06.25.10

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts

  • Podcast Season 2 Episode 11

    In this episode: Google releases its own command-line tool, Ubuntu drops F-Spot, and has anyone seen Mandriva? Listen to the results of our haiku challenge, and we ask, do you use open source software for freedom or function?

  • Podcast 78 Gentoo Screenshots + IRC Basics

• Artwork

  • Top 10 Cursors For X Window System

  • South Park Tux

• Instructionals

  • Attack of the Cosmic Rays!

  • How To Set Up Software RAID1 On A Running LVM System (Incl. GRUB2 Configuration) (Ubuntu 10.04)

  • Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Tweaks

  • Nautilus Elementary Simplifies File Browsing [Linux]

  • Performing Image Magic with ImageMagick

  • Capturing screen shots and program interaction on UNIX and Linux systems: Part 1, Program interaction

  • Guerrilla Tactics to Force Screen Mode in Ubuntu

  • gentoo + youtube – flash + mplayer

  • Install Linux Mint on Your Windows Computer or Netbook

  • Delete SSH Keys

  • Device not managed in Ubuntu 10.04?

  • Perl Exporter Tutorial with Examples – @EXPORT and @EXPORT_OK

  • Using Vlookup() (or Hlookup()) in OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheets, with a Data Validity dropdown list

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

    • Javascript DataEngines and Runners

      With KDE SC 4.4, we put a fair amount of work into Javascript Plasmoid support. This has been extended a bit further in 4.5. Javascript has also blossomed as a runtime management tool for Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook, both of which support using Javascript for first-run layouts and configuration updates. Plasma Desktop also allows you to use Javascript for templated layouts and provides an interactive console for messing about with these things, features that hopefully will extend to other Plasma workspaces such as Netbook in upcoming releases.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Glippy – Simple Clipboard Manager with Image Support

      Clip-board managers are useful tools for users who copy-and-paste frequently or wish to copy something but use it again later. The ever-expanding resource that is Wikipedia gives two main tasks that clipboard managers such as Glippy aim to do: -

      * to store data copied to clipboard, so it can be pasted after closing the host application of the data copied, and
      * to make multiple clips from the history available, whereas most system-native clipboards overwrite one clip with the next.

    • In better news

      The GNOME Foundation released their conference speaker guidelines today. This is an important step not just in helping speakers know what’s acceptable, but also in helping audience members understand in advance what the community is likely to find objectionable and ensure that they can feel comfortable in raising concerns.

• Distributions

  • A Five-Way Linux Distribution Comparison In 2010

    With many Linux distributions receiving major updates in recent weeks and months we have carried out a five-way Linux distribution comparison of openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, and Arch Linux. We have quite a number of tests comparing the 32-bit performance of these popular Linux distributions on older PC hardware.

    Our test system was a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook with an Intel Core Duo T2400 (1.83GHz dual-core) CPU, 1GB of system memory, an 80GB Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00 SATA HDD, and ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 graphics. Below are some of the key software components for the different distributions that were tested in this article.

  • The Reg Guide to Linux, part 3

    Linux has changed almost beyond recognition since version 1.0 in 1994 and Ubuntu is about as polished and professional as it gets. It’s approaching the level of polish of Mac OS X, is faster and easier to install than Windows, includes a whole suite of apps and offers tens of thousands more, runs on cheap commodity hardware and costs nothing.

    Nobody knows quite how many Ubuntu users there are – it’s not sold or licensed, there’s no registration process and it doesn’t “phone home” and identify itself, so it’s hard to tell. Its creators reckon around 12 million, but then, the number-two distro on Distrowatch, Fedora, claims about twice as many.

  • Break your Ubuntu Addiction: Three Strong Distros

    I consider Simply Mepis to be among the first distro to get it “right” for people looking for a no-hassle, stable experience with a generally consistent environment from release to release.

    At its core, Simply Mepis is created to make things easy to use right out of the box for any Linux skill level. Despite being a KDE-only distro based on Debian, Mepis allows the end user to setup their network, video configuration and other settings from the Simple Mepis “assistants.”

    This is handy when you want to switch from the NVIDIA NV driver to a proprietary driver instead, yet wish to do so safely from a GUI environment.

  • Reviews

    • Ubuntu 10.04 Review

      I am using Ubuntu 10.04 and really enjoying it since I have more programs to choose from then I have had with other versions of Linux.

    • The myth of Arch Linux and the i586

      The most obvious, and among Arch’s Greatest Hits, is the abs tool, which will mirror the current Arch build scripts onto your local system. From there, almost anything is possible, so long as you’re willing to take the time to build things yourself.

  • New Releases

    • Low power Linux: wattOS R2

      The latest release of wattOS is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” and features several advanced power management tools to help users consume less energy for their “daily computing needs”. According to the developers, the latest update has a much faster boot and install time and overall responsiveness is improved. Other changes include replacing the Exaile music player with Rhythmbox and the addition of the F-Spot personal photo management application

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Introduction to Unity Launcher

      If you are testing our Unity weekly builds, you may have noticed that the Launcher is beginning to show some dramatic changes. We put a lot of effort into designing the Launcher’s deepest details, and those details will take time to surface in the weekly builds, but this post is not only about explaining you how the Launcher will be, but also to explain the rationale behind its design.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Android

    • Intel porting Android to x86 for netbooks and slates

      Google Android is generally aimed at mobile devices with ARM-based processors. But we’ve seen several efforts to bring the software to x86 processors, including the independent Androidx86 project as well as an Acer netbook which dual boots Windows and Google Android.

    • Google Remotely Deletes Android Apps

      Google this week removed two applications from its Android Market, and exercised a feature that lets the company remotely delete the apps from a user’s phones.

      Google did not reveal the names of these apps, and said only that they were “two free applications built by a security researcher for research purposes.”

Free Software/Open Source

• The Immortality of Open Source Projects

  Think of Sun Microsystems, and what comes to your mind?

  For me? Purple workstations–my first exposure to Sun equipment.

  For others, it might be Solaris. Or Java. There’s a host of things Sun was well-known for before it was acquired by Oracle last year and systematically dismantled to fit within the Oracle ecosystem.

  But I’ll bet middleware was not one of the things you initially recalled. But it’s some of Sun-now-Oracle’s cast-off middleware that may prove to be a huge business for a burgeoning new community, led by some former Sun employees.

  The company is ForgeRock, which made a small splash in the open source scene when it started up this February in Norway, led by Lasse Andresen, former Central & Northern Europe CTO at Sun. The ForgeRock team was later joined by Simon Phipps, former Sun Open Source Officer, member of the Open Source Initiative’s Board of Directors, and (now) Chief Strategy Officer at ForgeRock.

• Seeks delivers new search engine paradigm

  Google rules the search engine roost today, but upstarts always have their sights (and their sites) set on a share of its success. Seeks, for instance, introduces a new breed of social search engine in which users can collaborate and share their experiences in finding results, instead of keeping that information in the hands of a search engine provider.

• Events

  • Plasma @ Akademy

    The Plasma team will also be hosting a Plasma Feedback Round Table. This is a session for us to sit around a room with other interested / concerned KDE folk. We will answer the questions those attending have to the best of our abilities (and record the ones we don’t have answers for to do further research on them), and discuss ideas regarding Plasma now and in the future with all in attendance.

  • me @ Akademy

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla: Our browser will not run native code

    Mozilla vice president of products Jay Sullivan says that unlike Google, the open source outfit has no intention of bundling Firefox with Adobe Flash —– or with a plug-in that runs native code inside the browser. Mozilla, Sullivan says, believes that the future of online applications lies with web standards, including HTML5.

• Project Releases

  • ownCloud 1.0 is here

    Today we are releasing ownCloud 1.0
    This is the first step of the 1.x series with a planed 1.1 really soon.

• Openness/Sharing

  • The economics of openDemocracy

    In the language of my discipline, economics, openDemocracy produces a public good. Why? First, because information, analysis, commentary and active engagement with the unfolding story of democracy everywhere across the globe is an essential part of the progress of democracy. Democracy is about self-government, and where can that be without self-understanding about government?

  • Open Data Commons – Attribution License released

    Thanks to everyone for their feedback on the licenses and their help with the project. We can now announce a new license to the Open Data Commons family, the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY) license. This is a database specific license requiring attribution for databases. This makes ODC-BY similar to the Creative Commons Attribution license, but is built specifically for databases. As a legal tool that only requires attribution, it complies with the Open Knowledge Definition, the Open Knowledge Foundation’s standard around defining the rights behind what something means to be “open”.

Leftovers

• Science

  • Convenience food changes could save ‘thousands of lives’

    Tens of thousands of lives could be saved if major changes were made to processed and convenience foods, the UK’s leading health watchdog will say today, challenging the government and the food industry to act to improve the nation’s diet.

  • Rats Breathe With Lab-Grown Lungs

    For the first time, an animal has drawn a breath with lungs cultivated in the lab. Although preliminary, the results might eventually lead to replacement lungs for patients.

• Security/Aggression

  • Paterson wants more DNA in the database

    Gov. David Paterson has proposed roughly doubling New York’s DNA database to include samples from even low-level offenders, making it the first in the nation to so broadly collect and use this evidence to solve crimes and exonerate people wrongly convicted.

  • Say no to a government ‘kill switch’ for the Internet

  • G20-related incident nets weapons charges

    But Robert Beggs, who knows Sonne, told CBC News that Sonne was a member of a group called the Toronto Area Security Klatch, a group of security professionals who share knowledge and research on matters related to IT security.

• Environment

  • Sunday Times apologises for false climate story in a ‘correction’

    The Sunday Times carried a rather large “correction” yesterday that, once read alongside the original offending article, amounted to a complete retraction. In fact, it was a giant climbdown.

    In The Sunday Times and the IPCC: Correction, the paper refers to a news page story on 31 January headlined “UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim” (removed from the Sunday Times site, but available, disgracefully, on this site).

  • BP May Be Burning Sea Turtles Alive

    BP has been using controlled burns to limit the spread of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. In the process they are burning much of what wildlife remains in the area alive. In particular, conservationists say that sea turtles—including the endangered Kemp’s Ridley—are being caught in burns. “Once the turtles are in there, they can’t get out,” Mike Ellis, a boat captain involved in the rescue, told conservation biologist Catherine Craig in an interview.

  • Don’t cry for investors burned by BP. They were warned loud and clear

  • Action – not research – is needed to save our pollinators

    Do we really need to spend £10m on researching why our pollinators are dying out?

    There is no doubt that honeybees, hoverflies, wasps, bumblebees, moths and butterflies are all under threat. Since the 1970s, there has been a 75% decline in butterfly species in the UK, three species of bumblebees are now extinct, and honeybees have been having a pretty hard time for the last few years.

  • Countermeasures/ Mitigation

    In the initial stages of the spill, an estimated 30,000 barrels of oil per day were flowing from the well. In July 1979 the pumping of mud into the well reduced the flow to 20,000 barrels per day, and early in August the pumping of nearly 100,000 steel, iron, and lead balls into the well reduced the flow to 10,000 barrels per day. Mexican authorities also drilled two relief wells into the main well to lower the pressure of the blowout. PEMEX claimed that half of the released oil burned when it reached the surface, a third of it evaporated, and the rest was contained or dispersed.

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Journalists Unite to Stop UK Digital Economy Act and ISPs Blocking Legitimate Sites

    The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has said that it will support legal challenges, such as those that could be brought by broadband ISPs like TalkTalk UK, against the recently passed and highly controversial Digital Economy Act (DEA). This is because the new law could be used against websites that publish material of public interest without permission (e.g. Wikileaks).

  • Daniel Ellsberg: Obama Should Release the Garani Massacre Video to the American Public Immediately

    From today’s Democracy Now with Amy Goodman:

    AMY GOODMAN: Are you calling for Wikileaks to post the [Garani massacre] videotape online?

    ELLSBERG: I’d call for President Obama to post that videotape online. Let’s see whether it confirms what his officials and the Bush officials said about it earlier, or what the truth is. Has he seen it himself? He certainly should. He has access to it. And if he does, what excuse would he have for not revealing it? So why is he waiting for Wikileaks to use its sources to decrypt that, when he can just easily release it, as he should have some time ago?

  • Tiananmen Square memoir axed by Hong Kong publisher

    A Hong Kong publisher said today that he had scrapped plans to publish an alleged insider account of the decision-making behind Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy student protesters.

• Copyrights

  • Another File-Sharing Case Fails – Join The Revolution Or Perish

    The on-going fight against file-sharing link sites in Spain is turning into a farce. Despite many rulings which state that the sites break no laws, still anti-piracy groups waste their money pursuing them. As yet another site is cleared of wrong doing, a lawyer who speaks out for civil rights on the Internet is clear on the piracy issue – either join the revolution, or perish.