03.20.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Recently I’ve had the pleasure of digging out a couple of old Mac computers to demonstrate to a few family members out of curiosity. I am definitely a believer in educating the next generation on computing of the past, and how we got from there to where we are today. So one of the computers I fired up is a Macintosh Quadra 900. As usual, it booted right up without problems after sitting for probably close to 8 years. Everybody was amused and it was actually a lot of fun showing them the Mac OS 8 operating system on it.
The next day, I remembered at one time I had a GNU/Linux server that had Netatalk running on it, so that I could connect from this Mac to the server and back up and transfer files. That server has since been upgraded, and I never really put in the time to get Netatalk running on it again until now. The server is a Pentium III 667 MHz system running CentOS 6.0, with X11 and all of the bells and whistles. The system runs good despite the fact that it is only a Pentium III. It also houses two 2 TB drives with the ext4 filesystem and runs very well.
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Desktop
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An attractive option for many reasons, though, is to buy the laptop with Linux preloaded, as I’ve noted before. You typically pay a little bit more, but you also avoid any headaches that may arise from getting everything to “just work.”
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Jon “maddog” Hall is a bit of a legend in the Linux community, so it’s truly an honor to have his participation here. Jon makes a number of interesting (and, of course, provactive points). For instance, he chooses his distribution based upon his client, rather than choosing what he personally prefers. And he gravitates toward software that offers the most functionality, rather than the easiest, which is an interesting counterpoint to the many in the “choose the simplest tool for the job” camp.
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Kernel Space
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Just one day after the Linux 3.3 kernel was released, the power management pull request for the Linux 3.4 kernel has already been submitted.
Rafael J. Wysocki submitted the email pull request with the power management changes for the 3.4 kernel. Key items include the introduction of early/late suspend/hibernation device call-backs, generic PM domains extensions and fixes, devfreq updates, device PM QoS updates, concurrency problem fixes, and system suspend and hibernation fixes.
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Graphics Stack
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Last month I mentioned that Intel Haswell graphics driver code would soon surface, it’s taken a bit longer than anticipated, but the Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers are beginning to push the code publicly so that the hardware enablement can land in Linux distributions ahead of the hardware’s availability a year from now.
Due to varying Linux release schedules and development cycles, plus that the open-source Linux graphics drivers can’t be easily updated by end-users without updating most of the system’s core components, Intel’s OTC developers are left to push out their new hardware support code quite early. Both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge Linux driver code began appearing a year in advance, so it’s that time of the year for Haswell graphics code to begin appearing for the Linux kernel, Mesa, libdrm, and the xf86-video-intel DDX.
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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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Last month was the Humble Bundle Mojam for games made in a weekend while previous to that was their first Android-focused Humble Bundle, with the titles still being available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
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Desktop Environments
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This past week, I played around with Windows 8. One overriding thought forced its way to the front of my consciousness. How would the Windows users react to the drastic change?
Change is a topic that has been much maligned and very heated over the last couple of years in technology. What brought this about? Within the framework of 2011 and 2012, the subject became a hotbed thanks to Ubuntu Unity and GNOME 3. Both desktops were drastically different than what users had grown accustomed to. What really surprised me was that the desktop metaphor had gone with little to no changes since the release of Windows 95. That’s quite a long time with little marked evolution. Both GNOME and KDE followed what Microsoft had declared the standard, and even both the open source heavy-hitters played along for quite some time. It wasn’t until the release of GNOME 2 and KDE 4 that noticeable change was on the way. When GNOME split its panels into two pieces, there was a little guff, but nothing more than a few ripples were heard. When KDE 4 came out, the Linux community was turned up on its head. But then, when Unity and GNOME 3 were released, one would have thought the Four Horsemen were about to make their apocalyptic appearances.
But now, a change is coming to the Windows desktop that is nearly as drastic as was from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 or from Classic GNOME to Ubuntu Unity. Windows 8 begins a new era with the adoption of what looks like part Windows 7 and part Windows Mobile (and inspired by open source designs).
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Last week, I had the chance to have a nice chat with Jonathan Riddell, Canonical employee and Kubuntu maintainer.
For years, Jonathan was paid to maintain Kubuntu. In a recent move, Canonical announced that Kubuntu will become a community-only project. As a way to start the conversation, I poked him about that:
— What happened? Is Canonical dropping KDE support?
— Well, we are doing with KDE exactly what we did with GNOME.
— Indeed. But what is the reason?
— Canonical seems to think that none of them managed to reach a non-geek audience.
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Rogue Linux distributions aren’t something that I tend to put much thought into. After all, considering that Linux distributions make their source code open and transparent, how effective would it be for developers to attempt to include harmful elements?
Yet despite this commonly held belief, it appears that one new Linux distribution wasn’t exactly it what claimed to be.
The distribution referred to as anonymous OS wasn’t what many of those who downloaded it thought it would be. Those who tried the Ubuntu-based release thought they were going to be testing a distribution centered around personal privacy and remaining anonymous online.
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There are a lot of Russians in the Linux world. Not only in Russia, but also in other parts of the world. The examples? Eugeni Dodonov lives in Brazil, Artyom Zorin lives in Ireland.
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New Releases
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The Zorin OS Team are proud to finally release Zorin OS 6 Lite, the latest evolution of the Zorin OS Lite series of operating systems, designed specifically for Windows users utilizing old or low-powered hardware.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Ubuntu and Mint don’t want it; Linus called it an “unholy mess.” While most other distros are passing up or postponing GNOME Shell, Fedora is full steam ahead. Does Red Hat know something the rest of us don’t? Or is GNOME 3 really as bad as everyone says?
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Debian Family
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I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we weren’t able to convert many of them into sustainable installations.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Two years ago in March of 2010, Mark Shuttleworth stepped down as CEO of Canonical Ubuntu Linux. Shuttleworth moved aside to deal with the strategic technical issues of the project and his Chief Operating Office Jane Silber stepped up to become the CEO.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Mythbuntu team has announced that starting with the 12.04 release they will be moving to LTS only releases. Mythbuntu ISOs will only be released for LTS releases.
The team will continue to provide MythTV packages for non-LTS releases in the standard Ubuntu repositories and the Mythbuntu provided repositories so the users will still be able to install MythTV on non LTS releases.
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Phones
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Android
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The CyanogenMod team made news last week when they announced that future versions of their venerable Android build would no longer include root-level access by default, a massive departure from essentially every other custom Android ROM. Some have questioned the move, claiming that removing root undermines the very idea of running a custom ROM.
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ANDROID DISTRIBUTION Cyanogenmod has announced that Cyanogenmod 7.2 finally entered release candidate status.
Cyanogenmod’s popular Android distribution has been ported to many devices and while the outfit is busy readying Cyanogenmod 9 based on Android 4.0, it is still working on Cyanogenmod 7.2. The operating system, based on Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread, has finally reached release candidate status, supporting 70 devices.
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Tweet
Samsung’s projector phone Galaxy Beam is an impressive device. We played with the phone during the Mobile World Congress and liked it very much. While the release date of the phone is still unknown we got reports that Indians will be getting this phone in April. IBN Live reports that “The device will be launched in India in April”. There is no report on the price of the phone.
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The update to Ice Cream Sandwich just started rolling out to the Samsung Galaxy S II last week and has yet to reach users in many regions, but the build’s code can now be found at Samsung’s open source portal. The release won’t be immediately useful for those looking to get Android 4.0 on their Galaxy S II right now, but it will make it a heck of a lot easier for the dev community to create custom software builds based on the latest version of Android.
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Samsung’s long-in-development Galaxy S III may be the first smartphone with LTE-based 4G built into the processor. Apparent leaks from an executive to the Korea Times had a quad-core Exynos processor shipping with both LTE 4G and HSPA 3G inside. The move would supposedly be to reduce the “huge amounts” Samsung has to pay to Qualcomm to get 4G, the anonymous insider said.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Tweet
Last year in December when Google chairman Eric Schmidt said that “in the next six months we plan to market a tablet of the highest quality” it was not clear what he meant by that.
The rumors were rife that Google was working on its own tablet on the lines on Nexus Phones. A Google tablet is due ever since Google announced ICS, which brings all Google devices under one OS. Now reports are coming that Google has picked ASUS for their tablet and it will be priced to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The tablet will have a 7-inch screen, according to reports.
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The tablet is running Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich on 1.0 GHz ARM Cortex A8 system processor. The tablet features a 7-inch LCD capacitive touchscreen. It has a 2 megapixel main camera and a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera. The tablets has an impressive 1GB of RAM and comes with 4GB storage. It sports a microSDHC card slot (with up to 32GB supported) so you can expand as much storage as you want. It has a mini USB port and Rechargeable Li-poly 4000MAh battery. It claims to offer up to 25 hours of music, up to 5 hours of video and up to 6 hours of Web browsing.
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Back in December, we announced that webOS would be going Open Source (thumbs up from me). Now, we have an official word from the webOS Developer blog: Enyo, the JavaScript app framework, is now available for download right here.
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Last Friday the OSI Board held a special meeting to fill vacancies that had arisen by the departure of three directors – Mike Godwin, Andrew Oliver and Michael Tiemann. Michael Tiemann left the Board after serving as OSI President for many years and leaves a large gap which the board will only fill thoughtfully; as a consequence, Martin Michlmayr, currently OSI Secretary, was temporarily appointed Acting President and the election of a full new President scheduled for the first meeting of the new Board, on April 4th. The Board warmly thanks all three for the contribution they have made to OSI.
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The Open Source Initiative has announced three new board members: Mike Millinkovich, Luis Villa and Deb Bryant. From 1 April, they will be taking over seats on the open source advocating organisation’s board which were freed by the departure of Mike Godwin, Andrew Oliver and Michael Tiemann. As announced at FOSDEM 2012, for the first time, the OSI board invited nominations for two of the seats from non-directors, specifically the new OSI affiliates; they retained one seat for a board-only appointment.
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Rackspace has been building what is arguably a reasonably respectable pedigree in open source technologies.
It was summer of 2010 that the company partnered with NASA to launch the open source cloud computing operating system OpenStack. Built to compete with VMware’s vSphere and Microsoft’s Azure, the OpenStack project has seen a list of blue chip vendor names sign up as community members since its launch.
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From today people using Android smartphones will be able to access YouthNet’s online volunteering database, Do-it, through a mobile application.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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CNet reports that Blizzard joined Mozilla in 1998 and spearheaded efforts to transform the web from a series of documents into a software platform running across connected devices ranging from mobile phones and tablets to televisions and cars. Much of Blizzard’s work focused on the HTML5 web standard.
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SaaS
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The cloud computing strategies at Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM have a common thread. It’s called OpenStack — the open source cloud platform. The VAR Guy therefore asks an obvious question: Is OpenStack a path forward for hardware resellers that are seeking to develop public and private cloud services strategies? Hmmm…
First, here’s a bunch of background. Within the next two months or less, Hewlett-Packard is expected to unveil the HP Cloud — which will compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Windows Azure. Meanwhile, IBM quietly in joined the OpenStack effort in February 2012, though no major announcement was made. And Dell has been an OpenStack proponent since 2010.
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CMS
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Education
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My husband and I are librarians. We were talking recently about library training, the library profession, the open source movement, and how open source digital content is being distributed today in public libraries. We were struck by the way that open source thinking has infiltrated many areas—but not yet the profession or institution of librarians.
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Healthcare
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Last week a large discussion began among GCC developers about their hopes and plans for GCC 5.0. The common theme is for GCC 5 to be more like the increasingly-popular LLVM compiler infrastructure project.
David Malcolm, a Red Hat developer, initially forked a GCC development list thread and re-titled it to GCC 5? and laid out his views. In his lengthy message he talked about the ongoing work for moving more of the GNU Compiler Collection from being written in plain C to being in C++, the need for a proper GCC plug-in API, and moving GCC towards being a collection of libraries.
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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OpenROV is a project that provides plans and software for a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Currently, it’s a series of prototypes, with the goal of a fully-realized design of an underwater exploration device.
It was originally created to explore Hall City Cave in northern California. The cave has a lake where robbers supposedly dropped gold. The ROV has made a successful journey into the lake, although it hasn’t yet struck gold.
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Open Data
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Programming
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Google has announced the accepted mentoring organisations for its eighth annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event. According to Google Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) member Carol Smith, there were more than 400 mentoring applications for this year’s contest, of which 180 open source projects were accepted – 41 of these are new to GSoC.
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Finance
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People are reflected in glass as they walk past Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York City. Photo by Mario Tama via Getty Images.
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While the global financial meltdown and its aftershocks have unleashed a flood of indignation, condemnation, and protest upon Wall Street, the crisis has exposed a deeper distrust and implacable resentment of capitalism itself.
Capitalism might be the greatest engine of prosperity and progress ever devised, but in recent years, individuals and communities have grown increasingly disgruntled with the implicit contract that governs the rights and responsibilities of business. The global economy and the Internet have heightened our sense of interconnectedness and sharpened our awareness that when a business focuses only on enriching investors, managers view the interests of customers, employees, communities—and the fate of the planet—as little more than cost trade-offs in a quarter-by-quarter game.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Crucial discussions going on in the EU Parliament will determine the fate of ACTA. Whereas the rapporteur David Martin is siding with the EU Commission in attempting to defuse the debate and postpone the final vote on ACTA, other members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) insist on voting in the coming months, as originally planned. By urging for a swift rejection of ACTA ahead of next week’s meetings in the Parliament, EU citizens have a decisive role to play.
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03.19.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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And, really, why wouldn’t it be? Nearly every “hot” technology hyped in the media these days directly or indirectly depends on Linux. Cloud computing? Big data? DVRs? Android smartphones? It’s all running Linux underneath, and as these sectors continue to explode, so too does Linux.
About the only hot tech property that doesn’t have a direct Linux connection right now is the tablet market, which anyone would have to concede to Apple’s iPad.
With all the giddiness about the success of Linux, I was a little curious about where Linux is popular these days, so with a little time to kill, I did a little research on Google Insights for Search. If you’re not familiar with this tool, Insights produces normalized results of search terms entered on Google, and tracks those trends over time. It also breaks out search terms by (again, normalized) geographic area.
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Linux. It’s really not a hard operating system to learn. In fact, that very first statement is wrong. Linux is not an operating system. Linux a kernel which is used as the very core to build an operating system around. But these are the things that children of today are not learning. Not in public school systems anyway.
When I was a teenager, I was very interested in computers. I looked forward to and really enjoyed my Information Technology classes. But it wasn’t just the computers that I was interested. The more I got involved with them, the more I wanted to know about what goes on to make them work. Or to be precise, the operating system.
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Linux Australia has rejected a request for funding from the Gold Coast Tech Space, a project that would promote open collaboration among members of the technology community in the area.
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The recent Linux Foundation report about the Linux jobs market highlighted a need for experienced professionals, but the traditional Linux training and certification programs don’t always impart the kind of skills actually required by employers. In an attempt to bridge this gap, veteran Linux trainer and Linux Journal associate editor Shawn Powers has teamed up with CBT Nuggets to develop a series of Linux training videos entitled “Linux for the Real World.” According to the description, this course “goes beyond the hypotheticals to walk viewers through real-world situations.”
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Desktop
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The difference a year can make is huge. A year ago, it was “standard wisdom” among many that GNU/Linux could never make it on the desktop. That does not seem to be the case today. The question this year seems to be what share M$ can retain, if any.
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Meanwhile, most OEMs are shipping more and more GNU/Linux systems and folks who weren’t into personal computers at all are shipping many millions of ARMed machines.
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The Mental Health Center of Riagg Rijnmond reduced their employee desktop budget by two-thirds by ditching their proprietary hardware and software for a Linux and open source-based system, which includes NoMachine software.
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Kernel Space
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Oracle and SUSE already support Btrfs, even though the filesystem hasn’t yet been proven in a proper field test and is officially still classified as experimental. The two distributors have also pressed ahead with the Btrfsck test and repair tool, foregoing any prior testing by the Linux community.
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Linux 3.3 fixes problems that resulted in freezes when writing to slow disks. Hot replace support for software RAIDs removes the element of risk when hot swapping disks in RAID arrays. The network subsystem now includes teaming support, a virtual switch and infrastructure for avoiding “bufferbloat”.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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The Best Alternative File Browser for LinuxLinux is rife with awesome file browsers, so if you don’t like the one that came with your distro, you have a lot of choices. Our favorite is the insanely feature-filled Krusader for KDE.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Ryan “Icculus” Gordon, the well known independent Linux game developer that’s single-handedly brought many games to Linux, is set to be giving a presentation in two weeks on a to-be-announced topic.
Ryan Gordon will be giving a presentation on 31 March in Chicago as part of the Flourish conference. The presentation’s title and description is simply TBA (to be announced) on the presentation page.
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Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteer game developers, has released the ninth alpha of their open source real-time strategy (RTS) game, 0 A.D. yesterday. The aptly codenamed “Ides of March” release debuts the Roman civilisation and introduces new combat and trade systems.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The first Ubuntu flavour for tablets is now making daily builds. We even got our first bug reports from our localy Plasma Active upstreams. Images are for i386 only for now, ARMv7 should be added when we know it’s a bit more stable and have testers.
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Besides Canonical no longer sponsoring the Kubuntu distribution following the 12.04 LTS release of this KDE-focused Ubuntu derivative, there’s some more changes this cycle. As a last minute change prior to next month’s Kubuntu 12.04 release, Mozilla Firefox support is being dropped.
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GNOME Desktop
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Cinnamon 1.4 has been released and announced by Cinnamon Development Team. Cinnamon 1.4 bring a few changes, the major change in this release is a new hot corner behavior which can now use either workspace selection (like Compiz “Expo”) or window selection (like Compiz “Scale”).
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There are a lot of distributions (distros) of GNU/Linux. A lot of newbies visit Distrowatch.com to check them out, compare styles and contents and try one or more out. It’s the “car lot” GNU/Linux. The ranking of “Hits Per Day” gives some idea of what newbies are seeking:
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New Releases
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The Tiny Core Project development team has released version 4.4 of its minimal Linux distribution. According to lead developer Robert Shingledecker, the new update makes searching for additional extensions easier using a new TAG field. Searching using tags is now supported in both the GUI and command-line versions of the AppBrowser and ScmBrowser for finding Self Contained Mountable (SCM) applications, which were introduced in version 4.2.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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As a non-technical user of Linux, and after reading several posts about the battle between developers and users who feel neglected by them, I could not prevent myself from worrying a bit about the soon-to-come release of Mageia 2. You know, maybe Mageia also jumped on board that train that takes you to DumbOSland, where you “use-your-computer-as-if-it-were-a-cellphone”.
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Mageia 2 Beta 2 was released yesterday with the declaration “near the goal.” They say “only one and a half months til the final release of Mageia 2.” Mageia 2 is in version freeze and developers are concentrating on bugs. However, there’s one major bug that continues to plague them.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat has announced the release of beta versions of both JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 and JBoss Developer Studio 5.
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Well, I am seeing it first-hand with a client that is swapping their IBM MVS/TSO platform for Red HatEnterprise Linux. All applications and data move off the mainframe and are exchanged for Micro Focus substitutes.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I spent some time Friday helping a friend who lives in the boonies to install a new modem. His only broadband option is ferociously expensive, so he’s still using dial-up Internet access, and his old USB modem died. He was savvy enough to not buy a USB winmodem; instead, he bought a US Robotics USB hardware modem — the kind that works with Linux. It appears to the computer as a standard USB serial port connected to a standard serial modem.
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I like awesome stuff. Most of us do. However, there has been an unfortunate trend in the Linux community as of late. The major distributions have been gravitating towards a Linux that goes for awesome a little too hard. Gnome 3 and Unity have driven the major Linux distributions to be completely unusable to the average user. The Linux community isn’t solely to blame. Microsoft has had similar usability issues with their new Windows 8 design. And yes, I’m aware that the “average” user isn’t the typical demographic for Linux users, but, isn’t that the community’s end goal?
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Flavours and Variants
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Mobeen Iqbal has announced the availability of the Vinux 3.0.2. This Ubuntu based operating system is specially developed for blind and visually impaired users. Hence it contain screen-reader, full screen magnification and support for Braille display.
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Further to the ignoble saga of Anonymosus-OS, an Ubuntu variant targeted as people who want to participate in Anonymous actions: Sean Gallagher has done the legwork to compare the checksums of the packages included in the OS with their canonical versions and has found a long list of files that have been modified. Some of these (“usr/share/gnome/help/tomboy/eu/figures/tomboy-pinup.png: FAILED”) are vanishingly unlikely to be malware, while others (“usr/share/ubiquity/apt-setup”) are more alarming.
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Inside the 5-kilogram robot is a fully functioning computer, running a version of Linux, that would allow a user to do all the things a computer normally does only this time with a face on it. With its HDMI outputs and Blu-ray player it is a multimedia center, but its speech-to-text (and animated mouth) means it can read out your emails, tweets etc.
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Phones
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Android
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While the launch of the new iPad is grabbing headlines worldwide this month, its chief software rival, Android by Google, is also undergoing a series of sharp changes that have not been heralded as widely.
Google’s strategy — to develop the same operating system software that every phone and tablet maker could share and create a uniform experience for users — has largely worked.
Android is quickly becoming one of the most popular operating systems, embraced by some of the largest smartphone makers worldwide.
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Tweet
Android is undoubtedly conquering the world. It has beaten Apple’s iOS in almost every market. However, Android doesn’t play very well with the US armed forced deployed overseas to help democracies and freedom. Those brave soldiers who risk their lives to keep us safe fin themselves deserted by Google’s Android. The same is the situation with US government employees or diplomats who are abroad serving their country.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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I recently purchased a Toshiba Thrive Android tablet. It is a wonderful device! The only thing that I can fault it for is not having access to the rich repository of GNU/Linux software. In this article, I will detail my dream tablet: a tablet running Linux.
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Summary: In this special edition of The Linux Week In Review, I will discuss the coming growth of GNU/Linux running on tablet computers. GNU/Linux on tablets was indirectly predicted by various devices on Star Trek years ago. The Star Trek PADD undoubtedly ran Free Software because commerce and for-profit motivations were a thing of the past by the 23rd and 24th centuries. However, we live in the 21st century where profit is still a huge motivator. GNU/Linux is a great way to maximize profits on tablet hardware.
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The DoD and VA are employing open source in their mammoth joint iEHR to an extent the federal government has not previously attempted – and among the agencies keeping a close eye on that is ONC.
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Are you tired of the seemingly endless tales of gloom being circulated by the media? Do you see headlines telling us that almost 1.2 million people under 24 today are classed as Neets (not in education, employment or training) and doubt whether the Government will ever fix education policy so that it teaches the next generation of workers to find their own feet? Are you concerned we are not doing enough to promote the virtues of original thought so that we can produce the nation’s future captains of industry and enterprise? Do you despair that education is helping to perpetuate a society that’s obsessed with entitlement and personal rights rather than driving young people to ambition? Well, to paraphrase that great British film Life of Brian, allow me to try and cheer you up, you old bugger.
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In addition to the Open webOS roadmap, HP is releasing legacy code from webOS 3.0.5 in a separate distribution.
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Facebook has proposed several changes to its Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and is asking the public for feedback until March 22nd. The most important changes are the prohibition of extracting source code from its downloadable software, and a clear explanation that friends can share your information through applications. The changes are necessary since Facebook released its first download “Messenger For Windows” this month, and because it has come under greater scrutiny from government privacy offices.
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A two-member team from the UK visited the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) campus in Technopark here on Saturday.
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Abhishek Arora might be the baby of the family – he’s 14 – but when it comes to technology, he’s the grandpa . It’s little wonder that when Mohan Lal Arora wants to embed an interactive chart in his PowerPoint presentation, he calls on his son. Ditto for Ruhani Arora , who understands technology but turns to her younger brother for a helping hand every now and then.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Oracle v Google, and OpenOffice.org fiascos may just be froth compared to deeper issues with Oracle. Some analysts are saying that the purchase of SUN has put Oracle into direct competition with lots of companies who used to promote use of Oracle’s database, Oracle’s bread and butter.
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The JavaOne organisers have announced that they are now accepting presentation submissions for JavaOne 2012. The annual conference will take place from 30 September to 4 October at the Hilton San Francisco, Union Square and, as in previous years, it will coincide with Oracle’s larger OpenWorld event.
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CMS
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Today, Nuxeo announced an alliance with Liferay. Both are open source products taking advantage of the CMIS standard to integrate the two systems.
Nuxeo is an enterprise content management platform, while Liferay is a portal package. Both have the advantage of being Java-based, CMIS-compliant and are each open source, making integration between the two systems even easier. The way it should work is Nuxeo will act as a content repository for the Liferay portal.
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Education
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Healthcare
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Business
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“I can think of no business model that makes any sense without profits,” said Slashdot blogger yagu. Besides, “starting with ‘free’ software doesn’t guarantee profitability — free is misleading. Profits come from good products, and while there are plenty of good OSS applications, good isn’t enough. I’m all for someone turning an OSS application into a product, aka, software with great service! I’m happy to pay for TLC and see OSS members make money.”
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Semi-Open Source
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To help accelerate the adoption and integration of Pentaho into third party applications, particularly software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, Pentaho now has a new program called Powered by Pentaho that is designed to help independent application vendors embed Pentaho’s analytics capabilities into their solutions.
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BSD
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Normally, we would recommend using the source code file from the Nagios site to install NRPE. However, with FreeBSD, there are at least two advantages to installing NRPE from the official FreeBSD ports.
First, the source code file in FreeBSD ports is already modified to work with FreeBSD. Second, FreeBSD ports contains many FreeBSD-specific plugins that can be used with the FreeBSD version of NRPE.
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GNU Project Releases
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We are proud to announce the release of GNU Classpath 0.99.
GNU Classpath, essential libraries for java, is a project to create free core class libraries for use with runtimes, compilers and tools for the java programming language.
The GNU Classpath developer snapshot releases are not directly aimed at the end user but are meant to be integrated into larger development platforms. For example JamVM, CACAO and Kaffe can make use of an installed copy of GNU Classpath 0.99, while GCC (gcj) will use the developer snapshots as a base for future versions. For more projects based on GNU Classpath, http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/stories.html
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Many bug fixes. Beginning of a spreadsheet facility and user-defined widgets. Special editing mode for the documentation.
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Openness/Sharing
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Colby Powers, 13, works on a circuit board at the Sauk City Public Library as part of an Arduino club in which participants use simple computer programming to manipulate the open-source microcontroller.
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Hardware
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Xbox hacker and co-founder of the Chumby project, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, has designed an open-source Geiger counter to help citizens in Japan detect radiation in the wake of the nuclear disaster, Huang writes on his blog.
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Programming
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Finance
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A day after police broke up a rally at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and arrested dozens, Occupy Wall Street protesters said Sunday that their movement for economic justice would pick up momentum with the spring.
Activists listed issues including student debt, the environment and the November elections as priorities going forward. But some observers who watched workers hose down the now-barricaded park that was Occupy’s home wondered whether a movement so diffuse could accomplish anything.
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The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. employee who criticized the company’s culture in a newspaper column bolsters the case for Wall Street restrictions like the Volcker rule, congressional Democrats said.
While the March 14 New York Times opinion piece by former executive director Greg Smith drew no requests for hearings or investigations, lawmakers including Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and Jeff Merkley said the article showed why the U.S. needs tighter restrictions on Wall Street practices. The two Democrats authored the Volcker rule’s ban on proprietary trading and conflicts of
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This week people have been buzzing about Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith’s high-profile resignation from Goldman and his description of the way that company’s ethics and morals have declined over the last decade and more, especially under current CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
But Smith’s revelations aren’t really news at all, and the moral decline he describes at Goldman has been replicated throughout our corporate culture. Behavior at Wall Street firms like Goldman may have been more overtly criminal, but the shift from respect for the customer to the desire to rip customers off is pervasive and insidious.
Wall Street has, of course, been the epicenter of this behavior. Years ago it was reported that traders at Morgan Stanley used to get off a phone call and gleefully shout “I ripped his face off!” — about their own clients — after successfully selling them what they knew were garbage investments. The surprise isn’t that Goldman Sachs encourages its employees to mislead clients and put its own interests above theirs — the surprise is that anybody is surprised.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) should be prohibited from boosting its dividend or repurchasing stock because Federal Reserve stress tests showed the investment bank is too leveraged, according to former regulator Sheila Bair.
The leverage ratios of four financial firms dropped below 4 percent under the stressed scenario, according to test results the Fed released this week. Two of those firms, Citigroup Inc. (C) and MetLife Inc. (MET), were prohibited from raising dividends or repurchasing shares. The central bank approved the capital plans of two others, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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One of the most extreme proposals yet in a recent spate of attacks on women’s reproductive health comes out of Arizona. American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Arizona State Chair, Rep. Debbie Lesko (R), is sponsoring a new bill that allows employers to pry into the sexual life of female employees.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The mathematical constant pi continues to infinity, but an extraordinary lawsuit that centred on this most beloved string of digits has come to an end. Appropriately, the decision was made on Pi Day.
On 14 March, which commemorates the constant that begins 3.14, US district court judge Michael H. Simon dismissed a claim of copyright infringement brought by one mathematical musician against another, who had also created music based on the digits of pi.
“Pi is a non-copyrightable fact, and the transcription of pi to music is a non-copyrightable idea,” Simon wrote in his legal opinion dismissing the case. “The resulting pattern of notes is an expression that merges with the non-copyrightable idea of putting pi to music.”
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Send this to a friend
03.16.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:36 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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We know that Linux on servers is big and getting bigger. We also knew that Linux, thanks to open-source cloud programs like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was growing fast on clouds. What he hadn’t know that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), had close to half-a-million servers already running on a Red Hat Linux variant.
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Kernel Space
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When running Linux file-system benchmarks at Phoronix it is most often a comparison of EXT4 vs. Btrfs, since they are the “hot” Linux file-systems at the moment. Sometimes others like ZFS, Reiser4, and XFS also join the party. In this article is a look at all of the Linux file-systems with install-time support under the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. When carrying out clean installations each time with changing out the root file-system and using the default mount options, ReiserFS, JFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS are all being compared in this article.
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Graphics Stack
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Seth Forshee, a kernel engineer at Canonical since last year, published the Apple GMUX driver to the kernel mailing list. From the commit message, “Apple laptops with hybrid graphics have a device named gmux that is used for switching between GPUs and backlight control. On many models this is the only reliable method for controlling the backlight. This series adds initial support for the gmux device, along with anciallary support for disabling apple_bl when the gmux device is detected. Initially only backlight control is supported.”
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They barely had enough members voting to meet the minimum 25% quorum to carry out an official election. Only 40 of 144 members voted this year, which comes in at just 27.77%.
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Hello, Wayland developers!
It’s high time to begin discussing application ideas with mentoring organizations.
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Applications
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How many times have you searched for an important file but can not remember where is it ? Have you left the USB stick in your briefcase? Or, HDD backup in the office? Or even left in the USB in your car ? What a mess, right?
What do you think of a way to save all your files in a safe place and have it always at your disposal? I have the right solution for you! DropBox! It’a multi-platform online storage service. It runs on Linux, Windows and even on your Android smartphone!
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The cross platform, open source media player du jour VLC has just had a massive update to VLC 2.0 that should excite media consumers from every level
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The new and improved applet supports both the traditional notification area used by most desktop platforms, and Ubuntus Appindicator library. This should allow Jupiter to sit in the notification area of most desktops out there.
In addition to the new applet, the underlying scripts have been updated adding support for Glidepoint touchpads, and also fixing up a few bugs.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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It looks like another game is likely to come to Linux: Wasteland 2. Wasteland 2 is the sequel to the wildly successful post-apocalyptic role-playing video game from 1988.
Following in the success of Double Fine Adventure on Kickstarter, Brian Fargo and others involved with the original Wasteland game from more than two decades ago have gone to Kickstarter to crowd-source the funding of a sequel. This game has also been extremely well received on Kickstarter and has raised more than $1M USD.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The lead Kubuntu developer Jonathan Riddell has announced the activation of Kubuntu Active project targeted at tablets. The project has started creating daily builds. At the moment the builds are available only for the i386 architecture, but will soon be available for ARMv7.
“The project is aimed at creating a Kubuntu version of the Plasma Active tablet interface,” writes Fabian Scherschel on H-Online.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Be prepared to be amazed because this is huge and would change the way you interact with multiple applications in Unity. The Compiz window manager has been around in Ubuntu for quite a long time, in fact I cannot think of a time when it wasn’t present. The good old days where people in fact use Ubuntu because of the fancy cube effect and other effects. With Compiz, you have a huge list of Compiz plugins like Spread, Expo, Alt-Tab and many more etc. And this has remained the way it has for the past few years, sticking out like a sore thumb in light of the new modern, gorgeous Unity interface. Well, all that is about to change soon.
John Lea, the lead designer of the Ayatana Team has just provided insights of the new Spread that has been designed. We will be covering the new design here but the detail he goes into is overwhelming. It gives an idea of how every minute thing is thought of during the design process. All right, enough with all this beating around the bush. Let’s dive straight into it, shall we?
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Most of us who follow Linux know that it has been a huge success at the server level, and powers much of the server infrastucture of the Internet. The fact is, many Internet and enterprise users don’t even realize the extent to which they depend on Linux and related platform technology every day. In addition, Linux is playing a bigger part in business technology deployments, which companies like Canonical and Red Hat are extremely focused on. Now, Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth is out with some hard-hitting data that shows just how effectively Ubuntu is competing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Here are the details.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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The mystery has been solved. Hewlett-Packard’s short-lived CEO Leo Apotheker was responsible for ending the young the life of Palm WebOS, according to the company’s former CTO.
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Android
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Earlier this month we revealed that Google had chosen ASUS to produce their upcoming “Nexus tablet.” This report was later echoed by Digitimes, who said the 7-inch tablet could arrive as early as May. This has been the hottest Android rumor of the month so we have continued to ask around and dig up more details. We just received some new information, so read on for the full report.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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According to a study by IDC Android tablets made some strong gains in fourth quarter of 2011. This growth can be attributed to Amazon which introduced its Kinde Fire tablet running cutom Android OS. Android tablets increased their market share from 32.3% in 3Q11 to 44.6% in 4Q11. This is an impressive 12.3% increase. On the contrary iOS slipped from 61.6% market share to 54.7%, losing around 7% market to Android.
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We also had the opportunity to talk to NYSE Technologies’ Head of Global Alliances Feargal O’Sullivan. He will be a keynote presenter at the Collaboration Summit and will be talking about “Open Middleware Standards for the Capital Markets and Beyond.”
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Music-making technology has improved dramatically in recent years, and software and hardware tools even play a bigger role in the production processes of huge bands ranging from Coldplay to Metallica. Free and open source music making and production technologies have also become very sophisticated, and are worth looking into. If you play and produce music here are some must-have free tools that you can leverage.
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In order to increase the depth of support it can deliver to the market, Zytronic has introduced the first in a series of new software drivers for use with its range of Projected Capacitive Technology (PCT) touch sensors and touch controller products. Designed to work with Zytronic’s latest ZXY100 touch controller series, the initial drivers will support the increasingly popular Linux operating system, and for industrial users Microsoft Windows CE . The Linux drivers are supported on both Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian 6.01/6.02 distributions.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Even as its competitors generate the headlines and talk more than a little smack, Eucalyptus Systems has been quietly and carefully re-aligning its business practices, while steadily growing. Now the cloud computing company is ready to take on the sector with less quiet and more open source attitude: including a radical shift in how it will deploy its main product.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Simply put, the regular update release cadence of LibreOffice provides the highest quality open source office suite ever created.
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CMS
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Magnolia International has announced the release of version 4.5 of its enterprise content management system (CMS). According to the developers, this update to the Java-based CMS – available as an Enterprise Edition or an open source Community Edition – is the “largest upgrade to date”, improving usability and adding a number of new features.
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Project Releases
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The Apache Tomcat team has announced the immediate availability of Tomcat Connectors 1.2.33. This is a stable release and includes both bug fixes and new features compared to version 1.2.32. The complete Changelog for Tomcat Connectors (the changes between 1.2.32 and 1.2.33) include the following:
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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The OpenStreetMap project is preparing to delete data from its database on 1 April if data contributors have not agreed to licence their data under the Open Database Licence (ODbL) or assign it to the public domain. The move is the culmination of a near two-year long process to switch the licensing for the data behind the popular mapping project.
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Security
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Since 2001, S21sec has collected all major software companies’ known security holes in a database, including those of Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. The “Vulnera Database” is fed from 36 sources, among them well-known contributors such as CVE, Bugtraq and Secunia. It currently lists more than 22,000 products and over 74,000 security holes in total.
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Chinese hackers have released proof-of-concept code that provides a roadmap to exploit a dangerous RDP (remote desktop protocol) vulnerability that was patched by Microsoft earlier this week.
The publication of the code on a Chinese language forum heightens the urgency to apply Microsoft’s MS12-020 update, which addresses a remote, pre-authentication, network-accessible code execution vulnerability in Microsoft’s implementation of the RDP protocol.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In the Spring of 2011, when Libyan oil production — over 1 million barrels a day (mpd) — was suddenly taken offline, the world received its first real-time test of the global pricing system for oil since the crash lows of 2009.
Oil prices, already at the $85 level for WTIC, bolted above $100, and eventually hit a high near $115 over the following two months.
More importantly, however, is that — save for a brief eight week period in the autumn — oil prices have stubbornly remained over the $85 pre-Libya level ever since. Even as the debt crisis in Europe has flared.
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Finance
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Until early Wednesday morning, Greg Smith was a largely anonymous 33-year-old midlevel executive at Goldman Sachs in London.
Now everyone at the firm — and on Wall Street — knows his name.
Mr. Smith resigned in an e-mail message to his bosses at 6:40 a.m. London time, laying out concerns that Goldman’s culture had gone haywire, putting its own interests ahead of its clients.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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A trade association known for using the terms “compost,” “organic,” and “biosolids” to describe sewage sludge is investing in a new public relations campaign to influence policymakers and the public. The US Composting Council (USCC), which was founded by the disposable diaper industry, will be expanding its long-standing efforts to “rebrand” sewage sludge, which is increasingly disposed of on agriculture crops and through garden centers without telling the public that their food is being grown in medical, industrial, and human waste.
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Censorship
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Every single ISP in India has been ordered to block 104 sites offering unauthorized music. A total of 387 ISPs must block the sites immediately via DNS and IP address blocking, backed up with Deep Packet Inspection. While the IFPI praised the action, their Indian counterparts are singing are more interesting tune – they don’t want to destroy their opponents, but bring them into the business.
“Content theft is a global problem and we must have a global commitment to solving it. This is an important opportunity for the Indian government to move forward with strong protections against online theft,” MPAA chairman and CEO Chris Dodd told the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry conference this week in Mumbai.
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Civil Rights
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon are among the ISPs preparing to implement a graduated response to piracy by July, says the music industry’s chief lobbyist.
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ACTA
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Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Server
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That means more and more customers are asking IBM, HP and Dell, the big three server hardware vendors, for Linux on their hardware. Specifically, IDC found that “Linux server demand was positively impacted by high performance computing (HPC) and cloud infrastructure deployments, as hardware revenue improved 2.2% year over year in 4Q11 to $2.6 billion. Linux servers now represent 18.4% of all server revenue, up 1.7 points when compared with the fourth quarter of 2010.
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It’s certainly easier to run a LAMP server. No purchasing required except for hardware. No need to allow audits by M$ and “partners”. No need for so many re-re-reboots. No need to accept malware as a normal part of IT. No need to re-install during the life of the server. Less downtime. Better throughput because the OS is not working for M$. Easier to install. No EULA to “accept”. No authentication code to record for posterity. No licensing fee. Simpler accounting.
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What’s more interesting, though, is the trends that emerge from the very latest reporting quarter, Q4. Linux was the only operating system that saw a revenue increase in servers Q4, with a 2.2 percent rise. Windows lost 1.5 percent and Unix 10.7 percent.
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Kernel Space
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In “release 2″ of the “Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel” (UEK), which is intended for Oracle Linux from versions 5.8 and 6.2, Oracle has called the Btrfs filesystem “production-ready”. This makes Oracle the second Linux distributor to officially support Btrfs in an enterprise distribution, even though the filesystem is currently still considered experimental in the Linux kernel that is maintained by Linus Torvalds. SUSE took this step in late February with the second service pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), which is the first version where the use of the designated “Next Generation File System” is covered by the SUSE support.
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It’s been a while since having anything to talk about concerning LM_Sensors, the user-space side to Linux hardware sensor monitoring, but yesterday they finally put out a new release. The LM_Sensors 3.3.2 release is about two months behind schedule but comes with several changes.
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“The whole thing just shows how hypocritical and frankly more than a little nuts the Linux community is,” Slashdot blogger hairyfeet opined. “What is the one argument that gets trotted out any time anybody points out every other major OS on the planet has a driver ABI, like BSD, Solaris, OSX, OS/2, and Windows? Why, it’s ‘ZOMG people might make binary blobs! We can’t have that, better to make a lousy product whose drivers break often, ZOMG!’”
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Applications
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Audacity 2.0.0 brings some of the fantastic Audacity Beta features into a full release, including an overhauled UI, improved effects, and lots of bug fixes
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Frictional Games is one of those few development teams which releases Linux native versions of their games and quite possibly the only one that provides us ‘Tux Gamers’ with the survival horror fix some of us crave. F.G. struggled to get off the ground, even though the Penumbra series proved to be moderately successful. It was generally well received by critics, though the sales numbers didn’t reflect this and they found themselves going through a rough patch. This changed when they included Penumbra: Overture in the first Humble Indie Bundle in 2010, alongside Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Samorost 2 and World of Goo. Due to the success of the bundle, Frictional released the source code for the game and offered a discount on all the other Penumbra games.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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I’ve been rather quiet on my blog about the Make Play Live tablet project, and I hope you’ll all excuse me for that. So much has been happening that I’ve hardly had time to breath. I’ve spent the bulk of the last few weeks on the road speaking with various people and building upon our foundations.
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The recently announced KDE Plasma Active powered tablet Spark has been renamed to Vivaldi due to trademark issues. The KDE project leader and creator of the tablet Aaron J. Seigo announces on his blog that they “ran into a problem with trademark for the name we had chosen, and this pushed us back to the drawing board.”
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GNOME Desktop
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Delayed seven days, the second Beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment was announced today, March 14th, by the GNOME Project developers.
GNOME 3.4 Beta 2 updates various packages such as NetworkManager, Baobab, Brasero, Empathy, Eye of GNOME, Epiphany, Nautilus, Vala, GTK+, gvfs, GNOME Icon Theme, GNOME Desktop, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Screenshot, GNOME Keyring, GNOME Screensaver, GNOME System Monitor, GNOME Contacts, GNOME Backgrounds, GNOME Panel, and much more.
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Happening on Thursday, 15 March, is a test-day surrounding the GNOME Shell and its extensions for the GNOME 3.x desktop. The Fedora camp is looking for people to try out the latest GNOME Shell and to then play around with the many GNOME extensions.
Even if you’re not an ardent Fedora user, it’s recommended to participate in their test days if you’re interested in the project being tested. Unlike other distributions, the Fedora / Red Hat developers actively work towards pushing their changes back upstream, etc.
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On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 1.4!
It’s been a month since the 1.3.x releases and we’ve been reading your feedback with a lot of attention. Most of the things you’ve asked made it to this release and today we’re extremely proud to release another major update to the Cinnamon desktop.
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It was just a few weeks ago that the Linux Mint project’s new Cinnamon desktop was declared officially stable–just a few short months since it was born, in fact–but on Wednesday the project team behind it unveiled a major new release packed with several new tools.
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The hacking group Anonymous now has its own desktop operating system, pre-loaded with tools for finding Website vulnerabilities and simulating denial-of-service attacks. However, some members of the group are already distancing themselves from the software.
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We “expect” Anonymous to launch coordinated DDoS attacks on sites that fall within their wrath. We “expect” Anonymous to be vocal about beliefs on political corruption and the rights of everyday people. But what we didn’t expect to see was an actual operating system from the hactivist group, yet it seemingly makes perfect sense given their view of governments and corporations worldwide.
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We looked at the project, and decided that although the name of the project was misleading (we see no evidence that it is connected with Anonymous) it appeared, on initial glance, to be a security-related operating system, with, perhaps, an attack-oriented emphasis. We have, in the past, taken a consistent stance on “controversial” projects – that is, we don’t pass judgement based on what’s possible with a product, but rather consider it to be amoral – neither good nor bad – until someone chooses to take action with it.
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I pieced together a Gateway M250 laptop a year or so ago (3 bad ones parted out into 1 good one) and loaded it up with max RAM (2GB). It’s now a handy little 14 inch laptop with a 1.73Ghz single core Centrino processor. Not bad…but when playing videos or streaming them, it can really struggle. So keeping the operating system lightweight on it is a definite must.
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Arch Linux is turning 10 this month. Ten years that have gone so fast, it is the same time since my first daughter birth. I can still remember like yesterday being in the Hospital seeing her fragile body and now she is my best friend.
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New Releases
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Alexander Tratsevskiy proudly announced earlier today, March 14th, the immediate availability for download of the Calculate Linux 11.15 operating system.
Calculate Linux 11.15 brings lots of new features, especially the inclusion of the Linux kernel 3.2.8, KDE SC 4.8.1, GNOME 3.2, OpenLDAP 2.4.24, Samba 3.5.11, The GIMP 2.6.11, XBMC 11.0, and the LibreOffice 3.5 office suite.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As a last minute change prior to next month’s release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Canonical is planning to drop the non-SMP version of Ubuntu’s PowerPC Linux kernel.
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Two days ago I wrote about Wayland’s Weston compositor landing in the Ubuntu 12.04 repository, which excited many Linux desktop users. However, for those thinking that Wayland/Weston is ready for end-users with next month’s Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin”, that is not the case.
The article two days ago that pointed out the Weston compositor landing in the Ubuntu Precise repository due to a package sync with Debian, but besides that, it also noted the GTK+ build in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is unlikely to support Wayland. While GTK+ 3.4 should be in the 12.04 LTS release, it must be built with the –enable-wayland-backend option in order to have the Wayland back-end support so that this tool-kit can function without X11.
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Ubuntu 12.04 is an Long Term Support (LTS) release. LTS releases generally attracts more people to the Ubuntu Community due to its importance, support (5 years) and its stability. And Ubuntu 12.04 is no exception to this. While the Ubuntu developers are working hard to polish Ubuntu, we the community can contribute in other ways. One such way is to bring out an easy to read Ubuntu Manual for new users to Ubuntu. This will benefit the users new to Ubuntu and Unity (users upgrading from Ubuntu 10.04).
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Flavours and Variants
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Many Linux distributions specialized for multimedia distributions have come and gone. Some were pretty good, but Dream Studio has outshone them all. Musician and maintainer Dick Macinnis has just released Dream Studio 11.10, based on Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot. Dream Studio 11.04 is a tough act to follow – is it worth upgrading to 11.10?
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Phones
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Android
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AIDE is an IDE running on Android for developing Android applications. This post contains an interview with its creators.
A small team from Germany has developed an Android Java IDE (AIDE) that runs on Android 2.2-4.0 devices and can be used to develop Java applications for Google’s mobile OS, including editing, compilation, automatic error checking and logcat debugging. AIDE can load and work with Android projects initially created with Eclipse. While development can be done on the road on a smartphone, the recommended scenario is working on a larger tablet that has a keyboard attached.
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A new open source benchmark aims to give engineers and end users a way to measure the performance of Android-based systems. The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) released its AndEBench metric as an app on Google Play and the Amazon Appstore for Android.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Amazon’s Fire was the big driver for Android; the online shopping centre shifted 4.7 million units in the last three months of 2011, giving it 16.8 per cent of the world market. Samsung was the third most successful tablet-maker with 5.8 per cent of the fondleslab pie and Barnes and Noble (3.5 per cent) and Pandigital (2.5 per cent) were fourth and fifth.
Windows doesn’t even seem to factor in IDC’s predictions for the years ahead that foresee iOS and Android continuing to carve up the market between them by 2016 with remaining manufacturers scooping less than 5 per cent.
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Before launching into this review, which pits Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 against Apple’s iPad 2, I took a few days to familiarize myself with the Galaxy Tab’s Android 3.1 (“Honeycomb”) OS. The thing is, I’d already used iOS on an iPod Touch for two years, but was a rank newbie when it came to Android.
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Open source’s ability to innovate has been challenged many times. But Glyn Moody argues that open source innovation is actually going from strength to strength, creating new opportunities to deliver cheap computing to people corporations would not normally consider.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla’s Brian Bondy said the outfit did some preliminary work on getting a basic application working in Metro. However Bondy complained of poor documentation on Microsoft’s part and a general lack of public knowledge, saying, “To get started we read the MSDN whitepaper entitled Developing a Metro style enabled Desktop Browser. This document lacked quite a bit of information though so a lot of registry hacking was needed to get things working. Jim [Mathies] and I documented a lot of this missing information….”
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Thunderbird, the popular email client, has added chat support for future versions. The feature was introduced in the daily builds of Thunderbird. I am running 14.x series on Kubuntu.
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Back in December, we covered a blog post from Ehsan Akhgari, a Firefox engineer, which discussed work on what could eventually become an essential part of delivering silent updates to the Firefox browser. If you’re a Google Chrome user, you may already appreciate the fact that updates to the browser happen in the background, and now, according to a post on the Mozilla Hacks blog, background updates are coming to Firefox. Not every user is going to be happy with the news, though.
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SaaS
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An interesting argument and McKenty knows alot more OpenStack than I do. That said, I think that McKenty is wrong.
You need to look no farther than the Apache Software Foundation to see how this dual system of money and meritocracy can work. The Apache Software Foundation takes big money from vendors like Microsoft, who yield little influence on development. Development is managed by The Apache Way of meritocracy and it works. The Eclipse Foundation has a similar model that has also worked well.
So yes, you can have big money and a meritocracy for developers too.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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I cannot pinpoint accurately what caused to inflate the whole issue, but it seems that some at Apache OpenOffice (incubating) would like to stress that there are the rightful continuation of the now defunct OpenOffice.org project, to the point of showing outright hostility to LibreOffice. They base their claims upon the following elements:
* they own the OpenOffice.org domain name
* they own the trademark of OpenOffice.org
* they must be the right heirs of OpenOffice.org since the Apache incubating project they’re contributing to was born out of the will of the copyright holder (Oracle) through its donation to the Apache Software Foundation.
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Not too long ago, many, yours truly included, thought that OpenOffice was dead. That opinion was informed by the decision the major Linux distributions made to replace OpenOffice.org, as it was known at that time, with LibreOffice, the new office suite forked from OpenOffice.org by its former contributors.
If this is all news to you, here is a brief recap of what happened. OpenOffice.org was a Sun Microsystems-sponsored project. It was, then, the most popular office suite, as it was pre-installed on almost all Linux and BSD desktop distributions. Then something happened. And that “something” was the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. by Oracle Corporation.
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Clearly Heintzman does not get FLOSS. The GPL, for instance is a licence, not a contract, so one it not “contractually obliged to do anything”. One is permitted to copy by a licence from the creators under the conditions laid out by the GPL. OpenOffice.org ships under a mixture of licences for different parts of the code, reflecting its long history and huge number of contributors.
He never does get around to explaining why IBM chose Apache/ASL licensing except to state that IBM chose it. He certainly does not explain why IBM went with the code contributed to Apache instead of the code forked to LibreOffice and the greater numbers of contributors if they were interested in “community”. OpenOffice.org has yet to make an ASL release while LibreOffice is chugging away making release after release and doing well while OpenOffice.org is still under code review years later.
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CMS
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Last week, I attended CeBIT, the enormous technology trade fair that takes place every March in Hanover, Germany. This year, as I walked through the building devoted to content management and other enterprise technologies, I spied a booth with Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and TYPO3. All except for the latter are well known in the United States, but I was surprised to find that those three are struggling to find market share in Germany.
I found it remarkable that the three open-source web content management systems that are so popular in the United States were having trouble getting the same level of recognition in Germany.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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While many Linux desktop enthusiasts still have nightmares concerning the early days of PulseAudio, the developers behind this common open-source audio server are planning to do a major 2.0 release before month’s end.
PulseAudio has been found in major Linux distributions like Ubuntu going back to 2008, but it was only in September of 2011 that they hit the 1.0 status. Their next major release is now PulseAudio 2.0.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Have you ever seen results from your community engagement and realized the impact of your efforts? We recently told you about the LocalWiki project and shared some of the results from the Triangle Wiki day event. But then our friends at Code for America took it a step further.
The co-founders of LocalWiki were in the Code for America offices last week to see how they could build on the success of the Code Across America event. They took the data–633 page edits, 100 maps, and 138 new photos–and amplified it.
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The second release candidate of GCC 4.7 is available today for those wishing to try out this open-source compiler that will be officially released in the coming weeks. Separately, there’s also updated documentation concerning the state of the C99 language support.
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With GCC 4.7 being released soon, new compiler benchmarks at Phoronix will be published in the coming weeks (beginning next week Monday), but for those wondering what’s different on the feature side, here’s a look.
Most of the key GCC 4.7 features have already been talked about in a number of different Phoronix articles, but here’s a concise summary of what to expect from this open-source compiler collection.
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Finance
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The following letter to Goldman Sachs’ worldwide clients was issued today by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein:
Dear Goldman Client:
By now, many of you have probably read the regrettable resignation letter published in today’s New York Times by former Goldman executive Greg Smith, explaining why he is leaving the firm after twelve years.
In the letter, in which he excoriates Goldman and its practices, Mr. Smith comes across as a man of conscience, ideals, and high moral standards. And as you read his words, you no doubt asked yourself this troubling question: how could Goldman have hired such a person?
At Goldman, we pride ourselves on our ability to scour the world’s universities and business schools for the finest sociopaths money will buy. Once in our internship program, these youths are subjected to rigorous evaluations to root out even the slightest evidence of a soul. But, as the case of Mr. Smith shows, even the most time-tested system for detecting shreds of humanity can blow a gasket now and then. For that, we can only offer you our deepest apology and the reassurance that one good apple won’t spoil the whole bunch.
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Intellectual Monopolies
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.14.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has once again lit the fuse of another explosive discussion. This time he came out with some data. “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves.” Mark then presents us with this chart from w3techs.com.
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Kernel Space
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Besides the DRM work already piling up for Linux 3.4, there’s more. The Samsung developers responsible for the Exynos graphics driver have sent in their “-next” pull request, which brings several new features, including the basis of 2D acceleration for this open-source ARM graphics driver. There’s also a virtual display driver that could be used for handling wireless displays.
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For those that don’t closely follow the various development lists, at the end of February a Silicon Motion developer came to the DRI list announcing he had “a kernel driver for all our graphics chips” that he was looking to mainline. It sounds nice, but in the end it’s a let-down and the most you’ll probably get out of it is a few laughs.
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Following last weeks release of the new X.Org EvDev input driver that introduces support for multi-touch and smooth scrolling, the updated Synaptics input driver is now available for Linux users. Key features, of course, are multi-touch and ClickPads support.
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With the release of the Linux 3.3 kernel being imminent and the Linux 3.4 kernel drm-next already offering lots of changes, here are some Intel Sandy Bridge benchmarks comparing the Linux 3.2 kernel to a near-final Linux 3.3 kernel and then the drm-next kernel that’s largely a 3.3 kernel but with the DRM driver code that will work its way into Linux 3.4.
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The results of our Linux file system fsck testing are in and posted, but the big question remains: What do the results tell us, what do they mean, and is the performance expected? In this article we will take a look at the results, talk to some experts, and sift through the tea leaves for their significance.
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Applications
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This will be the last in the unstable GIMP 2.7 series. GIMP 2.7.5 is considered somehow a beta version for 2.8 or even a release candidate. It has exactly the same features and functionality which 2.8 will have. The devs want to really release in (late?) March. No more real bugs are blocking the release (Michael Natterer and others have fixed them all in the last weeks). The last big missing thing was the lack of support for the PDB paint API which has also been fixed now! So all the important stuff is completed.
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I am fond of programs that do not impose standards on me. The Mirage image viewer follows that philosophy. The image editing preferences let me select the default scaling quality, whether or not to auto-save or prompt for action, and the saving quality to apply. But since its focus is on file viewing and not file controlling, Mirage starts with a clean slate.
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Games
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Pushed publicly yesterday was the test profile to run benchmarks of the popular Half-Life 2 game under Linux. As a result, coming out soon will be benchmarks of Half-Life 2 on Linux with an assortment of graphics cards and drivers.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Cinnamon is a GNOME Shell fork which tries to offer a layout similar to GNOME 2: it comes with a panel at the bottom by default (optionally, you can use 2 panels or a panel at the top) that supports autohide, panel applets, a classic system tray, GNOME2-like notifications and so on, but using GNOME 3.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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If you consider yourself a fairly advanced Linux user, I would (as one who has used nearly every Linux distribution worth talking about) highly recommend Sabayon Linux. At least from my own experience using it, Sabayon is the best Linux distribution overall. Here are some of the reasons why:
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Red Hat Family
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European groupware and collaboration software maker Zarafa has intergrated its Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) with ClearOS Professional, made by Salt Lake City-headquartered ClearCenter, a hybrid IT platform provider that works closely with managed services providers (MSPs).
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Fedora
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Yesterday I tried and successfully built b2g on Fedora 16 x86_84, targeting the emulator. These are my notes on how to do it as the instructions to setup the build environment are very Ubuntu centric.
The prebuilt binaries expect to be on a 32-bits system. So we are gonna need to install 32-bits packages. Also there is a requirement to have adb to boostrap (it is built afterwards). Fortunately you can skip installing the SDK for the bootstrap and use the Fedora package android-tools that provides adb.
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Yup, it’s Test Day time again. We did start up quite late this cycle, it feels like, but we’re stacking them deep each week to make up for it!
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Landing today within Ubuntu’s 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” repository is Weston, the reference compositor for the Wayland Display Server. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS won’t have a full-on Wayland preview as was originally hoped for last November.
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When you think of Ubuntu Linux, what do you think of? I would guess you think about the Linux desktop. While Ubuntu is certainly a big player—maybe the biggest—when it comes to the Linux desktop, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu wants you to know that “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves.”
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Widespread interest in the Raspberry Pi, a tiny but complete Linux computer that can be bought for as little as $25, caught the device’s designers completely off guard, Reuters reported this week.
The news that a first production run of 10,000 sold out in less than a day, Eben Upton said, left the Raspberry Pi Foundation “punch-drunk” over the degree to which their expectations had been outstripped.
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Phones
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Some of the Labs projects are open source, others are merely peeks into the stats behind Gravity’s service. For example, check out the metrics page. It’s good if you want to see the live metrics of Gravity Network data, number of signals processed on a given day, or number of requests that Gravity is processing per second.
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In what is undoubtedly Africa’s largest open source project, source code for the well-established and highly regarded Cubit Accounting platform has been released under GPL v3 as Accounting-123.com.
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The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) has opened up its tender for a new EDRMS platform to include open source options, promising to consider these equally alongside proprietary software.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 11, a new version of the popular open source Web browser. The update brings several noteworthy new user-facing features and a number of technical improvements under the hood.
When Firefox 10 was released in January, the browser gained a new suite of tools for Web developers. Mozilla continued to work on the browser’s integrated development tools and has issued several major improvements in Firefox 11. One of the most significant new tools for Web developers is a new Style Editor.
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SaaS
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Rackspace has recently added some more open source talent to its cloud services and hosting team.The recent recruit is Andrew Shafer (pictured] co-founder of Puppet Labs and former VP of Engineering at CloudScaling. Shafer will help Rackspace’s Cloud Builders and OpenStack teams develop products and bring them to market more quickly.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Education
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Australia is ranked first among English-speaking counties and second in the world in leading a global, digital, open education revolution. Australia follows closely behind top-ranked South Korea –a nation with a bold policy goal of all textbooks and the entire school curriculum available in digital formats by 2015. In February 2012, the Australian government released a new version of their My School website. Users can now search nearly 10,000 Australian schools for statistical information and other details on a particular school, or to compare similar schools. The website provides a range of measures, including the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy, to help parents with school enrollment.
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Business
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BSD
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On behalf of NetBSD developers, I’m happy to announce the availability of a public beta of NetBSD 6.0, for your testing pleasure.
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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Applying open source methodology to disease research could speed up the process of drug discovery, according to researchers at the University of Sydney.
Senior lecturer at the university’s School of Chemistry, Dr Matthew Todd, told Computerworld Australia that the current method of drug discovery is extremely competitive and mostly carried out behind closed doors to protect certain ideas and any commercial benefits down the track.
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Open Access/Content
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A bill that would fund a library containing open source textbooks for the 50 most popular lower division courses at state colleges and universities has been proposed by State Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg on Feb. 8.
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Programming
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This week on Federal Tech Talk, Host John Gilroy is joined by Greystones Group CEO Sheila Duffy and Director of Technology Services Mary-Sara Camerino.
Most listeners are familiar with Vivek Kundra’s 25 initaitives for reducing cost of federal IT. Two of these concepts are agile software development and using open source software.
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Security
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Microsoft has released six security bulletins to close a total of seven holes in its products. According to the company, one of the bulletins (MS12-020), rated as critical, addresses two privately reported vulnerabilities in its implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
The first of these is a “critical-class” issue in RDP that could be exploited by an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code on a victim’s system. Although RDP is disabled by default, many users enable it so they can administer their systems remotely within their organisations or over the internet. All supported versions of Windows from Windows XP Service Pack 3 to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are affected.
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Finance
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Siewert is expected to inherit the portfolio of Lucas van Praag, a long-time Goldman executive who ran the public relations department and developed a reputation for his sharp wit and barbed emails to reporters he believed had misrepresented the bank. Van Praag is expected to leave within weeks.
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Censorship
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A couple weeks ago, we noted that with all of these questionable domain seizures going on, it was a shame that ICANN wasn’t speaking out against such questionable abuses of the domain system. We thought its silence was a sign of its impotence to actually take a stand. Turns out we may have actually overestimated ICANN’s willingness to stand up for the internet. You see, late last week it put out a “Thought Paper on Domain Seizures and Takedowns.”
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The Doe Defendants registered the alias “NHLiberty4Paul” at YouTube and Twitter and posted a YouTube video attacking Jon Huntsman. The video ends “American Values and Liberty – Vote Ron Paul.” The Does acted without Paul’s permission–so much so that Paul sued them for violations of the Lanham Act and defamation. After filing the lawsuit, Paul sought to unmask the Does.
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Owners of online marketplaces can breathe a little easier this week: on Tuesday, a state-level appeals court issued a decision flatly rejected a dangerous court precedent that threatened not only online auction sites but social networks, message boards, and every other platform for online expression.
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Privacy
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The India Controller General Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks has just (March 12, 2012) issued an order granting a compulsory license to patents on the cancer drug sorafenib/Nexavar, in the matter of NATCO Vs. BAYER. A copy of the decision is attached below, and is also available from the government’s web site here: http://ipindia.nic.in/
KEI filed an affidavit in the case, which is available here. http://keionline.org/node/1359. The Bayer price in India for sorafenib was 69 thousand USD per year. A survey of prices on sorafenib is available here: http://keionline.org/prices/nexavar. Bayer’s main defense of the pricing was its program of discounts to lower income patients, and the fact that CIPLA was selling an infringing product at a lower price (Bayer is suing CIPLA, and asking for damages and injunctions).
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No sooner had the Department of Justice announced its plan to investigate Apple and five of the Big Six publishers for e-book price-fixing than a representative of those benefiting most from this (alleged) collusion boldly stepped into the fray. Scott Turow, bestselling author and president of the Author’s Guild, has issued one of the most profoundly self-serving and wrongheaded statements ever to grace the pages of a legacy industry’s website. There’s a ton to unpack here, so let’s get right to it.
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I would have never, ever expected to be able to write a The Next Web blog post that involves my local library, but this story is just too crazy to not bring to your attention. It’s not really related to tech, though, so bear with me.
People with a healthy interest in fundamental freedoms and basic human rights have probably heard about SABAM, the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, which has become one of the global poster children for how outrageously out of touch with reality certain rightsholders groups appear to be.
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Trademarks
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For us this was never about a trade mark but being able to use Scrolls as the name of our game which we can – Yey.
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Copyrights
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In the wake of the Internet blackout that led to the dramatic death of two controversial online piracy bills, a new warning has entered the Hill vernacular: “Don’t get SOPA’d.”
Lawmakers are tiptoeing around issues that could tick off tech heavyweights such as Google or Amazon. They don’t want a legislative misstep to trigger the same kind of online revolt that killed the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate in January.
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Every time you think we’re done seeing totally ridiculous arguments about file sharing, the old really silly ones pop back up. Musician Logan Lynn has written a pretty silly rant on Huffington Post entitled Guess What? Stealing Is Still Wrong. And, indeed, it is. But nowhere in the article does he actually discuss stealing. He discusses infringement. In silly black and white terms that assumes that every single download is absolutely a lost sale, that no one who downloads ever gives him any money and that his biggest fans are criminals.
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Home Secretary Theresa May has approved the extradition to the US of a student accused of copyright infringement.
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ACTA
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Now that the EU’s ratification of ACTA has departed from the original script of everyone just waving it through, the European Commission is clearly trying to come up with Plan B. Some insights into its thinking can be gained from the minutes (pdf) of a recent Commission meeting, pointed out to us by André Rebentisch.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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That’s the percentage of Apple’s revenue generated by the sale of its iPod, iPhone, and iPad devices: what CEO Tim Cook refers to as their post-PC product line.
Cook revealed this figure as part of the ramp-up pitch for the new iPad last week, and emphasized (as one might expect at an launch event for what has proven to be the most popular tablet in computing history) Apple’s commitment to a post-PC future.
There has been a lot of attention paid to Cook’s statements, and not just because of iPad marketing hype. Just today, for instance, a report went over the wire about the analysts over at Gartner predicting that the “Personal cloud will replace personal computer”–with the idea that corporate data will be stored in the cloud and accessed through “smartphones, tablets, and other consumer devices.”
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I have a work-issued MacBook Pro running OS X, a laptop running Windows 7 and a desktop running Ubuntu 11.10. That makes me lucky enough to have the big three operating systems at my fingertips.
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Desktop
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Kernel Space
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Working with direct rivals may have been unthinkable 10 years ago, but Linux, open source and organizations such as The Linux Foundation have highlighted how solving common problems and easing customer pain and friction in using and choosing different technologies can truly drive innovation and traction in the market.
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Applications
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Looking for a no-nonsense command-line tool for monitoring your GNU/Linux system? Glances might be right up your alley. This neat little Python-based utility provides an overview of all key system aspects, including CPU load, disk storage, memory consumption, and network activity. More importantly, the utility does a good job of presenting monitored data in an easy-to-follow manner.
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Instructionals/Technical
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However, it’s a Linux administrator truism that you should run a GUI on a server only when you absolutely must. That’s because Linux GUIs take up system resources that could be better used elsewhere. So, while using a GUI program is fine for basic server health checkups, if you want to know what’s really happening, turn off the GUI and use these tools from the Linux command shell.
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Wine
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In my previous blog, I mentioned that I was finally free of proprietary drivers. But that story wasn’t completely over. While basic 3D acceleration and things like glxgears worked fine, wine did not run Windows games yet. So here’s a report on the progress since then and some tips on how to get these things to work!
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Last week, a group of Plasma Active hackers and designers met in basysKom’s office in Darmstadt. The officially dubbed “Plasma Active Three Sprint” had as its goals to plan the next release of KDE’s device-spectrum user experience, define work needed to accomplish this release, design user interfaces for new features and enhancements, and of course get cracking. Another point of focus was to work on a few things that need to be done before the launch of the SPARK, the first consumer device featuring a fully free and openly developed software stack, running KDE software.
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GNOME Desktop
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New Releases
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Jose Antonio Calvo has announced the availability of beta version of Zentyal 2.3 on 9th Mar, 2012. Zentyal is server Linux operating system which is based on Ubuntu and this version is based on Ubuntu 12.04 beta 1 and beta version for Zentyal 3 which will be released in September.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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There is something about Unity that separates it from all other free software projects I know. It is most likely the biggest marketing success in the history of Free Software, considering its base audience and limited scope. It has a unique edge that places everything else completely in its shadow. Having a background in marketing and sales myself, I thought I’d share my perspective on why Unity is such a gigantic success.
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GNU/Linux has a deep penetration in the government sector and big enterprises. More and more governments are now going for vendor-independent solutions. Ubuntu is seemingly making inroads into these markets.
Ubuntu Governator Mark Shuttleworth says, “Lots of governments now buy PC’s from the world market with Ubuntu pre-installed. Several Canadian tenders have been won by companies bidding with Ubuntu pre-installed on PC’s. The same is true in Brazil and Argentina, in China and India and Spain and Germany. We’re seeing countries or provinces that previously had their own-brand local Linux, which they had to install build locally and install manually, shifting towards pre-order with Ubuntu.”
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These two desktop shells are the buzz words of many Linux enthusiasts these days. In fact, these two desktop shells deserve the credit since they brought the much needed public attention to Linux. Both have received their fair share of mixed reviews from the community. I have used both of them and I think that both represent the future of the desktop environment in their own way. However, which one is better? Well, read on to get to know the answer to that million dollar question.
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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is organising ‘Ubuntu Cloud Day’ to be held on April 4th, 2012. Tailor made for engineers and developers with a professional interest in using Ubuntu Cloud as a developer along with a keen interest for developing innovative applications for the Ubuntu user base.
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Flavours and Variants
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We’ve introduced elementaryOS Jupiter earlier today. At the request of our users we’re presenting a screenshot tour of elementaryOS 0.1.
elementaryOS is a Linux operating system based on Canonical’s Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) distribution, powered by Linux kernel 2.6.35 and the GNOME 2.32.0 desktop environment.
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Softpedia is once again proud to introduce today, March 13th, a new Linux-based operating system for the masses, called elementaryOS.
elementaryOS is an operating system based on the Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) distribution from Canonical, offering a light, fast, clutter-free and smooth desktop environment.
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As we’ve reported, the diminutive $25 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi became available for purchase in its first incarnation only days ago, and the first devices sold out in mere seconds. Developers and tinkerers are putting numerous Linux distros on the devices, including Fedora, Debian and Arch Linux, and the next batch of Raspberry Pis is due imminently, and will probably sell out nearly instantly as well. ZDNet U.K. has gone so far as to say that “Raspberry Pi is the Linux punk ethic,” and the device has already drawn interest from educational system and technology industry leaders.
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The GNU/Linux OS the Raspberry Pi computer is designed to work with is all about “Free” software. But before you get to excited about getting stuff without paying, it’s free in a sense that’s not about money. Free software is designed to let users study and change it, but can sell for cold hard cash.
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We haven’t talked much about the Raspberry Pi for a while now, so it’s time for a quick update.
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Phones
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Android
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Android developers can now hack code on the move with the beta release of AIDE, the Android developer kit which runs on an Android device to create Android applications.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Databases
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They really should look into using PostgreSQL. It’s $0 per core, CPU, server, cluster etc. If they insist on support there are plenty of companies who will support PostgreSQL. e.g. EnterpriseDB would provide and support PostgreSQL for a fraction of the cost of M$’s database under the old pricing scheme.
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BSD
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Openness/Sharing
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Process over content. Aly Khalifa from Gamil Design and Designbox used this mantra to instill open source roots at SPARKcon—an annual event that showcases, celebrates, and influences the creative momentum naturally found in North Carolina’s Triangle region.
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Today, as we kick off the 4th Annual Open Government Hackathon at PyCon we’re extraordinarily happy to announce one of the most significant milestones in the history of Open States: as of today, all 50 states (as well as DC and Puerto Rico) are now supported via our API and bulk downloads. This makes Open States the first and only completely open, completely free resource for accessing legislative information in a uniform format across all 50 states.
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You might prefer to make the picks yourself based on your own basketball knowledge. Maybe you crowdsource your selections based on previous picks or expert opinions. Or are you one of those people that spends hours digging through all the data and stats available?
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Programming
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Tiobe Programming Community Index reveals lack of usage of Go and Dart, while programming languages from Oracle, Microsoft, and Apple rank prominently
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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A product made by grinding up connective tissue from cows and beef scraps that used to be made into dog food is too disgusting to serve at McDonald’s, Burger King or Taco Bell, which have all dropped it due to public pressure, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) thinks it’s fine to serve in school lunches. The USDA plans to buy seven million pounds of the “Lean Finely Textured Beef” (LFTB) from Beef Products Inc. (BPI) and serve it to school children this spring.
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Finance
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New York City’s police strategy embraced “broken windows.” The police increased the priority with which they responded to even minor offenses that upset the community – “squeegee men,” graffiti, and street prostitution. Reported blue collar crime fell in New York City. It also fell sharply in most other cities, which did not implement “broken windows” programs, but Wilson and the NYPD got the credit and popular fame for the sharp fall in reported blue collar crime in New York City. Wilson became one of the most famous blue collar criminologists in the world.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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The European Parliament may be about to side with the Commission in its strategy to stall the ACTA debate, and postpone by one year or two the vote that could kill it once and for all. It is urgent that citizens contact Members of the Parliament to urge them to continue working towards a clear and strong political position, leading to the unavoidable rejection of ACTA, rather than allow these technocratic manœuvres.
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European Digital Rights (EDRI) sent a briefing document to the Parliament, and Mr. Kamall relayed an item raised by the organisation to the European Commission by written question. The answer of De Gucht is remarkable on multiple levels. But there is more to it. The footnote issue from the leaked documents was openly discussed by Commission staff during hearings, in fact Luc Devigne argued about it with Canadian Law Professor Michael Geist. The key caveat below is the word mandatory. Again the Commission and Council cover up the negotiations as a result of confidentiality. Here is another video from the stakeholder hearing where Margot from XS4all did a bunny test for the snake on 3strikes.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.13.12
Posted in News Roundup at 4:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Not to worry, though. This month, Net Applications shows that other OS had 93.84% but a year ago the share was 94.38%, a decline of 0.5% in spite of the bias. In California, the bias in business is probably 10:1 so a change of -0.5% could be -5% in reality, a serious shift for M$. The monopoly is on a short leash with government and education using GNU/Linux. In Argentina there is an active anti-trust investigation of M$’s practices. It would not take much for business usage to change dramatically if GNU/Linux is allowed to compete fairly. According to the US embassy in Argentina, “42 percent of Argentine firms use Linux on at
least some of their computers”. Brazil should not be much different.
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I’m a Linux user, but I kind of like Windows XP, and I can get along fine with Windows 7, but Windows 8? Argh!
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Usually, if you say “linux” people think about a very hard to use OS. But is it true? Is Kubuntu really an OS for developers and nerds? I’m going to present “common people” Kubuntu, saying it’s the new version of Windows 8: let’s see what they think about it without any prejudice. And, since I’m a serious person, I’m filming it.
By the way: I got the idea because KDE has been awarded as best desktop environment of the year.
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# Philippines saw shipments down 33%.
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Server
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When it comes to clothes, I’m a normal guy. I just want to walk into a store, grab something that fits, buy it (What, try it on? Are you kidding!?), and head home. Well, that’s what I want to do. I’ve learned over the years that just because something should fit doesn’t mean that it will fit. It’s the same with Linux servers. Sure, they’re all built on the same code base and can run the same applications, but one may fit you perfectly while another may make you look like a clown.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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In this article, I’ll examine this issue closely, and I’ll also offer tangible solutions to these issues as well.
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Back in January the release of DirectFB 1.6 was imminent, but then the developers behind this frame-buffer project ended up dragging the release on for stabilization reasons. This month is now the project’s revised target for doing the first DirectFB 1.6 stable release.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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RSS feeds are a great way of keeping up with your favorite blogs and sites that support the technology, as they offer several benefits over other means of monitoring a site for news and articles. Updates are more or less added in real-time to the feed reader, which makes RSS feeds a much faster method of staying up to date than email, website monitoring tools or checking a site manually multiple times throughout the day.
Most desktop and online feed readers display feeds in an email like interface. A few change that, for instance by displaying RSS feeds in full screen or as a Desktop Ticker.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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I spend quite a lot of time triaging bugs in Fedora for stuff I maintain upstream. The most common crasher bug I come across is colord segfaulting deep in libsane. Digging even more, 99% of those libsane crashers are when the user has installed closed source binary drivers to make the scanner “work”.
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Desktop Environments
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Enesim is said to be similar to the Fog Framework and started out as a research project to optimize the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, but then ended up becoming a project in its own right. The Enesim graphics framework supports vector and raster-based graphics, is considered highly-extensible, supports OpenCL and OpenGL renderers along with a software-based fall-back, and multi-threading support. The SVG renderer for Enesim is also said to be significantly faster than other common SVG libraries.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Just a few days ago I upgraded KDE SC to its latest release, 4.8.1. This first dot release is very interesting in that it incorporates a significant number of fixes to elements as critical as Dolphin and KDE PIM. Now that the first round of polishing is there for KDE SC 4.8, and since I have been using it extensively for weeks, I think it is a good time to put together a review and see where KDE stands as of today. THE GOOD NEWS There are three main areas where KDE SC 4.8 shines: Stability, Performance and New Features.
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GNOME Desktop
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I’ve recently spent a couple of months using Gnome 3 in Fedora and a few weeks using Gnome 2 in Debian Squeeze, Now I’m using Gnome 3 again in Debian Wheezy. Switching from the new to the old and back has given me a good idea of what I like or don’t like in Gnome 3, and what makes life easier or more difficult using it.
Overall, I much prefer using Gnome 3, which puts me at odds with a lot of people who have written about it. What I love most is the minimalist elegance of layout. Gnome 2 just looks 20th century while Gnome 3 looks 21st.
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It was a full decade ago that Arch Linux made its public debut. Over the weekend developers and users posted of their early experiences and brought the milestone to the forefront. However, users have been discussing just how to mark this upcoming anniversary for several months on the forum.
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The title can be somewhat deceiving. When you think of “Old School” you think of out of date, whimsical technology that most people only look at on occasion. Well, scrap that train of thought when applied to Vector Linux, because Vector is just as useful as nearly any modern platform. That doesn’t mean it’s for everyone — but if you long for the days when your Linux distribution didn’t eat up your resources and an installed OS contained everything you needed to get through the day, then look no further than Vector Linux 7.0 Standard Edition. You’ll wind up with an easy to use, lightweight desktop (Figure A) that is ready to perform like few other distributions.
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Paul Seelig announced last evening, March 11th, the immediate availability for download of the Window Maker Live CD 2012-03-11 Linux operating system.
Window Maker Live CD is a Linux distribution based on Debian Linux and the lightweight Window Maker window manager.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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The Sabayon Linux distribution is a Gentoo-based project which attempts to provide a cutting-edge user experience which “just works”. The project provides several editions, the main ones being the GNOME, KDE, Xfce and Core flavours. Each edition is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds so the hardest hurdle to cross is figuring out which ISO we want to download. I opted for the Xfce edition which, if you’ve been following my reviews of late, you’ll notice is becoming a bit of a trend. Recently I’ve been finding GNOME 3 too unpleasant and cumbersome to use and, while I enjoy the features of KDE, I’ll be the first to admit it’s a bit on the heavy side. More and more I’m finding Xfce provides my ideal balance of features and performance.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that owners who managed to grab its USB microcomputer before supplies depleted can now download and install a recommended Linux distribution.
The Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix is a distribution from software packages of the Fedora ARM project, with a “small number” of extra packs modified from Fedora versions that Fedora could not include due to licensing problems.
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John Leyden wrote an interesting article Linux vulnerable to Windows-style autorun exploits, about how security researches had discovered that Linux is potentially vulnerable to a user sticking a USB device or CDRom into a locked machine. The basic idea was that “Nautilus” would execute thumbnail drive code, to display thumbnails icons in the file browsers based on the content on the removable media, even if the machine was locked. If the thumbnail executables were vulnerabile, a cracker could use the code used to process the thumbnail images to kill the screensaver/lock.
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Debian Family
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I’m always wondering about people who forget to spring forward or fall back when daylight saving time begins or ends.
Now I’m one of them.
I have a 10 a.m. conference call today, and looking at the clock on my GNOME desktop in Debian Squeeze, my operating system on this laptop since late 2010, I dial into the call.
There’s nobody there.
Later I’m working on my test laptop, running DragonFlyBSD, on which I have the ntpd daemon running. It’s an hour ahead.
Except that it’s not. My Debian laptop is an hour behind.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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“My concern is that the evolution acceleration curve for technology, specifically how users interact with the interfaces, is too steep, and Ubuntu starts running the risk of being too clever, too quick,” said Slashdot blogger yagu. “It’s hard to evangelize linux/ubuntu/favorite distro and find out users are too confused to understand and use it because every time they look, it’s different.”
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Among the most eagerly anticipated features, the heads-up display, makes its debut in Precise. The HUD is supposed to eventually replace the traditional menu system by guessing the command you want to issue based on the first few letters you type into a search box. In the beta version, you can call up the HUD by hitting the Alt key. In his blog, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth describes HUD as a revolutionary change in the way people will interact with their computers, but the version that comes with the 12.04 beta is a long way from that vision.
For example, HUD is supposed to be able to search through the available application and system (indicator) menu commands and offer these as you type, but the HUD isn’t as smart as it should be. To adjust the volume settings on your computer, for instance, you ought to be able to type “volume” into the search box, but doing so produces no result whatsoever. To get to that command, you need to type the less intuitive “sound” instead and choose from four options. How this is more efficient than merely clicking on the speaker icon and adjusting the volume on a slider is beyond me. Performance was even quirkier when I tried to use the HUD to find commands in an application. It worked to a limited degree with the image-editing program Gimp, but the search itself seemed slow. To save a file, I typed “save” and the HUD went through 15 options before offering me “File > Save As” whereas I could easily have saved time by using the keyboard shortcut, CTRL-S.
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When Mark Shuttleworth announced HUD, I had my worries. Unity itself needed a lot of work to be further polished. In a recent interview with Mark at MWC I asked about the worried around HUD and he explained his vision of HUD. So, let me get one thing out of our way ‘HUD is not going to replace the traditional menus’.
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Christian Dywan, the main developer of the open source WebKit-based browser Midori, has announced the release of the latest version of his project. Midori 0.4.4 has improvements in several areas, including better GTK+ 3 support, improved interaction with Ubuntu’s Unity menubar and other fixes.
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Who runs Ubuntu? Where, why and how? That’s a question lots of people — including probably even Canonical employees — would like to be able to answer better. Toward this end, a survey of general Ubuntu users is underway. Here’s the scoop.
Last month, Canonical completed a survey of Ubuntu server users that revealed quite a bit of interesting information — from the apparently hobbyist nature of many Ubuntu server deployments to the ways people are and aren’t currently deploying Ubuntu servers in the cloud.
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Phew! it’s been a long road to release the next unity, but I’m more than happy to finally announce the release of 5.6. Unity components (dee, libunity, bamf, lenses, nux) and unity itself, plus some compiz snapshots (post 0.9.7.0) are part of this release. The packages are currently building on the official builders and should be soon available to you.
No particular new feature apart from better ibus support are part of it, plus a tons of bug fixes and some miscelleanous improvements: – Daniel van Vungt landed a patch in compiz that enhances its performance for more than 51%! When you test it, I can ensure you feel a real noticeable difference (in particular on older machines, like mine). – The alt tap false positive revealing the HUD is now part of the past. We know this one was annoying people, I can only tell you it’s been technically challenging ;). This has been a rocking combined effort in compiz/unity sides. – the file lens can now find files that were never opened before.
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Ubuntu for Android has become extremely popular among enthusiasts. There was a lot of excitement around Ubuntu for Android during the Mobile World Congress. I was at the booth for coverage and I saw how people were excited about it. Ubuntu for Android, as I understand after talking to Mark Shuttleworth, is much more than yet another prototype. It’s much more than just another Canonical project. It is undoubtedly a Linux geek’s toy, but it is a real business device which, if executed well by Canonical, can disrupt the enterprise market.
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Jo-Erlend Schinstad is one of the most active and dedicated members of the Ubuntu community who tries to clear confusion around Ubuntu related issues. He also takes pain in explaining technologies, how it works and how it can be improved. Jo was recently appointed as a member of EMEA and it was a great opportunity to talk to Jo-Erlend about his engagement with the free software community, especially Ubuntu.
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Ubuntu 12.04 is currently in its beta and updates are rolling everyday to remove existing bugs and polish the system for the final release on April 26th. However, today I received almost 100 updates which is huge considering I update my system every few hours (call me paranoid). Notables updates have been made to Compiz and Unity. Most of the updates however are performance improvements rather than visual tweaks. Still, I will try to list them all to the best of my knowledge.
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Phones
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Android
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The popular photo-filtering and sharing app Instagram is finally coming to Android. The co-founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, made the announcement at SXSW. He said that the app is being tested internally as private beta and will be released soon.
There is more for iOS users to get envious, the Android app of Instagram is better than its iOS cousin. “In some ways, it’s better than our iOS app. It’s crazy,” Systrom said. He said that the app is fast, works great on large screens and can share photos to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and other networks.
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Events
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The Linux Foundation has announced the keynote speakers and track highlights for this year’s Collaboration Summit. The invitation-only Summit will take place 3-5 April in San Francisco and will include keynotes by Frank Frankovsky, Facebook’s Director of Hardware Design who will talk about the company’s Open Compute project, Gerrit Huizenga from IBM, and Huawei’s CTO Timo Jokiaho.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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San Francisco based Firefox Clinic plans to help Firefox users on 24th March, but it needs the help of more advanced users on the day
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CMS
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Drupal is a huge software project by any measure, with thousands of developers writing code for it and deploying websites and applications on it. Alongside Linux, Apache, and Mozilla, it is one of the largest open source projects in the world. This infographic helps explain the important work of Drupal’s Security Team.
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Unicon, an IT consulting company that specializes in developing open source software for education, has added 20 portlet enhancements to the Jasig uPortal project. Jasig is a consortium of schools and companies that sponsor open source software projects for higher education. uPortal is an open source portal framework for use by institutions to house software components, such as a Facebook connection, a photo viewer, or a “MyCourses” link to a course management system. These are known as “portlets.”
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Education
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The FTA is a global community and network of academic and social organizations active in the fields of Free Software, Standards and Hardware. It is currently hosted by the Free Knowledge Institute (FKI) after its foundation in 2008 by the FKI, Open Universiteit Nederland, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and Universitet i Agder.
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Business
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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OpenSim seemed like the perfect alternative. It uses the same viewers as Second Life, so it’s familiar and (relatively) easy to use. Land prices are ridiculously low. And many hosting companies would set up private grids for us and allow us to make local copies of entire regions — even entire grids. Or, with enough technical skill, we could run as many OpenSim regions as we wanted for free on our own servers.
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Open Hardware
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Actually, the Arduino hardware is Open Source Hardware so you don’t have to buy an Arduino, you could buy the parts yourself and build it up on a breadboard. I’m going to assume, however, that you aren’t at that level yet you’ll want to go ahead and buy a board. The latest version of the Arduino is the Arduino Uno (Revision 3). For this tutorial, I recommend the following parts:
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Other word processors have their own standards as well. OpenOffice Writer, for example, uses the OpenDocument, or ODF, format. Kingsoft Writer uses a format called WPS. And so on.
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Security
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The White House orchestrated a simulated cyberattack on New York City’s power supply during a summer heat wave late Wednesday to illustrate not only potential human and economic casualties, but to tee up support for Senate passage of a sweeping cybersecurity bill.
During a classified briefing in the Office of Senate Security, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan showed lawmakers how a hacker could breach control systems of the city’s electric system and trigger a ripple effect throughout the population and private sector, according to a source familiar with the scenario.
“The fact that we could be subject to a catastrophic attack under the right circumstances and we now know some of the things that would help us to protect against such an attack, that’s why it’s important now for the Congress to take this up,” Napolitano said in an interview with POLITICO.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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It won’t be a surprise to see that even the smartest users behave in the most stupid manner when on Facebook. They give out their location without even realizing what they are doing. It becomes increasingly dangerous when members of US army start giving out their location in different ways.
A deployed service member’s situational awareness includes the world of social media. If a Soldier uploads a photo taken on his or her smartphone to Facebook, they could broadcast the exact location of their unit, said Steve Warren, deputy G2 for the Maneuver Center of Excellence, or MCoE.
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Cablegate
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The UK Government has issued Defence Advisory Notices to editors of UK news outlets in an attempt to hush up the latest bombshell from whistle-blowing web site WikiLeaks.
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Finance
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This soft censorship of the financial news by the visual and print media in the States is nothing new. I have spoken to a number of people who find themselves and their viewpoints shut out of the discussions on financial and economic issues in the US. I have seen this happen repeatedly in the area of stock and metals market abuses and their reforms.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The pharmaceutical drug lobby PhRMA gave $356,075 to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “scholarship fund” in 2010, but listed the recipient’s address at a lobbying firm steps away from the Wisconsin State Capitol, rather than ALEC’s Washington, D.C. offices, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service. The PhRMA contribution is leading to calls for greater transparency about how the ALEC scholarship fund operates.
In its 2010 IRS filings, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, better known as PhRMA, listed a $356,075 contribution to the “ALEC Scholarship Fund.” That fund pays for flights and hotels for state legislators to attend ALEC conferences in places like New Orleans or Florida.
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Censorship
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When U.S. authorities shuttered sports-wagering site Bodog.com last week, it raised eyebrows across the net because the domain name was registered with a Canadian company, ostensibly putting it beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Working around that, the feds went directly to VeriSign, a U.S.-based internet backbone company that has the contract to manage the coveted .com and other “generic” top-level domains.
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PayPal, which plays a dominant role in processing online sales, has taken full advantage of the vast and open nature of the Internet for commercial purposes, but is now holding free speech hostage by clamping down on sales of certain types of erotica. As organizations and individuals concerned with intellectual and artistic freedom and a free Internet, we strongly object to PayPal functioning as an enforcer of public morality and inhibiting the right to buy and sell constitutionally protected material.
Recently, PayPal gave online publishers and booksellers, including BookStrand.com, Smashwords, and eXcessica, an ultimatum: it would close their accounts and refuse to process all payments unless they removed erotic books containing descriptions of rape, incest, and bestiality. The result would severely restrict the public’s access to a wide range of legal material, could drive some companies out of business, and deprive some authors of their livelihood.
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Civil Rights
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The Fourth Amendment’s search-incident-to-arrest doctrine permits police officers to access the data on an arrestee’s cellphone without a warrant, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit declared Feb. 29 (United States v. Flores-Lopez, 7th Cir., No. 10-3803, 02/29/12).
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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In January, La Quadrature du Net responded to the BEREC consultation, based on the findings of the RespectMyNet platform. Although these only give a partial account of the situation, the submission presented 144 confirmed reports of breaches to Net neutrality, concerning 44 operators in more than 14 Member States.
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Canada’s politicians are set to make a decision any day, setting the course for copyright and the Internet that will last for years. Please send a message to your MP and the government by filling out the form on the right.
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DRM
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Reader Jason Alcock alerts us to another example of a company taking a backwards approach to value-added services by putting artificial restrictions on their content. Apparently, while ebooks from the popular publisher Penguin are available to borrow from Kindle libraries, Penguin requires that they only be transferrable by USB, not wireless. This, in turn, means that they cannot be read with the free Kindle apps on platforms like iOS and Android, since USB transfer is only supported on the Kindle device itself.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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The public domain is meant to be a source of free culture for all the world to enjoy, mix and derive other works from. Unfortunately, there are many people and organizations in the world that wish to block the use of public domain material. Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. (ERB) is one such organization. Founded in 1923, this corporation has been handling all the copyrights and other rights for the works created by the author Edgar Rice Burroughs. Amongst the rights held by the corporation are the rights to the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars characters. What makes this situation somewhat unique is the fact that only a portion of the Tarzan and John Carter books are still covered by copyright in the US. A number of the early works were published prior to 1923 when modern copyright terms of life plus 70 years went into effect. Even though the copyrights of the early works are long expired, ERB has shown that it will block the use of both characters in modern derivative works.
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Copyrights
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While the major music companies’ revenue from music sales has gone down, they have a brand new increasing income stream: revenue generated from the sale of other people’s music. In the past five years, hundreds of millions of dollars of songwriter royalties have been generated and never paid to the songwriter, or have been given to Warner Bros, EMI, Universal, Sony and others based on their market share- estimates put this new income at over half a billion dollars.
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The MPAA is moving full steam ahead in their ongoing battle with file-hosting service Hotfile. Pointing to the criminal investigation against Megaupload, the movie studios are asking for a summary judgement against Hotfile, a development which would effectively shut down the site. The MPAA argues that Hotfile is a piracy haven where more than 90% of all downloads are copyright infringing.
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Michael Geist points us to “A critique of how the collecting agency behind the ‘bone stupid’ copyright deals signed by U of Toronto and Western U is poised to have its wishes ensconced in Canada’s soon-expected Copyright Modernization Act, Bill C-11, with provisions that ‘override the copyrights of others, monopolize markets and collect a de facto ‘Education Tax’ [that] is inefficient, immoral, and likely unconstitutional.’”
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ACTA
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The global upsurge of popular opposition to the Anti-Counterfeiting Agreement (ACTA), particularly evident across Europe in the last month, has pushed the governments of Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, and the Netherlands, Poland to reconsider their ratification of the controversial treaty.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.12.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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A big task was pending since a very long time in my todo lists. It was installing and trying out Linux. Having heard about many features and praises about Linux and programming on the LAMP stack from a few of my friends and colleagues, I decided to give it a try myself. So I went about learning and researching Linux & LAMP, formatted my hard-drive, created new partitions and installed Ubuntu 11.10 (a variety of Linux that ships with the GNOME desktop environment). The first emotion I then felt was that of regret – Why didn’t I do this earlier? Why was I focused on programming in a closed-source OS environment with bloated software, and a runtime with just two options to code – VB.NET & C#. Being enlightened about the open-source legends and milestones achieved by Linux and the secure way it handles its file-system, I couldn’t help but wonder at its marvel.
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I was at the bookstore last Sunday and I found my first Vietnamese language Linux book. Amazing!!!
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What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
I’m currently running Mandriva 2011 on both my desktop and my laptop. Depending on the project I’m on I can either be working at home for extended periods (as I am currently) or on the customer site. I recently spent a few months on a customer site in Malaysia, and in that case my laptop becomes my main system.
I’ve previously dabbled with Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu and others, but I have generally been very happy with Mandriva. I have always preferred the KDE environment over GNOME. In the early days when KDE2 came out (and I was running Redhat) I used to compile the latest KDE releases to use on my system. These days things are more mission-critical and I prefer to have a supported, packaged system. Whether I change this in the future depends on Mandriva’s future.
My laptop is actually a triple boot setup, and also has Windows XP on it. I often do a lot of hands-on work on customer’s systems and for this I find Linux simply much more productive and powerful than Windows. The only time I use Windows is when a customer project mandates the use of a particular piece of software. In practice I find this doesn’t happen often, but having WIndows allows me to support this when it does.
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Linux skills are in growing demand in today’s IT hiring landscape, and there are many ways to bolster those skills both online and off.
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Desktop
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Joe Brockmeier wrote an insightful piece on ReadWrite entitled “What We Lose in a Post-PC World” that starts off with this: “Tim Cook, Ray Ozzie, and a host of others have proclaimed that we’re in a “post-PC world.” Well, not quite yet, but you can see it from here.”
[...]
Meanwhile, technology marches on and as evening falls on the pre-Post-PC era — which might be called the post-pre-Post-PC era by purists, opening another argumentative can of worms as a sideshow — Blender developers will actually get an Android version for tablets up and running, just proving the point that you can do it, but ignoring the important question around why you would make software to run on something that’s not built for the job.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linux server users won’t have to wait long to benefit from the new Intel Xeon E5 processor, announced earlier this week. Hardware vendors and Linux operating system vendors alike are ready to leverage Intel’s latest server chip architecture.
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How do Linux kernel devs figure out which kernel will be the basis for their enterprise distros?
The Linux kernel community is made up of lots of different developers working at different companies. But as it turns out, those companies don’t really control their own kernel roadmaps as much as they might think.
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While it looks like there’s still another week before the Linux 3.3 kernel will be released and thus marking the merge window for the Linux 3.4 kernel opening, here’s some of the DRM graphics changes you can expect to see merged.
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Graphics Stack
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GLSL 1.40 is a requirement for OpenGL 3.1, which Intel is now attempting to support in Mesa now that they have OpenGL 3.0 / GLSL 1.30 support for their Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics driver. There’s been talk of possibly having OpenGL 3.1 in place for Mesa 8.1, which will be released this summer, and GLSL 1.40 is part of this.
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APITrace was introduced in April of last year as a way to help graphics driver developers debug the graphics stack. This free software program allows for easy OpenGL API tracing regardless of driver. APITrace 2.0 was then introduced in September to support the latest OpenGL 4.2 specification and to provide other new functionality. Today the program has reached the version 3.0 milestone.
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If you have been desiring better video playback support on the open-source ATI/AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack, the days of being frustrated may be limited. There’s some code concerning UVD — the GPU’s Unified Video Decoder engine — that will be going through internal code review at AMD this coming week.
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One of the Gallium3D drivers yet not fully supporting the OpenGL 3.0 specification is the LLVMpipe software rasterizer. However, if you’re curious of what’s left before this CPU-based graphics driver can handle GL3, here’s a list.
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Some new details have emerged concerning the 2012 X.Org Developers’ Summit, which will take place this September and commemorate 25 years of X11.
First of all, while it’s not been officially announced on the mailing lists or elsewhere yet, XDS2012 is expected to happen from the 19th to 21st of September. It’s been mentioned on the XDS2012 Wiki page and elsewhere and discussed for weeks, like back at FOSDEM, but I believe Egbert Eich will be sending out the formal announcement soon.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Lauterbach has announced support for the Beyond Semiconductor’s BA22 family of microprocessor cores with its debug tools.
Lauterbach’s TRACE32 tools provide BA22 processor debugging through a standard JTAG interface for the complete debug process, including code download, flash programming and source code debugging.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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The open-source Xonotic gaming community has released version 0.6.0 of their DarkPlaces-powered Nexuiz-forked game. Xonotic 0.6.0 offers up some mighty improvements as Xonotic nears version 1.0.
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Google is leaving no stone unturned in developing and promoting Native Client (NaCl) to game developers. Not only indie game developers are being attracted but Google is striking deals with big game production houses like Square Enix and Ubisoft.
If you are still not aware about Native Client games, read our articles on it from here. All these games are playable in Chrome/ium browser in sandboxed mode. All you have to do is enable hardware acceleration and whitelist your graphic card.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The source of the problem is the fact that kded is sometimes frozen by one or more of its modules. Plasma NM < 0.9.0 used to do several synchronous calls to networkmanagement module in kded, specially to get the signal strengh of wifi access points and 3G connections. You can imagine how often wifi access points (all access points in range, even the ones you are not connected to) can trigger signal strengh… signals :-/ Yes, every often.
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No, I’m not. Because I never left, hihihihi. The title is a clickbait…
[...]
Looking ahead into the misty future, I can honestly say I do not know which Linux distribution I will be running on my current and new hardware in the coming years, but I definitely know I will be using Windows. That’s the simple reality. No, let me rephrase that. I will be running Windows XP and Windows 7, as Windows 8, if rumors are all true, aims to become the new lead champion in the moronity club. Still.
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Linux Deepin is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that uses a highly customized GNOME Shell as the default desktop environment. It was initially created for Chinese users only, but there are now different ISO images for both Chinese and English languages.
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I have also excluded three Linux distros that appear on the Distrowatch “Top Ten” list: Arch Linux, Slackware, and CentOS. From what I’ve gathered, Arch Linux and Slackware are better suited to advanced Linux users than to newcomers; and CentOS is primarily for “enterprise” users (those setting up servers). I’ve heard many good things about all three, but they’re probably not distros for the Goodbye, Microsoft audience.
I’ve included PC-BSD as a representative of the BSD Unix family. While I have not tried it myself, I’m told it’s the “Ubuntu of BSDs” for ease of installation and use, and it is aimed at desktop use rather than servers.
I mentioned several lightweight distros in late 2009; some have since gone dormant or have been discontinued. (Namely FeatherLinux, SLAX, SaxenOS, BeaFanatIX, U-Lite, Fluxbuntu, and Wolvix.) The only “dormant” distro I’ve included is Damn Small Linux, which, though not updated since 2008, is still popular and useful.
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Arch Linux is 10 years old today. Arch Linux was started by Judd Vinet in March 2002. Judd announced the release of Arch Linux 0.1 (Homer on March 11, 2002).
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Just a few weeks ago, at the end of 2011, I reviewed a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu with the OpenBox window manager: SalentOS. That distribution was created by an Italian person who lives in Salento, hence the name.
I am not sure if Italians have some extreme love of OpenBox, but very soon after that, I heard about another OpenBox-based distribution from that country. This time, though, it is based on Debian. To be precise, on the unstable branch of Debian – Sid.
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New Releases
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Gentoo Family
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This time around, I’m reviewing Sabayon Linux 8 in its Xfce 64-bit edition. Honestly, I chose the Xfce edition because my USB stick is 2 Gigabytes, and the GNOME and KDE versions are too large to fit. But I can confirm that you can use UNetbootin to install Sabayon onto any laptop that lets you boot from a thumb drive.
Sabayon is a distribution based on the Gentoo version of Linux. Gentoo is a long-established distribution that is one of the very few using source compilation to provide you with the software you install. While this allows you to customize your system to an unprecedented degree, it also requires the desire and the confidence to do much more “under the hood” work than most distributions expect. One of the aims of Sabayon is to make the initial installation of Gentoo painless, and they succeed in that.
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Red Hat Family
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Open-source technology thrives by letting anybody know how it works and encouraging them to come up with new ideas and to tailor software to their own needs.
Could your nonprofit work the same way?
Any organization can, said Rebecca Suehle, a writer and editor at the open-source software company Red Hat, in a session today at the South by Southwest Interactive conferene.
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Q. Tell me about the culture of your company.
A. Since we were founded in the 1990s on the idea of leveraging broad open-source communities, we naturally adopted that approach in our culture long before the Facebooks of the world even existed. So we’re on the bleeding edge of what so many companies are going to face because of this whole millennial generation coming up. It just does not like this idea of hierarchy.
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Last year I’ve decided to purchase a license of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (self support) to use on my home laptop. For a few years that I had not used Red Hat (or clones) for Desktop. I don’t find expensive at all the 45€’s that Red Hat charges for 1 year license, specially considering that I really don’t have to worry much about security (as the updates flow in quite nicely)…
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Fedora
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The Fedora Linux has finally arrived for the Raspberry Pi, after much delay. The Fedora Linux version is titled as the Fedora Linux Remix and is the recommended Linux distribution for the credit-card sized $35 computer. This linux distribution is based on Fedora 14 and is available along with versions of Debian and Arch Linux for the Raspberry Pi.
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Debian Family
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The Debian project is pleased to announce the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.
The alpha and ia64 packages from DSA 1769 are not included in this point release for technical reasons. All other security updates released during the lifetime of “lenny” that have not previously been part of a point release are included in this update.
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The Debian project has announced the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename ‘lenny’). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.
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The Debian project is pleased to announce the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename `lenny’). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release,
along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.
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Debian Edu (aka “Skolelinux”) is a Debian Pure Blend specifically targeted at schools and educational institutions, and provides a completely configured school network environment out of the box. It covers PXE installation, PXE booting for diskless machines, and setup for a school server, for stationary workstations, and for workstations that can be taken away from the school network. Several educational applications like Celestia, Dr. Geo, GCompris, GeoGebra, Kalzium, KGeography and Solfege are included in the default desktop setup.
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Inspired by the interview series conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux community. This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a more international audience.
While Debian Edu and Skolelinux originated in France and Norway, and have most users in Europe, there are users all around the globe. One of those far away from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator and contributor. It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to work out of the box in Japan. I got him to answer a few questions, and am happy to share the response with you. 
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical the company behind Ubuntu has announced the Ubuntu User Survey 2012 Poll. The motive behind the poll is to understand how people discover, use and share Ubuntu. The poll is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The results of the poll will be shared with the community some time later.
The poll takes hardly 5 minutes to fill in and basically looks into how you discovered Ubuntu, your use cases, and if whether you would recommend Ubuntu to your friends and others. This poll if answered by many would give answers to questions like the demographic usage of Ubuntu and many other questions. You can find the polls in the links below,
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Every six months, we will do a review of the latest version of Ubuntu and see what features/improvement Canonical has added to the popular distro. The next version of Ubuntu – 12.04, Precise Pangolin is now available in beta and this is particularly important since it is the next Long Term Support (LTS) version. As of all LTS version, the emphasis is always on stability over new features experimentation, so it is interesting to see how the 12.04 will perform. Let’s proceed with the review.
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When it comes to improving hardware support for Linux, there are two traditional strategies: The Do-It-Yourself method, by which geeks write their own device drivers, and the Beg-And-Plead approach, or asking OEMs for open-source drivers and hoping they comply. But Canonical seems to be forging a third path by actually cooperating with upstream manufacturers to bring better hardware support to Ubuntu. Here’s how, and what it means for the lives of Linux users everywhere.
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Flavours and Variants
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Netrunner is a KUbuntu based LiveDVD distribution running KDE 4.7.4 and is available in both 32 and 64 bit flavors. It takes the best of Kubuntu and adds a bit of their touch to the programs being offered. Netrunner is a distribution based for novice users of Linux.
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Though the KDE desktop has a few obvious advantages over Unity, Kubuntu has always played second fiddle (maybe third) to Shuttleworth’s baby, Ubuntu. While the distro has received critcism and praise in equal parts, one thing has never change. Commitment.
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Phones
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Android
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Still thinking of the best method for unifying your smartphone and computer? The best option seems to be the official Ubuntu for Android, which was unveiled at Mobile World Congress. But while we wait for that to come around, you can go the hacking route and install the full Ubuntu OS, yourself.
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In a nutshell, Open Source Software aims to ‘liberate’ you of the bonds enforced by proprietary software. These bonds restrict your basic rights of freedom to choose between softwares, freedom to modify current programs etc. For more details, do check out Richard Stallman on Wikipedia (Akash has done a post on him too).
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Firefox users who cannot wait to update the stable channel of the web browser from version 10 to 11, can download the new version from the official Mozilla ftp server or third party download sites early. Please note that while it is unlikely that the final version will get replaced in last minute, it has happened in the past. It is recommended to wait for the official release announcement if Firefox is running in a productive environment, or if you do not need to have access to the new feature set introduced in the browser right away.
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CMS
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The first-ever Blue Drop Awards are how the Drupal community recognizes peers for pushing open source content management to the limit. The awards are more than recognition–they’re a clever way to help market this growing open source community. And we already know that Drupal and open source go hand-in-hand.
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Healthcare
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Skysoft Incorporated, and Orlando based IT Services and Software Development firm, has chosen OpenEMR as the platform to move forward with starting in 2012. Skysoft currently develops software prototypes for the United States Department of Veterans Administration. Skysoft is also developing medical prototypes in-house and will begin to integrate the OpenEMR platform with ours.
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BSD
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Porting FUSE to a FreeBSD kernel module has been a long-time coming. The FreeBSD FUSE kernel module port originally began as a Google Summer of Code project, but it wasn’t successful. In 2011, work on the port was restored via another year with Google Summer of Code, but at the end of the summer the FreeBSD FUSE implementation was still unstable and suffered data corruption issues. Now it seems that FreeBSD FUSE is finally getting hacked into shape and may be committed in the coming days.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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From the mailing list announcement, “Julia is an open source language for technical computing that strives to be in the same class of productivity as Matlab, R, python+numpy, etc., but targets the performance of C and Fortran. It is due to LLVM that julia has been able to achieve such good performance (in my opinion), with relatively little effort in a short amount of time.”
Additional information on the Julia project is available from JuliaLang.org. “Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. The library, mostly written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, FFTs, and string processing. More libraries continue to be added over time. Julia programs are organized around defining functions, and overloading them for different combinations of argument types (which can also be user-defined).”
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Public Services/Government
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The American internet entrepreneur, 45, will become an unpaid adviser across all government departments to help civil servants develop “innovative” new technology.
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Openness/Sharing
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Standards/Consortia
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Standards-based open Web technologies are increasingly capable of delivering interactive multimedia experiences; the kind that used to only be available through plugins or native applications. This trend is creating new opportunities for gaming on the Web.
New standards are making it possible for Web applications to implement 3D graphics, handle input from gamepad peripherals, capture and process audio and video in real-time, display graphical elements in a fullscreen window, and use threading for parallelization. Support for mobile gaming has also gotten a boost from features like device orientation APIs and improved support for handling touchscreen interaction.
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SOFTWARE HOUSE Microsoft has gone into some detail about some of the most obvious changes in the look and feel of the Windows 8 user interface.
A long Microsoft blog post goes into some detail about the apparently subtle changes that are supposed to speed things up and make things easier to do in Windows 8. We are not convinced.
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Security
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So, while I don’t agree with the TSA’s response to this video in which “Blogger Bob” somewhat angrily snaps back about how important TSA scanning is, I don’t think Corbett’s claims are that convincing and I’m surprised at how much press it’s been generating. Yes, the scanners are probably pointless, and it’s all security theater, but that doesn’t mean we should all stop thinking through the details on videos that potentially show some weaknesses in these machines.
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Microsoft yesterday said it would ship six security updates next week, only one critical, to patch seven vulnerabilities in Windows and a pair of for-developers-only programs.
This year’s March Patch Tuesday will feature three more updates and three more patches than the same month in 2011, but will fix fewer bugs than the March roster in each of the years 2008-2010, according to records kept by Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Now that global oil supply is a zero-sum game, in order for the five billion people in the Non-OECD to consume more oil they need a donation from us, here in the OECD. And as you can see, we are “happily” (recession, unemployment, lack of growth) giving up these energy sources as best we can.
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Finance
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In a signal that partisan squabbling in the nation’s capital may be reaching new levels of rancor, a key Republican regulator is pursuing an unusual avenue to overturn a Wall Street reform rule issued by his own agency. Scott O’Malia, one of five commissioners who lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is asking a powerful White House office that has no actual authority over the CFTC to assess his agency’s work.
If the Office of Management and Budget were to take O’Malia up on his suggestion, it would radically change the way some federal regulations are written and severely hamper implementation of a host of rules mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.
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In the last couple of weeks I’ve been pushing foreclosure fraud. Well, not pushing the fraud but rather arguing that foreclosure is fraud. It has to be. If a mortgage was registered at MERS, then the chain of title was broken. Broken chains mean the bank cannot foreclose. But that was MERS’s business model, and so most mortgages are “infected”. Still, there’s a lot more to it than that.
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Censorship
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Tesla and the company’s lawyers are nothing if not determined. After a judge smacked down the electric vehicle manufacturer’s libel suit against the BBC and Top Gear for comments made about the range of the Tesla Roadster, the automaker rallied with a second, amended lawsuit. It didn’t take long for the the same judge to nix the new case, too, saying the amendment was “not capable of being defamatory at all, or, if it is, it is not capable of being a sufficiently serious defamatory meaning to constitute a real and substantial tort.”
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One of the most fundamentally insane things about government and politics is the fact that evidence-based policy is frequently not the norm. It should be common sense that you don’t create new laws and regulations without actual evidence that they will work, or even clear evidence on the scope of the problem they aim to solve. But as we know, things don’t really work that way—it’s a lot easier for politicians and legislators to make their push based on emotion and public perception.
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A scientist’s duty is to science. Researchers must be able to share their findings, and discuss their published work with peers, journalists and the public in a timely manner.
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DRM
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Steve Pearlstein writes in the Washington Post about competition in the book selling business link here. He boils the policy issue down to picking your monopolist, Apple or Amazon. That doesn’t really frame the choices consumers face.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The Obama administration plans to ask Congress this year to renew White House “trade promotion authority” so it can finish talks on an Asia Pacific trade pact and pursue other possible initiatives, the top U.S. trade official said on Wednesday.
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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On March 7, 2012, the US Trade Representative Ron Kirk testified before the Senate Finance Committee. Senator Wyden (D-OR) asked him about the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), in particular the transparency issues.
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