is rare these days that I encounter Linux distributions which do not run smoothly on both of my test computers and I feel that the additional testing and use of resources does not provide significant benefit to justify the time and media expended. Going forward I intend to limit hardware testing to one machine and load distributions onto the hardware using a USB drive. Should you have any thoughts on this change one way or the other, please feel free to comment below or e-mail me.
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Ubuntu or Linux Mint. This is the question most people ask me when they set mind to install first Linux distribution in their machine. When you plan to use Linux, you are surrounded by the choice. There are 100′s of Linux distribution available, each having their own specialty. People pick their favourite distros because they find it convenient and easy to use. The same distro can be disgusting and ridiculous to other people. So, its the choice that matter. however this articles will helps you to visualize the differences between Ubuntu and Linux Mint and helps you to find the appropriate choice for you.
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The path to Enlightenment is long. In fact, Enlightenment 17 has been in the works for 12 years now. The first version of this unique desktop environment was released by Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler) in 1997. Version 0.17 (E17) was born in December 2000, and is a complete rewrite of E16. A number of distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, to name a few) have long included an E17 package. However, these versions have so far failed to exploit the amazing eye-candy potential of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL).
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Wind River has introduced the latest version of Wind River Linux, which was developed from the Yocto Project open source development infrastructure and has achieved Yocto Project Compatible registration. Wind River Linux supports an array of hardware including ARM, Intel, MIPS and Power architectures.
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With flexible I/O options and Linux capability, the Raspberry Pi offers enormous potential for hardware development. Andrew Back takes us through the possibilities with his hardware-hacking getting-started guide for the credit-card-sized Linux computer.
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Phones
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Mozilla, the company that makes the popular Firefox browser, is working on a mobile operating system that will launch on a smartphone built by ZTE, Reuters reports.
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Android
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Android continues to win market share despite being a very young mobile operating system, and as that happens, the number of impressive applications for it is rising too. Many of us have favorite Android apps, but we use them almost exclusively on smartphones or tablets. As we’ve covered before, you can also run Android apps on your desktop computer or laptop. BlueStacks App Player has been available for some time for Windows users who want to run Android apps on PCs. Now, BlueStacks App Player is out in an alpha version for Mac users.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The Vivaldi tablet is a project from the KDE development team aimed at introducing a tablet with open source Linux-based software with the KDE Plasma Active user interface.
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We have been overwhelmed with your support the past week after our announcement of Makr.io and the opening up of signups on joindiaspora.com. This week, we are excited to share with you some important Diaspora announcements.
When we started Diaspora two years ago, the project kicked off with amazing reception and support from people that believed in our ultimate goal: giving users ownership over their data. It’s a powerful idea, one that captured the imaginations of millions of people across the world. This vision has expanded and evolved over the past two years that we have been working on it as the project has grown.
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Some people may have been surprised when Twitter recently joined The Linux Foundation. You couldn’t tweet about your dinner, your latest game, or the newest political rumor without open-source software.
Chris Aniszczyk, open-source manager at Twitter, explained just how much Twitter relied on open source and Linux at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technology conference. “Twitter’s philosophy is to open-source almost all things. We take our software inspiration from Red Hat’s development philosophy: ‘default to open.””
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It’s back — and bigger and badder than ever! Our sixth annual Bossie Awards call out more than 100 open source products in seven categories
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One of the best benefits to open source software is how it can fill in the gaps when developing applications. At times it makes sense to look around and see if anyone else has already solved the problem you are looking at, especially if it is a common feature. Unfortunately, not all open source projects are built the same, and deciding to adopt someone else’s code into your project must be carefully considered. Here are seven steps to starting a successful long-term relationship with an open source project.
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For more than a decade, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. As we’ve noted, there is now even an Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). While companies such as Willow Garage have grabbed most of the headlines on the open source robotics front, a new one is generating buzz: Rethink Robotics. It’s the brainchild of noted roboticist Rodney Brooks.
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I’m a graduate student at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland. I got my BSc in Computing then was accepted for a PhD studentship in 2008 – I’m currently writing my thesis on biological metaphors for critical infrastructure networks. I also work remotely part-time for the open source consulting company Lanedo. I believe that open data and communication can have a massively positive impact on how the world connects, so a job programming open source software is a dream come true. I’m fascinated by coding (C, C++, Python, Ruby, Java), music (composition and consumption), physics, mathematics and more generally, learning how things work. FLOSS is a fantastic bridge for all of these things and has the additional benefit of bringing people the world over together. I also like functional programming languages, reading (particularly but not exclusively sci-fi and fantasy), gaming (Valve’s recent porting efforts are very hopeful), electronics, writing and drawing.
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It’s a problem as old as the microprocessor: How do you provide important information to users without getting in the way of their workflow? On most open source platforms, the answer to this conundrum currently lies in passive notification popups or bubbles. And while some interfaces get it right, others — especially GNOME Shell — could do a lot better. Here’s how.
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Events
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Earlier this week we published the full schedule for LinuxCon Europe and Embedded Linux Conference Europe. In many ways, I think the technical content for LinuxCon Europe may be the best collection of speakers we’ve ever had. I wonder if the location in Barcelona has anything to do with that….
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Australia’s premier open source conference, Linux.conf.au (LCA), will be without a host city after next year’s conference, which will be held in Canberra.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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By StatCounter’s count, Chrome passed Internet Explorer during the week of May 13th. StatCounter’s stats are based on a sample of 15 billion page views in the company’s network and they show that Chrome was gradually pulling away from IE. As Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter’s CEO wrote in a blog posting in July . “There is much greater competition now. Although IE still leads in countries such as the US and UK, on a worldwide basis Google’s Chrome overtook IE in May and maintained a narrow lead in June.”
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Mozilla
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Users have complained about the performance of Firefox for years and although each release promises better resource management, the complaints keep coming. Now a new feature will help users and developers pinpoint the reasons Firefox may not be as peppy as it should be.
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The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of the popular and free browser, Firefox. Firefox 15 comes with major changes that will make the browser more lightweight and prevent memory leaks.
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Following the release of Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of their email client: Thunderbird. Now along with E-mails, you will be able to chat with your online buddies right from the application. For the time being, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, IRC, Twitter and XMPP/Jabber are supported. You can read about the configuration instructions from here.
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Back in February, we reported on how Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm to become a serious player in the smartphone arena with its own open mobiile operating system. And, just recently, we reported on Techweek Europe’s posts of a series of screenshots, seen here, showing Mozilla’s mobile operating system with a look and feel that Mozilla claimed was non-representative of the final OS. What’s being called “Firefox OS” looks very compelling, and is even showing up for the Raspberry Pi.
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The Mozilla Foundation has been moving ahead quickly with its plans to become a big player in the smartphone business, and is retaining its focus on emerging markets, according to several recent update posts. And, photos of its “Firefox OS” have been appearing everywhere, including collected updates found here. Many people don’t have a firm grasp on Mozilla’s strategy, though, and recent comments from Mozilla’s CTO can clear any confusion up. Here are details.
As Mozilla jumps into the smartphone and mobile operating system arenas, its big partners are Qualcomm and Telefonica. As we’ve reported, these big telecom players can help Mozilla compete in emerging markets. Telefonica, for example, has a huge presence in Latin America.
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If everything goes as planned, Mozilla will release an update for Firefox 14.0.1 that will bring the version of the Internet browser to 15.0. The stable version of the browser won’t be the only version that will receive an update in the coming days. Firefox’s extended released support version will be updated tomorrow as well, followed by updates for Firefox Beta on August 30, and Firefox Aurora on August 31 (you can check out the regularly updated Mozilla Firefox Release Schedule to find out about future Firefox releases).
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Even before the bits have dried on Firefox 15, Mozilla want to talk about Firefox 16. One of its big “innovations” is a command line for debugging but this isn’t your father’s command line – it’s all new and reinvented.
Firefox 16 is still in the beta channel, but you might want to check out its new developer feature – a command line. It doesn’t add much that is completely new, just a keyboard-oriented way of getting at the existing developer tools.
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SaaS
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To seasoned software standards expert Angel Diaz, today’s effort to create interoperability in the cloud is reminiscent of the mid-90s when HTTP emerged as a state-of-the-art technology. Every application server had to do that same function but there was no standard, he said. And so IBM helped create Apache web server software and the standard code for building web pages.
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In the past two weeks, many momentous announcements have arrived surrounding OpenStack, the open source cloud computing framework. As we reported, Rackspace, which has begun calling itself “the open cloud company,” announced the release of Rackspace Private Cloud software, built on OpenStack and designed for companies that want to install, test and run a multi-node OpenStack-based private cloud environment. That news, of course, immediately followed Red Hat’s announcement of its upcoming OpenStack-based cloud platform, already available in a preview edition. And now, as it releases a significant update to Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical is also doubling down on its OpenStack focus.
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It’s official: OpenStack, the open source cloud platform, has formed an independent entity, the OpenStack Foundation, to promote the project and open source cloud computing more generally. Here’s the scoop, and what it means for the open source channel.
Founded in 2010, the OpenStack project has enjoyed broad support from a host of big names for some time. In addition to Rackspace Cloud and NASA, which launched the project, several major companies in the open source channel and beyond have worked closely with it for a while. The platform provides the main cloud computing solutions for the Ubuntu and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Linux distributions, and is endorsed by Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO), Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD), among other organizations.
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Upon the occasion of the launch of the OpenStack Foundation, which will put an enormous amount of backing behind the open source cloud computing platform, the OpenStack team at Red Hat is out with a post that discusses how the team will transform OpenStack into a meaningful product. As we’ve noted before, and as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports, Red Hat intends to do for OpenStack what it did for Linux. There are several reasons to believe that Red Hat can do just that, not the least of which is that Red Hat knows exactly how to provide world-class support for open source software.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has announced a new bug-fix release of the open-source office suite, LibreOffice. LibreOffice 3.6.1 is fixes some of the bugs and enhances stability of the application. LibreOffice 3.6 was released last month and this version includes some enhancements over that release.
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Adopting Linux as a platform has helped change Oracle over the past 15 years from a fragmented, decentralized behemoth to a sleek, consolidated service provider, said Senior VP and CIO Mark Sunday in Oracle’s LinuxCon keynote presentation Friday morning.
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I’m starting to realize it’s like pulling teeth to get Wall Street analysts to say something indiscriminately positive when discussing the prospects of database giant Oracle (ORCL).
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f you’re considering upgrading to LibreOffice 3.6, my advice — at least for the present — is DON’T. Or if you do, proceed with caution. (Instructions below.)
In the past, upgrades have been flawless, but I do still regularly backup my Profile folder. The wisdom of doing so was proved at the weekend when I upgraded from LO version 3.5 to 3.6. It all went swimmingly as usual, but when I can to use the new version I discovered some anomalies. Gone: 40+ macros I’ve built up over years of using OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. Gone: some basic settings such as Page Format (A4 went back to Letter) and Measurement Units (Millimetres went back to Inches).
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CMS
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Funding
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Ceph is an open-source storage subsystem that proponents say is more adaptable and less expensive than proprietary storage systems. Probably more to the point, it is also a competitor or alternative to the Swift storage system that is part of the OpenStack cloud platform. Ceph claims API compatibility with both Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The first ever professional grade GIMP Magazine will launch on September 5th this year.
Steve Czajka of GIMP Magazine tells Muktware, “GIMP Magazine features the amazing works created from this world wide community. Photography, digital arts, graphic arts, web design, tips & tricks, step by step tutorials, master classes, help desk questions, product reviews and so much more are showcased and explored in this quarterly publication. This publication is available for free and is licensed Creative Commons CC-AT-SA 2.5.”
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GIMP is one of the most important applications for Linux users. It gives them some of the capabilities found in other popular image manipulation programs without the expense. Well, a group of enthusiasts have banded together to produce a new magazine just for GIMP users. GIMP Magazine “features the amazing works created from an enormous community from all over the world estimated at around 8-10 million people.”
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Software freedom activist Richard Stallman, speaking at IIT-M, argued that non-free software created a system of “digital colonisation” and applauded the states that have introduced GNU/Linux operating systems in their schools. He declared, “More Indian states should open their windows to free software. It is safer and cheaper than available alternatives.”
I was impressed. When a Linux-lover offered to change the OS on my desktop to Ubuntu (Linux), I nodded. I was thrilled this would let me modify and personalise programmes on my PC. It was a 160-GB version of 12.04 LTS (long-term-support for five years) and free, free!
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Join the FSF and friends on Friday September 21st, from 2pm to 5pm EDT (18:00 to 21:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.
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GCC 4.7.2 has been released with fixes for regressions and serious bugs on GCC 4.7.
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Public Services/Government
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A day after the Federal elections were over, Belgium government has open-sourced the code used for voting machines. The move is, however not for sharing and reuse, but for showing that the machines were not fraudulent.
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Licensing
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Over the past several years, Creative Commons has increasingly recommended free culture licenses over non-free ones. Now that the drafting process for version 4.0 of their license set is in full gear, this is a “a once-in-a-decade-or-more opportunity” to deprecate the proprietary NonCommercial and NoDerivatives clauses. This is the best chance we have to dramatically shift the direction of Creative Commons to be fully aligned with the definition of free cultural works by preventing the inheritance of these proprietary clauses in CC 4.0′s final release.
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As I’ve written about before, I am always amazed when suddenly there is widespread interest in, excitement over, and focus on some particular GPL violation. I’ve spent most of my adult life working on copyleft compliance issues, so perhaps I’ve got an overly unique perspective. It’s just that I’ve seen lots of GPL violations every single day since the late 1990s. Even now, copyleft compliance remains a regular part of my monthly work. Even though it’s now only one task among many that I work on every day, I’m still never surprised nor shocked by some violation.
When some GPL violation suddenly becomes a “big story”, it reminds me of celebrity divorces. There are, of course, every single day, hundreds (maybe even thousands) of couples facing the conclusion that their marriage has ended. It’s a tragedy for their families, and they’ll spend years recovering. The divorce impacts everyone they know: both their families, and all their friends, too. Everyone’s life who touches the couple is impacted in some way or other.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Source is everywhere. When fossils fuels are depleting fast and humanity is worrying about how to supply power to the next generations, Zenman Energy is building a solar steam engine that will be affordable to the masses and also cost fraction of current photovoltaic solutions. On the top of it, it will be open-source.
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Scientists celebrated a breakthrough in their understanding of the human genome this month – the results of a large collaborative project driven by big data and built with Linux.
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Open Access/Content
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Many universities, including U.C Berkeley and M.IT. have been involved in e-learning for a long time, and, not long ago, M.I.T. and Harvard teamed up to deliver online learning to millions of people around the world, through their new edX initiative. Not to be outdone, Stanford University is going to offer 16 courses and two new, interactive e-learning platforms this fall. Here are details.
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Programming
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The abundance of you that have contacted me regarding my offer to teach you C is heart warming and clear evidence of GNOMEs future potential.
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Gnome University Project (GU) is an effort by Christian Hergert to push people in Gnome developing. GU is all about C and Gnome technologies, but it also a nice way to start learning C programming within a big scale project.
GU is still on early stages and it is a work in progress but there is already a repository with some beginner chapters.
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Health/Nutrition
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The drought that descended on the United States this summer will translate into higher prices for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The inevitability of this scenario introduces an old question that has become new: When weather strikes, what can curb food inflation?
Recent suggestions cover a wide range of complicated approaches, from GPS-guided drip irrigation techniques to genetically engineered crops and from new federal biofuel standards to new farm insurance programs to new commodity-markets regulations. How ironic that the oldest agricultural technology of them all may provide the simplest and most timely solution.
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Finance
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A group of shareholders has filed a lawsuit against health insurer Amerigroup Corp. and its adviser, Goldman Sachs & Co., alleging that the company eschewed more lucrative offers from other companies before agreeing to be acquired by WellPoint Inc. for $4.5 billion.
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This book is about corporate crime – although that phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in its 288 pages.
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Unfortunately, corruption is so endemic on Wall Street that Goldman Sachs really does not seem out of place. The truth is that a lot of the things that are said about Goldman could also be said about JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley.
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The close relationship between Wall Street and Washington belies their 200 mile separation and theoretically differing goals.
By spending money on campaigns and lobbyists, The financial industry has managed to give itself something of a voice in the halls of Congress, regulators’ offices and even the White House. Of the top ten firms with employees donating to Romney’s campaign, eight are big banks, according to Federal Election data cited by Bloomberg. In addition, Wall Street spent more than $100 million last year on lobbying while the provisions for the Dodd-Frank financial reform law were being finalized, according to The New York Times.
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One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.
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Back in the first quarter of this year, SFW covered Goldman Sachs’ ill-fated sojourn into the world of Islamic bonds (sukuk). Goldman had planned on floating a $2 billion sukuk but the entire project was shot down by Shariah scholars.
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When central bankers talk about more quantitative easing to help spur markets, remember this. While millions around the world go hungry or pay more for food, the bankers are cashing on enormously on the crisis. Barclays is being named here but don’t forget that both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley also operate in this space.
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Copyrights
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09.22.12
Posted in News Roundup at 3:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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When Acer was ready to announce a new smartphone running Alibaba’s Aliyun operating system, Google responded with force. If it were to be released, Google would end its partnership with Acer, which uses Android for 90 percent of its smartphones.
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Animation and video editing in Linux can be treacherous territory. Anyone who has tried working in these media probably has experienced the frustration of rendering a huge file for an hour only to see the program crash before the export is finished. A bevy of tools and applications for manipulating video exist for Linux, and some are more mature than others.
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Desktop
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For years now, there has been a lot of talk about the “fractured” Linux Desktop environment. It’s an easy argument to make, given the number of distros, desktop choices the user has and the number of apps that may perform the same function.
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Previously I preferred a “clean” install of Gnome, uncluttered with KDE dependencies and apps but recently, I’ve had a change of heart
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In 2007, thanks to netbooks and Vista, Linux briefly exploded onto the desktop. Microsoft soon realized they were losing the low-end laptop market and they brought XP back from the dead and practically gave it away to original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s. It worked. Linux’s popularity receded. In 2012, Microsoft is once more bringing out a dog of a desktop operating system, Windows 8, so desktop Linux will once more get a chance to shine… if it can.
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And here is where Torvalds disagrees. Torvalds wrote, “One of the core kernel rules has always been that we never ever break any external interfaces. That rule has been there since day one, although it’s gotten much more explicit only in the last few years. The fact that we break internal interfaces that are not visible to userland is totally irrelevant, and a total red herring.”
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The alpha version of what will become ROSA Desktop 2012 has been made available for download. It comes about a week later than planned, but that is no big deal. The most important thing is that it is here. Let the bug hunting begin!
For those reading about ROSA Desktop for the first time, it is a desktop Linux distribution published by ROSA Laboratory, a Linux solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia. ROSA Desktop is actually the end-user version of ROSA Marathon Enterprise, the desktop edition for businesses.
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds has poured scorn on claims made by the co-founder of the GNOME Desktop project, Miguel de Icaza, that he (Torvalds) was in any way to blame for the lack of development in Linux desktop initiatives.
De Icaza made the claim in his personal blog on August 29 when he wrote: “Linus, despite being a low-level kernel guy, set the tone for our community years ago when he dismissed binary compatibility for device drivers. The kernel people might have some valid reasons for it, and might have forced the industry to play by their rules, but the Desktop people did not have the power that the kernel people did. But we did keep the attitude.”
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Torvalds said that Gnomes were in total denial about what their problem really is and were blaming everybody except themselves.
De Icaza puffed that his involvement with Gnome stopped about five years ago, so it is unfair to the Gnome guys to attach my position to their project.
But he claimed that the fact that kernel guys ruled Linux did stuff up everything for the rest.
He said that Torvalds had a strong personality, and so do a lot of the people that surround him and like it or not, that influenced the attitudes of people.
“My take is that you are brilliant, clever and funny, and you can also be mean and harsh. Many people tried to imitate you, but they were neither brilliant, clever or funny. They just turn out to be mean and harsh and this attitude spread on the mailing lists,” he wrote.
He agreed that when it came to CORBA, both the KDE guys and GNOME had it wrong and the same applied to .NET.
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Server
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At LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technical conference, Jim Zemlin’s, the Foundation’s executive director said, “If you are going to master software development, you must master open source.”
Why is it important for businesses to master open source? Zemlin said it’s because “Software is the future of IT. Hardware is important to enable software, but what I mean that the value that end-users sees from technology increasingly comes from the software.”
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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When the “news” came out that Intel wouldn’t be supporting Linux on its new Atom CPU, Clover Trail, I didn’t buy it. This next-generation Intel Atom processor was always meant primarily for Windows 8; but with Intel’s x86 instruction set, it would also always support Android and Linux.
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Linus Torvalds rarely appears in public these days, and has little to say when he does.
“There’s nothing interesting about me,” Torvalds asked, when asked along with his fellow panelists to name something interesting about himself that no one knows. “I’m in a bathrobe reading email. I read email and answers and merge code written by others.”
His appearance at LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego yesterday was no different, but he did reveal a few interesting factoids after being questioned by the audience.
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The Linux kernel is the world’s largest collaborative development project. Almost 3,000 individual contributors work together to create and maintain an operating system kernel that works on everything from wristwatches and mobile phones to mainframes, along with all the peripherals imaginable for each platform. Linux creator Linus Torvalds sits at the top of a loose hierarchy of kernel maintainers and acts as final arbiter for what does or does not get included.
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It’s been a year since Kernel.org was hacked by intruders. Still no report publicly explaining what happened.
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I have been pondering the systemd situation for a while. My biggest concern has been that Debian and Ubuntu have not made decisions to adopt it as default, especially when Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mageia, and others have. Maybe Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 will include it as well. So it seems like on the init system level, two fragmented groups are emerging: those who use systemd and those who don’t. My second concern is the ability for a casual/intermediate user to transition from a systemd-using system to one that doesn’t use it.
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Not all Open Source foundations are created equal. Over the last 15 years that I’ve been actively engaged in open source activities I’ve seen more than my fair share of open source foundations go bust. I’ve also seen a few do really well.
Remember the OSDL?
The OSDL was the pre-cursor to the Linux Foundation. It was an organization that I personally never really liked and neither did Oracle. Back in 2006, Wim Coekaerts (then the Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle) told methat OSDL was all about business and Oracle knew how to deal with the Linux community on its own.
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Graphics Stack
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NVIDIA has released a new Linux graphics driver in the 304.xx series, which means the GeForce 6/7 series support is still there, while adding in some new improvements.
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The xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.2 driver was released today to take advantage of the new capabilities of X.Org Server 1.13.
Namely, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.2 hooks into the platform bus support, support for shared pixmaps with its EXA acceleration back-end, pixmap tracking/updating support, DRI2 offloading support, and the RandR provider/capabilities support. These features are what’s being done to work towards Linux support for GPU hot-plugging and NVIDIA Optimus.
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Applications
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If you’re learning a foreign language, there is always the need to go beyond the standard textbooks and listening materials. Resources like CDs,DVDs, and even movies in that particular language help you become a good listener and communicator. Also, these days, there are plenty of software available that help you learn better and faster. On Linux too, there are many such applications that can push you further in your linguistic endeavors without you having to pay a single penny. Here is a list of the best ones.
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I must admit I’m wading uncharted waters here. The fact I have some street credit with 3D design and rendering does not make me an expert on computer-aided design. Still, I probably have a decent sense of understanding how 2D/3D plans and draft should work.
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At a time when many developers are focused on cloud applications, Yorba’s sights remain fixed firmly on the desktop.
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Windows being the most popular operating system on the planet, some of its apps stand out in the popularity chart and Nero is one among them. And like many popular Windows programs, Nero is also not available for other platforms.
In this post we would be talking about free Nero alternatives to Nero for Ubuntu. We would cover all the good and free Ubuntu apps which lets you burn CDs / DVDs. The world of Ubuntu apps is huge and finding a good option for any of your needs may turn out to be a big task.
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Proprietary
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Movie streaming company Netflix have once again reiterated that have no plans to support Linux anytime soon.
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Instructionals/Technical
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One of my first experiences with network security was building firewalls for small offices and Internet cafés. Our boss at the time was adamant that we use open source, and directed us to OpenBSD and “pf”, their packet filtering firewall. It was a good call. OpenBSD proved to be rock solid, and pf was easy to configure and easy to maintain. Fast-forward a little over a decade and I’ve just finished installing a new pf-based firewall, this time as an entire FreeBSD distribution called pfSense.
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Games
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Aside from having an obscure name, making Escape From Booty Bay an interesting open-source game is that it’s built atop EFL, the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.
Escape From Booty Bay is built using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries and is described as ” a physics puzzle game in which players operate a cannon to stop pirates escaping from the prison. As players advance through the game levels, difficulty increases and new challenges are placed, like firing against moving targets.”
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There’s been a discussion that organically started within the forums concerning whether Linux is a “very weak system for gaming”, with a variety of reasons being expressed by a number of different Linux users. There’s now more than 100 comments on the topic, but do you think Linux can succeed as a first-rate gaming platform?
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In terms of stability and flexibility, Linux blew away its proprietary counterparts a long time ago. What it sorely lacks is developer interest, especially in the gaming department. But there are signs of a major revival. To the delight of Linux gaming enthusiasts, EA started publishing games in Ubuntu Software Center in May 2012. Valve on the other hand is taking things to the next level by actively developing a Linux port of their popular game Left 4 Dead 2. To celebrate the occasion, we have put together a collection of 20 most exciting games for Linux (not essentially released in 2012 itself and in no particular order). Hope you like it.
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Valve is expected to have the initial Steam Linux client available in the near future along with the Left 4 Dead 2 game in some form of beta, but a full-blown Linux push by Valve Software might not happen until around February.
Gabe Newell has publicly said yes to having Steam on Linux this year and that the Linux beta will be soon, but I am hearing now that their official Linux push might not be until February of 2013.
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Steam Greenlight is a new system that uses community votes in picking some of the next games to be released on Steam.
Developers post information, screenshots, and videos for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution. Steam Greenlight also helps developers get feedback from potential customers and start creating an active community around their game as early in the development process as they like.
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Valve is beginning to roll out the “Big Picture” mode today for their Steam game distribution client.
Big Picture is the new user-interface Valve’s targeting as a full-screen mode for running Steam on your television set and other devices with very large displays. This is also leading to their eventual foray as a Linux-based gaming hardware console.
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Isn’t it funny how the whole tech blog universe must light up with this perpetual cycle of unmitigated hype, hostility to lash out at anybody like me who calls “B.S.”, and then a month later: It never happened?
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GarageGames will make its flagship engine, Torque 3D, available for free with an open source license in a few weeks, as part of the company’s efforts to realign its goals.
The engine will be released to Github under the MIT free software license, offering Torque 3D 1.2′s complete source code and four starting templates. GarageGames’ Dave Wyand will lead open source development and oversee future updates.
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Linux gaming has acquired bigger dimensions lately, after the active involvement of well known commercial games developing studios and other independent efforts, but we should not forget to support the great selection of open source games that Gnome users can enjoy!
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Desktop Environments
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It’s benchmark season again and as I have raised some concerns about the results of the published benchmark, I was asked to properly explain my concerns without making it look like a rant. So this is what I try with this blog post.
Given the results of the published benchmark, I could go “Wooohooo, KWin’s the fastest!”, but instead I raise concerns. I don’t see that in the data and I hope nobody else sees that in the published data.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KDE Telepathy team is pleased to announce the fifth major release of the new KDE Instant Messaging suite. The immediately available 0.5 version brings polish in many places, better stability, 58 reported bugs fixed and some nice new features too, making the instant messaging experience in KDE Workspaces more pleasant and enjoyable. Special attention was given to the log viewer, which received improvements galore.
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Indeed, in spite of the disbelief, people do realize that it is up to them to make things happen, that it is unrealistic to wait for it to magically occur at the hands of others and so they dig in and get it done, thankfully often with great joy. (Most of us working on Free software love what we do.)
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The Randa meetings have hosted discussions on KDE’s libraries, Plasma, multimedia, messaging and more.
These discussions resulted in significant decisions being made that were unlikely to be achieved with the quality and quickness experienced at such a meeting. Those decisions translated into improvements in our software … a lot of improvements. This time around the topics in focus are education, accessibility, multimedia and the Plasma Workspaces. Each of these four topics has a group of committed developers and contributors coming to Randa to work on them. Yes, it’s four developer sprints in one!
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21 year old twins from Greece are two of the dedicated people headed for Randa, Switzerland to work on KDE software. Giorgos and Antonis Tsiapaliokas are working on Plasmate, the KDE Software Development Kit for Plasma Workspaces. Giorgos wrote about his KDE background and what is motivating him to be part of the intensive coding in Randa.
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The hosting proposal needs a strong team of local volunteers who have an eye for detail that is able to organize and host our annual community summit.
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Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform.
These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.9 series. 4.9.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.9 series and are recommended for everyone running 4.9.0 or earlier versions. The release only contains bugfixes and translation updates so it is a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.
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Truth to be told, I’m writing this article something like three, three and a half months after my original Kubuntu Pangolin rather lukewarm review, but to be in line with the same take on SUSE, which took place 60 days after the initial piece, the title here was chosen as it is, just slightly misleading. Anyhow, it’s been a while since I first installed the latest Long Term Release version of Ubuntu, the one adorned with the KDE desktop. Overall, I was somewhat disappointed by the spring edition, as it showed a definite neglect when compared to its sweet big brother. In a way, it got the attention you reserve for bastard children, in a medieval setting, of course. Today, everyone loves their children equally, right.
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GNOME Desktop
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With Gnome 3.6 still being on beta (3.5.90), the discussions about the features of the upcoming 3.8 have already begun. It is not surprising that the first feature that is under examination is Fallback Mode.
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Yeap it is official by FSF Free Software Definition. Fedora isn’t free software. Linux (kernel) isn’t free software. Firefox isn’t Free Software. Pretty much there isn’t Free Software (FS), but we can baptize things by occasion as FS.
Trisquel according to FSF is one of the nine distributions that they meet the FSF’s strict guidelines by completely eschewing proprietary components.
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Few days ago I installed Gnome Shell 3.5.91 in my Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal beta setup. and I’ve a mixed feeling about the new version of Gnome Shell, which is going to be called as Gnome Shell 3.6.
This new version introduces many changes and improvements and is definitely worth an upgrade. So I’m sharing my feelings about this version of Gnome Shell on Ubuntu. Note that Ubuntu 12.10 is still in beta and so is Gnome Shell. Though there shouldn’t be any visible changes since feature freeze and UI freeze is already over.
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Gnome 3.6 beta has been out for a while, but not available for testing without compiling the software, so I was pleased to see that a live image is available- basically running on an alpha release of Fedora 18.
I was familiar with what was coming from a post at As far as I know. There are descriptions of changes with screenshots there, so I’ll just add a few personal comments.
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Even if GNOME 3.6 has not yet been released, the GNOME developers published some of the features that will be implemented in the next major release of the desktop environment, GNOME 3.8.
According to the GNOME developers, it looks like GNOME 3.8 will fix or even drop the Fallback Mode, because it has become less and less useful and because it does not work as it should. More details can be found here.
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Here’s a quick interview with Constantine Apostolou who is the creator and maintainer of the Cinux Linux distribution. Creating an operating system from scratch has its difficulties, but also its good parts. Constantine explains this process and gives us more details about his own baby – Cinux!
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The start of the month has seen the latest release, 7.2, of Linux From Scratch (LFS). The new edition of the guide that shows users how to create their own Linux system from the source code is now based on a toolchain that uses glibc (GNU C Library) 2.16.0 and GCC (GNU compiler collection) 4.7.1. There are, in all, 26 other components that have had their instructions in the DIY Linux guide updated, including Linux 3.5.2, Kmod 9, Perl 5.16.1 and, Udev 188 (extracted from systemd).
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Just a few days ago I wrote about Edubuntu, the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution targeted to the “market” of teachers, students, pupils and everyone in the industry of education.
You can install this operating system on a Linux Desktop or Laptop, which you bought for your child or yourself.
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A huge factor in this project’s early success is its ability to maintain state-of-the-art Linux components without compromising on the Gnome 2 user experience. SolusOS’s development team has molded a classic Gnome 2 menu using Gnome version 3.4.2 with no new user interface.
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Once again I’ve compiled some charts to show what the major, full desktop distributions look like while running on limited hardware.
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New Releases
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Pat called another round of testing due to changes and more bug fixes towards a stable Slackware 14.0 release by announcing RC4. While some may be disappointed due to delay to the release, but they must understand that Patrick has it’s own standard when talking about stability and security in Slackware. He never prefer to have early release when he thinks it’s not ready yet. So, please test this release and make sure all the major bugs has been resolved.
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Slackware is bound to be about ready, Patrick’s on his fifth release candidate for Pete’s sake. Fortunately, his steganographical message in the latest changelog said, “Really, this time it is not a drill! Everything is in place and ready to release at this point.”
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A shiny new GeeXboX release has arrived! GeeXboX 3.0 is a major upgrade that integrates XBMC 11 “Eden” and adds the long-requested PVR functionality. This means you can finally use GeeXboX to watch and record live TV too! In addition to our usual x86 ISOs, this release is also available for several embedded platforms, with working full HD video and graphics acceleration for most of them.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Katherine Noyes wrote her opinion about the new release of PCLinuxOS here. When I read it, I did not pay a lot of attention mainly because of one reason: I had installed PCLinuxOS 2011.6 in both my desktop and experimental laptop and I was very satisfied with its performance. Therefore, I thought, is it really necessary to bother downloading the PCLOS 2012.08 .iso, burning it to a DVD, and installing it if my computers are doing OK? After all, as a PCLOS newbie, I did not want to break a system that was working as expected.
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Mageia Foundation released the first Alpha version towards to Mageia 3 (March 2013) three days ago, with UsrMove! If I am not wrong Mageia is just the second popular distro (after Fedora) that migrates to UsrMove, and that shows that the people there, chancing the optimal solutions.
Speaking of popularity, Mageia’s market trend grows rapidly and by taking into consideration that Mageia 3 is a huge improvement from version 2, it won’t be long till Mageia will look Ubuntu in the eyes.
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It’s no mystery that Mageia depends on the conjunction of many contributors and many donors. Totally. Some provide the financial and technical means for the project – some provide their skills and time to make it go ahead.
So here’s a quick, mid-year, report of how we have used the money we received. Mostly – for building our technical infrastructure.
For 2012 alone, to this date with a budget of about 10k€:
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about 80% has been invested in our infrastructure; this means: domain names, certificates, hosting and most importantly, server hardware: in July and August, we purchased and installed 2 new, rather expensive servers in Marseille Lost-Oasis datacenter, to improve the distribution’s building and packaging;
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about 10% has been used for transportation, people to events or to go to the datacenter for maintenance operations;
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about 7% percent has been used for marketing materials.
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ROSA, previously known for ROSA Marathon 2012, a Mandriva fork with five-year support, has now released a test version of an enterprise Linux server distribution. According to the release announcement, the beta version of ROSA Enterprise Linux Server (RELS) “Helium” is based on Red Hat and Mandriva server solutions.
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Since its inception, Mandriva has been known for delivering solutions that are easy to use.
Since the beginning of 2012, many things have happened ; and very soon you will see the release of new products that help businesses with the tools they need for their infrastructure and their IT.
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Breaking news! Mandriva is not dead. Or maybe it was and came back to life, not as a zombie (Bernie Lomax) this time, but as a modest, yet persistent dog that simply refuses to give up the race.
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Red Hat Family
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In 2002, Linux was on its way to becoming a major business operating system, but it wasn’t there yet. Then, Red Hat dedicated itself to make Linux an enterprise operating system. Ten years later Red Hat was the first billion dollar pure play open-source company. Today, Red Hat announced a similar plan for the OpenStack cloud.
Just as with Linux, Red Hat knows there’s no way it can make OpenStack the de facto cloud software of choice for the enterprise by itself. In a blog posting, Red Hat’s OpenStack team wrote, “A huge community is contributing to OpenStack. More than 180 participating companies and 400 contributing developers have produced six software releases in just a little over two years. Some organizations will choose to leverage all that innovation directly by implementing, testing, patching and supporting community releases on their own.”
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Red Hat, Inc. is expanding its engineering headquarters at 413 Littleton Road from 75,000 square-feet to 175,000-square feet. The shell of the addition is expected to be completed by the end of December, according to project manager David Ferreira of the Gutierrez Company of Burlington. Gutierrez is overseeing the ongoing project.
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The current practice of public procurement of IT solutions is a barrier to the development of a healthy industry of open source service providers, says Jim Whitehurst, the Chief Executive Officer at Red Hat. He also says that public administrations and open source software are a natural fit, since this type of software allows them to share and reuse software solutions.
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Fedora
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The last time I tried to install and run the Cinnamon desktop on top of Fedora, I hit a snag and the review ended with a rather uninspiring screenshot of a failed loading of the desktop. This happened after using an external repository source for the Cinnamon installation.
Since, I’ve been mailed by lots of people, including the Fedora Community Chief Simian, as his very signature proclaims, and they all told me that Cinnamon is now available in the official repositories and that I should retest with this new source. Which is exactly what I did. I will not keep you in eternal suspense, so I’m going to tell you upfront. It worked this time. But what about my overall satisfaction? Ah, well, you will have to scroll down a bit for that. Fedora + Cinnamon, take two. Action.
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The Konqueror web browser has been replaced by Firefox, for example, and VLC has replaced other video players. This reduces the amount of time a new user needs to spend hunting down software packages and makes the environment feel more friendly. In addition, Kororaa comes with several third-party repositories enabled, allowing users to simply open their package manager and find the software they need, rather than manually searching the web for repositories, enabling them and then searching for the package. Kororaa’s approach takes the headache out of finding software, or at least most of it. The graphical front-ends for YUM are still quite slow, but at least having YumEx available in the default installation makes up for the waiting by having an attractive and flexible interface.
Packages and management of the same aside, Kororaa does a nice job of being a friendly desktop-oriented operating system. It’s cutting-edge, it is responsive and it comes with some great administrative utilities. The KDE edition provides a powerful, flexible desktop with a traditional layout and the distribution is easy to install. Despite some early problems I faced with updates and the boot loader, things got straightened out and Kororaa was, after that first day, a pleasant distribution to run. It’s modern, it comes with good software, a manual with a few helpful tips and the interface generally stays out of the way. If you’re a fan of Fedora and want to stay on the cutting edge without the hassles that upgrades and fresh installs bring, then Kororaa is a nice, friendly way to achieve that. It is essentially a ready-out-of-the-box desktop edition of Fedora and a welcome member of the Fedora/Red Hat ecosystem.
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It’s rather old news, but today it has been finally set as default—yes the wallpaper for Fedora 18 Spherical Cow release. It took so much time because I didn’t manage to update the package that sets the defaults in time before Alpha freeze.
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The Fedora project has postponed the release of the Fedora 18 alpha by a further week. The delay was caused by various problems with the Anaconda installer, which is being given a face lift that required major restructuring work in this version of the Linux distribution. A proposal to continue using the version of Anaconda that was used in version 17 of Fedora was recently dismissed by the Engineering Steering Committee.
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I think most people are aware of the Humble Bundle which have been releasing a range of cool and great games on Linux since they started up. The games though has usually tended to be distributed as a tarball and doesn’t automatically integrate itself into your Fedora system like you would like. Well thanks to the cool effort called Mumble RPMS you can now turn all those tarballs from the Humble Bundle into nice RPMS for Fedora. So a big thanks to the author of Muble RPMS for doing this work!
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When Sperical Cow hits the digital shelves sometime in late October or early November, users will have to get used to a new firewall management application. Sperical Cow is, of course the code-name for Fedora 18, the next stable release of Fedora.
On current versions of Fedora, the firewall management application is system-config-firewall, a static firewall application that requires a refresh of the firewall with any rule change. The new application will provide a dynamic system that will not require a refresh or reload of the firewall, even after a rule change.
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Debian Family
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Joerg Jaspert sent some bits from the FTP Team, announcing the ongoing sprint during which the team is working on optimising the current code behind the main archive, finalising a proposal for Debian Personal Package Archives (PPAs), and merging backports.debian.org into the main archive host. This year, participation in the Google Summer of Code initiative helped the team in implementing a true multi-archive capability, making it possible to merge separated parts of the Debian archive (like security and backports) into the main archive. Joerg also added a call for volunteers: if you are a Debian Developer and want to help one of the key teams of the Debian infrastructure, please consider joining them.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Running an alpha version of an operating system, Linux or otherwise, is quite a different experience. It means, for instance, that you are not allowed to complain when minor things have bugs or simply don’t work – it is all par for the course, after all this is alpha software. That doesn’t mean however that when you do run into problems that it doesn’t still suck.
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Ubuntu and Canonical have come a long way since their 7.04 Feisty Fawn release, which followed Microsoft’s Windows Vista. Back then, Canonical failed to capitalise on Vista’s universal rejection by its users. But it’s now 2012, and things are different. Does Ubuntu 12.04 have what it takes to position itself as a more usable alternative to Windows 8? We put both operating systems in front of 18 testers to find out…
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Most Linux people know that Google uses Linux on its desktops as well as its servers. Some know that Ubuntu Linux is Google’s desktop of choice and that it’s called Goobuntu. But almost no one outside of Google knew exactly what was in it or what roles Ubuntu Linux plays on Google’s campus, until now.
Today, August 29th , Thomas Bushnell, the tech lead of the group that manages and distributes Linux to Google’s corporate desktops unveiled Goobuntu from behind Google’s curtain at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technical conference, First things first, can you download Goobuntu to run it yourself? Well yes and no.
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Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions around. The next version, 12.10 aka Quantal Quetzal, has just reached beta phase. Here’s what looking to to be the new Ubuntu’s best features so far.
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The Ubuntu sponsor last week released an upgrade of its Landscape systems management platform that offers a bevy of new features including enhanced reporting capabilities for compliance management, roles-based access control, a robust API, bare metal provisioning capabilties and better integration with the Ubuntu 12.04 platform.
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At LinuxCon 2012, and CloudOpen, Canonical touted its pioneering work with OpenStack and said it intends to position its next platform – Ubuntu 12.10 in October — with Juju and Charm technologies as the Cloud for human beings, much the way it positions its current OS as Linux for human beings. Its five-month-old Ubuntu 12.04 was the first commercial distribution to incorporate OpenStack.
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Stephen Fry is more than just a a revered actor, writer and comedian: he’s also an Ubuntu user.
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The alternate installer, required when users want to configure cryptsetup, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) or software-based RAID arrays during installation, may disappear from Ubuntu as early as version 12.10. The idea is mooted in a proposal put forward by Steve Langasek, Engineering Manager at Canonical’s Ubuntu Foundation.
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Amazingly while Ubuntu is moving more and more towards Unity and Gnome 3, there are quite a few distro hugging the limelight with their remixed Gnome 2 offerings. Kiwi Linux is one such distro – it takes you back to the classic Gnome 2 days. I guess users of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will love Kiwi, 12.04 has changed a lot for many of them!
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Forget colourful foliage and dropping temperatures, nothing says autumn for Linux nerds like the arrival of an Ubuntu beta. This season includes twice the fun, with Canonical plotting not one, but two betas for the coming Quantal Quetzal, or Ubuntu 12.10. The first arrived on Thursday.
Quantal Quetzal comes hot on the heels of the 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release earlier this year and – at least for more conservative users – is unlikely to be a high priority upgrade. LTS editions of Ubuntu are delivered every two years and have extended support from Canonical.
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Olli Ries, Director of Technology at Canonical shared information about some new features in Ubuntu 12.10 that will help in generating affiliate revenue for Ubuntu project.
Music and Video Lenses, will have a “more suggestions” category that is added to search results obtained from the home dash. This will help users to find content available online in addition to what already resides on their device. All these results can be previewed from dash itself through new ‘Unity Previews’ feature available in Ubuntu 12.10.
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Flavours and Variants
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Where do you live? I don’t know the rules of your residence country, but Russia, where I was born and spent most of my life, has a rule: the 1st of September is the start of the school year. Even if this day falls on a weekend, like we have it in 2012, schoolchildren must have their great event, especially those who go to school for the first time in their lives.
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Today we review a fresh Linux distribution from France called Emmabuntüs. Their first major release of Emmabuntüs 2 1.01 is based on Xubuntu12.04. This distro was designed to facilitate the refurbishing of computers given to human help associations, especially Emmaüs communities (where the name comes from) and promote the discovering of Linux and GNU by beginners. The goal of this thousandth Linux distro is intended to be sleek, accessible, equitable.
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If your like me, no Linux distribution or desktop environment suites you just right. I always seem to have to work around something or with something that just doesn’t suit me.
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Cinnamon 1.6 (along with Muffin 1.1.0 and Nemo 1.0.1) was released yesterday. You can read the release announcement and an overview of the new features at: http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/?p=207
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A major deal will see a Sony factory in Wales crank out thousands of the Linux mini-computers, proving that not all low-cost electronics need be made in China.
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The Raspberry Pi finally saw a release on February 29 this year and is thought to have sold 200,000 units, with a million expected to ship before the year is over. That’s a lot of tiny PCs, but it’s also been an opportunity for owners to feedback any problems or tweaks they’d like made to the board.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has taken the feedback on board and today announced a revised design is being put into production. The new Raspberry Pi, known as revision 2.0 PCB, is expected to start shipping in the next few weeks. The only way you’ll be able to tell which version you have is when you receive it, hook it up, and type “cat/proc/cpuino” in a terminal. if the code that appears is 4, 5, or 6 then you have the new board, otherwise a 2 or 3 signifies the original board.
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Phones
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Android
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After the Raspberry Pi, the APC and Hackberry A10 are the latest entrants in the hugely popular line of ultra small motherboards designed to run any thing from the Android OS to trimmed down Linux distributions. But keep in mind that these are development boards, not mobos that you can buy and build a standard desktop computer from.
No wonder they are popular with tinkerers, developers and wannabe DIYers. No doubt that they will eventually go mainstream, but for now, these boards are a hacker’s delight. This article presents a casual comparison of the Android Personal Computer (APC) and the Hackberry A10.
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NASA is aiming to launch a line of small satellites called “PhoneSats” that are cheaper to make and easier to build than those it has produced in the past. To achieve this, engineers are using unmodified Android smartphones — in one prototype, HTC’s Nexus One, and in another, Samsung’s Nexus S — to perform many of a satellite’s key functions.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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This highly detailed review introduces Google’s first Android tablet: the Nexus 7, made by Asus. After briefly comparing the device’s features and specs to those of several other leading 7-inch tablets, we’ll examine the Nexus 7′s Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) user interface, and then demonstrate a selection of useful Android tools and apps for system management, communications, social networking, media streaming, entertainment, and productivity.
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I love my Nexus 7. It’s replaced my Apple iPad for daily use. But, at 7-inch display, people who want a full-sized tablet don’t like it as much as I do. For them, the new Amazon Kindle Fire HD with its 8.9-inch display, 16GBs of storage, and a price of only $299 may just hit their sweet spot
Don’t think for a minute that the Kindle Fire HD is just for home-users. True, it’s got lots of consumerish features such as FreeTime, so your kids won’t spend all day on the tablet; Dolby audio for music and movies; X-Ray for Movies, which will let you get film info from IMDB while you’re watching a film; and so on. That’s all nice, but it was the business features that caught my eye.
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The 9.4-inch Xperia Tablet S is Sony’s latest shot at an Android slate. “Every Android tablet has to be compared against the Nexus 7,” said ABI’s Jeff Orr. Like the Nexus 7, the Xperia Tablet S is based on the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. However, the Google tablet is priced at $200, while the Xperia Tablet S will be offered in three models starting at $400.
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The Democratic party has released a Ruby on Rails open-source program, Voter Registration that enables you to deploy a Web application that enables U.S. citizens to register to vote. There is also a version that you can simply embed on your site, which is branded for the Obama/Biden campaign. The open-source version is unbranded so there’s nothing on it that even a Tea Party member could object to.
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Over the years, I’ve heard (and I keep hearing) that you can’t do this or you can’t do that or you can’t do the other thing using Linux or using Open Source software. And guess what? Most of those things I’ll never do or rarely, if ever, need to do. As I’ve written in this space and elsewhere, I really don’t care what other people think or what they use their computers and devices for. None of that has any bearing on what I need and what to do.
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We wrap up our investigation of vector graphics editors with a look at Adobe’s Illustrator, along with a selection of more specialist applications, including Microsoft’s Visio and the free, open-source LibreOffice Draw.
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Melbourne is one of many cities around the globe that will mark Software Freedom Day next Sunday, September 15.
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Technology history is one of software platforms and control over those platforms. Generally, the more companies allowed to participate in a platform the more growth that platform can generate, because no one company can possess all the good ideas.
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LinuxCon
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s mobile operating system project used to be called Boot To Gecko, but a series of images have revealed a platform, now called Firefox OS, which promises to deliver speed and portability through the use of HTML5.
Firefox OS is a mobile ecosystem built entirely to Open Web standards. It will enable a revolutionary approach to smartphone software development, where every application can be written in HTML5. Mozilla’s European president Trsitan Nitot told TechWeekEurope that he expects to see hundreds of thousands of developers building apps for the new platform.
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SaaS
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The official debut of the independent OpenStack Foundation was welcomed by most as a big step forward to establishing an open cloud but the inclusion of two big league proprietary vendors, namely VMware and Cisco, has raised a few eyebrows.
As the OpenStack Foundation prepares to launch its most advanced open source cloud platform code-named “Folsom” within weeks, the organization held a coming-out day to celebrate its official independence, its ability to attract more than 180 companies and an excess of $10 million in funding and the acceptance of last-minute bigwig members Intel, NEC and VMware.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The first quarter/half of 2013 will be the most exciting period for Linux Desktop – ever(!?) so far. This has to do mostly because many major distros are going to drop XServer for the shake of Wayland.
While GTK3 port in Wayland is expected to be complete and stable by 3.8 around in March, some popular applications like Gimp, Libre Office, Firefox, VLC isn’t sure if they make it.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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We are proud to announce the release of GNU Health 1.6.3, the Free Health and Hospital Information System. This version brings major improvements in the hospital information system, both from the administrative and patient management. Here is a quick summary of the main changes…
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The United Nations International Institute for Global Health UNU-IIGH – have sucessfully delivered another GNU Health training, in their “Free Software Hospital Information System Development Workshop” .
The workshop was held during September 10-14th, at the the United Nations University facilities in Malaysia. There were delegates from Indonesia, Myanmar, Laos, Philippines, Cambodia, Tajikistan, Sudan, Kenya and Morrocco.
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Project Releases
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Licensing
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In the early days of commercial open source, misinformation was a major impediment to adoption. Many enterprises, for example, explicitly forbade usage of code released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). When asked about the justification for this prohibition, the most common response centered around difficult-to-articulate concerns about being compelled to open source code they did not wish to. The fear that this “viral” license would infect their private repositories was rampant.
The truth, as became obvious following the mainstream adoption of GPL-licensed projects like Linux and MySQL, is that this was never the risk it was perceived to be. Simple usage of these technologies does not trigger the reciprocal provisions of the license, those that require modifications to be distributed under the same terms as the original source code, i.e. the GPL. More to the point, even if it was the case that applications built on top of Linux or MySQL were regarded as modifications, enterprises would not be subject to the terms of the license because of the so-called ASP loophole.
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Programming
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Organising a conference is hard work. That’s one reason why there are as yet no formal bids to host the Australian national Linux conference in 2014.
And the one group said to be putting together a bid, a group from Perth, is looking for a professional body to take over the organising.
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Standards/Consortia
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The big news in the standards arena yesterday was a joint announcement by five of the standards setting organizations (SSOs) that have been most essential to the creation of the Internet and the Web: IEEE, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and Internet Society (the last three being closely affiliated entities).
Joint announcements by SSOs are rare, and the subject matter of this announcement was more so: each organization was joining in the endorsement of a set of five principles that they assert support a “new paradigm for standards” development.
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The BBC have recently written about a sample of PC’s in a study being pre-loaded with malware intentionally prior to buying them , so with the best will in the world on behalf of the consumer, you’ve lost before you have begun.
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Health/Nutrition
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A decade and a half after farmers began planting the first genetically engineered (GE) crops, the future is clear. The scientists who pioneered genetic engineering thought of themselves as environmentalists, creating products that could reduce pesticide use. Instead, they have simply perpetuated the same “pesticide treadmill” as their pesticide-peddling counterparts resulting in the application of a greater volume of ever more toxic pesticides.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Now that oil’s price revolution – a process that took ten years to complete – is self-evident, it is possible once again to start anew and ask: When will the next re-pricing phase begin?
Most of the structural changes that carried oil from the old equilibrium price of $25 to the new equilibrium price of $100 (average of Brent and WTIC) unfolded in the 2002-2008 period. During that time, both the difficult realities of geology and a paradigm shift in awareness worked their way into the market, as a new tranche of oil resources, entirely different in cost and structure than the old oil resources, came online. The mismatch between the old price and the emergent price was resolved incrementally at first, and finally by a super-spike in 2008.
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The future of New York’s water supplies and the health of its millions of citizens hang in the balance as Governor Andrew Cuomo decides whether to end the state’s moratorium on new wells to drill for “natural” gas through the controversial industrial process of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” Activists estimated that over two thousand concerned citizens joined the march in Albany Monday to try to persuade Cuomo not to lift the moratorium — statewide or in some counties — a decision expected to be announced some time after Labor Day.
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Concerned people from the U.S. and numerous other countries will join in a global campaign event Saturday to call for a ban of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” More than 150 events, on five continents, are planned for this weekend’s “Global Frackdown” — a day of action against fracking — coupled with the promotion of the expansion of clean, sustainable energy options.
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Finance
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The National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Business are working to make the anti-regulatory fervor their members share an issue in the last weeks of the campaign.
The chamber and the manufacturers group have taken out issue ads saying the expense to business in complying with federal regulations is killing job creation. NFIB local affiliates are conducting tours and news conferences to let small business owners present their personal stories.
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Despite the divide-and-conquer tricks of both the mainstream Left and the mainstream Right, Occupy and the Tea Party were originally protesting the exact same thing: the malignant, symbiotic relationship between big government and big corporations. Conservative and liberal protesters both railed against the unchecked power of the Federal Reserve.
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On Sept. 13, Harold Hamm, chairman and chief executive of Continental Resources, testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce about achieving energy independence. He said his company, an oil producer, could produce much more if federal policies didn’t hold it back. Among them is the tax system. Mr. Hamm said his company paid an effective tax rate of 38 percent.
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Since we seem destined to have a national debate on the topic of government freeloaders in the wake of the Romney fundraising video, it might be worth asking how we think about someone getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for sitting on a corporate board for which they did little obvious work. Erskine Bowles, a possible future Treasury Secretary, is of course the poster child for such people.
Mr. Bowles has earned millions of dollars sitting on corporate boards over the last decade. The stock prices of the companies on whose boards he sat have mostly plummeted. Since 2003 the Erskine Bowles stock index has lost more than one third of its value. By comparison, the S&P 500 has risen by more than 50 percent. If Mr. Bowles was trying to serve shareholders, he has not done a very good job.
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The entire backdrop to this transaction is problematic. An FHFA official “wondered whether Fannie Mae squeezed Bank of America hard enough on price considering the bank was benefiting by “getting this stuff off their books.”
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Asian stock markets rebounded Friday, led by gains in technology and oil companies, despite uncertainty about the fragile global economy.
Crude rose above $93, clawing back some of its recent large fall and helping to boost energy stocks.
Strong orders for Apple’s iPhone 5, which went on sale Friday starting in Asia, gave a general boost to sentiment in the technology sector.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Negotiations between the Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) failed to result in a contract before Sunday, September 9, 2012 at midnight, sparking the first teacher’s strike in Chicago in 25 years. The strike is now in its second day.
The last teacher walk-out in 1987 lasted 19 days. Many hope and expect that this strike will be short-lived, both sides of the negotiations say they are close to a compromise, but have yet to settle important issues such as how much teachers will pay for their health benefits and how teachers will be evaluated.
This final set of issues comes on top of a long series of demands made by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration which included longer work days, a longer school year, new ways of evaluating and rewarding teachers, and an expansion of non-union charter schools in the city. CTU leaders also cited concerns such as a lack of professional development opportunities, and the lack of air-conditioning in many sweltering classrooms. The union was pleased however to restore through negotiations some of the art, music, world language, technology, and physical education classes cut by the administration earlier.
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Manufacturers of flame retardant chemicals, an industry that got a boost from Big Tobacco’s shadow money decades ago, are being exposed to increased public scrutiny. In the fallout, a front group formed by the three biggest manufacturers, calling itself “Citizens for Fire Safety,” has been shuttered.
The Chicago Tribune published its “Playing with Fire” series in May 2012, catapulting highly toxic flame retardants — present in many household consumer products — into the national spotlight. In the process, it not only highlighted the work of a handful of chemists who’ve been fighting to ban the most toxic of these chemicals, but it also exposed the “deceptive tactics” of the industry’s main front group.
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Censorship
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An analysis of the orders issued by the Ministry of Communication & IT makes it difficult to discern the intentions of the authorities. The specific URLs sought to be blocked included the domains of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, BlogSpot, WordPress, Google Plus, Wikipedia, Times of India, Al Jazeera, FirstPost and other websites.
Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 provides the Central Government, the power to block access by the public of any information, to maintain public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offense amongst other things.
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We write to you as the consultation on parental controls closes. In recent years there have been two comprehensive reviews into the issue of child safety online, the Byron Review and the Bailey Review. They considered a wealth of academic expertise, parental concerns and technical input and both arrived at the same conclusion – parents are the best people to decide what their children can see.
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Due to some problems with their website, the European Commission have extended the deadline for submissions to the ‘notice and takedown’ consultation. This is actually pretty good news for anyone who has yet to submit a response – you still have until Tuesday 11th September to have your say. The Commission are asking for responses to a questionnaire.
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The European Commission is holding a consultation -ending on the 5th 11th of September- about “A clean and open Internet”. Citizen input is critically needed to ensure that freedom of expression is protected, against the attempts of many lobbies to impose draconian repressive procedures to censor online content.
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It’s been a while since I wrote an article for OpenBytes. So I’m to look at a subject which is all over the news at the moment, but in this case take a look at it from a slightly different perspective.
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Civil Rights
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Tonight at 7:45pm PST (4:45am CET), Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder and spokesperson of La Quadrature du Net will receive his 2012 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) at a ceremony in the Project One Gallery in San Francisco. The whole team of La Quadrature du Net thanks EFF and congratulates Jérémie.
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A photo published by the Mail Online, shows one of the two women who accused besieged Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange of “rape”, happily smiling with him at a party … two days after he allegedly “raped” her. This casts even further doubt on what is already a highly dubious story, as it seems very unlikely that a rape victim would voluntarily attend a party with her would-be “rapist” at all, much less be smiling about it for the camera.
Although the woman, known only as “Woman A”, has had her face obscured in the photo “for legal reasons”, The Mail reveals she’s 33 years old, which by a process of simple elimination means she must be Anna Ardin (who also goes by the pseudonym “Bernardin”), the 33 year-old militant feminist currently in hiding in the American-Israeli occupied West Bank, not her co-accuser, 28 year-old Sofia Wilén.
The basis for both women’s accusations is also highly dubious. In Ardin’s case her sole claim to “rape” is that Assange’s condom broke during sex, and Wilén’s complaint (which she only made under coercion from Ardin) is that he didn’t wear one at all, but she “couldn’t be bothered” telling him to put one on. Suffice it to say Sweden’s “rape” laws are quite bizarre, if they seriously want to extradite Assange on the basis of something as trivial as “condom incompetence”. And that’s assuming any of their claims are true at all, given that Wilén’s testimony was apparently “embellished” by the police, and Ardin found it necessary to subsequently delete SMS and Twitter messages to cover up her distinct lack of emotional trauma after supposedly being “raped”. In fact, quite why Sweden felt it necessary to issue a European Arrest Warrant to extradite Assange in the first place is a bit of a mystery, given that they had more than adequate opportunity to question him while he was in Sweden, but chose to let him go, then bluntly refused to question him in the UK later. This is by far the most suspicious “rape” case I’ve ever heard of.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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For some months now, there have been intense discussions on the threats raised by the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). In December, the 193 Member States of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations, will gather in Dubaï for this important conference aimed at amending the ITU’s founding treaty, the “International Telecommunication Regulations” (ITRs).
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Copyrights
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The reverberations from yesterday’s Supreme Court of Canada copyright decisions will be felt for years (good coverage of the decisions include posts from Mark Hayes, IP Osgoode, Barry Sookman, Howard Knopf, the Toronto Star, and the CBC). While much of the coverage has focused on the music downloading issue, the continued expansion of fair dealing is perhaps the most significant development.
I focused on the court’s expansive view of fair dealing in an earlier post, but I think it is worth digging a bit deeper to ask whether Canada has now effectively shifted from fair dealing to fair use. The Copyright Act obviously still speaks of fair dealing, but the expansion by the courts and the legislature may have effectively rendered it very close to fair use.
Under a fair use system (such as that found in the U.S. or Israel), the list of qualifying categories or purposes is illustrative rather than exhaustive. In other words, the statute identifies purposes that may qualify as fair use, but acknowledges that the courts may add new purposes as they see fit. The key to fair use therefore lies not in the purposes – virtually any copying can qualify – but rather in the analysis that follows over whether the particular use is fair. The flexibility of fair use has been lauded as one of its great benefits, opening the door to new innovation that politicians might not envision when drafting the law.
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The Internet Archive has just enriched the BitTorrent ecosystem with well over a million torrent files, and that’s just the start of “universal access to all knowledge.” The torrents link to almost a petabyte of data and all files are being seeded by the Archive’s servers. Founder Brewster Kahle told TorrentFreak that turning BitTorrent into a distributed preservation system for the Internet is the next step.
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