10.01.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Finding a new job can be an overwhelming prospect in just about any industry today, but for those with Linux skills, the challenges are a little bit less daunting.
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What I would like to see is a sparkled, verbal, full screen application that teaches the child how that mouse works. “Hey, YOU DID IT” resounds when the child gets the task right. Or…”Not quite but close, let’s try that again”.
Tuxmath or Tuxtyping comes to mind in style and purpose. I’ve tried to contact the developers about this several times in the past two weeks but as of yet, there has been no response.
I don’t write software and I don’t have time to learn how to…not at this level. I am imploring those who have the skills to contact me and let’s talk this through…at least to see what can be done or if it can be done. Maybe it’s already out there and I missed it. If you need money to do this, I will find you a sponsor or if I can’t do that, I will take on side work to pay you what I can.
What I do know is that Linux can make a difference in the life of an Autistic child and those who care for her.
I’m simply asking for a few people to help make that difference.
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I have written a lot about using GNU/Linux in education where it is just about perfect at helping teachers, students and administrators create, find, modify and present information, the lifeblood of education. Today, I read about an engineer’s use of GNU/Linux for his work. Most of his work can be done with applications available from Debian GNU/Linux’s repository although he uses a few things running under Wine:
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Server
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Oracle is taking the fight to Unix market leader IBM with its eight-core SPARC T4 processor and systems with rack, blade, and clustered systems – a full data center press.
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Virtualization technology was initially embraced by large enterprises. These large IT shops had the resources to invest in the hardware, software, consulting, and training necessary to take advantage of virtualization technology. These early adopters paid the price in terms of high costs for virtualization software and early blade servers, and also in terms of dealing with the inevitable bugs that accompany any new technology. On the other hand, these early adopters also benefited significantly from the reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) which is made possible by virtualization. They saw their capital expense decrease due to reduced hardware purchases and they saw their operating costs shrink due to reduced costs for power, cooling, and maintenance.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linux 3.1 comes with all the components that are required for using the 3D acceleration features of various current GeForce graphics chips. The Intel graphics driver is still not using an important power saving mechanism by default. The kernel now supports the Creative Titanium HD.
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Two messages have been sent to the linux-kernel mailing list regarding the imminent return of (parts of) kernel.org.
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Graphics Stack
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David Airlie has announced new work on the xf86-video-modesetting driver, which aims to be a generic X.Org (DDX) driver that will take advantage of the generic parts of the Linux KMS (kernel mode-setting) APIs so that any GPU should be supported.
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Applications
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Cairo-Dock also known as Glx-Dock is a graphical user interface application launcher to quickly organize applications and files from docks and desklets and easily launch them.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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I spent about a month in my spare time reading the source code of Quake II. It was a wonderful learning experience since one major improvement in idTech3 engine was to unify Quake 1, Quake World and QuakeGL into one beautiful code architecture. The way modularity was achieved even though the C programming language doesn’t feature polymorphism was especially interesting.
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It’s time for a new performance comparison… It’s time for (perhaps) the most addictive soccer game in history… Ladies and Gentlemen.. Pro Evolution Soccer 2011!!!!
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Desktop Environments
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After a few weeks of getting grumpy with my KDE desktop at work, I thought I would investigate what other desktop environments are availbale for the version of Fedora that I am using (15 if anyone is keeping count). This particular install came with Gnome installed as well as KDE and ordinarily I would be ecstatic about this as Gnome had been my desktop of choice for a long time. However, the most recent version of Gnome has clearly been redesigned to accommodate a touch device and has lost all the “normal desktop” feel about it that a computer user would expect. Gnome used to be a complete breeze to use, have lots of good looking and useful tools (which to be fair, you can still use), and always had an air of familiarity about it. Now, you don’t get a proper “Start” style menu and have instead a page of applications under certain categories that looks more like the home screen of an iPod/Phone than a desktop. Coupled with my other general beefs with the change of interface and overall look and feel, Gnome had to go and I needed something to fill the gap. Step forward XFCE!
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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When I first got to know Qt, it was a cross platform tool. That was really the reason for me to start using Qt. It was a great cross platform tool. At the time, I was using a Tru64 based system with real X-terminals. You know, the ones where the screen really is a stupid terminal connected to the network. Tru64 meant a real Unix, as in non-Linux, setup alongside Alpha CPUs. Great for what the school wanted us to do, i.e. use Matlab and latex.
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Yesterday, September 29th 2011, it was published in the Dot, the article KDE España, an inspiring first year, wich summarizes KDE Spain activity after the agreement between that organization and KDE e.V. was signed.
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GNOME Desktop
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Version 3.2 of the GTK+ GUI library has been released. The new version brings several enhancements and improvements, including better CSS theming support, two new widgets (GtkLockButton and GtkOverlay) a refreshed file chooser and a new family of “GtkFontChooser” widgets. The most important changes, though, are still experimental: the support for HTML5 and the Wayland display server. Programs that use GTK+ 3.2 can run as web applications in HTML5-compliant browsers as this video shows:
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The internet is becoming pretty much everything. And This feature integrates Gnome to the web by providing support to access your web accounts like Gmail, hotmail natively right from your desktop. Through this feature you can access the web account’s email, calendar, chat right from your desktop after you login. This feature is made available to all distros which will run Gtk 3.0. You can use this feature in Ubuntu 11.10 from the control panel. This feature was developed by David Zeuthen. Check out the screencast and screenshot for more details.
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New Releases
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After 3 months of intensive work, we are very pleased to announce that our first update of DoudouLinux Gondwana, the version 1.1, is now out!
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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I’m a little late this cycle to move my laptop to the Fedora pre-release. (Note the web site doesn’t yet feature the Fedora 16 Beta — that should change next Monday around 10:00 US Eastern time.) I had tried some Live USBs along the way and they were generally looking great, but before now I hadn’t had the spare time to do the installation and test to make sure my various workflow bits were all working normally. Today I finally took the plunge.
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But the login dialog itself, part of GNOME 3.2, is also really swank! With smooth animation and fading, it now feels so much more polished from the very beginning of the signon process.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has now sounded the whistle for developers to walk through its doors and begin to more easily write applications for its Ubuntu Software Centre, by officially launching a portal – developer.ubuntu.com.
The effort is taking up the “app store” model launched by Apple and followed on by the Android community.
While the Ubuntu desktop distro has always had an uphill battle for market share against Windows and Mac OS X, the developer portal to the Ubuntu app store shows the community’s leadership gets it. Third-party developers are the key to strengthening platform, and both developer.ubuntu.com as well as the app store are “Open for Business” signs.
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Phones
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Nokia is reportedly working on a Linux-based operating system code-named Meltemi which is aimed at low-end phones. Sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal that the project was being led by Mary McDowell, Nokia’s executive vice president for mobile phones. Nokia has declined to comment on the matter.
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Android
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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According to a report Apple has slashed iPad orders by 25%, according to research report from JPMorgan Chase. There is no indication as to why Apple is cutting the orders of the iPad by such a huge percentage. There can be several possibilities — a) the iPad market has saturated. b) Tablets are not for everyone and Apple fans who wanted the new toy from Apple already got one and don’t see any need to upgrade to the newest one. c) Android has started to make serious dent in the iPad market. The figures of non-Apple tablets may be smaller but more and more users may be going for Android powered tablets instead of the iPad which is controlled by a China like regime.
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Amazon has finally set the tablet stage on fire with the launch of $199 Android tablet against Apple excessively expensive iPad tablets. Amazon has made the right move at the right time by offering a tablet with the perfect price. This is one tablet which is going to pull the ground from under the greedy Apple.
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In a Google Groups post, Nitobi software developer Brian Leroux announced that the developers behind PhoneGap have applied to contribute their open source mobile development framework to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The project has now been proposed to the Foundation for consideration and incubation as a new Apache project; however, at the time of writing, the proposal has yet to be posted.
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Mozilla
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SaaS
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Karmasphere™, a Big Data Intelligence company, today announced it has secured $6 million in a Series B round of funding, led by new investor Presidio Ventures. Also participating in the round are existing investors Hummer Winblad and US Venture Partners. Total investment in Karmasphere, since it was launched in 2010, is now $11 million.
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Databases
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Percona, Inc., the largest and oldest independent MySQL services vendor, today announced the release of Percona Server version 5.5.15. The new release enables users to save memory and allows them to simultaneously hold more types of data (such as large BLOB and TEXT types) in memory by removing the fixed-length limitation on the MySQL MEMORY storage engine. The new release is based on improvements designed for the world’s largest online auction company.
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Project Releases
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As expected, Twitter has released its Storm stream processing framework as open source. The distributed real-time computation system was originally developed by BackType, which was acquired by Twitter in July of this year.
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Public Services/Government
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The Innovationpark South Tyrol (TIS) in the autonomous province of Bolzano in Italy, is increasing its efforts to support innovation in local industry in using free and open source technologies. It recently made ‘Free software and open technologies’ one of its seven departments.
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Open source is a topic rising in importance for public administrations in the United Kingdom. Very recent examples of public administrations turning to this type of software include city and county councils, hospitals and government departments, and politicians increasingly recognise its importance.
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Programming
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Distributed version control changed free software development in ways we’re only now beginning to understand. I used SVK for years from the start, and it improved the way I work. (Yes, I committed code on airplanes in 2005. I’ve forked and patched projects I don’t have commit access on. I’ve done that for six years now.)
These days Git and friends have taken over from SVK, and that’s fine.
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I joined Geeknet as the Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge, and I am responsible to grow and extend our ecosystem. I am excited to bring in all my experience in the open source business and my understanding of open source communities to Sourceforge.
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The Ruby development team has issued the first release candidate for version 1.9.3 of its open source programming language. According to the developers, compared to the first preview from August, the RC1 for the next stable release doesn’t include a lot of changes as it primarily focuses on fixing bugs. Provided no serious problems are found, the team say that final version of Ruby 1.9.3 should arrive within two weeks.
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In answer to a direct question about whether his company was going to buy Yahoo at a forum at Stanford University in Silicon Valley this afternoon, Alibaba Chairman and CEO Jack Ma said: “We are very interested.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Copyrights
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Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore was busy on Twitter yesterday, pointing to many groups expressing support for Bill C-11, the new copyright bill. While he omitted pointing to releases from students (“anti-circumvention provisions will seriously undermine students’, teachers’ and the general public’s use of copyrighted works.”) and librarians (“legislation which does not include the right to bypass digital locks for non-infringing purposes is fundamentally flawed”), it is interesting to look at some of the organizations he did cite.
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ACTA
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It has been reported in global press this week that ACTA will be signed October 1 in Japan. http://goo.gl/nC0PL But that does not mean that ACTA actually goes into effect. Indeed, there seems a decent chance it will not go into effect anywhere.
ACTA Article 40 states that the “Agreement shall enter into force thirty days after the date of deposit of the sixth instrument of ratification, acceptance, or approval as between those Signatories that have deposited their respective instruments of ratification, acceptance, or approval.” Although six ratifications is a pretty low threshold for an agreement with 36 parties to the negotiation, it is far from clear that this agreement will get even that.
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The Honourable Ed Fast, Minister of International Trade and Minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway, today signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), an international agreement aimed at combatting the spread of trade in counterfeit and pirated goods. In the June 2011 Speech from the Throne, the Government of Canada committed to enforcing and defending intellectual property rights and helping balance the needs of creators and users to foster innovation- and knowledge-based prosperity.
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I asked myself, “Is this even LEGAL???” I still laugh to myself that such a thought entered my head, but it was justified. My previous experience was that if it was free it had to be a bootleg or that it just wasn’t any good because I never heard of anybody using it. Nevertheless, I tried several LiveCD’s before I made the attempt to install it on my own computer, I tried out Fedora, Debian, Freespire, and ultimately, Ubuntu. Everything I read about Ubuntu told me that that was the distro of choice for Linux newcomers, so I ran with it.
I ran an Ubuntu 8.10 LiveCD and surprisingly it was pretty easy to navigate through and even though it was different than the Windows I was using, a lot of its features functioned in a very familiar way. I was quite impressed and completely intrigued. Ubuntu came with my favorite internet browser, Firefox, installed by default. It had a movie player, a music player, it’s very own office suite, a bittorent client and a universal instant messenger client, right out of the box. I was one week away from the release of 9.04, so I waited and after release I downloaded and installed it to my computer. I never looked back again. I was “sold” on this free Linux.
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Desktop
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Canonical’s “Ubuntu Friendly” hardware-validation program, which officially debuts next month along with Ubuntu 11.10, should make life a little easier for people with computers that don’t get along so well with Linux. But what if your computer is designed from the ground up to run Linux flawlessly? I recently got a chance to speak with ZaReason CEO Cathy Malmrose, whose company has been shipping Linux PCs for years, about precisely that question. Here’s what she had to say.
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Windows 8 machines will require what’s known as “secure boot” which is marketed as a security feature but in reality it’s primary purpose is to prevents other operating systems from being booted on the machine.
On top of taking ownership of your hardware, Microsoft has decided to take Apple’s walled garden approach to apps.
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Kernel Space
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The Finnish Linux User Group FLUG has awarded Jukka Ehto, the IT chief of the city of Kankaanpää with the Linux Contributor of the Year Prize. Lehto managed a large virtualization and desktop project(1) in the city, using Red Hat’s virtualization technology. In the process, he shaved off about 50% of his budget and 10% of the average time to deploy a new workstation. The prize includes a 2000 euro award.
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In many ways (and for many years) I think that the most exciting new features are in user space.
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Graphics Stack
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AMD announced two days ago, September 28th, the immediate availability for download of the ADM Catalyst 11.9 video driver for Linux platforms.
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Applications
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hecking to see the structure and amount of contents on your hard drive is a pretty important capability. In fact, I just recently featured a program that does such a task for Windows. But the same program cannot be used on Linux (or other operating systems for that matter).
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Minus is a free service that lets you share files easily with your friends and family. Its goal is to make file sharing as simple as possible by allowing users to upload and share their files from anywhere, be it mobile, desktop, or web. Applications for this service are available across all platforms including Linux. Furthermore, Minus also works on popular browsers like Firefox and Chrome. Here’s a quick review of the Linux version of the application.
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VortexBox is turning heads with promises of an easy-to-use media server, but does this streamlined Fedora derivative pass muster?
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So, as usual, I’ve no wrote in this space for a long time, but today, as my daughter sleeps like a baby (10 months :P), I’ve got the time for some writings..
So since my last post, I’ve acquired a new 13″ laptop to replace the good old asus eee 701, I needed a small, fast and good pc for some of my engineering work.
Just in short lines the PC is an Acer Travelmate 8371, and Linux Mint Debian Edition runs very smooth…. only one thing does not work at all, and that is the fingerprint reader, which I don’t care at all.. One of the most important things for me in laptops is battery (6 hours) and suspend (all ACPI events works out of the box. Even the intel wireless card work without problems…So I’m very pleased with this little and robust machine…
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Stopmotion is a Linux program designed for creating stop-motion films. It’s available for most distributions and easily compilable for the rest. Stopmotion is simple in its design, and it allows you either to import a series of pre-taken photos or take live stop-action with a Webcam. I find the latter to be slightly easier, as you can see a ghost image of the last shot you took, making the slight changes you need easy to spot.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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All past and future Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle customers will have a nice, shiny copy of TRAUMA on their Humble Bundle download page. If you redeemed your bundle on Steam, TRAUMA should automatically be added to your library. (You may have to restart your Steam client for it to appear.)
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Well folks it’s that time…again and my addiction is getting ever stronger…
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Desktop Environments
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Kant – O from DeviantART has a designed a cool conky theme inspired by Windows 8 Metro UI.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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If for whatever reason you purposefully don’t play Minecraft, feel free to tune this post out and carry on with life. It is KDE related, promise!
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GNOME Desktop
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We all know Gnome, and similar GUIs, are there only as a fancy console multiplexer, but even so it’s useful to have widgets in your menus or dockbars to display useful data, like the release date of DNF (*). Gnome has a limited amount of applets from which you can choose, and most of them are crap or limited in their customization. You can always create your own widgets, but that’s a pain in the ass for lazy people like me. Fortunately we lazy people can now use something an order of magnitude more useful than widgets in Gnome : we can use console commands!
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GNOME Shell and Unity are the two new approaches towards creating the ultimate desktop experience by GNOME Foundation and Canonical respectively. Both approaches stirred up fair amount of controversies, with personalities like Linus Torvalds going so far as to call GNOME Shell an unholy mess. But things aren’t that bad, or are they? Let’s find out.
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I’ve been using KDE 4.7 for the past few months, since Gnome 3 and me really don’t get along.
I decide to take 3.2 for a spin on my Fedora 16 computer, and found it to be more of the same.
Network Manager is as incomplete as ever. Just add an advanced button, dammit! I hate having to type “nm-connection-editor” because the Network panel is half-baked for people who actually need to choose their IPs. KDE has no problems with this. The old (Good?) Gnome didn’t have a problem with this.
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I’m switching back to KDE 4.7.1, and will might try again in 6 months, but as the Magic 8-ball says… “Outlook not so good”.
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It appears that the GNOME developers worked hard to bring a new file manager to the upcoming GNOME 3.2 desktop environment, which will be released later tonight.
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There hasn’t been any public activities in the -Current tree. The last update committed was in September 6 and since then, there has been a lot of changes happening in the open source world. Some people might ask “Why wouldn’t Slackware development tree gets updated lately?”
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Recently I’ve been thinking about how Linux desktop distributions work, and how applications are deployed. I have some ideas for how this could work in a completely different way.
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Red Hat Family
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Open-source software provider Red Hat (RHT) had a quarterly earnings decline of 5%, followed by growth of 18%, 37%, 33% and 47%. Technically speaking, moving from deceleration to growth is not acceleration, but it is progress.
The Street expects earnings of 26 cents a share this quarter, which would be a 30% pop. To keep the acceleration going, Red Hat would have to beat by 4 cents. The company delivered those kind of beats in two of the past three quarters.
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Fedora
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As has been stated in previous blogs we have three types of unconfined processes on Fedora.
1. We have unconfined_domain() system processes. initrc_t, init_t, kernel_t, …
2. We have unconfined_domain() user processes. unconfined_t,
3. We have permissivedomains
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Jesse used Ubuntu Linux for the project. The computer he ran the monkeys on is a Core 2 Duo 2.66GHZ with 4 GB RAM running Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit. He used Hadoop, Amazon EC2 along with the world’s most popular Linux OS. He said that he created an Amazonian Map Monkeys.
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In this interview Daniel Bray (Lupine) of the Ubuntu Florida LoCo Team explains how he was able to use Ubuntu instead of Microsoft to complete his college degree. In an era when almost all schools in the United States require that its students use either Microsoft or Mac based technical solutions, Bray finds a way to exercise his freedom of choice and use Free and Open Source software to complete his degree.
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Jupiter is an applet designed for netbooks and laptops that you can use to switch between maximum and high performance and power saving mode, change the resolution and orientation, enable or disable the bluetooth, touchpad, WiFi and so on.
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These are the days where the release team is awake for 24 hour per day. Every issue that comes up on their radar has to be evaluated and checked if it warrants re-spinning all the CD images, re-doing all the testing, or if it should go into a stable release update after the release. It’s a challenging time, but things are looking quite good. (If you ignore the problem of developers just not sleeping.)
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A bunch of bug fixes and minor tweaks to Unity in Ubuntu 11.10 slid down the update pipe yesterday – but what exactly has changed?
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There look to be about 100 options which are divided into three main categories which are then divided into further subcategories:
Startup (Login Settings, Session Control)
Desktop (Compiz Settings, Desktop Icon Settings, GNOME Settings, Window Manager Settings)
System (Nautilus Settings, Power Manager Settings, Security Related, Workarounds)
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Flavours and Variants
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For some months I’ve been meaning to try out WattOS, an Ubuntu derivative that claims to do more than providing simple desktop theme changes and other high-level customizations. It seeks to provide a simple and fast desktop that’s also said to conserve more power and run better on older hardware, but is this actually the case? Here are benchmarks of WattOS R4 compared to the upstream Ubuntu 11.04 release from which it’s derived, and the numbers are quite revealing.
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Phones
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Android
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Philips has finally made their GoGear Connect PMP available for presale. It’s an Android-based device that looks like it could still be on Froyo, but we can’t say for sure. If you need something this size (3.2 inches) and just want a cheap device to play your content on, give it a look.
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While we already have plenty of upcoming Motorola smartphones on our radar, sometimes one still manages to sneak up on us, not spotted early-on via some blurrycam leaks. That’s the case with the Motorola i940, which just put in an unexpected FCC appearance, offering us a nice series of images of the handset.
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Samsung begun sending out press invitations to their next “Unpacked” event, slated for October 11th. Kicking off at the same time as CTIA, this is likely the day and event where we’ll get our first look at the next version of Android – Ice Cream Sandwich.
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It’s not often that we get to toss up a picture of a luxury car, but will jump at the chance as it relates to the latest rumored Motorola device. According to members of Howard Forums, the next slideout keyboarded device from Moto will be the DROID4 or 4G and is known internally as the “Maserati.” Sound familiar? I’m going to assume that this is the same device our Panda friend mentioned a few weeks back during his Nexus poem. Many of you caught his comment on it and starting looking for answers immediately.
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If you think Disney is just making cartoons and not interested in mobile technology, then you might be wrong. Believe it or not, Disney actually offers quite a few phones under their Disney Mobile network and today they have added two new Android powered devices. The announced phones are known as DM011SH and DM010SH.
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Dell has officially announced its third Android smartphone (after the Mini 3i / Aero and the Dell Venue). The new handset has been unveiled in Japan, where it will be available via Softbank, under the name of Dell Streak Pro 101DL.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Fruity cargo cult Apple has admitted that its patent trolling antics are because the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is better than anything it could come up with.
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Yep, the ebooks have DRM and ‘lending’ these books out is nearly impossible…
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Motorola‘s 7-inch Android tablet is set to arrive in November, while the company’s second attempt at the 10.1-inch segment will follow on in December, according to Chinese reports. Compal is responsible for the design of the smaller slate, the Commercial Times claims, while Motorola has been developing its larger XOOM-replacement in-house; neither is expected to launch running Ice Cream Sandwich, according to the tipsters.
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Toshiba’s Digital Products Division (DPD), a division of Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc., today announced the addition of the Thrive™ 7” Tablet to its expanding line-up of consumer tablet devices. Featuring a brilliant hi-resolution seven-inch diagonal touch display1, the Thrive 7” Tablet offers a complete tablet experience with entertainment-optimized features in an incredibly portable design that weighs under a pound2 and fits comfortably in the palm of your hand.
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We do love getting our hands on some “in the wild” shots of unknown products and this time we’re showing you the upcoming Huawei 4G tablet destined for T-Mobile. Our very own ninja guess is that we’re likely to see a formal introduction during next months CTIA event. At that point we’ll learn the
Huawei tablet has a 7″ IPS WVGA 1280 x 800 screen, 1.2GHz dual-core processor on top of Android 3.2 Honeycomb, Flash 10.3, 16GB of internal memory, dual-cameras and a 4100mAh battery.
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Kobo had a minor booboo today. Their new Android tablet, the 7″ Kobo Vox, has shown up on Futureshop.ca with a spec sheet, ship date, and a retail of $250 CAD.
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All of this, of course was ballyhooed as the next chapter for Android too early. People far and wide predicted that Android tablets would immediately challenge Apple’s iPad for market share, which isn’t the case. But the Kindle isn’t the iPad. It’s its own breed of mobile hardware device, and Amazon is making a big bet on Android with new generation Kindles such as the Fire.
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Amazon’s Kindle Fire may not be an iPad killer or offer cutting-edge features, but it could prove to be a big headache for Android tablet and e-reader vendors, analysts agree. Meanwhile, others debate whether the Fire’s customized UI represents a true fork of Android, and argue over whether its cloud-oriented Silk browser is a breakthrough in mobile multimedia or an unprecedented invasion of privacy.
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A prominent figure from Melbourne’s free and open source software community has complained to the Australian Labor Party that attempts to legalise the offshore processing of asylum-seekers are against party rules.
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The Apache Foundation is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the arrival of the full text search engine Lucene at the foundation. In 2001, Lucene entered the ASF as a sub-project of the Apache Jakarta project. Since 1997, it was available to download on Sourceforge, but in 2001 “Apache provided Lucene a home where it could build a solid community”, said Lucene’s creator and ASF Chairman Doug Cutting. Since then, said Cutting, Lucene’s usefulness to a wide range of applications and deep improvements have led to it powering “smart search and indexing for eCommerce, financial services, business intelligence, travel, social networking, libraries, publishing, government, and defense solutions.”
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s new Firefox 7 release presents a new, snappy Web browsing experience for users and brings along a host of new tools for developers.
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As part of its rolling wave of updates, Mozilla today released a new beta version of Firefox that gives some new options for searching, controlling tabs, and managing add-ons.
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At a recent gathering of Mozilla folks I gave an informal talk on the early history of Mozilla. It’s unpolished, it’s low production value (one mike in a big room) and it’s clearly a talk to a live audience that was filmed. Ideally we’d do some editing, add some text for the questions that can’t be heard and maybe try to improve the oddly abrupt ending.
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CMS
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When it became clear eMusic’s old, custom-built content management system was becoming a drag on the company, the search was on for a replacement. WordPress offered an open source tool with a passionate developer community. The CMS switch worked out well for eMusic in the end, but it wasn’t always easy. Here are some lessons learned in the process.
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Education
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Schools and universities in Romania and the Republic of Moldova want to increase their use of GNU/Linux based computers and are also turning to Moodle, an open source e-learning environment, following presentations and practical demonstrations in August and September.
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The open source summer school is organised by the Computer Science faculty from the Vasile Goldis Western University in Arad. The university hosted such summer school for six or seven years, first titled ‘Linux and virtual learning environment’ and in the past three years known as “Computer science at the castle’.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Free Software Foundation today announced the relaunch of The Free Software Directory. For years The Free Software Directory allowed users to search and browser for software that meets The Free Software Definition, which is basically what most think of as Open Source software, but an update was needed.
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Project Releases
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I’m pleased to announce that StatusNet 1.0.0 has just gone golden. We’ve released the 1.0.0 version for download, and it’s running now on all StatusNet cloud systems.
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PiTiVi Video Editor has just reached version 0.15 bringing in new features and fixes. This is last PiTiVi release based on traditional engine. PiTiVi 2.0 will be based on GES (GStreamer Editing Services) and will bring better performance and stability to this popular video editor.
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Standards/Consortia
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Last week, my university approved the use of open source software officially and adopted Open Document Format (ODF) as its standard. The TV news even covered the decision!
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We changed the world.
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The day has finally arrived. Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 has been approved. It is now an OASIS Standard.
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Some of you have noticed there is something buzzing among your Dutch friends. It has to do with education, Silverlight, open standards and being obese. I’ve been asked to write about it in English so you all can get on the same page as us, and sign a petition to show your support for our campaign to make the use of open standards in education mandatory.
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Health/Nutrition
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The Kaiser Family Foundation just released the findings of its annual survey of businesses to determine how much the cost of employer-sponsored health coverage has gone up. There were some unexpected findings.
One was that the average cost of annual premiums for family coverage is now more than $15,000. The 9 percent increase in the cost of health insurance over last year caught many people by surprise because it represented a bigger hike in premiums than in recent years.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. won dismissal of a lawsuit brought by Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg over losses on $37 million in collateralized debt obligations.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s board of directors has won the dismissal of a lawsuit seeking to recover billions of dollars of bonus payouts and other compensation awarded for 2009.
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With Europe on the verge of a financial meltdown and many of Wall Street’s biggest banks trading at or near their 52-week lows and at a fraction of their book value — take for instance, Goldman Sachs, which is trading at about 75 percent of its book value, staring down a rare quarterly loss, cutting compensation, and firing thousands of employees — is it possible that the turmoil in the global financial markets is finally accomplishing what regulators the world over have not been willing or able to do: force these financial beasts to rein in their excessive risk-taking and act more like the dull, boring utilities we need them to be for our own safety?
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A glance at the latest US employment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals sharp differences in unemployment rates by educational attainment: college degree or higher: 4.3%; associate degree or some college: 8.2%; high school graduates, no college: 9.6%; and no high school diploma: 14.3%. Moreover, while the overall unemployment rate remains over 9 percent, a recent McKinsey report found that employers are having trouble filling specific positions because they could not find applicants with the right skills. The report projects that if economic conditions improve, there will be a shortage of 1.5 million workers with college degrees by 2020, but a surplus of almost 6 million of workers with no high school degree. It also projects a continuing shortage of workers with technical and health care skills not necessarily requiring a college degree.
Just about every such study points to a similar trend: for the foreseeable future, the US economy will need better educated workers with specific skill requirements. Workers without a post-secondary education face a contracting set of job opportunities. Those with higher educational attainments will be in the best position to obtain good jobs with good pay.
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Darrell Issa is going postal. In the name of “Saving the Post Office,” the head of the House Government Oversight Committee is ready to knock off 200,000 jobs and put the U.S. Postal Service, founded in 1775, on the path to oblivion. President Obama’s rescue plan is only slightly better — 80,000 people might lose their jobs.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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October is fast approaching, with its annual deluge of pink ribbons and cause marketing campaigns that leverage emotions surrounding breast cancer to sell products. In past years, PRWatch has reported on questionable “pinkwashed” products like buckets of fried fast food, cringeworthy “I Heart Boobies” bracelets marketed to teenagers, and even a pink “breast cancer awareness” Smith and Wesson handgun.
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Privacy
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Thursday again already? We’ve created a monster, now haven’t we? Anyway, here we go with yet another Top 10 list.
You might’ve read the news that net neutrality rules are set to become law on November 20th. Of course, how “neutral” the net becomes depends on whether you’re connecting the old fashioned way, by a wire running into your house, or through the gee whiz magic of wireless service. The wireless providers get a break because evidently they aren’t charging enough already or something.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
09.30.11
Posted in News Roundup at 3:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Few vendors and few topics on the Linux Planet inspire as much vitriol as Microsoft. This past week, Microsoft managed to inspire new outrage, as details about its secure boot approach for Windows 8 were alleged to be a potential risk for Linux. It was also a week that saw a delay for Linux 3.1 as the kernel.org servers remained offline.
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Server
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Amazon has declared its Linux Amazon Machine Image (AMI) production ready. With the update, Amazon is introducing a security center to track security and privacy issues, providing 50 new packages for the distribution and adding access to Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL).
The Linux AMI provides a Linux image for use on Amazon EC2, so that users have a way to get started with EC2 without having to create their own image or use one of the paid images from Red Hat or SUSE.
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A total of 50 new packages are available including the command line tools for AWS, Dash, Dracut, Facter, Pssh, and Varnish. 227 other packages have been updated and 9 have been removed. For a full list of changes, refer to the Amazon Linux AMI Release Notes.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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We talk about Eucalyptus, the project that enables on premise private clouds without retooling existing IT structure or introducing new hardware.
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I’ve not been particularly good at keeping up with this blog here, although I have generally kept up with the oggcast that I co-host with Karen Sandler, Free as in Freedom, which is released every two weeks.
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This Blog needed a header image – and it still needs a lot of header images to rotate through. So I created one out of an image of a Berlin Subway station. Nothing much new in here – rotating, cropping to the needed aspect ratio, a bit of curves for better contrast and colours, scaling and sharpening. Finally I added a text layer with the image credits.
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Kernel Space
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But many of you who closely watch this space may be asking: what about Meego? While Meego will remain a project at The Linux Foundation, we see industry leaders lining up behind Tizen. Imad Sousou, Meego’s technical steering group co-leader, had this to say about the future of Meego.
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The annual Storage Developers Conference is kind of like a five-ring circus. There are way too many tracks to follow, all going on at once and all interesting to varying degrees to varying people. It was a big show again this year, but this year it didn’t matter what else was going on. The center of attention was Microsoft’s center-ring act: SMB2.2.
I have been going to the SNIA SDC every year since before it was the SDC. I started going in 1997, when it was still “The CIFS Conference”. Even before that, I went to lots of different computer conferences and shows. Remember DECUS and DEXPO? Amiga DevCon? LISA-NT? I do.
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Applications
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I knew this day was coming… the day when a Linux application could begin to suffer from that horrible disease so many other applications suffer from on other platforms. Bloat. What is bloat? Bloat is the addition of unnecessary features that cause an application to grow to a size that renders it slow and laggy. Those features may be useful to some. But for many, they are just an anchor dragging the application deeper and deeper into murky waters.
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Do you love using the Gimp, but feel lost amongst all the tools and options? Find just the things you need for the job at hand, instantly, with a simple search. With Adaptable Gimp, you’ll even find step-by-step instructions for accomplishing precisely the thing you want to do. This software, powered by user contributions, makes it easy for just about anyone to use The Gimp. It all revolves around “TaskSets”, a concept so amazingly useful you’ll wonder why it wasn’t in The Gimp all along.
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Airtime 1.9.4 has been released with new DEB packages for Ubuntu and Debian that keep installations automatically updated with the latest version. Airtime is Sourcefabric’s open source radio software for scheduling, automation and remote station management via any web browser. It can be downloaded free from airtime.sourcefabric.org
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Minus is a free service that lets you share files easily with your friends and family. Its goal is to make file sharing as simple as possible by allowing users to upload and share their files from anywhere, be it mobile, desktop, or web. Applications for this service are available across all platforms including Linux. Furthermore, Minus also works on popular browsers like Firefox and Chrome. Here’s a quick review of the Linux version of the application.
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Instructionals/Technical
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If you’re into 3D animation, then perhaps the one and only program you will ever want and need is Blender. Well, this is a bit of an exaggeration, but it sure is a mighty program that does a lot. In fact, it does so much that you will feel quite intimidating even browsing the menus. Luckily, there are a plenty of books that can help you around.
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Games
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We don’t use DRM. When you buy these games, they are yours. Feel free to play them without an internet connection, back them up, and install them on all of your Macs and PCs freely. There is no time-limit on your downloads.
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Humble Bundle is back with another pay-what-you-want plus charity deal on sweet indie games — the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle! Thanks to everyone’s past support, Humble Bundles have now raised over $2,000,000 for charity (the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play charity).
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Xonotic is a free first-person shooter game for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The Xonotic project started as a fork of Nexuiz, a game which was popular for many years on Linux. The fork was created because Nexuiz was licensed to IllFonic game studios, and it is to be used as a platform for developing a commercial game for Steam, Xbox and PlayStation.
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Desktop Environments
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For those looking for an interesting read today, Martin Gräßlin, the maintainer of KDE’s KWin and known for his insightful blog posts, has written about fighting the schism in free software; in particular, the KDE vs. GNOME battle.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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When you are looking for a universal document viewer that will suit all of your needs you might as well go for one with all of the features. Thats where Okular dominates the stage on KDE desktops, being one of the best document viewers available. Some of the excellent features include advanced presentation support, overview mode, and annotation capabilities. Also with Okular it is easy to open files and switch between them. Okular will store your recent documents for easy viewing as well. This is how you can install Okular document viewer on your system from the Linux command line.
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For a fun and friendly instant messaging client try Kopete for the KDE desktop. You can use Kopete to communicate with your friends and family, even using multiple different network interfaces. Kopete also offers some key features that are lacking in other instant messengers. Advanced users can also expand the functionality of Kopete using plug-ins without much hassle. So if your current instant messenger will not suffice maybe you should try Kopete today. To install Kopete on your system open your terminal and type these commands.
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Qt, the cross-platform and application UI framework, formerly run by Trolltech until they were taken over by Nokia, has taken a step forward to more independence: the hosting of the project will soon move to qt-project.org, a domain owned by a non-profit foundation “whose only purpose is to host the infrastructure for the Qt project”. Lars Knoll, director of Research and Development at Nokia, announced the change on the Qt Labs Blog noting that this move was solely about the infrastructure and the new foundation would not have anything to do with steering the project.
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GNOME Desktop
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If the mere mention of Gnome shell brings terrible images in our mind. Relax and take a look at our tutorials on installing and using Gnome shell in Ubuntu. After you do that take a look at a few gorgeous gnome shell themes that is bound to leave you asking for more.
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GNOME 3.2 was officially released yesterday with all those cool features which I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for. Let’s take a look at what’s new:
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The first major revision of GNOME 3 offers tighter integration of online services into the desktop environment. The development team has also introduced many minor enhancements and resolved a number of irritating idiosyncrasies.
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Now that GNOME 3.2 has been released, the GNOME 3.4 desktop environment will see the light of day in about six months from now, and it will bring many new features and improvements.
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Pardus is a Linux distribution developed by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), an arm of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). Unlike most distributions, it is not based on another; an original, in the same sense that Debian is an original Linux distribution.
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New Releases
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Steven Shiau proudly announced the final and stable release of its popular Clonezilla Live operating system, used for cloning hard disk drives.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Update Pack 3 was released as the “latest” update pack today. If you’re not using Linux Mint Debian, please ignore this post.
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Mandriva announces the immediate availability of a new release of the Mandriva Directory Server (MDS), an easy to use, powerful and secure solution for managing identities, directory services and network services within the enterprise.
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I wish I had the time to provide a more comprehensive review of Mandriva 2011, perhaps I will come back later on with a few more articles featuring Mandriva but until then I seriously recommend trying Mandriva 2011.
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Red Hat Family
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YUM is a package manager and updater service for Red Hat Linux, and if you’re part of the Red Hat Network, you’re likely already using the offering to keep your applications fresh. YUM makes sure your various server components are as up to date as they can be, bringing you the latest and greatest in Red Hat without much fuss.
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Red Hat “won’t be the first company to make a billion dollars a year off of open source — Google and IBM spring to mind — but as a ‘pure play linux distro vendor,’ this is great news,” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “There’s certainly a halo effect for all linux-based endeavors.” Red Hat has been criticized “for focusing on the business and server market and ignoring the desktop, but the move has paid off in continued growth.”
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For this HowTo I used a VirtualBox with CentOS 5.7 x86_64. I attached a separate 20GB Data drive mounted to /data. This will hold the lessfs DB and data. The lessfs mountpoint I put at /lessfs.
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The Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA), a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies, including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), today announced that it is experiencing rapid growth in participation from companies focused on cloud computing and emerging markets around the globe.
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Fedora
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We are making some great progress on Anaconda’s UI revamp mockups after last week’s Anaconda team meetings. Here’s the storage flow diagram, now annotated with the screen #’s from the mockups:
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Welcome to Trisquel GNU/Linux! I’ve been wanting to write this for a long time, because trying this distribution really feels inviting. Trisquel GNU/Linux is as you can see by the naming convention one of the few distributions fully endorsed by the Free Software Foundation, and in return they’re doing a lot to promote the FSF and their principles on their website. If you’re yawning already, hold steady and read on, because Trisquel looks sharp and has something to offer.
Trisquel is available for i686 and x86_64 architectures, and is drawing from both Debian and Ubuntu, a fact which became immediately apparent when booting. To celebrate Software Freedom Day 5.0 was released on 17th September which has become an annual tradition for the project. The main and so far only edition was using GNOME, but since 4.5.1 in May this year there’s also a Trisquel Mini edition using LXDE, and we have been promised that a KDE using image for 5.0 is on the way. For more advanced needs like disk encryption, RAID/LVM or server setups a netinstall image is also available. Since I have a 64-bit capable machine I downloaded the CD sized image trisquel_5.0_amd64.iso (696 MB).
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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When Ubuntu 11.04 was released, Phoronix provided Bootchart results for five different systems showing the boot performance from Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS through Ubuntu 11.04. Since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, the boot time has unfortunately increased.
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It worries me because Ubuntu was our fresh brand, to try and get out there and if we bugger it up we’ll have to make a whole new brand
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In this interview with Strategic Architect for Ubuntu One, Stuart Langridge, I kick off the first of a series of articles about Ubuntu One.
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Flavours and Variants
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Timesys announced embedded Linux development support for two Logic PD embedded modules incorporating Texas Instruments’ 1GHz DM3730 processor. The LinuxLink offering supports Logic PD’s Torpedo System on Module (SOM) — which at under one square inch is billed the industry’s smallest embedded module — as well as the larger, more feature-rich DM3730 SOM-LV module.
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Phones
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Nokia is developing a new Linux-based “Meltemi” operating systems to replace Symbian on its feature phones, according to the Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, more details have emerged on the Linux Foundation’s MeeGo-derived Tizen project, which also gained a bit of industry support beyond co-sponsors Intel and Samsung.
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Android
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ZTE is preparing two Android tablets, including a seven-inch “T98″ model built on Nvidia’s five-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, code-named “Kal-El.” Meanwhile, Asus announced a rugged, Tegra 2-based seven-inch Asus Tough-ETBW11AA model with Android 3.2 and 1280 x 800 resolution on Japanese carrier KDDI, and the Motorola Xoom finally got its LTE 4G upgrade on Verizon.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Think that new $199 Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is cheap? Indian officials plan to launch a tablet for students on October 5th that will be available for just $35.
We’ve been hearing stories about the cheap Indian tablet since last summer — and it’s not the country’s first foray into cheap computers. Officials promised a $10 laptop way back in 2009, but it turned out to be just an inexpensive computer without a keyboard or monitor.
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The long awaited $35 (Rs 1735) dream tablet promised by the Indian government will finally see the light of the day as the launch date has been fixed for October 5. The low cost computing device touted to be the cheapest in the world, has been a project drawn on lines similar to the OLPC, with the students being the target beneficiaries.
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There’s no denying the open source world lags far behind the proprietary universe when it comes to tablets and touch-enabled devices. But as ZaReason CEO Cathy Malmrose explained recently, that may soon change, as she and her employees are working hard to release a Linux-friendly tablet. Here are the details.
It’s true that open source developers have been making progress when it comes to touch. Interfaces including Unity and GNOME 3, with their finger-friendly buttons and emphasis on dropping and gesturing, lend themselves to touch in ways that earlier desktop environments do not. And projects like Canonical’s uTouch promise better overall support for touch on Linux.
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Today in New York, Amazon introduced Silk, an all-new web browser powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and available exclusively on the just announced Kindle Fire. You might be asking, “A browser? Do we really need another one?” As you’ll see in the video below, Silk isn’t just another browser. We sought from the start to tap into the power and capabilities of the AWS infrastructure to overcome the limitations of typical mobile browsers.
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Amazon was widely expected to announce a Kindle-branded tablet today, and it did — also revealing three additional Kindles, two breaking the magical $100 price barrier. The $200 Kindle Fire has a seven-inch color IPS (in-plane switching display), “cloud-accelerated” Silk browser, dual-core processor, and 8GB of flash storage, while the $150 Kindle Touch 3G, $99 Kindle Touch, and $79 Kindle all include six-inch E Ink screens and either 2GB or 4GB of flash.
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Presto chango! You can have a full-fledged Android tablet today by applying your DIY skills to a few simple ingredients: a Nook Color, a memory card, a PC to carry out a few tasks — and some nerve. Among your rewards, besides self-satisfaction: the Amazon Kindle app. This is a great solution for anyone who already has a Nook or anyone who just can’t wait another month or so for Amazon’s Fire.
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Today’s big tech news is the release of a new generation of Amazon Kindles. Of particular interest is the Kindle Fire, a $199, 7-inch color touchscreen tablet based on Android. It seems destined to become the most credible competitor to the iPad.
One point I haven’t seen anyone make about this is the importance of open source software to the evolution of the tablet computing market. Google decided to make Android an open-source operating system, which meant that third parties could take the code, tweak it for their own needs, and sell competing Android-based products. That’s what Barnes and Noble did last year with the Nook Color, and it’s what Amazon did to create the Kindle Fire.
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Toshiba announced a seven-inch Android 3.2 tablet featuring an Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor and a 1280 x 800-pixel resolution typically found on 10.1-inch models. The Thrive 7″ Tablet offers 16GB or 32GB of storage, microSD and HDMI connections, five- and two-megapixel cameras, and a full complement of wireless features — except for cellular support.
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Andy: I’m 24 years old, I grew up in the Midwest United States and am currently working as an embedded software engineer in the Los Angeles area. I’ve been interested in Free Software for the past 6 or 7 years since first installing GNU/Linux during high school. I’ve mostly contributed small patches to various open source projects after finding bugs or when I wanted additional features. Of my own projects, they tend to be small, obscure, and arguable crazy, with AWeather being the main exception as the most “Normal” application.
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Tim Yeaton is the President and CEO of Black Duck Software. He has more 30 years experience working in the software community. Contact him at tyeaton@blackducksoftware.com.
Most people do not think of software developers as being high on the “social” scale. In fact, the (misinformed) stereotype for a typical developer is that of the introverted geek. But in many ways, particularly with open source developers, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
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The free software world moves rapidly, but every individual project also moves at its own pace and rhythm. Consequently, it is easy to get behind on the news. Here is a look at the state of the art in the open source desktop publishing (DTP) arena for fall 2011.
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Lucid Imagination released a new version of LucidWorks this week that provides an easier way for data centers to install and use the open source search products Apache Lucene and Solr.
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Every month, regular as clockwork, the free software community receives a gift. It takes the unusual form of the Netcraft Web Server Survey, which provides a measure – by no means the only one – of the market share of the main web server software used on the public internet.
For the last 15 years, Apache has been the most popular system there; and for the last 15 years, Microsoft’s IIS has failed to dethrone it, despite at least two concerted attempts to do so (visible as temporary rises and then falls in the latter’s market share). This month, though, the survey has an extra little present: Microsoft’s market share has not only (again) failed to rise, it has actually sunk back to the level it attained in June 1997. That is, in 14 years, IIS has gone precisely nowhere.
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache Whirr has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP).
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Hi there! Let me start this post, the first of many, by introducing myself and my team. I’m Ashley Jones, manager of and senior engineer in the Web Development group here at Splunk. My team is responsible for every nook and cranny of the code for a number of sites you know and love. This includes, but is not limited to, splunk.com, docs.splunk.com and blogs.splunk.com. We have wonderful groups inside Splunk that we’re privileged to provide the code which makes their design work well and their content easy to consume.
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Events
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The Apache Software Foundation announces ApacheCon Keynotes by noted Open Source authority David A. Wheeler, Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschweiler, and IBM Emerging Internet Technology group CTO David Boloker.
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It’s been some time now that we’ve been talking about devops, the pushing together of application development and application deployment via IT operations, in the enterprise. To keep up to speed on the trend, 451 CAOS attended PuppetConf, a conference for the Puppet Labs community of IT administrators, developers and industry leaders around the open source Puppet server configuration and automation software. One thing that seems clear, given the talk about agile development and operations, cloud computing, business and culture, our definition of devops continues to be accurate.
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Web Browsers
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With the Oneiric Ocelot release of Ubuntu just around the corner, we decided to take a fresh look at some alternative browsers for Linux. While Firefox is arguably still the champion of Linux web browsers, it has a history of being slow and getting bogged down by sites like Facebook. As a result, the Linux browser market has never been more full of competition. If you’re looking for a break from Firefox, there’s probably an alternative browser out there for you.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has started the Firefox development merry-go-round again, updating its Beta, Aurora and Nightly builds to versions 8, 9 and 10, respectively.
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Mozilla is patching it’s Firefox Web browser for at least 10 vulnerabilities, seven of which are rated as being “critical.” Firefox 7 was released on Tuesday offering users the promised of improved perfomance and better memory usage.
On the security front, the Firefox 7 release provides a critical fix for what Mozilla describes as, “Miscellaneous memory safety hazards.”
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Only it’s not Windows 7, but Firefox 7.
I downloaded it as a .tar.bz2 file and used alien to convert it into an RPM. You do that by typing SU in Konsole, then your root password. You have to use this this command:
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Big Data/SaaS
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SAN ANTONIO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–OpenStack™, the open source cloud operating system, will today release “Diablo,” the fourth version of its community-driven software, with nearly 70 new features and enhancements making it possible for a broader community of users to deploy OpenStack clouds in production on a global scale. OpenStack Diablo allows users to automate and control pools of compute, storage and networking resources across a global footprint and multiple datacenters with increased scale, performance and networking capabilities. There have been nearly 50,000 downloads from the central code repository, and production cloud environments are coming online across the globe.
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Every technology goes through this evolution. It’s created, it’s put in a box and finally it becomes just software.
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Databases
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Matt Raykowski pointed out a couple of notes about the recent announcement by Oracle that it would begin supplying closed source extensions to MySQL, which it acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems (such as this one from Simon Phipps and this one from Monty Widenius)
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This new foundation, combined with the injection of experienced QA personnel from the ranks of Sun and Oracle, made the project ready to offer reserved features to customers, while continuing the development of a lot more features for the community edition.
From a community standpoint, I welcome the commercial extensions.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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It was just a year ago today that LibreOffice was officially announced and the first beta of the OpenOffice.org fork was released. The Document Foundation marked the occasion by sending out a announcement with lots of juicy statistics. For example, LibreOffice represents the results of the collaborative power of 330 contributors.
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Firefox developers searching for a way to protect users against a new attack that decrypts sensitive web traffic are seriously considering an update that stops the open-source browser from working with Oracle’s Java software framework.
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CMS
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A number of concerns have been voiced from the community about the substantial growth Acquia has achieved since its inception, the number of key contributors who are now employed by Acquia, and the subsequent influence that this allows Acquia to have on the project.
While some of these concerns have validity, I also think there is also a fair share of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) being spread. So, let’s clear up a few points.
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As followers of this blog, you might have read that Acquia acquired two Drupal companies; security specialist Growing Venture Solutions and migration expert Cyrve. We wanted to do these acquisitions because they create a win-win-win situation; it is beneficial for the Drupal community, our partners and our customers. I personally championed and led those acquisitions so I want to take a moment to explain why…
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Healthcare
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Semi-Open Source
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Funding
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A project in which I’m involved, in the middle of a time of change, recently received an enquiry from a member of its user community. The enquirer was pleased with the software, concerned about the changes and wanted to provide support to the project to ensure it continued and as an expression of gratitude. “Where should I make a donation to support the software?”
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Seek advice first. In some really great comments that Linus Torvalds supplied on the Input/Output blog, he said this: “The first thing is thinking that you can throw things out there and ask people to help…”That’s not how it works. You make it public, and then you assume that you’ll have to do all the work, and ask people to come up with suggestions of what you should do, not what they should do. Maybe they’ll start helping eventually, but you should start off with the assumption that you’re going to be the one maintaining it and ready to do all the work.” There it is: You can’t take the Tom Sawyer approach right out of the fence and ask everyone to whitewash your fence.
Know what open source means. The Open Source Definition is where every project leader should start when it comes to how open source projects should be distributed, and what actually qualifies as open source. It’s also good to review Open Standards requirements.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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On this day in 1983, Richard Stallman wrote the groundbreaking announcement that he intended to write a comparable version of Unix. After experiencing frustration in getting critical changes made in the source code of proprietary software, he set out to champion the idea of returning to the spirit of sharing that existed in the early days of computer programming. He cites as one reason for the project:
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the re-launch of its Free Software Directory at directory.fsf.org. The Directory lists over 6,500 programs that are free for any computer user to download, run, and share. It was first launched nearly a decade ago, but the new version brings a host of new features designed to make it a more useful and current resource for users, developers, advocates, and researchers.
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Project Releases
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This is the first release of NeonView, a minimalist, lightweight image viewer written in C and using the GTK toolkit.
This first release, codenamed ‘Betta splendens’, includes just a handful of features for now, however it is the base on which development of more advanced features will take place. Still, the goal of NeonView is to remain clean and lightweight, while also trying to implement only the needed functions that a simple image viewer should have.
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Programming
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Windows 8 currently boasts the same hardware requirements as Windows 7. Don’t believe it. Microsoft has never been accurate with its hardware specifications yet.
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Another issue is that most casual PC users aren’t going to be too enthused about having to do anything extraordinary just to get their computers ready to install Linux. Even with an off switch in computer BIOS, Secure Boot could still be a significant stumbling block for some.
And even if disabling Secure Boot in the BIOS is simple to do, the fact is that Linux newbies who aren’t aware that Secure Boot even exists will only find themselves frustrated when their distribution won’t install as expected.
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A number of Australian Linux users have filed a formal complaint with the national competition regulator over what many perceive to be restrictive practices introduced in upcoming Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system which may stop many mass-market computers from being able to boot alternatives such as Linux.
Microsoft recently revealed it would support a PC booting protocol named the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) in Windows 8. The move was broadly seen as positive, as it will increase the security of PCs as well as doing away with the legacy limited BIOS platform which underlies operating systems like Windows and Linux on computers today.
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Finance
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Mark Ames referred me to the documentary “Lifting the Veil.” I’m only about 40 minutes into it and am confident it will appeal to NC readers, provided you can keep gagging in the sections that contain truly offensive archival footage (in particular, numerous clips of Obama campaign promises).
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Rogers astroturf lobby campaign against a spectrum set-aside, which sneakily uses people interested in a notification on when LTE may be available in their market, foreshadows a major battle over the rules on the 2012 spectrum auction. Much like the 2007 battle over the AWS auction, the incumbents will argue that the market is already sufficiently competitive and that any set-aside will unfairly advantage new entrants. The 2007 battle included submissions from Rogers and Bell that insisted that Canada was already “extremely competitive” and that consumer prices for wireless services very low. For example, Rogers argued:
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Rogers, Canada’s biggest cellphone carrier, made waves on Friday by taking its lobbying efforts for the next auction of wireless airwaves to the public. The company launched a website that urges Canadians to write to their MPs in support of a wide-open auction, rather than one that will set aside licenses for new cellphone companies.
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Responding to what it says is a thinly veiled attempt at manipulating government regulators and public perception, Mobilicity today said Canadians should not be fooled by a new Big 3 carrier stunt to get people to protest more wireless spectrum set-asides for Mobilicity and other new carriers.
“The future of affordable wireless rates is at risk, not the future of long-term evolution (LTE) networks,” said Chief Operating Officer Stewart Lyons. “Mobilicity has helped bring down the cost of wireless in Canada significantly and we need to augment our limited amount of spectrum to ensure affordable pricing continues.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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When the Federal Communications Commission last week issued its final network neutrality rules and said they would go into effect at the end of November, lawsuits against the policy could finally begin. Verizon and Metro PCS, both wireless carriers, had already made clear their intention to sue and were widely expected to be the first to do so. Instead, they were beaten to court by the activist group Free Press—one of the strongest supporters of network neutrality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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What is curious is that this company that is taking people’s IP’s must be using some sort of commercial app to target the specific city of the person. For example when I try to geo-locate the 70.53.229.233 IP using standard available web apps or demo’s of commercial apps, it shows it to be in Terrebone, or Ottawa or Toronto. The filing shows it as Asbestos, Quebec. How did they get that? And with which app? Or did Bell give them that location?
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The Copyright Board today released a decision denying AUCC’s request to amend the interim Access Copyright post-secondary tariff to force Access Copyright to issue transactional licenses.
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The legislation, first introduced ahead of the federal election in May, is designed to cope with things like movie piracy, which the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association put at more than C$1.8 billion ($1.7 billion) in 2009-10, or the equivalent of 12,600 full-time jobs.
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The Conservative government is taking another stab at revamping Canada’s copyright law after minority parliaments scuttled past attempts.
Industry Minister Christian Paradis will reintroduce the government’s copyright reform bill Thursday, setting out what consumers and educators can — and can’t — do with copyrighted songs, movies, video games and e-books in the age of MP3 players.
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Later today, the government will table Bill C-11, the latest iteration of the Canadian copyright reform bill that mirrors the previous Bill C-32. It was widely reported this fall that the government would reintroduce the previous bill unchanged, re-start committee hearings where they left off in March (with prior witnesses not asked to return), and move to quickly get the bill passed by the end of the calendar year. That seems to be what is happening with today’s tabling and a new legislative committee to follow.
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ACTA
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It has been reported in the global press this week that ACTA will be signed October 1 in Japan. But that does not mean that ACTA actually goes into effect.
ACTA Article 40 states that the “Agreement shall enter into force thirty days after the date of deposit of the sixth instrument of ratification, acceptance, or approval as between those Signatories that have deposited their respective instruments of ratification, acceptance, or approval.” Although six ratifications is a pretty low threshold for an agreement with 36 parties to the negotiation, it is far from clear that this agreement will get even that.
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On Saturday, October 1, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan will hold the signing ceremony for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) at Iikura Guest House, Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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On Saturday, October 1, 2011, parties that have completed relevant domestic processes will sign ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).
FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure) statement:
The world faces major challenges: access to medicine, diffusion of green technology needed to fight climate change, and a balanced Internet governance. While flexibility is essential to solve these major issues, ACTA codifies heightened measures.
To stimulate startup companies, the EU legal situation should minimize market entrance risks for innovators. In digital markets, innovators are often confronted with patent minefields. Even a mere allegation of infringement may easily lead to market exclusion. ACTA’s damages beyond the actual prejudice have a disproportional negative effect on startup companies, which do not have deep pockets.
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Japan has announced that negotiators of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will congregate at the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Saturday and those countries that have “completed the relevant domestic processes” will sign the agreement.
ACTA is a voluntary international treaty that seeks to provide standardised international enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights. The agreement was negotiated in secret by the Governments of a collection of countries over the past three years.
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09.28.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In this interview Daniel Bray (Lupine) of the Ubuntu Florida LoCo Team explains how he was able to use Ubuntu instead of Microsoft to complete his college degree. In an era when almost all schools in the United States require that its students use either Microsoft or Mac based technical solutions, Bray finds a way to exercise his freedom of choice and use Free and Open Source software to complete his degree.
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PulseAudio, the sound server that has been adopted by KDE (and others), has reached version 1.0. According to the release notes, “The first thing you need to know is that 1.0 is just a number. We do not attach specific significance to the 1.0 moniker. It’s really just a way to clean up version numbers – it’s an eternal debate as to what constitutes “1.0 quality” and in the end we could easily go on forever with the previous numbering scheme.”
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Server
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Airbus is one of the first industrial HPC customers in the world to plunk its most recent supercomputers into containerized data centers.
Hewlett-Packard inked a supercomputing upgrade deal with the aircraft manufacturer four years ago, and in the final phase of the contract earlier this year, HP put two of its Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) containerized data centers at Airbus sites in Toulouse, France, and Hamburg, Germany. Airbus, which has experience in cramming as many human beings as is physically possible into a small, confined space, undoubtedly admired HP’s ability to do the same with servers, storage, and networking inside modified shipping containers.
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The University of Texas has teamed up with Intel and Dell to build a Linux supercomputer cluster, as part of the National Science Foundation’s “eXtreme Digital” program. Due in 2013, the “Stampede” comprises several thousand Dell Zeus servers — each with dual eight-core Intel Xeon E5 CPUs, plus Intel’s new parallel computing “MIC” co-processors — and will be “the most powerful x86-based Linux HPC cluster” deployed in the U.S., say the partners.
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The Netgear engine specifically looks at HTML files for threats. The UTM9S also provides an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) to protect against network layer attacks. The UTM9S uses IPS signatures from the open source SNORT project as well as ones developed by Netgear. While the UTM9S is able to do both anti-virus and IPS security in one box, Leung noted that it’s not necessarily a replacement for a dedicated IPS device.
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Kernel Space
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While there are still several days left of this year’s Oktoberfest, to take a short break this morning from benchmarking the wonderful beer, food, and Bavarian females, here are benchmarks of the new Intel HiZ Linux support. Just a few days ago a new, nearly ready patch-set was published for implementing hierarchical Z support within Intel’s Mesa DRI driver.
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If you are an automount users (either the autofs variety or the nfs one), please give this a try. There’s been some changes in the automount logic: they are small and fairly obvious, and I doubt anybody will notice anything at all, but I’d still ask automount people to try it out.
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Graphics Stack
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Glamor, an open-source project that up until now has received little community attention or public acknowledgement outside of its small development group, has now been called to be merged into the X.Org Server. But what is Glamor?
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Josh (Cheese) Bush from Twolofbees.com let me know that has made an interview with rotektor (Tim Jung) who has recently been appointed GNU/Linux Games Lead for Desura , it comes with 3 parts – so here is the first part (the others will be published on his website in the next few weeks).
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Desura closed beta client was released few days back and only limited number of people got access to it.
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Three years ago I’ve posted about a cRPG titled The Broken Hourglass.
Unfortunately the game wasn’t developed as fast and professional as one could hope for, and it seems more like a hobby than a real effort to finish the game, so the development was abandoned.
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Another one of my favourite projects has had a new release, Corsix-th the open source engine for Bullfrogs old Theme Hospital has hit a new milestone!
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The Android Marketplace offers a variety of games to choose from. Even though many of those games are absolutely free, only a handful of them are open source. While that may not bother many Android users, there are a lot of FOSS enthusiasts who love to have everything that’s open source. So, whether you’re an open source fanatic, or a FOSS purist, here are 5 great open source games that you can try out on your Android device.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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What do you know about Russia?
Vodka? Bears on the streets? Siberia?
Any more stereotypes?
Let me give you another one: Linux.
Yes, Linux!
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Linux users have a lot of good options for burning CDs and DVDs. K3b, however, is one of the best I’ve used. The latest version of K3b, 2.0.2, brings to Linux what Windows users have long loved in one of the leading CD burners of that platform, Nero. K3b is fast, simple to use, and has lots of options.
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GNOME Desktop
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While not replacing the Nautilus file manager or playing a major role within the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.2, there is a new GNOME file manager available.
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Gnome Pie is an application inspired by a World of Warcraft addon called OPie, that tries to offer a different way of launching applications in Gnome.
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With the official release of GNOME 3.2 coming later in the week, Red Hat’s Matthias Clasen has christened the official version of the GTK+ 3.2 tool-kit. GTK+ 3.2 brings several interesting features since the inaugural GTK+3 release earlier in the year.
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Before discussing what distribution to choose, let me give you a brief history on Linux. Linux is an open source software that was developed by Linus Torvalds while a Computer Science student at the University of Helsinki. In 1991, in an effort to write his own version of the UNIX operating System, Torvalds wrote and published the binaries (the running programs in machine language) as well as the source code on the Internet inviting other programmers to join. Today it is one of the best and most ubiquitous operating systems in the world. Most importantly, it is free and open source under the GNU General Public License. It is also now one of the most popular operating system after Windows and MAC.
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Pardus Linux 2011.2 is now available. In this update release, the NetworkManager have been updated to 0.8.5.91, problems about adding VPN connections have been fixed, handle WLAN security passwords gracefully while upgrading distribution; ModemManager is updated to 0.5, improvements for Samsung modems, support access technology reporting for Qualcomm Gobi modems, fix communication with Nokia N900 devices; CUPS is updated to 1.4.8; LibreOffice is updated to 3.4.3, fixed crash closing document with footnotes; MPlayer – fixed crash playing subtitled videos which was triggered by FreeType 2.4.6 security update.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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People say you don’t know what you have until its gone. I must say that the Fedora and RHEL documentation team’s produce is certainly one thing that I do take for granted… EXCELLENT documentation! Its always there, and generally excellent, if sometimes a bit hard to find in the wiki.
Its certainly not going away, nor ever I hope! My problem comes when I need to deal with other projects for the $DAYJOB and discover other project’s equivalent systems don’t have documentation to a level I have come to take for granted. Whether its my personal projects within and around Fedora, my dayjob RHEL component or open stuff I play with the documentation is normally good.
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CentOS is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RHEL 6.1 was released in May, providing Red Hat’s customers with new hardware and security updates. CentOS is still not out with a CentOS 6.1 release, but they’re not leaving their users hanging.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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So stay tuned for future improvements! And speaking of staying tuned, I’d also like to announce Planet PulseAudio. This is an aggregated feed of posts about PulseAudio. If you have a blog and write about PA, please get in touch and we can add your feed. The design is heavily borrowed from Planet GNOME so it should be familiar for some readers.
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Canonical added the default GNOME 3 desktop theme, Adwaita, to the default themes of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system, due for release on October 13th, 2011.
Yes, you heard right: Adwaita is now part of the default themes of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system, alongside other popular themes, such as Ambiance and Radiance (see the screenshot below).
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Flavours and Variants
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The Bodhi install is very easy and doesn’t take long since it’s based on Ubuntu. You’ll get to pick from a variety of themes before you use your desktop. Here are some screenshots of the install. See the image gallery for the full install.
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Bsquare announced a $299 Android development board incorporating Qualcomm’s dual-core, Snapdragon APQ8060 processor. The DragonBoard provides a variety of I/O including JTAG, Ethernet, and mini-USB, pre-installed sensor and connectivity (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) daughtercards, plus an optional $199 peripheral kit with a WVGA touchscreen, battery, and both five- and one-megapixel cameras, says the company.
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Phones
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MeeGo will become Tizen, Intel announced today.
“Intel joined Linux Foundation and LiMo Foundation in support of Tizen, a new Linux-based open source software platform for multiple device categories,” the company said in a statement. “Tizen builds upon the strengths of both LiMo and MeeGo and Intel will be working with our MeeGo partners to help them transition to Tizen.”
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The Linux Foundation and the LiMo Foundation issued a joint statement on Wednesday morning to announce the launch of Tizen, a new Linux-based open source mobile operating system. The platform’s application stack and third-party developer frameworks will be built around standards-based Web technologies. The new Tizen website says that Intel and Samsung are jointly backing the effort.
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Android
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The $199 7in IPS ultra-wide display, dual-core processor tablet weighs 14.6oz. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said at the launch that Amazon will ship “millions” of the devices, which run a customised version of Android, from 15 November.
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TESTING OUTFIT Bsquare has released a testing and evaluation board featuring Qualcomm’s dual-core Snapdragon APQ8060 chip.
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T-Mobile announced two smartphones that run Android “Gingerbread” on a dual-core, 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, feature eight-and two-megapixel cameras and near field communication (NFC) radios, and support the carrier’s 42Mbps HSPA+ 4G network. T-Mobile’s version of the Samsung Galaxy S II offers a 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, while the HTC Amaze 4G supplies a 4.3-inch display as well as high-end camera features.
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The Linux Foundation’s MeeGo project will merge with the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation’s LiMo spec, bringing together two struggling open source mobile Linux projects, according to an industry report. Meanwhile, Nokia shipped the 3.9-inch Nokia N9 — the first MeeGo-driven smartphone, and most likely the last.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Motorola Mobility is prepping two successors to its Xoom tablet, including an e-reader-focused 8.2-inch model, according to several reports. In other Android tablet news, the original Xoom did surprisingly well in recent Consumer Reports rankings, Amazon is expected to unveil an Android tablet/ereader on Sept. 28, and Barnes & Noble is readying three replacements to the Nook Color.
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Digitimes Research has analyzed figures from Google about the company’s certified devices that have connected to Android Market each month, and pointed out that monthly sales of Google certified Android tablets grew from an average of less than one million units in the second quarter of 2011 to 1.5 million units in August, according to senior analyst of Digitimes Research, Luke Lin.
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After HP liquidated its remaining TouchPad tablet inventory last month by marking down the prices to $99 for a 16GB tablet and $149 for a 32GB model, the company placed one more order with its suppliers which was expected to result in a few hundred thousand more TouchPads heading to America.
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Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), the world’s largest online retailer, unveiled its Kindle Fire tablet computer, taking aim at Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s bestselling iPad with a device that’s smaller and less than half the price.
The Kindle Fire will have a 7-inch display and sell for $199, compared with $499 for Apple’s cheapest iPad, Amazon executives said in interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek. The device, a souped-up version of the Kindle electronic-book reader, will run on Google Inc.’s Android software, the Seattle-based company said. Amazon also introduced a touch-screen version of its e-reader, to be called Kindle Touch.
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I’ve been a big advocate of open source software since I learned about the model of software licensing and development 10 years ago. I am a big believer that many minds produce great things, so the idea that a community of users would develop and improve software to the benefit of the community really appealed to me. Open source is often a great solution for cash-strapped libraries that can adopt tools like Open Office for free instead of paying for Microsoft Office licenses on all of their computers.
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A few months ago I went to Campus Party in Spain. I have blogged about Campus Party before, so I will not spend a lot of time and space here on that topic.
I will tell you about a young man, Luis Iván Cuende García, who was fifteen years old when I met him but who had released his own distribution of Linux called “Asturix”. He, his father and his friend Ricardo had all traveled to Campus Party at the invitation of the Campus Party management.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has released a new version of the open source Firefox Web browser. The update brings a much slimmer memory footprint courtesy of Mozilla’s MemShrink project. The new release also includes some improvements to hardware-accelerated rendering on Windows, support for the W3C navigation timing specification, and an opt-in system for collecting performance data.
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Ladies and gentlemen, dear readers, Mozilla unleashed a few minutes ago (September 28th) the final and stable version of the highly anticipated Mozilla Firefox 7.0 web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird 7.0 mail client for Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
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Mozilla Firefox 7 has been released. The new release fixes some stability issues and several bug fixes. Mozilla Firefox 7 available to Download for Linux, MAC OS X, and Microsoft windows. Also available to install on Ubuntu “Natty, Oneiric” using PPA.
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SaaS
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Piston Cloud Computing came out of stealth mode today, launching an OpenStack-based cloud OS that allows enterprises to build private clouds that meet security and compliance requirements. Former NASA and Rackspace execs are leading the charge. The OS will be generally available Nov. 29.
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Twitter has open-sourced Storm, its distributed, fault-tolerant, real-time computation system, at GitHub under the Eclipse Public License 1.0. Storm is the real-time processing system developed by BackType, which is now under the Twitter umbrella. The latest package available from GitHub is Storm 0.5.2, and is mostly written in Clojure.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Today marks the one-year anniversary of The Document Foundation (TDF) and the LibreOffice project, a promising community-driven fork of OpenOffice.org (OOo). The project has seen considerable growth during its first year of existence. TDF estimates that there are now 25 million LibreOffice users worldwide.
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Since Oracle obtained MySQL in the Sun takeover, many FOSS folks have been wary of Oracle’s plans for the open source database, a wariness that wasn’t eased by Oracle’s handling of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice split. When a couple of weeks ago we learned that Oracle has added three commercial extensions to MySQL, many figured that was the beginning of the end of MySQL as a free and open project.
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The Internet, September 28, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) celebrates its first anniversary, one year after the unveiling of the project and the release of the first beta of LibreOffice. “What we have achieved in just twelve months is incredible,” says Charles Schulz, a member of the Steering Committee. “Let’s have a look at some numbers: we have 136 members who have been nominated for their contributions to the project; we have some 270 developers and 270 localizers (although we always want to attract more), many of whom are also members; we have over 100 mailing lists, with over 15,000 subscribers, half of whom receive all our announcements; and there have been thousands of articles in the media worldwide”.
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BSD
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Because of his position in the FreeBSD project at that time, Kamp was particularly annoyed by the pattern he was seeing, which is why he sent his thoughts to the email list. “You see it in politics, from national to school board and boy scout meetings,” he says, adding, “You see it in pretty much any meeting in a corporate context where somebody has a ladder to climb.”
Not that this would have any relevance in your life. Oh, no. I’m sure you’ve never seen any behavior like this at all. But play along, because a friend might have experienced “bike shed” moments. Right. A friend.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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What, I wondered, happens when Stallman no longer leads? Will new intellectual leaders emerge, or will free software be limited to a single generation?
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Project Releases
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Airtime 1.9.4 has been released with new DEB packages for Ubuntu and Debian that keep installations automatically updated with the latest version. Airtime 1.9.4 also includes the new file storage system with ‘watch’ folders, allowing stations to magically synchronise files and to easily browse their audio archives, as well as Shoutcast support, improved front-end widgets, and extensive bug-fixes.
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Programming
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A recent blog post dealt with my suggestion that PC users should switch to Linux and ditch Windows. Once they make the move to Linux, they’ll no longer need to pay for computer repairs (antivirus, spyware cleaning, etc.), especially those offered by online services are constantly advertised on cable television.
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Science
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Security
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The attack on Kernel.org last month was “a big wake-up call,” according to Green Armor’s Joseph Steinberg. “This breach could have been astronomically worse. If the attack had been carried out with more sophistication, the attackers could have done a lot worse damage than they did. The gut feeling is that it is more of an accidental intrusion.”
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Privacy
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Facebook consistently reappears in the news with regards to privacy and the data it keeps on each of its users. For example, earlier this week an engineer working for the social network had to explain why Facebook tracks you even when you’re logged out.
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I used to like Facebook. Oh, its security and constantly changing privacy protection was a bad joke, but it was still the best way to find and keep in touch with old friends from high school (Hi Cathy!) and the like. That was then. This is now.
It was bad enough that Facebook tries to harvest your phone number, in the new Facebook Open Graph platform you can share all kinds of usage data with your advertisers… uh friends. With the new Facebook, you can automatically share what movies you’re watching on Netflix, what music you’re listening to on Spotify, and what’s you’re reading on Flipboard.
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Copyrights
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Files containing movies and music are spread between different computers on the internet and bittorrent software is used to find the file parts and reassemble them. Some files, such as the open source Linux operating system, have no copyright, while files of music, movies and television shows belong to copyright holders.
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09.27.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Unless you’re a motorhead to a varying degree — and an older one at that — you probably don’t know who John Cooper is. His contributions in racing circles — putting the engine behind the driver in his Cooper Formula 1 cars in the late 1950s — would normally cement his place in automotive history, but he didn’t stop there.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Accessing Kernel.org will simply result in a “Down for maintenance” message. It’s also in a similar manner for Linux.com, which was exploited earlier this month. LinuxFoundation.org is at least back online.
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If anyone knows the joys and sorrows of managing software development projects, it would be Linus Torvalds, creator of the world’s most popular open-source software program: the Linux operating system. For more than 20 years, Torvalds has been directing thousands of developers to improve the open source OS. He and I sat down to talk about effective techniques in running large-scale distributed programming teams – and the things that don’t work, too.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Today we’ll take a look at a great Indie title Amnesia the Dark Descent, it’s been released 1 year ago, but i discovered it few days ago.
This is a Survival-horror game that has had a lot of success, is an expertly crafted tale of terror as well as searching that utilizes its active dynamics to enthrall players with a method that every tale should have.
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Desktop Environments
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Over a decade ago an event happened which is still influencing our life in free software. Instead of one, two projects emerged to bring a fully free desktop to Linux based systems. Back then we failed to see the advantages of having multiple available desktop environments and we basically created a schism between the KDE and the GNOME world.
The Schism is still in place!
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Overall KDE4 doesn’t limit my working overly compared to KDE 3.5 (although, so far as I can remember, it doesn’t improve it). One area where it particularly falls down is in printing. I have remarked earlier on the absence of kprinter.
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During KDE’s (one of the largest open source communities around, with about 2500 active developer accounts with direct write access to many millions of lines of code across dozens of products, and large numbers of external contributors) ongoing migration from SVN to Git, GitHub was never considered as an option because the community considers it unacceptable for an open source community to throw their weight behind a proprietary solution.
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A great Ksplash theme collection for KDE 4.x featuring many Linux distributions. Innovative themes designed to be suitable to many users who would like to customize the default Ksplash theme.
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GNOME Desktop
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If you are a Linux user, you must already know about conky, one of the coolest Linux applications. Last year, Techdrivein introduced an awesome collection of beautiful conky configurations. But since we gradually have more Linux users, new conky setups have been created everyday. So here are 7 new but amazingly beautiful conky configurations that will make your Ubuntu/Linux destop look more awesome than ever.
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Cardapio is a menu for GNOME that can work as a panel, AWN or Cairo Dock applet and even as a stand-alone application.
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Given the short time that has gone by since I last tried Chakra, I’m impressed with its progress.
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Outside of the U.S., there are several “national” Linux distributions. These include China’s Red Flag Linux; Turkey’s Pardus, and the Philippines’ Bayahnian. Other countries, like Russia, are on their way to moving their entire IT infrastructure to Linux and open-source software. In the U.S., the government, especially the military, makes use of Linux all the time. Indeed, Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), the most popular software set for hardening Linux against Linux is sponsored by the National Security Agency. But, there hasn’t been a national American Linux desktop distribution… until now.
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New Releases
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With so many Linux distributions to choose from, it can be difficult to keep tabs on them all. Over the past few weeks I’ve written about Bodhi Linux–a lesser-known but nice (and increasingly popular) flavor of Linux–as well as Arch Linux and Mandriva. But today I’d like to round up other distributions of the free and open source operating system that have released key updates recently.
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Yesterday has been released the version 4.0 of Tinycore linux, one of the smallest linux distribution around.
You can find the detailed changelog in their official forum, among many updates some are:
* Updated kernel to 3.0.3
* Updated udev to 173
* Updated glibc to eglibc-2.13
* Updated e2fsprogs base libs to 1.41.14
* Updated gcc base libs to 4.6.1
* Updated util-linux base libs to 2.19.1
* Updated eglibc for 486/586 support.
* Updated base Xlibs (microcore users need to get new Xlibs.tcz)
* Updated all the custom core utilities to use the new repository area.
* New loadcpufreq to handle module loading.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva 2011 is attractive with ease of use improved and some new additions. Mandriva Linux has made a great come back after going through several tough times of financial crisis. This product from Rosa Labs, sure is appealing. Let us look at some of the new features of Mandriva 2011.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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David Lehman and Will Woods are in the Boston area this week so along with Chris Lumens, Peter Jones, and David Cantrell we’ve all been whiteboarding away, planning and refinement on the upcoming Anaconda UI redesign that is scheduled to land in Fedora 17.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu bagged itself some mainstream media exposure this weekend when it was reviewed on Indian news channel ‘CNN-IBN’.
As part of the stations 25 minute technology segment, ‘Tech Toyz‘, the English language news network featured a short review of Ubuntu 11.04.
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Ubuntu Tweak 0.6 has been released. Ubuntu Tweak 0.6 will introduce some new features and new user interface design kinda looks suitable to the upcoming release Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. Now it’s available to install for tester and developer through Launchpad PPA.
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You’ve heard the talk, the complaints, and the scathing reviews. Both GNOME 3 and Ubuntu Unity have been met with a hailstorm of bad publicity — so much so that people are turning away from adopting Linux — at least Linux that uses either of these two desktops. So if you want to switch to Linux but you don’t want to use either of these desktops, what can you do? Well, I’ll give you five what-to-do’s that will ease the troubled Linux desktop selection.
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Sticking exactly to the plan, we are quickly moving towards the release of 11.10, and it’s only three weeks until then. If you like partying, start organising your local release party soon! Beta 2 was released yesterday, so give it all the testing love you can. You won’t be disappointed, there’s something great and new in there for everybody.
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I don’t often write about pre-release versions of Linux distributions any more – I did for a while, but the amount of negative feedback I got compared to the benefit I felt it was providing became too great. I’ve decided to make an exception this time, though, because there are two particularly interesting new releases coming up – Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, and openSuSE 12.1. I was thinking that I would have the added incentive of both Beta releases coming out on the same day, but openSuSE decided to push theirs back because they are still working on some difficult conversions to systemd, so I just downloaded Daily Build 301 instead of the actual Beta release. They say that the final release date (10 Nov) will not be changed as a result of this delay, though. The screen shot below was made on my HP dm1-3105ez, after installing Ubuntu 11.10 Beta-2.
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This is the sixth article in a series to explain the basics of Ubuntu Development in a way that does not require huge amounts of background and goes through concepts, tools, processes and infrastructure step by step. If you like the article or have questions or found bugs, please leave a comment.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #234 for the week September 19 – 25, 2011, and the full version is available here.
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At the request of many Phoronix readers, here are some benchmarks comparing the 64-bit performance of Ubuntu 11.04 versus a recent development build of Ubuntu 11.10. Six different systems were benchmarked for this comparison.
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I’m thrilled to announce the launch of a significant milestone in the ongoing effort of making Ubuntu a target for app developers: the new Ubuntu App Developer site.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint is said to be gaining ground on Ubuntu’s popularity dominance lately. This means more folks are using Linux Mint than ever before. These users are bound to be distributed throughout the world – granted with a large concentration in Europe. But there are sure to be users in the USA, Asia, Australia, and South America too.
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Now, AriOS 3.0 is out there. As a potential candidate to becoming a complete, truly successful Ubuntu derivative, an accolade which has so far been reserved to only Linux Mint, I took the distro for a spin, with high spirits and higher expectations. Tested: the 32-bit version, on my T60p experimentation rig. There’s a 64-bit version, too.
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I changed my Ubuntu workstation from an Ubuntu Ultimate Edition distro to Zorin OS 5 Core. After a week or so I liked it so much I upgraded to Zorin OS 5 Ultimate and installed Zorin Core (the free version) on my other machines. The reason for the changes was quite simple. Zorin OS 5 Ultimate gave my workstation the baseline Ubuntu 11.04 plus the Gnome desktop with features that keep the UI very straightforward and clean. The other machines are kept busy doing distributed processing work for BOINC projects like SETI, Einstein and LHC so their OS and UI needs are minimal. Zorin Core provides the same UI but the distro installs with fewer extra programs to update and maintain.
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Phones
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Android
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Samsung had its hands full today, launching several phones, including this refreshed Galaxy S II with a large HD screen.
The Samsung Galaxy S II HD LTE – which was announced in Korean this morning – sports a 4.65in OLED display with a resolution of 1280 x 720. The handset is apparently the first with an OLED display to feature a higher pixel density than 300ppi, rocking in at 316 pixels per inch.
Other features include 16GB of storage, an 8Mp camera with 1080p video recording, NFC support and a large, 1850mAh battery.
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About 40 percent of U.S. mobile phone users over age 18 now have smartphones, and Google’s Android OS runs on over 40 percent of them, says Nielsen.
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Portland’s lure lost some luster when the Great Recession hit.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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As we reported back in June, while many users applaud the rapid release cycle that Mozilla announced for the Firefox browser back in February, not all IT administrators are among the fans. It’s easy for consumers to forget that businesses have much more stringent requirements for accepting new applications of all sorts, including browsers, into mainstream use. There are security concerns, compatibility concerns, and more. Mozilla officials have already announced that they take the protests from the IT community seriously, and have a working group focused on delivering Extended Support Releases (ESRs) specifically for businesses that want to use Firefox. Do these efforts from Mozilla go far enough, though?
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With the rapid release cycle and all, we are seeing more releases of the Firefox browser than before. Mozilla just pushed Firefox 7 to the official ftp server to prepare for today’s release of the browser. Firefox 7 is actually the first version of the rapid release cycle that is showing big improvements over previous versions.
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Three and a half years after developers plugged “hundreds” of memory leaks in the Firefox browser that had slowed many PCs to a halt, memory leaks in Firefox 6.0.2 are apparently once again frustrating users.
In a number of issues posted on Mozilla’s support message board over the past several weeks, users report repeated instances of Firefox eating more than 1 GB of memory during basic tasks. Some memory leaks have been tied to browser plug-ins, while other users insist they are doing nothing exotic to cause such significant memory use.
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Databases
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When Oracle announced its intent to acquire Sun Microsystems, the very first question we asked was what would become of the open source MySQL database and Sun’s record of openness with it. The general concensus around Oracle’s plans was that the database giant would position MySQL as a way to onboard users to its commercial offerings. (Oracle offers an Enterprise edition.) There is now debate about the extent to which that is happening, especially because Oracle has just released three commercial extensions for MySQL.
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Oracle last week quietely announced the addition of new extended capabilities in MySQL Enterprise Edition, confirming the adoption of the open core licensing strategy, as we reported last November.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The event promises to bring together some big names in the industry, with the sponsorship list including Novell, SUSE, RedHat, Canonical, and Google among others. Attendance is free for all.
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Over the weekend, LibreOffice took the Experiment award for most appreciated software at the Open World Forum in Paris. I use LibreOffice every day, so I definitely think the award is well-deserved. Although I use some extensions, LibreOffice (and OpenOffice) have a collection of add-ons that I haven’t even explored yet. Here are three particularly useful add-ons to improve your office tools:
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Finance
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Since the financial crisis hit, investment banks have been rightly criticized for their tendency to be more concerned with their own trading profits than the well-being of their customers. Sometimes, however, an investment bank can take the whole client service thing a bit too far.
Take, for instance, the case of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and its client Solyndra LLC, the California-based solar-panel maker that filed for bankruptcy protection on Sept. 6 and dismissed its 1,100 employees.
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Dozens of demonstrators who have vowed to “occupy” Wall Street were arrested Saturday on the seventh day of a social media-fueled protest against U.S. banking institutions, according to protest organizers.
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That’s what Wall Street trader Alessio Rastani says in this extraordinarily candid interview on the BBC. “This economic crisis is like a cancer,” he tells the host. “If you just wait and wait hoping it is going to go away, just like a cancer it is going to grow and it will be too late.”
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09.26.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is continuing its move toward engineered systems that integrate hardware and software with a new Oracle Database appliance.
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Kernel Space
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Facebook has made many open-source contributions over the years from their high-performance PHP-To-C++ compiler, to parts of their infrastructure, to some of their development tools. One of their open-source projects they made public last year for increasing their database performance was Flashcache. Flashcache is a kernel module that provides a block cache for Linux with various caching modes.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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We might not pay these Linux gems much attention but we’d soon notice life without them.
Here, we salute some of the things that make using Linux so enjoyable.
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I find the best way to listen to music on XBMC is via daap. It makes configuring playlists and adding media simple. It’s also cross-platform, so those folks using actual iTunes can listen to their tunes as well.
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Proprietary
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Although I have very strong philosophical beliefs about software, and I am sympathetic to your argument, Goodbye, Microsoft is intended as a practical site to help users rid themselves of Microsoft products as much as possible. What’s “possible” varies widely from user to user. If that means keeping Windows but dropping Office, we help with that. If it means a complete switch to FOSS, so much the better. And if it means a middle ground such as switching to Linux but running a few applications in a virtual Windows machine, we help with that, too. And to the extent that VMWare Workstation enables that solution for some users, it’s a step in the right direction, and I’ll inform readers of that option.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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It’s no secret that Gnome 3 (and Gnome-shell) are not being well received by everyone. Canonical is going with its Unity and for many other Gnome users, the future is Gnome-shell.
KDE is/was never an option for me, I simply don’t like it. Over the last few years I’ve tried to get on with KDE, but found myself time and again going back to Gnome after only a very short period of time. Maybe that’s because when I migrated fully to a Linux desktop, I mostly used Gnome and have now become indoctrinated in working with it. Series 2 offered everything I wanted, it was simple, clean and familiar, however with its move to 3 series I find that it no longer has a place in my heart. Without repeating views which I’ve stated many times in the past, I will merely say that Gnome-Shell to me feels as if it should be on a smart phone, not a desktop form factor. My personal comfort zone in desktop computing is not having a “cushion” between myself and the OS (Gnome-shell). People may disagree, people may like Gnome-Shell. I do not.
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GNOME Desktop
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Is there a killer in the software code running millions of medical devices? GNOME Executive Director Karen Sandler, formerly of the Software Freedom Law Center, has been fighting to get this software opened up for inspection and review since she received her own implanted defibrillator in 2008. The FDA and Supreme Court have been no help. She recently shared her journey at OSCON 2011.
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It’s been a long time since a desktop environment has caused so much controversy in the FOSS universe. How long? It is really hard to say, since the last time I can recall any kind of user backlash and retreat was over half a decade ago when the KDE project announced KDE 4.0. Alot of people relate the release of KDE 4 to the release of Gnome 3, drawing all sorts of wild parallels; but I say that these 2 releases could not be any more different. Now this article is not about KDE, but at the same time, a clear line in the sand must be drawn in order to explain what Gnome 3 really is.
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As distribution developer, some of our most important tasks are
* making packages work together nicely
* and selecting “stable” package version sets for a broader audience
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New Releases
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The newly released IPCop 2.0 Linux firewall distribution updates the kernel to version 2.6.32, adds hardware support for Cobalt, Sparc and PPC systems and includes a new installer that assists users with such tasks as setting up a network. The developers have also revised the user interface: for example, the system menu has a new scheduler for time-based actions, the web proxy menu includes more advanced settings, and the DHCP server menu has been simplified.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mobile ad network Millennial Media, is releasing its monthly report which gives a view into how each OS, device and manufacturer is performing on one of the largest remaining independent ad networks in the world. In August, Millennial actually combined connected devices and smartphones when breaking out the OS impression share. That’s significant because iOS and Android share can include tablets into factoring presence on the network. And last month, Android was in the top spot with a 54% share, while iOS was in second with a 28% share. Rim followed with 13% share.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is continuing to grow its revenues even in the midst of the current macroeconomic climate. Red Hat is growing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that they’re growing the number of deals worth more than $1 million.
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Those who say you cannot make money from FLOSS are ignoring RedHat which exceeded expectations handsomely. Investors are loving them.
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The ClearOS Enterprise 6.1.0 beta 1 release is here! This release will kickstart the process of creating a stable base system: installer, RPM packages, users, groups, system tools, LDAP, network, firewall, framework, and Marketplace. At the same time, we will start rolling out more apps like Web Proxy and Web Access Control found in this beta 1 release.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” Beta 2 has been released. I installed it in VirtualBox (with 3D support) to see what’s new since 11.04.
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Phones
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Companies that do have their own successful proprietary platforms are no it usually too eager to start giving them away in hopes that outside developers will make it better in exchange. Companies who’s platforms do fail to take off or get into trouble, on the other hand, sometime do try to turn to the open source community for help. Sometimes these efforts work and result in a successful product (e.g. Netscape Navigator turned Firefox), sometimes they end in disaster – e.g. Nokia’s Symbian experiment. However, even in Netscape case – it wasn’t the actual open sourced code, but the community created in the process that built Firefox browser from scratch, without much help from Netscape. And it took years of stale browser competition for Firefox to emerge, while Netscape’s corporate owner reaped very few benefits from open sourcing.
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Android
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Two high-end Android 2.3 smartphones were unveiled in Korea by HTC and LG this week. The HTC Raider 4G features a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, a 4.5-inch IPS (in-plane switching) display, 4G LTE, and an eight-megapixel camera with a 28mm lens attachment, while the LG Optimus Q2 sports a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, a slide-out keyboard, and a four-inch IPS display with 700-nit brightness.
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Java SDK is, perhaps, one of the most important advantages of Android which provides various powerful functions of Java programming language. However, many developers complain about Android’s fast development pace that they have difficulties to catch up. But if we think more positively, this fast-paced transformation seems to have materialized Android to consolidate itself as the most popular mobile platform. On top of that this popularity has led to many patent suits with Microsoft, thus pressuring many carrier providers to inevitably pay patent fees who initially used the technology thinking it was free. Also Oracle’s patent suit against Google citing that Java cannot be used on mobile devices just because Android uses Java. For above reasons and more, the future path of Android might not seem as smooth as before, but we can’t say it will be gloomy either. I hope all these issues will be settled down, and Android will continue to prosper.
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Android smartphones now outsell Apple products in Australia, according to research firm Kantar WorldPanel. It says Android had 42.9per cent of the market last month compared with Apple’s 37.2per cent.
Open Source Industry Australia, a body that promotes free and public-domain software, urged the ABC yesterday to get over its Apple fixation.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The Asus Eee PC X101 is the thinnest, lightest, and cheapest member of the Eee PC netbook family. The mini-laptop weighs just two pounds, measures less than 0.7 inches thick, and sells for about $200.
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ase this amazing piece of hardware, then you can get it from NewEgg, Amazon and B&H. NewEgg is offering the tablet in both the 16GB and 32GB version but with only one color choice: brown. The ASUS main site shows that the Eee Pad also comes in white, but for some reason, it’s not available on NewEgg. You can also check out the deals from Amazon and B&H. For all you Canadian residents, Amazon.ca is offering the tablet in both 16GB and 32GB flavors, but like NewEgg, the tablet is only available in brown.
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Wellington open source software firm Catalyst IT has won a seven-figure contract to develop the news website and supporting systems for the South China Morning Post.
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Sonatype delivers Sonatype Insight, a new solution for governing the use of open-source software in enterprise systems development.
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Events
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Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University (SMVDU) today celebrated the event of ‘Software Freedom Day’ (SFD) in their university campus. The event was organized by OSUM (Open Source University Meet-Up) club of SMVDU. The event was sponsored by AGMATEL INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED and AMTRAK TECHNOLOGIES. Software Freedom Day is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
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SaaS
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Puppet Labs is moving forward new provisioning, orchestration and automation capabilities designed to advance the platform’s stellar reputation in the management arena.
Puppet Enterprise 2.0, which debuted this week and ships October 21, is the first major upgrade of a company’s commercially supported version of Puppet that counts Google, Twitter, Apple, NYSE, Match.com, Red Hat and Citrix among its 250 enterprise customers.
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If the term “Cloud Computing” has any meaning, it can only be a certain attitude towards computing: an attitude of not thinking carefully about what a proposed scenario entails or what risks it implies.
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Marten Mickos and Eucalyptus have pumped new life into their build-your-own–cloud platform, revamping its approach to open source while adding new code designed to protect users from catastrophic failures.
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Databases
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By truncating software freedom before distribution, the supplier ensures you can’t use the software without restriction or benefit from the freedom of others to do so. In other words, while there may be some open source software in its origins, it’s not open source software you are receiving.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Google is going full out in its efforts on three different fronts: suppressing the Lindholm emails, challenging the Mitchell Patent Report, and now seeking to again suppress portions of the revised Cockburn report on damages.
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Yesterday we discussed the Google requests to suppress portions of the revised Cockburn Damages Report submitted by Oracle and to preserve the Attorney’s Eyes Only status of the Lindholm emails. Now Oracle has responded to each of those requests.
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Business
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Open source software vendor Talend has cited the growth of its partner network as proof that the channel’s appetite for non-proprietary products is growing.
The vendor, which specialises in open source data integration products, claims to have doubled the size of its UK channel over the past 12 months and now has more than 50 partners signed up.
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Project Releases
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The code can be optimized, but should give you a clear understanding on how to make smooth OpenGL lighting. And you can admire the stunning results with a mere basic material and one lamp!
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Public Services/Government
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The minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, vowed in March that he would “create a level playing field for open source software” as part of his strategy to slash the government’s £20bn annual bill for IT equipment.
A recent BBC Freedom of Information request hinted at just how far the government has to go before open-source technologies are widely adopted by various government departments. Although some are using open source for server management and workspace IT, proprietary vendors such as IBM and Microsoft still rule the roost.
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The Sleman government will use a free open source operation system in its office computers
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Sticking with her original deadline announced last year, European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes told a European interoperability standards forum yesterday that a public portal for access to government and public data from across the continent is on track to go online in Spring 2012. Following that, the next stage in Comm. Kroes’ agenda includes an ambitious project to launch a community-built, crowd-sourced public data platform for all of Europe.
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Open Access/Content
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Mr. $200 Textbook — the rival of cash-strapped college students — and Textbook Rebel –a Spongebob Squarepants lookalike – helped gather students to sign a petition that urges professors, publishers and college decision makers to consider inexpensive textbooks or free e-books over conventional, high-priced textbooks.
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Open Hardware
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Makers and motherboard-modders rejoice! One of the most popular open-source computing hardware companies recently debuted new hardware offerings for gadget geeks, including a beefier project board that will allow makers and hobbyists to create more complicated embedded computing projects.
Arduino announced three new products at Maker Faire NYC this weekend: The Arduino Due, which features a souped up ARM-based microcontroller, the Arduino Leonardo and the self-explanatory Arduino Wi-Fi.
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Health/Nutrition
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The chain’s press release about the Initiative says heart disease and stroke are the first and third leading causes of death, respectively. What Walgreens doesn’t say is that while it searches for ways to prevent heart disease, the chain also continues to sell one of the nation’s leading causes of heart disease and stroke: cigarettes. Not only that, but when the city of San Francisco passed an ordinance in 2008 banning pharmacies from selling cigarettes (based on the logic that as health-promoting businesses, pharmacies should not promote smoking) Walgreens fought the measure.
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Security
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The Internet is already essential infrastructure – where we make financial transactions, share personal data and get access to important information. It is part of our economic and social framework – and becoming all the more so. That’s a good thing. But it also means that the risks and impacts of cyber-attacks grow ever more. So what do we do when the system is under threat?
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Finance
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This sort of First Amendment violation should be a cause for concern for every American, whatever the political persuasion. This is a country where gamblers can now pillage the wealth from the lower classes and dodge prison sentences, while those who see a wrong and try to stop it are corralled, pepper-sprayed and hauled off to jail for attempting to petition their government—their government—for a redress of grievances.
Why don’t some of these blue-collar policemen do something for their own people and haul some Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers off to jail for a change?
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Last week, the insurance industry and its allies began what I predict will be a massive campaign to sell the public and policymakers on the idea of moving forward with the Ryan plan — albeit with a few tweaks and new a new sales pitch to make it seem more consumer-friendly.
An outfit called the Healthcare Leadership Council (HLC) announced in a press release a scheme that could be called Ryan-lite, but don’t be fooled: the plan would — to use a favorite industry term — take us down the “slippery slope” toward a complete corporate takeover of the Medicare program. (Insurers and their allies for years have warned Americans that enacting sweeping health care reforms they don’t like would lead us down the slippery slope toward socialism.)
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Civil Rights
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Civil society groups launched today an online platform to help citizens track Internet access restrictions imposed by telecom companies. This platform, RespectMyNet.eu, will present EU lawmakers with the evidence they keep denying: there is an urgent need to legislate against Net Neutrality violations, which harm fundamental freedoms as well as innovation and competition.
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09.25.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Elizabeth Krumbach is the kind of Linux person I find fascinating. She’s very strong on the technical side, with lots of Debian contributions to her name, but she’s also very active socially, in all kinds of Linux-related outreach. But even more impressively, Elizabeth seems to be using her ideal Linux desktop setup, which is always a cool thing to read.
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Server
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Fab loses his hair, the Pirate Party scores big time in Germany, Google+ gets an API, identi.ca gets upgraded and Microsoft goes completely insane with Windows 8.
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Kernel Space
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As you know, we’ve been working very hard on building a new kernel.org infrastructure from the ground up. This new infrastructure will no longer have shell access to the git repositories; instead we will be running git using the gitolite web glue.
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Graphics Stack
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Jeremy Huddleston released xorg-server 1.11.1 a few hours ago. This release was done since two “brown-bag” issues were found in X.Org Server 1.11.0, which was released just one month ago.
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Back in January I heard from VIA that their open-source Linux strategy / support was basically dead. They don’t have the resources or justification to do the work any longer, and their Linux TODO list was basically shot. In the years since they announced they were trying to become open-source friendly (and follow the steps of ATI/AMD), they only managed to push out some partially open-source code and some chipset documentation. But could they be playing around with open-source graphics drivers again?
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Applications
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OpenShot, one of the most popular video editors for Linux has reached version 1.4, getting a many improvements and bug fixes:
* New video and audio effects
* New 3D animations
* New transitions
* Timeline improvements
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After more than seven months of development, the OpenShot project has announced the arrival of version 1.4 of its open source video editor for Linux. According to the developers, the latest release of the non-linear, timeline-based video editor “represents a huge investment by our small and dedicated team”. In addition to “tons of bug fixes and speed improvements”, a number of new features have been added.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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It’s time for another bi-weekly development release of Wine… This new release, Wine 1.3.29, has noteworthy changes when it comes to Visual Basic Script (VBScript) and X Render support.
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Games
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After releasing couple of tech demos and final version for Linux, indie game studio Swing Swing Submarine has released a new demo of their game Blocks That Matter for users to get their hands on.
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Remember a year back when those Linux Steam builds leaked, everyone went crazy, and then nothing happened? Yeah. Well, it’s happening again, except this time with Desura, and the Linux client actually exists…
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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I gave Gnome themes a whirl, but ultimately decided that I like the default Gnome 3 desktop. Except for one thing: all windows are grey. The active window is grey with black text as the title, and inactive windows are a slightly different shade of grey with dark grey text as the title.
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A new maintenance release of Linux Portable Security LPS has been released, this release added more support for RealTek wireless drivers; added additional broadband cellular drivers; added additional SmartCard drivers; revised About Box to show licensing info; removed GMail S/MIME add-on, which no longer works with GMail; updated Flash to 10.3.183.7; updated Firefox to 3.6.22; updated DOD Configuration add-on to 1.3.3; updated Java to 6u27; updated OpenSSH to 5.9p1; updated DOD Root CAs. Find more info in the chagelog
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New Releases
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Summary:
· Announced Distro: GeeXboX 2.0
· Announced Distro: Pardus Linux 2011.2
· Announced Distro: Kororaa Linux 15
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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I am an active member of the German Mandriva community MandrivaUser.de, I was a Mandriva translator since about 2007 and I was one of the packagers creating the mud third party packages.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Tails, version 0.8 has been released 2 days ago, with some updates on his main packages.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If Canonical had its way, OEMs would make sure Ubuntu ran well on their hardware before shipping it. But most OEMs don’t, so Ubuntu developers have resorted to the next best thing: crowd-sourcing hardware validation to users via the Ubuntu Friendly program, which is almost ready for prime time. Here’s the scoop.
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Flavours and Variants
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This fantastic distribution is not merely another Ubuntu derivative. Bodhi delivers a smooth installation process, and an utterly perfected desktop environment that surely left developers locked in dark basements for weeks on end. Enlightenment may be exactly what all the other distributions are missing. The Enlightenment desktop is lightweight and highly customizable making this distribution a top choice for new or old systems. Bodhi comes with a minimal list of pre-installed applications as well, perfect if you are picky about what you like. So if you are ready to try something new Bodhi will leave you breathless.
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The new Ubuntu release (Oneiric Ocelot) comes out in about three weeks. Since the Linux news feeds I peruse have been filled with all the great improvements being made to the Unity interface in Ubuntu, I thought I’d download the new Ubuntu 11.10 beta 2 and check it out. It comes with new Linux Kernel version 3.0.4 and Gnome 3.1.92 along with an upgraded Unity.
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An almost-overlooked addition to the upcoming Kubuntu 11.10 is the new Kubuntu Low-Fat Settings package. With this set of new default settings for various KDE bits, it is quite possible to reduce memory usage by as much as 32% and reduce KDE’s start up time by 33%, according to our intrepid apachelogger. This is a boon to those of us with older and slower hardware.
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In the vast world of GNU/Linux distributions it can be difficult to choose one that suites all of your needs and still remains true to the core values of the Free Software Foundation. Although there are several distributions that have been branded 100% Libre, many of them seem to have lost steam and support.
I am pleased to report that Trisquel 5.0 was released this month. Trisquel is based on Ubuntu so users who are familiar with that distribution will feel right at home. Originally released in 2005 with the support of Richard Stallman and FSF, this installment of the 100% Libre distribution is well polished and a pleasure to use.
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Phones
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Android
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Stallman summarised by saying that Android devices are a major step towards free smartphones that are fully controlled by their users, but that there is a long way to go yet: “Even though the Android phones of today are considerably less bad than Apple or Windows smartphones, they cannot be said to respect your freedom.”
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In late August, Marcin Jakubowski, Open Source Ecology founder and director, posted the GVCS Rollout Plan for 2011-2012 on the project wiki. In his post, Jakubowski explained that the project’s 2010 budget was US $1,500 per month, and the current budget is $10,000 per month. He projects the project budget will be up to $100,000 per month within six months, with financing coming from True Fans (financial supporters) and production earnings.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google’s rapid development pace shows no signs of slowing as it rolls out a new stable version of Chrome, this time version 14.
Unlike Firefox, which also has an accelerated release process, Chrome appears to be benefiting from the high turnover, while Firefox seems to be suffering because of it.
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Mozilla
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The accelerated Firefox release cycle may be great for many users, but enterprise IT folks were not thrilled. To their credit, the folks at Mozilla eventually took the complaints seriously and founded a working group to address enterprise desktop needs. However, it seems clear that the Extended Support Releases (ESRs) will be second-class citizens.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The judge can order Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Google’s Larry Page to talk in closed court all he wants, they’re not going to settle Oracle’s lawsuit over Android and its alleged infringement on Java.
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BSD
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Public Services/Government
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The Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development used ‘Subversion’, an open source version control system, to publish online the first part of the source code for the government’s eVoting system.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Third, benefits for science. Because research in genomics, pharmacology or the fight against cancer increasingly depends on the availability and sophisticated analysis of large data sets. Sharing such data means researchers can collaborate, compare, and creatively explore whole new realms. We cannot afford for access to scientific knowledge to become a luxury, and the results of publicly funded research in particular should be spread as widely as possible.
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Of all the priorities Meg Whitman now must face as Hewlett-Packard’s CEO — and HP has many priorities — deep and long commitment to open-source technology must be near the top of the list.
HP’s software business is simply not a strength for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company — whether it’s on the desktop, the server, the data center or in the cloud. Perhaps the best piece of software that comes from HP is its Universal Print Driver, which is actually a powerful piece of software but not exactly positioned in the IT industry’s growth areas.
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Finance
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Growing concerns about the weakness of economic growth around the world are increasingly dimming prospects for American financial institutions, amplifying risks of spiraling troubles.
Even Goldman Sachs, the well-known investment bank, now could be headed toward recording its second quarterly loss in a dozen years — its first quarterly loss since the financial crisis — according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The bank’s lower earnings prospects have been taken by experts as a sign that Goldman is pulling back from taking risks. In the immediate term, a cutback in financial activity by Goldman and other banks is likely to drag on the struggling American economy, as more businesses and consumers find it harder to secure credit needed to make purchases.
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Lack of government regulation; easy lending in the US housing market meant anyone could qualify for a home loan with no government regulations in place.
Also, London was competing with New York as the banking capital of the world. Gordon Brown, the British finance minister at the time, introduced ‘light touch regulation’ – giving bankers a free hand in the marketplace.
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Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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There has been plenty of concern recently about companies sneaking their own marketing material or one-sided corporate propaganda into schools. And while some may differ on how big a problem this is, I think most people would agree that a local government shouldn’t be aiding the process — especially without revealing the corporate sponsor. And yet, that appears to be exactly what New York City is doing. And, to make it even more ridiculous, they’re doing so by putting forth a corporate-sponsored contest about the importance of copyright… and hiding in the fine print that by entering the contest, you may be giving up your own copyrights.
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09.24.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Meet Linux, Linux the harlequin. Linux wears a coat of many colours, is depicted as a bumbling fool and people love to laugh at it. This harlequin is called a clown, a fool, an idiot and looked upon with derision by people of “class”. This harlequin is ignored and just treated and thought of as simply background entertainment. In other words Linux the harlequin is not thought of as important at all and is generally underestimated.
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I wrote recently about how Microsoft is now among the broadest supporters of enterprise Linux server, but when it comes to desktop PCs and laptops, mobile and converged devices and end users, Microsoft’s Linux support is a time warp back to 1998 when computers and their software were fused by proprietary sodder.
Though probably not intended as one of the new Windows 8 features to be highlighted, recent reports indicate a boot requirement in Microsoft’s latest Windows 8 OS prevents booting of Linux.
As a Linux user who has installed several different distributions on several different failed Windows machines, I’m concerned for a few reasons. One, it can be difficult to impossible to avoid the so-called ‘Microsoft tax,’ whereby Windows machines are purchased with the intention of installing Linux. Two, this is a serious limitation to the growing segment of users that like a dual-boot option with Linux. Three, what will happen to all of those PCs, laptops, netbooks and other devices after the Microsoft software becomes buggy, broken or outdated?
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An obvious question is why Linux doesn’t support UEFI secure booting. Let’s ignore the issues of key distribution and the GPL and all of those things, and instead just focus on what would be required. There’s two components – the signed binary and the authenticated variables.
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Microsoft have responded to suggestions that Windows 8 may make it difficult to boot alternative operating systems. What’s interesting is that at no point do they contradict anything I’ve said. As things stand, Windows 8 certified systems will make it either more difficult or impossible to install alternative operating systems. But let’s have some more background.
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The same will happen with tablets. A small, number about 60million will be shipped in 2011 but in 2012, the number could increase dramatically, about 300%. That means when “8″ is released, the installed base of GNU/Linux or Android/Linux or iPad tablets could be about 200 million. OEMs are not going to shift to the “tight margin” model that M$ imposes on PCs in the smart thingies. The newcomers will be making more than M$’s partners on small cheap computers than on “PCs”. By the end of 2012, consumers and businesses will know and love the small cheap computer and will turn up their noses at M$ offering small expensive computers.
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Desktop
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My laptop is just a plain old Thinkpad W510 with a 15” screen running 1920×1080. I don’t have another monitor, I don’t have a desktop or a second laptop, this is it.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Apple has its self-explanatory fruity logo, Microsoft has its stained-glass banner, and Linux has its floppy, friendly, ever-cheerful penguin Tux as its team mascot. But after 20 years of existence, does Linux benefit from the Tux logo? Some say Tux is a perfectly fine way to represent Linux as a whole; others call it “cartoon-y” and prevents people from taking Linux seriously.
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I was supposed to do this on Monday, but it didn’t seem to be hugely pressing.
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If you have ever wondered what the creator of Linux does in-between working through the thousands of changes, corrections and new features for the next Linux release, the answer is simple: he writes software. Linus Torvalds has just released subsurface, a dive-tracking program designed after he found that “none of the dive log software worked for me”. The subsurface application runs on Linux and uses gtk2 for the GUI. It can process xml dive files or work directly with any dive computer supported by libdivecomputer.
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Graphics Stack
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In my talk (or rather: structured discussion) “Methods of Attraction: How to bring in new contributors” on this year’s X.org Developer’s Conference I brought up reasons why open source projects often fail to attract new contributors, and some changes to help this.
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One of the mailing list threads I’ve been trying to catch up on this week while at Oktoberfest is the heated discussion about merging video/input drivers back into the X.Org Servers. This discussion was started at the XDC2011 conference, but there’s many e-mails being exchanged from more parties not in favor of merging the drivers into the xorg-server tree or wishing to see other developmental process changes.
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Originally this annual survey was set to end on 20 September, but due to being busy with Oktoberfest, that deadline was forgotten about. As a result, there’s still time to participate.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Did you learn all your Linux console skills from books or from forums? Or, did you peek over someone’s shoulder to see the real action? Once in a while, we stumble upon new projects that deserve some attention, like Playterm. What’s the reason for this command-line “peep show”? To spread GNU Linux command-line knowledge.
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Games
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Josh (Cheese) Bush from Twolofbees.com let me know that has made an interview with rotektor (Tim Jung) who has recently been appointed GNU/Linux Games Lead for Desura , it comes with 3 parts – so here is the first part (the others will be published on his website in the next few weeks).
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The Plasma Active OS has been on Desktop and Netbook interfaces for quite awhile now. The exploration into a much wider range of devices that can utilize the Plasma interface is the goal of the current beta testing. By displaying the possibilities of Plasma OS to other devices through a beta run, the developers at KDE are targeting the largest pool of users possible.
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C++11, the new C++ ISO standard that was approved last month and formerly was known as C++0x, has been called to be employed by Qt and KDE as quickly as possible.
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A free software project such as the many projects under the KDE umbrella do not need users, they only need more developers. A user which is not able to develop is useless. Because of that it is totally acceptable that you demand that user’s should start learning programming to fix the bugs they report.
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The last couple of weeks have been ridiculously busy. Or, if you prefer (and I do): ridicubusy. On the personal side of life, I managed to squeeze in a two day paddle-and-camping trip the other weekend, played dinner host to Lawrence Krauss (made some of my favourite dishes, and one new one (for me, anyways): egg yolk ravioli), co-hosted a “Ready, Steady, Cook!” evening at the house along with S. All of that was enjoyable, and great breaks between the long hours of working on Plasma and general KDE “stuff”.
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME 3.2 is almost here, the team has made available the release candidate version for testing and the final build is expected to land in a week.
If you can’t wait for that long or want to help some of the remaining bugs, if any, you can grab the sources and see what the second update to the third major iteration of the GNOME desktop environment looks like.
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I have long been an advocate for listening to the users (see this old thread in in GNOME’s ml), and through the years I have discussed over and over with GNOME developers why it’s important to listen to your users, and why they are barely doing it.
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The chief executive of the GNOME Foundation, Karen Sandler, will be the first keynote speaker at the 13th Australian national Linux conference scheduled to be held in Ballarat from January 16 to 20 next year.
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Red Hat Family
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That was the takeaway from my exclusive phone interview with Red Hat (NYSE: RHT ) CEO Jim Whitehurst after the company reported second-quarter earnings last night.
Revenue for the quarter tallied up to $281.3 million, up 28% year over year, while non-GAAP net income was $56.5 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, rising 53% from last year. Non-GAAP operating income jumped 41% to $76.4 million, resulting in an 18.7% operating margin. The company’s total deferred revenue balance, an important precursor to sales, rose 25% to $813.2 million and billings grew 30%.
[...]
Even Samsung is considering taking its mobile OS, Bada, open source next year.
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In yesterday’s ugly market, only a few stocks were able to eke out gains. One of the standouts: Red Hat (NYSE:RHT). Its price was up 3% to $41.49.
[...]
So might the tough macroeconomic environment hurt Red Hat? Perhaps so. Yet the company has the advantage that its software is free. Consider that some of the hardest-hit sectors — such as financial services and the government — have shown continued demand for Red Hat’s services.
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Fedora
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Next, I’d like to remind you that in Fedora 16 we again have supplemental wallpapers and what’s more: since Fedora 16 all the supplemental wallpapers appear not only in GNOME’s and KDE’s wallpaper choosers but also in XFCE’s.
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This post is exactly what it prommised. I have decided to take the plunge and install Fedora 16 Beta RC1 on my Desktop. (Before anyone starts on me I have the experience to run a beta on a production machine and have a backup O/S RHEL 6)
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In his blog post referencing Wednesday’s Go/NoGo meeting, Williamson detailed some of the bugs causing another slip in the Fedora 16 release schedule.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The second beta release of Ubuntu 11.10 has been made available for download.
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Flavours and Variants
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We (Raja Genupula and I) have been making an OS that will integrate the Web seamlessly with the OS.
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Phones
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Android
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To what extent does Android respect the freedom of its users? For a computer user that values freedom, that is the most important question to ask about any software system.
In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users’ freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn’t. By contrast, the idea of “open source” focuses on how to develop code; it is a different current of thought whose principal value is code quality rather than freedom. Thus, the concern here is not whether Android is “open”, but whether it allows users to be free.
Android is an operating system primarily for mobile phones, which consists of Linux (Torvalds’ kernel), some libraries, a Java platform and some applications. Linux aside, the software of Android versions 1 and 2 was mostly developed by Google; Google released it under the Apache 2.0 license, which is a lax free software license without copyleft.
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The recently launched Adobe’s Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 have become an attraction for the developers. Although this version of the development tool is recently launched with an updater for multiscreen mobile support, the rave reviews of the product bear testimony to the fact that developers are willing to make the most of it. With Adobe Flash Builder, developers now have a single platform for developing highly expressive mobile applications that can be distributed via Android Market, Apple App Store and BlackBerry App World. Flash Builder 4.5 enables the creation of applications that work seamlessly across leading mobile devices platforms. These products provide developers with an opportunity to reach more than 80 million Android devices, BlackBerry Playbooks, iPads and iPhones.
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Events
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Open source software advocate Jon “Maddog” Hall will kick off a series of discussions about the potential open source software holds for economic development at a Sept. 22 lecture in Fairmont.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has published a proposal for an extended support release (ESR) version for Firefox versions that are deployed in business environments. The extended release cycle is designed to alleviate the burden of the 6-week rapid releases and respective support cycles by replacing them with 42-week versions.
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There’s a lot of talk about Firefox’s ever-increasing version number, and it made me wonder: what piece of software has the biggest version number of all? A brief scan of my Xubuntu 11.04 box suggests than XTerm, at version 268, has the lead, although I’m sure there’s something bigger out there. And in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter – how good the software is, and for how long it is supported, is a bigger issue.
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SaaS
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Businesses now offer computing users tempting opportunities to let others keep their data and do their computing. In other words, to toss caution and responsibility to the winds.
These businesses, and their boosters, like to call these computing practices “cloud computing”. They apply the same term to other quite different scenarios as well, such as renting a remote server, making the term so broad and nebulous that nothing meaningful can be said with it. If it has any meaning, it can only be a certain attitude towards computing: an attitude of not thinking carefully about what a proposed scenario entails or what risks it implies. Perhaps the cloud they speak of is intended to form inside the customer’s mind.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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For those that could be interested in my shameless self-promotion, there is some news about the LibreOffice Visio import filter at libregraphicsworld.org web site, accompanied by a fine interview with two fine hackers.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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What disturbs me is not the fact of the criticism, but how it is made. For one thing, it seems unrealistic. It’s all very well for Proffitt to say, as he did on Google+, that “I would hope that they would advocate the benefits of free software (of which there are many) without feeling the need to tear down everything else. Again.”
But how, in practice, is the FSF supposed to approach subjects like Android in a positive light? While Stallman concedes that “the Android phones of today are considerably less bad than Apple or Windows smartphones,” Android obviously isn’t free software, although many people I talk to have the vague belief that it is.
Obviously, a debunking is in order, but by definition a debunking is negative. In fact, how is the FSF supposed to discuss the matter at all, especially when any free software alternative to Android is so small and so unknown that any attempt to advocate it would automatically discredit itself?
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In his “Off The Beat” blog at LinuxPro Magazine, Bruce Byfield wrote about what he called a “disturbing trend”, namely to criticize and otherwise bad-mouth everything that comes out of the Free Software Foundation. He mentioned other pundits and journalists like Brian Proffitt and Joe Brockmeier.
For the record, I know and like everyone of these guys (Bruce, Brian, and Joe) and I really hate to see them fighting.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the Free Software Foundation. The FSF has, as its founder and figurehead, the legendary Richard M. Stallman. Richard is a very smart guy with some strong feelings about what constitutes Free Software. He’s also the guy behind the GPL, the license under which the Linux kernel was released. That document, the GPL, deserves to be called ‘visionary’, helping to shape the world of FOSS as we know it.
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Project Releases
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After over two months of work since 0.5.0 by a handful of developers, there’s finally a new release of Lightspark, the (other) open source Flash player. Unlike Gnash, Lightspark supports the AVM2 virtual machine and the newest versions of SWF files, while falling back to Gnash when it encounters SWF8 or earlier content.
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Open Hardware
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To realize this, the car company announced a partnership with Bug Labs to develop a new in-car research platform named OpenXC, earlier this week. [1] Ford also plans to introduce a socially-networked in-car fuel economy monitor connected to the Internet via Bug Labs’ cloud-based service, BUGswarm.
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It has come up many times, that the users of software products have the most influence over how these greedy and gigantic companies operate. Why? Because if users do not use and/or buy products, these companies could not and would not exist.
Microsoft is probably one of the worst abusers of its consumers. Complex licensing programs are designed purposely to make customers overpay for licenses. Little to no discounts have been offered for upgrades, even for users that had already purchased Windows Vista for example, despite Microsoft’s declaration that Vista was a “mistake”. Secretly undermining the competition, using legal devices like software patents, so that users must go to Microsoft and pay royalties to Microsoft if they use non-Microsoft software. Vendor lock-in, where current customers are unable to use non-Microsoft software because their Microsoft products are incompatible and too expensive to migrate away from. Closely monitoring the software that its customers use, in order to keep them from installing the software on too many computers without paying more. And the list goes on.
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Security
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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A few years ago, an amendment making sure that parallel importation was not criminalised in the EU disappeared after it was adopted in the European Parliament. This summer, the Chairman of the International Trade committee (INTA), Mr Vital Moreira, rewrote a question the INTA committee asked the Parliament’s Legal Services regarding ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). The INTA Chairman among others things left out a reference regarding parallel importation. Up until now, no member of the INTA committee questioned the behavior of the INTA Chairman. (See update below.)
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