03.08.14
Posted in News Roundup at 1:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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AV Linux is a very particular distribution aimed at a very specific niche of users. First of all, this is an OS geared towards the 32-bit PAE processor, which is considerably older than the current ones. In theory, the distribution is capable of turning older PCs or even Mac OS systems into an Audio / Graphics / Video workstation appliance.
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You might have noticed that I used the term “different strokes for different folks” in the headline of this article. I think it sums up well the issue of choosing a desktop environment because there simply is no one desktop that will appeal to everyone, no matter how great it is or how many people like it.
Personally, I prefer classic desktop environments like Xfce because they simply meld well with how I like to work. I find using them to be much faster and more intuitive when I am multitasking or just moving around my desktop.
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Ever since I started using Linux I have always carried a copy of Puppy Linux on a pen drive. I have such a high regard for Puppy Linux that I have a page dedicated to it.
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I have to admit that I thought I was going to have a frustrating time with Simplicity because whilst trying 13.10 I came up with a number of issues and it just didn’t work for me.
This however is 14.1 and it works very very well and in fact I haven’t come across any issues of note except for the fact that the OnLive application hangs. (Probably due to my poor internet connection).
Simplicity is a worthy replacement for those of you using LXPup which is no longer being actively developed.
If you have a laptop with a failed hard drive sat in a corner gathering cobwebs then you can easily breathe new life into it by running Simplicity Linux on a USB drive.
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Getting Mageia 4 on the laptop was no big deal. In fact, I used the 64 bit version of the OS and everything worked, even the Japanese IME with iBus.
Then I tried to get PCLinuxOS and, unfortunately, had problems with the display. I need to see if I can get to correct the problem later.
The other OS that I installed to the Strata was OpenMandriva 2013. The only problem was the lack of Wifi connectivity… It was solved easily adding the appropriate packages.
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My first look at a BlankOn edition was BlankOn 8, which was back in August 2012 (see BlankOn 8 preview). So it’s been almost a year and a half between BlankOn 8 and 9. That’s plenty of time to make major improvements and fix whatever needs fixing on a desktop operating system.
The distribution uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment with a custom desktop shell called Manokwari. It looked good the first time I took it for a spin (on BlankOn 8), but I wasn’t too impressed with some aspects of it. But that was 18 months ago, maybe things are better on BlankOn 9.0, which is code-named Suroboyo.
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Gaming on Linux has been behind Windows for a long time. Fortunately with the release of Steam for Linux that gap is beginning to close and I can foresee a time whereby Linux gaming will be on at very least a par with Windows.
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It has been a while since I last wrote a review about Zorin OS. Time moves pretty fast and with other distributions making great strides, is there still a place for an operating system like Zorin which basically deploys a familiar looking desktop on top of Ubuntu.
It has been a couple of versions since the last review so it is a bit pointless for me to just write the differences between now and then, so instead I am going for the full review as if I had never seen it before.
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Yet another feature of Distrowatch is announcement for coming releases for Linux distributions. If you look at the list of distributions due to be released within next 3 months, which one is the most interesting for you? Which new release are you looking for most?
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Hi there, and welcome to another edition of Gamerheadlines’ top 5. Today’s topic will be lightweight Linux distributions. So, keep in mind that, while there are several amazing distros for higher-end computers, such as Ubuntu and Mint, these distros are for those of us with, shall we say… computers full of wisdom. A wisdom that can only be attained following years (and years) of experience and, unfortunately, age.
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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I won’t lie; I used to love Power Puff Girls back when I was a kid. Something about Bubbles made me adore her. Not to mention Mojo Jojo too. I’m sure at one point of time we all had spent a good amount of time trying to perfect our Mojo Jojo impressions. So, this piece of news is actually quite exciting. Power Puff Girls: Defenders of Townsville is a new game by Radian Games heading to Steam and also slated for a Linux release.
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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03.07.14
Posted in News Roundup at 12:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Privacy
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In the EU – US trade negotiations (TTIP / TAFTA) the US tabled a proposal that would prohibit to require local data storage. If the EU accepts this proposal, the EU would give away an instrument essential to protect privacy.
On 5 March 2014 the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament organised a meeting on the complex relationship between data protection, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the general context of EU-US relations after the Snowden revelations. (Stream available)
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Grumpy with Dropbox? Forget sueing the company, which is trying to keep you from your lawyers with its new Terms of Service document effective as of March 24th, 2014.
NSA
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SURVEILLANCE WHISTLEBLOWER Edward Snowden has responded to the European Parliament’s questions about PRISM and data privacy.
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The NSA whistleblower has given extensive evidence to an inquiry into the surveillance of European citizens, describing what he calls a “bazaar” of EU intelligence agencies allowing the U.S. to spy on pretty much everyone.
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But this zero-sum framework ignores the significant damage that the NSA’s practices have done to U.S. national security. In a global digital world, national security depends on many factors beyond surveillance capacities, and over-reliance on global data collection can create unintended security vulnerabilities.
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Sen. John Walsh, D-Mont., introduced his first bill Thursday, to restrict the ability of federal security agencies to secretly collect phone records and other personal data on U.S. citizens.
Walsh’s bill, titled the Civil Liberties Defense Act, also would require the National Security Agency to purge records of already collected data that don’t comply with standards established by the act.
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The NSA is forbidden to spy on American citizens. But the GCHQ is not so forbidden. So has the NSA farmed out its surveillance of Americans to GCHQ? The NSA would then be following the letter of the law, but, through its association with the GCHQ, would have immediate access to surveillance of Americans.
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The National Security Agency leaker will speak with Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union, about NSA’s spying techniques and “the ways in which technology can help to protect us from mass surveillance.” The event will take place Monday and be moderated by Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project (who is also a legal advisor for Snowden). Snowden will take audience questions.
Torture
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Earlier this week, we wrote about the accusations that the CIA was spying on Senate staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee as they were working on a massive $40 million 6,300 pages report condemning the CIA’s torture program. The DOJ is apparently already investigating if the CIA violated computer hacking laws in spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee computers. The issue revolved around a draft of an internal review by the CIA, which apparently corroborates many of the Senate report’s findings — but which the CIA did not hand over to the Senate. This internal report not only support’s the Senate report’s findings, but also shows that the CIA has been lying in response to questions about the terror program.
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“The Senate Intelligence Committee oversees the CIA, not the other way around. Since I joined the Committee, the CIA has refused to engage in good faith on the Committee’s study of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Instead, the CIA has consistently tried to cast doubt on the accuracy and quality of this report by publicly making false representations about what is and is not in it.
Militarism
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After successful testing last year, the Navy is preparing to deploy its first directed energy weapon to the fleet. When it puts to sea this summer, the afloat forward staging base ship USS Ponce will be equipped with the Navy’s Laser Weapon System (LaWS).
Drones
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The Pentagon has confirmed launching a drone strike against the Logar Province of Afghanistan today, hitting their allies in a case of mistaken identity. The strike kill five Afghan National Army soldiers, and wounded eight others.
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In order to frame last night’s Intelligence Squared U.S. Debate, moderator John Donvan invited Georgetown University constitutional law professor Nick Rosenkranz on stage to give the audience a jumpstart on their thinking as to why this event was distinct from the previous debate on drones. He explained that while the first debate looked at policy–which invariably brings politics into the equation–this argument, “The President Has the Constitutional Power to Target and Kill Americans,” focuses solely on the question of constitutionality.
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This past week, I had to write a paper on the psychological determinants of the United States’ response to the attacks on September 11, 2001. I clarify the year because if y’all never noticed, the Benghazi attacks happened on the same exact day ten years later … eerie. Like most political science papers I write, I dove headfirst into the topic and justified my watching of movies before bedtime because I chose ones that had to do with 9/11. First, it was United 93. Very bad choice. Quite similar to the night I came home from going out and thought “I’ll just watch a short rom com and fall asleep while it’s playing.” I chose Hotel Rwanda. Three hours later, I was alone in bed bawling my eyes out because why is the world such a horrible place?!
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In 2011, a so-called terrorist threat, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was targeted and successfully removed from the picture, much like many other covert operations led out by top American military forces. The only thing that made this different from the assassination of Osama bin Ladin was that Anwar al-Aulaqi was an American citizen, as was his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi, whose death was officially stated as a “mistake” by the United States government. There were outcries from journalists and social justice groups following the two separate incidents; what happened to innocent until proven guilty? The response of the government was that the reasons for assassinating these two men — well, really one boy and one man — were too dangerous to let the public in on. So basically, we should really just trust the military and let them kill whomever they want, regardless of citizenship. Because the government is always looking out for the people, right? Except when they unlawfully assassinate us … it’s a cycle of complete bullshit.
Ukraine
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The EU has just announced that it’s going to freeze the suspect assets of 18 Ukrainian politicians, including former president Viktor Yanukovych. This comes after Switzerland and Austria froze assets earlier in the week. Quite apart from the criticism that the EU’s delay gives plenty of time for Ukraine’s missing billions to be shifted further afield, there is a bigger problem here.
If there are concerns that this money is corrupt, why did any of the EU’s banks accept it in the first place? Banks are supposed to obey anti-money laundering laws that require them to check out their customers and their source of funds. Then they’re supposed to turn down money that has been earned through crime – including the sort of state looting that seems to have been happening in Ukraine. And governments are supposed to hold banks that fail to do all this to account.
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In recent days, the Crimean peninsula has been at the heart of what some have described as the greatest international crisis of the 21st century. But this is not the first time the region has been so critical to international affairs. Many educated people have at least heard of the great struggle known as the Crimean War (1853-56), although its causes and events remain mysterious to most non-specialists.
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While the Kremlin denied any involvement, Georgian officials accused Russia of being behind the attacks.
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Posted in Mandriva at 11:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Today is a good day in many senses: winter ended and OpenMandriva Lx 2014 Alpha2 is here!
To keep up to high standards we decided to move Beta to RC1 date, and have Alpha2 today, to deliver you new fun according to the promise. This change does not affect the final release date.
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Mageia has been one of my favorite projects and distributions since its inception, but Jesse Smith said today that the spell is broken for him. Smith had issues with his network connection upon first boot, but continued to have installation and updating of software issues. He complained of poor performance, missing packages, and a seriously annoying task switcher too. All in all, he wasn’t pleased. He concluded (in part)…
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the March 2014
issue. 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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Posted in GNU/Linux, Security at 10:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Shifted focus (diversion towards non-issues like the GnuTLS flaw) and what we really need to watch out for when it comes to surveillance on GNU/Linux users
Cryptology is a funny thing. It’s an instrument of control (through predictive information. espionage, blackmail and so on). That’s more or less the thesis of a popular book from Wikileaks folks, titled “Cypherpunks”. Held in the hands of ordinary citizens, cryptology gives citizens power. Abused in the hands of freelance thugs [1] or state-sanctioned thugs like the NSA, cryptology helps guard the thugs (secrecy) and expose citizens who are only ever ‘enjoying’ fake cryptology, such as Microsoft’s and RSA’s. Now that Apple is receiving horrible publicity for breaking cryptology around the same time Apple joined PRISM there is some dodgy attempt to divert attention towards GNU/Linux, even if GnuTLS flaws are already patched and GnuTLS is not so widely adopted, not to mention the fact that is not used for very sensitive transactions such as banking [2]. The Linux Foundation was also quick to rebut the FUD [3], stating that “some were quick to point out that Linux distributions were not vulnerable to this particular issue” (contrary to corporate media reports).
What remains much bigger an issue, other than weak passwords (human error), is closed-sourced and proprietary hardware that may or may not incorporate Linux [4], such as my Home Hub from BT (which is rumoured to have back doors, based on some British press). A lot of what we’ve learned from the NSA leaks is that secret deals and collusion with companies is what’s responsible for back doors, not something which is visible at source code level. It is also what makes Red Hat, an NSA partner, difficult to trust these days [1, 2, 3]. The NSA reportedly asked Torvalds for back doors in Linux [1, 2, 3, 4]. Social engineering, bribes from the CIA in exchange for access (as reported in mainstream media) and even cracking is how spies get their way. They need not rely on programmers’ errors. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Researchers from the University of Kent quizzed a total of 48 people who had been affected by CryptoLocker. Of the sample, 17 said they paid the ransom and 31 said they did not.
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It seems that it’s only been a few weeks since we all heard of a nasty certificate validation error in Apple’s software, a.k.a. the infamous “double goto fail” bug. While some were quick to point out that Linux distributions were not vulnerable to this particular issue, wiser heads cautioned that a similar bug could be potentially lurking in software used on Linux.
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Team Cymru, the US-based security outfit which published the report, said that the network of hacked routers is one of the biggest of its kind that has been discovered, with most of the hacked routers in Columbia, India, Italy, Thailand, and Vietnam.
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Posted in Microsoft, Windows at 10:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Windows XP is almost officially dead now, so rather than cling onto it (as parts of China reportedly do) one needs to move to GNU/Linux
Microsoft is leaving Windows to rot (even where there is a large userbase [1]), so we should too. Sometimes in my job people who are mentally dependent on Windows (fearful of change) try to cling onto Microsoft APIs [2], Windows applications, server protocols etc. without quite realising that they only make their life more difficult, especially if they try to rely on GNU/Linux for the rest (especially on the desktop, not just the server). The right thing to do right now is to find alternatives to Windows which are based on GNU/Linux [3], protecting freedom [4] and dodging incarceration that proprietary software so gleefully promotes [5].
Some people said that 2014 would be the year of GNU/Linux on the desktop and based on what I see at work this is actually very probable. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Windows XP is 13 years old and Microsoft has no obligation to continue supporting it — but failing to support it means that many of the most vulnerable or cash-strapped customers could end up playing host to an avalanche of malware or security exploits.
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If you were hoping to eventually be able to run Windows applications within Google’s Chrome OS environment via Wine, the possibilities of that working out well are very slim.
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Microsoft will soon no longer support Windows XP so current XP users will need to migrate to a newer version of Windows or possibly Linux. If they don’t migrate, they run the risk of serious security problems once Microsoft stops issuing updates for Windows XP.
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We need to protect the freedoms in which Linux was born and grew up.
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The OS is the core of your computing experience. There’s no point trying to run a fully legal setup if the base of it is illegal. Windows and Mac OS are the most known operating systems, however they aren’t free.
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Posted in Red Hat, Servers at 10:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another Red Hat move which puts citizens’ data in the hands of unaccountable spies and their corporate partners/accomplices
Amazon, which is a very special partner of the CIA* (we gave dozens of references before in order to highlight this), has already earned Ubuntu some tough words and a snub from the EFF, FSF, as well as many others (nongroups). For Red Hat to play buddies with Amazon makes little or no sense. Amazon not only does many disgusting things (to customers, staff, externalities) but it also pays Microsoft for GNU/Linux, including RHEL. Like with Azure (as we explained repeatedly before), putting any computational resource on Amazon ‘clouds’ is like handing it all over to the NSA (for surveillance, interception, interference, censorship, modification leading to framing, and so on). Red Hat is said to have joined some nonsense programme that involves AWS [1-4], marketed as “secure” and “federal”. Who is this secure from? The Federal government of the United States? Surely not, unless of course you happen to be the government itself. The whole thing sounds so dodgy and it won’t give Red Hat much credibility now that Red Hat’s relationship with the NSA [1, 2, 3] is debated in some circles (it was last mentioned in an article from Sam Varghese earlier this week).
Making things even worse, Red Hat makes an approach [5] towards something which resembles Mono and promotes Microsoft APIs. This is not a wise move, for reasons that we are going to deal with in the next post.
Red Hat’s CEO speaking of himself as a “great leader” (without saying so directly) in Red Hat’s self-serving Web site that’s now treated as a news site by Google News [6]. Some say that Red Hat is a one-of-a-kind [7], but if Red Hat leans towards the NSA, puts customers’ data on Microsoft-taxed and NSA-eavesdropped ‘clouds’, hires executive staff from Microsoft and even promotes/spreads .NET and Hyper-V (which provides an NSA back door into GNU/Linux guests through Windows hosts**), then maybe it’s better to promote alternatives to Red Hat as a flag bearer and GNU/Linux leader. Red Hat recently found itself in somewhat of a scandal involving OpenStack [8-10] while it also formed OpenStack partnerships [11-15]. Red Hat really can do and should do more to embrace and disseminate freedom, not cages like AWS. Red Hat’s middleware business is a good example of this [16,17] as business (as in revenue/sales [18], like IBM's) becomes the top priority, even when Red Hat makes public appearances [19,20].
Perhaps what we need now is more strength for community projects like Arch and Debian. They, unlike Red Hat, don’t share a bed with malicious companies that violate users’ rights. █
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* The CIA was, just earlier this week, found to be illegally spying on government officials that act as watchdogs.
** Proprietary virtualisation software is the issue here. VMware is not much better because it’s run by former Microsoft executives (Microsoft is the top NSA partner) and is owned by EMC, which also runs RSA, the NSA’s notorious back doors partner.
Related/contextual items from the news:
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If you’re a government worker and have been wanting to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux securely on your Amazon cloud, it’s your lucky day. The popular open-source operating system is finally available on Amazon Web Services.
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Uhuru was founded just over two years ago by veteran ex-Microsoft executives: former vice president Jawad Khaki and former general manager Jawaid Ekram. They are self-proclaimed experts in bringing Windows to Open Source PaaS.
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Over the last 25 years of my career—from serving as a partner at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), to my time at Delta Air Lines, to my current role as president and CEO of Red Hat—I’ve been exposed to my fair share of leaders. I’ve learned that leaders and leadership styles can vary greatly depending on the company culture, industry and size, but there’s one commonality I’ve noticed among all of them: to be effective, leaders must be respected.
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The bottom line, therefore, is that in order for the model promoted by Levine to succeed, it’s predicated on the existence of underlying projects that achieve the balance of benefits that I alluded to above. Without the right scope of opportunity, sufficient success in recruitment, and abundant skill in execution, there will be no more RedHats emerging from this new model than the last. But where this methodology is understood and followed, not only will such opportunities emerge, but they will do so with far greater predictability than in the past.
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There’s rarely a dull moment when looking through Linux newsfeeds. Today we find Jesse Smith has reviewed Chakra GNU/Linux 2014.02. LinuxInsider.com looks at why distributions gain popularity then disappear. And finally, The Register covers a bit of convention confusion between Red Hat and cloud newcomer Piston.
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Piston, an Openstack-in-a-box vendor[1] are a sponsor of the Red Hat[2] Summit this year. Last week they briefly ceased to be for no publicly stated reason, although it’s been sugggested that this was in response to Piston winning a contract that Red Hat was also bidding on. This situation didn’t last for long – Red Hat’s CTO tweeted that this was an error and that Red Hat would pay Piston’s sponsorship fee for them.
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Red Hat originally made a name for itself as the only U.S.-based public company exclusively focused on open source, as it has proved that its Linux-focused strategy could be very profitable. But the company’s future is increasingly being tied to cloud computing and OpenStack in particular. This week, Red Hat marks two years of collaborating with contributors and developers on key OpenStack.org projects “to bring OpenStack from a project to a product.”
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Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions announced that Alcatel-Lucent deployed Red Hat Enterprise GNU/Linux OpenStack platform based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), as the common platform for its Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) solution, CloudBand.
“Alcatel-Lucent specifically chose Red Hat Enterprise GNU/Linux OpenStack Platform for use in managing CloudBand Nodes, the turn-key, all-in-one compute, storage and network node system that interfaces with the CloudBand Management System, along with any other OpenStack-enabled nodes,” the company said.
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A key part of the overall solution is Alcatel-Lucent’s Cloudband technology which is the company’s NFV platform that provides the server, storage and networking infrastructure with the Cloudband Node. Cloudband also includes management and orchestration functionality to deploy and manage network functions deployed on the infrastructure.
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Red Hat’s new JBoss BPM Suite is in part the result of its 2012 acquisition of Polymita, noted 451 Research analyst Carl Lehmann. The addition of that technology and other new features brings Red Hat’s BPM offering on par with other BPM suites and “gives Red Hat some competitive differentiation in the market,” he said. “I think they did a pretty good job there.”
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That’s according to a Red Hat spokesperson who gave me some additional insight into a press conference that the Raleigh-based open source software company will hold on Tuesday at 11 a.m. to announce new products in middleware.
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Videos from the DevConf.cz conference that happened earlier this month in Brno, Czech Republic, are now available online from the Red Hat focused event.
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