05.19.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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I spent some free time today getting caught up on the large backlog of phonon-gstreamer bugs. Towards the end, I started to have delusions of grandeur: Imagine a phonon-gstreamer codebase that doesn’t require supporting a zillion different audio frameworks, and instead belays that task to something that I don’t have to maintain.
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Desktop
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Just read another “forget desktop Linux” piece by a writer trying to cover Free software on a sight ostensibly doing the same. This is exactly the sort of thing I wrote about in a recent blog entry, and it’s sad to see it continue.
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The argument goes something to the affect that “since there is a movement towards enabling more devices at work and schools, the desktop no longer really matters.”
I understand my colleague Andrea’s passion for mobile devices and social media, but her conclusions seem seriously flawed. The reason I am writing this article is to ensure people understand the great value of Linux on the Desktop.
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In it Maria Korolov trots out a long list of “problems” with GNU/linux for large businesses. Here’s an example: “a typical organization will have one application for every 10 users, and, today, about half of those applications require the Windows operating system”
That makes no sense at all. It means businesses, money-making organizations, are foolishly paying for far too many applications. The largest organizations on the planet are governments and as we saw in Munich, it is worthwhile to shed unnecessary applications and rationalize the rest.
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I did some very simple timing of several different Linux distributions on this system before I changed the disk drive, and found that they all took about one minute from the GRUB menu to a ready.-to-use desktop. I repeated those tests with the SSD, and found that the average boot time had been cut to 30 seconds or less! The overall impression of using the system is faster with the SSD as well.
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Clearly, GNU/Linux works for them. It’s just silly that some commentators here cling to the idea that nothing can be done without that other OS. There is clear evidence to the contrary.
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Server
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nginx saw its 9th consecutive month of increased market share, gaining 894k hostnames and increasing its share to 5.48%, more than double the value it held a year ago. Apache fared the worst this month, losing 17.5M hostnames. However, it remains far ahead of the competition with two out of every three hostnames being served using Apache.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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After David Airlie brought up the new DDX driver API for the X.Org Server, a new discussion was born concerning the lack of patch review taking place for the X.Org Server.
David Airlie commented on the developers’ mailing list about the lack of patch review for the new API patches, he wonders how he’s “going to get the next 50 patches in at this rate some time this year.” Alan Coopersmith then responded with how there seems to be a harder time overall in getting patch reviews done. Coopersmith says, “I’ve got no ideas how to fix this quickly, but we need to get it fixed.”
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The new driver API for the X.Org Server that would finally allow for the X.Org stack to better compete with modern desktop drivers on Windows and Mac OS X, may actually see the light of day, prior to the Wayland push.
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Applications
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File compression is still the best way to send a huge bunch of photos to your dearest friend. It is one of the most important operations on almost every operating system, and is, therefore, inundated with a barrage of apps concerning it. On Windows too, file compression comes built-in, and so does on Linux. That said, the default compression method isn’t always the best one, and even if it is, there are people who are looking to trying out new tools for the same operation.
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Scalado Album correctly classifies images based on location and date, it provides only a placeholder, rather than a thumbnail, for some images. That was a disappointment. Images shot with app HDR Camera, for example, showed as a placeholder in the album, while images shot with the stock camera and others, including Vignette, showed successfully as thumbnails.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Wildfire Games has released the tenth alpha version of 0 A.D., an open source, historical real-time strategy game which features excellent graphics and sound. The new alpha brings Hellenic factions, basic technologies, civilization phases, click-and-drag wall building functionality, healing and more.
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Desktop Environments
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The Xfce 4 desktop offers a vast array of customization options that will leave your desktop looking nothing like the default. Take advantage of all the excellent graphical user interfaces offered for all of your options, settings, and preferences.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Video editing is one of the few areas where GNU/Linux is behind Windows and Macs. There are no professional grade video editing software for Linux. However, there are many honest attempts to bring quality video editing to the Linux platform. Kdenlive is one such project.
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Dave Edmunson, one of the lead developers behind KDE LightDM recently published an UPDATE describing some of the features (and shortcomings) already part of the first KDE LightDM release, as well as explaining a bit of what´s coming along in the next few months for the 0.2 release. Dave explained how some KDM features are still missing in KDE LightDM-0.1, but in turn, some of the screenshots he´s sharing look very promising. Among others, the benefits of using LightDM is, as its name rightly points out, its relatively low weight when compared with GDM or KDM. On top of that, there are obvious gains in terms of looks and flexibility. To give an example, changing the login screen wallpaper and/or welcome image will be very simple. Along the same lines, things like having the login screen and KSplash incorporating the same wallpaper the user has in her/his desktop should be easier. Inconsistencies between login screen and KSplash in terms of resolution and things of the like should also be out of the way thanks to the common QML thread. Here´s a picture of the Login screen control module, as it looks today. Note these are early days for this piece of functionality, so chances it may not look exactly like this come future releases:
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I’m pleased to announce our Kolab 2.4 product series can now be labeled 2.4.1!
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GNOME Desktop
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John Stowers has announced yesterday, May 14th, the release of GNOME Tweak Tool 3.4, an utility popular among users of the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
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You may have heard of ROSA before, but you may not be sure where. Almost 9 months ago, I reviewed Mandriva 2011 “Hydrogen”, and that version of Mandriva was developed in conjunction with ROSA Labs, a Russian Linux development group. Since then, Mandriva seen quite a roller-coaster ride and is now essentially on life support. It is all but certain that there will be no new releases of a distribution with the name “Mandriva” (or “Mandrake” for that matter). One fork appeared over a year ago, and that is called Mageia; that aimed to replicate and build upon the traditional KDE desktop that Mandriva used before the year 2011. The other fork is ROSA, and it is essentially a continuation of the novel desktop introduced in Mandriva 2011 “Hydrogen”. It seems like ROSA will become the haven for all Mandriva users that had not already gone to Mageia.
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A new version of the Parted Magic open source, Linux-based, multi-platform partitioning tool has been released. Labelled “2012_05_14″, the update is based on the 3.3.6 Linux kernel and includes version 1.12.1 of X Server.
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Linux is the operating system of choice for those who decide to go their own way. The open source model means the building blocks are there for you if you decide that you need your very own operating system.
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New Releases
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The latest version of Rocks cluster distribution – an open source toolkit for real and virtual clusters – has been released.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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In a blog post today Mandriva COO Jean-Manuel Croset announced that the new strategy going forward will be to let “the distribution evolve in and under the caring responsibility of the community.” Mandriva SA will, of course, be a part of this entity.
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After months of prevarication, and announcements that sounded as though they were emanating from a publication like Pravda, the company now says it will turn over development of the distribution to the community.
The man who made the announcement, chief executive Jean-Manuel Croset, appears to have a poor memory. The horse bolted some time ago – a goodly portion of the development community, fed up with the company’s dithering, forked the distribution in 2010 and created the Mageia GNU/Linux distribution.
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Mageia is a Linux distribution forked from Mandriva Desktop. Mageia 2 is the upcoming release, which is slated to be made available for public download just four days from today.
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Jean-Manuel Croset, CEO of Mandriva SA, announced last evening, May 17th, in a blog post, that the company decided to cease the Mandriva Linux operating system and transfer the responsibility to an independent entity.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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Fast forward one day, it seems like trying Fedora 16 Live was a failure: he gets a wallpaper and a mouse cursor, nothing else. I am showing a random screenshot from the web, trying to understand if he has a normal GNOME Shell empty desktop or is a deeper problem and this drives me to a large explanation on what GNOME, Unity, KDE, Xfce, LXDE are (and a statement of my desktop preference). I am asked again about my phone number and ignore the question. Then he wants to give Ubuntu a try, I don’t have a problem with that but he has: the same empty desktop with no panel, no right-click menus, no nothing. If is not the display, then it may be video drivers (ATI), so I recommend either a newer Fedora (F17 RC1 is online) or VESA parameters for boot (me blaming AMD).
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The Fedora Project has pushed back the release of the Fedora 17 Linux distribution by a week, from 22 May to 29 May. The main reason is that the project wants to take care of four bugs classified as blockers in the current release candidates; if possible, the developers will also use the extra time to fix a dozen other problems.
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Debian Family
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In my continued look at out of the ordinary Linux distributions, I installed Crunchbang Linux. Crunchbang’s main version is a distribution based on Debian’s stable branch (known as “squeeze”). This review is based on the 32-bit version of Crunchbang Linux. At this time, Crunchbang offers a regular version and one with backports installed (for the new kernel, among other things). I chose to use the regular version, R20120207 “Statler”.
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The move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 resulted in varied emotions with many people liking the much needed change and for many, lets just say that they felt devastated.
The Linux Mint team, after waiting out the initial change with Mint 11, released Mint 12 with Gnome 3 and now they have their work cutout with the Gnome 2 fork MATE and the Cinnamon Shell.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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FXI’s Cotton Candy, A $200 USB stick size PC running Ubuntu and Android 4.0 will start shipping at the end of this month to anyone who has pre-ordered the device in back in February.
These devices were supposed to ship in March but a number of new changes had delayed the manufacturing process. New features include a more durable casing, a micro USB port and improved Android 4.0 support.
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This is a guest post by Tom Slominski, a 15 year old Ubuntu user who ‘loves Linux, open source and web development with a tad of alternative rock sprinkled on top.’
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Are you looking for a job? Well, if you’re a good designer, live in London, UK, and you want a job at Canonical, now it’s the right time to apply for one of the many positions offered by the company behind the popular Ubuntu operating system.
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Flavours and Variants
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LinuxMint13 RC is available for testing, this release comes with 2 versions in a separated dvd`s: Mate and Cinnamon. For LinuxMint13 Cinnamon, apart of being very light offers some customization and integration of new applets, extensions and themes that can be found on the official website of Cinnamon. for Linux Mint13 Mate, also offers a version with the desktop environment that brings the user experience of Gnome Gtk 2 +3, this version is stable, fast and well integrated with Gnome 3.
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Xubuntu is a community-developed Xfce-flavored version of Ubuntu. It is supposed to be elegant, lightweight and easy to use. Reading my previous reviews of Xubuntu Karmic and Natty, you will find my experience to differ from the supposed mission statement. In the best case, Xubuntu was adequate but nothing more. Not quite the replacement for Gnome as some would claim.
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In my talk at Linux Fest Northwest — and I say this often to anyone who will listen — I mentioned that there is a “digital Darwinism” at play in the FOSS paradigm. That is, distros and FOSS programs rise and fall depending on the quality of the software and the community that gathers around them. Good distros and programs — the “fittest” — survive, and the others, well, not so much.
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Linux Mint 13 has jumped straight to a release candidate, hot on the heels of Ubuntu 12.04s release, and with a controversial switch to Yahoo search…
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The World at Work is powered by GE. This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place.
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Phones
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Android
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FXI’s Cotton Candy created a market for Android powered USB PC. FXI is selling its Cotton Candy for US $200, and now there is a competitor.
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If you thought the Raspberry Pi was the only tiny, ultra-inexpensive, pocketable computer running an open source operating system, think again. Not only is the OLPC effort showing signs of new life, but a number of Chinese web sites are now offering Android-based MK802 computers in thumbdrive-style form factors (shown here) for under $75. The prices even earn you free shipping if you happen to live in one of several Asian countries. Is there a market for these?
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Google plans to take another shot at direct sales for its line of Nexus phones — Android smartphones that offer an unadulterated strain of the mobile OS. The plan would cut carriers out of the distribution loop, and it’s similar to something Google tried years ago. That plan flopped. This time, Google will have more manufacturers as partners and more devices, but will consumers accept unsubsidized prices?
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According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Google wants to work more closely with smartphone manufacturers for the next version of Android – believed to be code-named “Jelly Bean”. The report says that up to five manufacturers will receive early access to the new mobile operating system in order to be able to launch phones carrying Google’s Nexus branding. The phones could be available in shops as early as late November this year. Google also wants to reverse its recent policy of selling largely through phone network channels, and to once again focus on selling Nexus phones directly; the newspaper cites sources familiar with the matter.
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As if the current share were not large enough, HTC and FaceBook are rumoured to be getting together on a smart phone to be released in time for Christmas. FaceBook has a huge opportunity for advertising the new gadget. Rumour has it that it will run Android/Linux. Between all the OEMs making Android/Linux smart phones, service providers promoting them and “Big Brothers” like Samsung, Google and now FaceBook promoting them globally, no consumer will be able to hide from Android/Linux smart phones. Share of shipments now is well over 50%. The only question is how large the share will become. There does not seem to be any limit yet. At the present rate of growth everyone on the planet could have one within a few years. Will people ever have a need for two?
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It’s mid-May — do you know where your Ice Cream Sandwich update is? Six months after Android 4.0 made its debut on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, millions of owners of legacy Android devices are still anxiously awaiting the day the new firmware gets downloaded on their own electronic real estate. At least the scene today is much more pleasant than it was just a few months ago, as ICS is finally rolling out to several popular devices. But if you’re shopping for a phone or tablet, how can you possibly keep track of which device has what version?
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After years of trying and failing to discourage manufacturers from adding user interface (UI) layers to Android, Google appeared destined for success with the visually refined Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”). Despite predictions that ICS would kill off the “skins” for good, however, HTC’s Sense and Samsung’s TouchWiz have not only arrived in new Android 4.0 versions, but they have met with positive reviews.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Retail outfit ZaReason has built a reputation over the years for offering quality Ubuntu-powered desktops and laptops at reasonable prices. It’s a bit of a surprise, then, to see that their latest offering — the ZaTab — is going to ship with Android pre-installed instead.
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Recently, it appears that the program offering paradigm is the virtual store front so to speak. Google’s play or Apples App store, to name the two most well known ones for mobile devices. Linux distributions have always had a form of application store where they are commonly known as repositories. In essence these ‘stores’ all work the same way. A single access point to all programs available for that operating system.
Shall we play a game? Just imagine you have written the program to end all programs and want to get this program into an application store for XYZ operating system. Which one do you think is the hardest to get into?
For your program to get into a Linux distribution it has to be already popular enough for someone to decide to do the work necessary so it can be included in the official repository. That someone can be you so I would say it is very easy for your program be become part of an official distribution.
I think we can discount windows for this exercise as it does not have an application store as such. Although there are rumours that they are working towards creating one.
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There are a lot of excellent reasons to get involved with an open source project. You can learn a new language, improve your existing skills, be challenged by a community that is at the top of their field or even get better at managing complex distributed projects. There are also dozens of ways to participate. Open up a project’s bug tracker and find an issue that needs to be fixed. Write a useful new extension or plugin. Even if you don’t code, just about every open source project out there could use more testing, more documentation and tutorials and help handling the load on their support forums and mailing lists. If you are a heavy user of open source software it feels great to give something back to the community that has contributed so much.
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There has never been a better time to be interested in digital photography. Not only do inexpensive digital cameras offer great high-resolution photos, but they come with very advanced feature sets. Over the years on OStatic, we’ve also covered a huge number of open source applications that can make editing, organizing and adding effects to digital photos much easier. If you’re under the impression that you must have Photoshop to be a top-notch photo editor, think again. The open source applications that are available are beyond robust. Here is our updated collection of great tools for the digital
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The OpenFlow open source protocol for software defined networking (SDN) took a big step forward today with the approval of the OpenFlow 1.3.0 specification.
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In the metaphorical space between the two worlds, there were opportunities to play with Lego bricks, try a Chaos Machine, listen to nerd comedy, and talk zombies. You could learn about Camp Luminous, which arguably teaches open source principles, or learn to build a TARDIS from open plans.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has introduced a new feature into the Firefox 13 betas called Reset Firefox which allows users to reset browser settings while retaining personal data.
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SaaS
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The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is going to stop active participation in the open-source infrastructure cloud project OpenStack – something the agency’s employees were deeply involved in creating.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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“I wouldn’t count OO out just yet simply because of ONE reason… the license,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “It’s common knowledge that NOBODY in business will go near GPL after the V3 debacle. Apache on the other hand is MUCH more business-friendly, and the Apache server is used all across the business landscape, so I can see businesses getting behind OO for that reason alone.”
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Donald Harbinson, Program Director for Open Standards/Open Source at IBM, noted the official beginning of the transition on the [ooo-devel] mailing list on Tuesday.
“A few minutes ago, I submitted the IBM Software Grant Agreement and Corporate Contributor License Agreement for IBM Lotus Symphony contribution. This action means infra can begin to prepare to receive the ‘Contribution’ into svn when they’re ready,” Harbinson wrote.
The move was hardly unexpected, since IBM announced last January that the last release of Symphony, 3.0.1, would be the final one for IBM’s version of the OpenOffice.org suite.
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On the 7th of May 2012 The Document Foundation has announced its first certification program. This certification is aimed at professionals who are interested in having their skillset certified in order to provide professional services to their customers. The program is currently being rolled out, in fact the first official certification meeting will take place at the LinuxTag next week. I would like to explain what we are trying to achieve in a bit more details by shedding some light on the reasons such a program came into existence.
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IBM has begun the process of contributing code from Symphony, its office automation suite, to the Apache OpenOffice project, saying: “This ends the Symphony fork here with Apache OpenOffice”. Earlier in the year, the company announced its intention to make the contribution, as it plans to move customers to Apache OpenOffice. Historically, Symphony has been based on a combination of Eclipse Rich Client Platform and OpenOffice.org code that was acquired when the OpenOffice.org code was under a dual-licence which allowed IBM to use the code and not release its changes.
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Funding
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In April 1982, exactly 30 years ago, the European Internet was launched by the Dutch researcher Teus Hagen, at a European Unix User Group conference in Paris. EUnet was the very first European Internet backbone. NLnet Foundation subsequently took the lead of this initiative, and not only helped shape the European Internet, but was fundamental in establishing the currently biggest Internet exchange on the planet, and also built out a market leadership. In September 1997, so 15 years ago, it was acquired by UUnet, now Verizon. All money was put in a fund with the sole purpose to make the Internet better.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Darned if one of the in-laws hasn’t figured out how to lose weight… So, now “the little woman” is on my case to eat right. In the North I did eat right because I had only lean meat, fruits, vegetables and cereal to eat, you know, nutritious, filling stuff.
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Public Services/Government
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A few Members of the European Parliament started a Written Declaration for open and collaborative government. Gianni Pittella, Rodi Kratsa-Tsagaropoulou, Marisa Matias, Katarína Neveďalová, Marietje Schaake. Written Declarations are documents which could get co-signed by other Members of Parliament. They get adopted when they reach a majority. Written Declarations could be perceived as petitions within the European Parliament and civil society groups often pressure MEPs to sign a Written Declaration that suits their interests. Here it would be rather difficult to get them to endorse the document WD 0019/2012. The reason is simple: instead of “unrestricted” they drafted “current”. That single phrase makes the declaration appear like a Trojan horse.
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Licensing
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At the end of April, I wrote about the idea that usage of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is declining and concluded that although new, commercially initiated open source projects were indeed tending to adopt other licenses, the use of the GPL itself is still growing — especially among projects in its core community of GNU platform development. This article explores why commercial projects pick particular open source licenses and what might happen in the future.
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Programming
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Asked on the developers’ mailing list last week was whether LLVM could be used for a decompiler, which an independent developer is working to construct.
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Finance
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After a winter lull, food stamp participation in Los Angeles County picked up again in March, to rise to a new all time high of 1,036,078 persons. Other economic data points to weakness in the nation’s largest state economy, as well. Indeed, falling tax collections are largely behind the recent budget deficit blowout of 16 billion dollars. And to think: many thought the years of California’s “budget crisis” were behind us. | see: Los Angeles County SNAP Users vs. Price of Oil 2007-2012.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Merrill Lynch & Co. employees discussed helping naked short-sales by market-maker clients in e-mails the banks sought to keep secret, including one in which a Merrill official told another to ignore compliance rules, Overstock.com Inc. (OSTK) said in a court filing.
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It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes God smiles on us. Last week, he smiled on investigative reporters everywhere, when the lawyers for Goldman, Sachs slipped on one whopper of a legal banana peel, inadvertently delivering some of the bank’s darker secrets into the hands of the public.
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Pundits and Wall Street reforming politicians are crowing: Wowie! Jamie D has fought for weak regulations, especially a weak Volcker rule, but now Wall Street’s goose is cooked! We’re going to get a strong Volcker rule!
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Privacy
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What a surprise: the U.K. government was forced to reveal under Freedom of Information laws more than 1,000 civil servants have ’snooped’ on British citizens’ private data.
Don’t worry about hackers illegally accessing government systems. It turns out government workers and civil servants who are trusted with private citizen data are more likely to access your data illegally.
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DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Geek TV star uses Ubuntu 12.04 download as example of legal BitTorrent use.
Wheaton, actor on Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Big Bang Theory, and Eureka, is deep into the geek life and has been blogging for years. He may be the most prominent geek advocate in Hollywood, which he says gets him in trouble when he argues in favor of network neutrality and against ill-considered piracy crackdowns, like ignoring legal uses of BitTorrent.
Using his download of Ubuntu 12.04 as an example, Wheaton argues that BitTorrent saves time and resources. The direct download would take an hour, but the torrent feed did the job in six minutes. Piracy legislation that would shut down or hobble BitTorrent protocol traffic would not stop file sharing, but would ruin a good protocol.
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ACTA
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There is a major problem with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that has little to do with IP or the internet: how does international law get made—by the President alone, or with Congress’s involvement? ACTA’s key problem in the United States is a Constitutional question that turns on the separation of powers. The President, or an office of the executive branch like USTR, can negotiate treaties that fall within presidential powers. But for topics that fall within Congressional powers, like IP law, the Constitution requires that Congress be involved in the process.
The most obvious and difficult way to involve Congress is through Article II of the Constitution. Under Article II, a treaty negotiated by the executive branch is presented to the Senate for ratification. The process is notoriously difficult, because it requires two-thirds of the Senate to approve. So USTR, almost understandably, wants to avoid the Article II process if at all possible.
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05.17.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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Now is as good a time as any to say goodbye to Linux on the desktop as a focus, and to emphasize the power and ROI gained from using Linux and Open Source solutions on devices.
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Thanks to ongoing advances in multi-seat Linux development, manufacturer Plugable was able to base its machines on Fedora, rather than proprietary software, though it also works with Windows Multipoint Server. By doing away with licensing costs, Plugable founder Bernie Thompson says the company can ensure an attractive price. The Kickstarter effort is in place to help the company realize “economies of scale” necessary to drive the cost down.
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Server
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HP has unveiled its first public cloud services in a late answer to rivals Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft and Verizon’s Terramark.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Following up on the performance comparison earlier this month of comparing Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics between Windows and Linux, up today are the results of a comparison of Windows 7 to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when using a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 “Kepler” graphics card.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Skype’s presence on Linux has never been really all that accepted… many in the community resented its proprietary nature, and only grudgingly installed it if they had to. As Michael Larabel recently pointed out on Phoronix, the Free Software Foundation is trying to shepherd free-software Skype replacement projects, but with little success thus far.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Thus, in direct practical terms, this development can do both harm and good. It might encourage GNU/Linux users to install these games, and it might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux. My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm. But there is also an indirect effect: what does the use of these games teach people in our community?
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Desktop Environments
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Newly released Ubuntu based distribution Hybryde allows you to switch between desktop environments without even logging out, and comes with Unity, KDE, and LXDE by default
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Version 0.9 of the Kdenlive open source video editor has been released, bringing usability enhancements and improvements to the effects workflow. According to its developers, the effect stack has been completely rewritten and now allows users to adjust parameters for multiple effects at the same time. These can then be grouped and the groups can be saved for use on other video clips.
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GNOME Desktop
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The GNOME Shell Window Buttons extension has been updated for GNOME Shell 3.4 and is now available in the WebUpd8 GNOME 3 PPA.
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New Releases
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Today we are pleased to announce the general availability of the 32 bit and 64 bit releases of OS4 Workstation 12.1.1. In this release we include a host of security and bug fixes as well as application updates.
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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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With the x32 ABI for Linux finally coming together, Ubuntu developers are making plans to support this interesting ABI in the future.
The Linux x32 ABI is intended for x86_64 hardware, but rather than simply targeting x86_64, it attempts to blend the best of IA32 and x86_64. With x32 there is a 32-bit pointer size rather than 64-bit, which drops the memory usage and could yield performance improvements, while still allowing the x32-compiled code to take advantage of 64-bit registers, a larger register file, and other x86_64 features.
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Mark Shuttleworth is the founder and former CEO of Canonical, the commercial company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Today he holds the position “Lead Product Design”, a role in which he shapes desktop and cloud product strategy. I spoke with him recently by phone about the increasing role of Linux in the enterprise, and the shift from traditional enterprise computing to cloud computing.
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Customizability has always been one of Linux’s best defining features, and the newly released Ubuntu Linux 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” is no exception.
I’ve already written about a few different ways to tweak Ubuntu’s Unity desktop generally, and last week one of those tools–Ubuntu Tweak–was updated to support the latest iteration of Canonical’s popular Linux distribution.
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Hands up if you have used Linux in one of its various incarnations for the desktop. Well if you are reading this blog, chances are you have done that. Like many other geeks and aspiring geeks I have dabbled with using Linux specifically Ubuntu and I must say after the initial novelty of using something other than Windows, or Mac OS for that matter, I have been rather casual about it.
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It is hard to estimate how many Linux boxes are out there -speaking about Desktop. Statistics shows 1%-5% of all computers run Linux. An average would be 3%. This can be true, this can be false, but it doesn’t really matter a lot as it is low number anyway. What really matters is the growth of Linux.
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It’s not very easy to find Ubuntu pre-installed PCs as Microsoft still dictates the traditional PC market.
System76 is one such company which offers Ubuntu only PCs. The company has launched two new laptops pre-loaded with Ubuntu 12.04 — 14.1″ Lemur Ultra and 15.6″ Pangolin Performance.
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With the release of Ubuntu Linux 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” less than a week ago, there’s still plenty of excitement and discussion about this latest iteration of Canonical’s popular Linux distribution.
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Move forward to April 2012 and Ubuntu 12.04 – codenamed Precise Pangolin – has been released. As we noted in our post detailing the new features themselves, there are lots of them. And, quite frankly, they have worked incredibly well. That’s not to say it’s perfect, as such, but it’s a vast improvement, which is what I like to see.
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Smartphones and the technology that powers them continue to evolve at an incredible rate. Year after year, phones have continued to close the power gap that separates them with their traditional PC counterparts. Taking advantage of the latest in mobile processors, Canonical is set to release Ubuntu for Android. The OS effectively turns your phone into a full Ubuntu desktop computer when docked and connected to a monitor, meaning the day your smartphone could act as your primary computer is drawing nearer.
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Having just launched Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical is bullish about its future, with Chris Kenyon, its VP of sales and business development forecasting that the firm’s operating system will ship on 18 million machines in 2013. According to Phoronix, Kenyon claimed that will amount to five per cent of worldwide PC shipments.
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Linux has the tendency to get no love from the major video game publishers. Well today we get news that the Free to Play games Lord of Ultima and Command and Conquer Tiberium Alliances are coming to the Ubuntu Software Center. The titles run in your default browser and installing the games through the Software Center adds handy Dash launchers in the Dash and Unity Launcher.
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The easiest way to install Ubuntu is to use the Wubi installer from within Windows. You won’t have to partition your hard disk and it can be easily removed if you change your mind.
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Six months have passed since the last release of Ubuntu, and that means it’s time for a new version – complete with a new smarty-pants zoological codename (the “Precise Pangolin” this time, better known as a scaly anteater).
This release is more significant than most. As the “LTS” indicates, this is a long-term support release, meaning it will receive updates and patches for a full five years, while more experimental releases continue to appear to a biannual timetable. The idea is to encourage businesses to install Ubuntu without fear that it will quickly become obsolete – indeed, this version ups the ante on that front, as previous LTS releases offered only three years of support on the desktop.
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One of the big advantages of Wubi is that it is much easier to remove Ubuntu installed in this way than it is if it was installed with the traditional partitioning of disks.
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Ubuntu is a very popular operating system and a Linux distribution. A large percentage of the Linux user base across the globe use Ubuntu. And many of the power users of a computer use Ubuntu as their primary operating system, including me and many of my friends. The freedom you get when you are using Ubuntu and the speed of the operating system, the ability for you to customize it the way you want, all of these factors add up to the fact that it is one of the best Linux distro there is. And support from the Ubuntu community is simply awesome.
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When Canonical launched its Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix back in February, it was based on Ubuntu Linux 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot,” which was then the most current stable version of the free and open source operating system.
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Flavours and Variants
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Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, uploaded a few minutes ago, May 16, the Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux Mint 13 operating system.
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A Raspberry Pi enthusiast has managed to get Windows 7 on the cheap Linux computer using Citrix XenDesktop, a sign that the device could bring savings to businesses, according to the foundation behind the device.
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Phones
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He noted how Linux is running beneath the shiny apps and interfaces of just about every smart phone and how, therefore, every vulnerability found in Linux has direct implications for the “computers in our pockets.”
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OpenMobile says it is looking for device manufacturers to add its proprietary software to their future Tizen devices so they can run Android applications. The company showed Facebook and Guitar Hero running on an Exo PC at the recent CTIA conference, though not apparently under a Tizen UI. A video of the apps running was recorded by The Handheld Blog.
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Android
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It was all the way back in August when Google announced plans for its biggest acquisition ever, agreeing to buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Since then, shareholders and regulators around the world have signed off on the arrangement, but China has remained the sticking point for Google to move ahead with the final deal. One thing that every analyst agrees on once the deal goes through is that it will kick Google’s true, long-term strategy surrounding the Android mobile OS into high gear. Now, there are reports coming in that imply that Google’s long-term Android strategy may include some surprises.
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For the third year in a row, mobile open source software projects have more than doubled in number, with the current count at around 18,000, up from around 8,000 in 2010. The rise of mobile computing in the enterprise, coupled with the Android’s rapid adoption worldwide, contributes to the trend as developers race to be the first to market with mobile innovations.
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Of the trio of Huawei’s Diamond-class smartphones announced at Mobile World Congress in February, the dual-core Ascend D1 got the least amount of buzz.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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At about $125 or less, the Zenithink C71 is already one of the cheapest tablets available that can run Google Android 4.0. But today Pandawill is selling the tablet for even less.
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Given time and the efforts of some very bright and altruistic people, an open source solution can be highly competitive. The good news for Sugar and its customers is that they have been down the curve with their open source solution. As open source rises in prominence, established players face painful changes, but for new entrants like Sugar, there is little or no transition.
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FuseSource advanced its “Integration Everywhere” strategy with Fuse ESB Enterprise 7.0 and Fuse MQ Enterprise 7.0, two new open-source integration and messaging platforms announced at its CamelOne 2012 conference.
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For many, the name Apache is synonymous with the most successful open source project of all time – the Apache HTTP Web Server. The Apache Web Server has dominated the web server landscape for the majority of the Internet Era, even as rivals (open source and otherwise) have attempted to make in-roads.
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The Apache Software Foundation has declared the first quarter of 2012 a quarter of “unprecedented growth” – it now has 104 current top-level projects (TLP) and 51 projects in the incubator, the largest number for either count. Jim Jagielski, the ASF’s president, said the “success can be attributed to Apache’s longstanding commitment to providing exceptional Open Source products, each with a stable codebase and an active community”.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google plans to give multiple mobile-device makers early access to new releases of Android and to sell those devices directly to consumers, said people familiar with the matter. That is a shift from Google’s previous practice, when it joined with with only one hardware maker at a time to produce “lead devices,” before releasing the software to other device makers. Those lead devices were then sold to consumers through wireless carriers or retailers.
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Mozilla
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Clearly, loyalty for Firefox is obviously high among Linux users–which I suspect is why there’s been so much vocal opposition to Mozilla’s plan.
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SaaS
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As part of our ongoing focus on open source cloud, we talked with Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos about the commoditization of hypervisors, what’s driving his company’s growth and its plans to release Eucalyptus 3.1 soon, marking the company’s shift to a much more open development model. The interview is presented in two parts. Yesterday’s post covered the open cloud, the role of APIs and where open source cloud computing is headed.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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On announcing the release of GIMP 2.8 the developers claimed that the update introduced ‘important changes to the user interface’. Is this the case or are there still issues to be found? 2.8 is available on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, making it widely available and it is of course still completely free and open source. The new release has been in development for three years, meaning GIMP 2.8 boasts 36 notable improvements to it’s interface and a number of updates beneath the surface supporting these. At times I have avoided using GIMP because it was cumbersome and disorganised, so I am interested to find out if my opinion will change with the new release.
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Programming
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Nvidia has continued its series of almost consecutive product announcements and updates this week by announcing the Nsight Eclipse Edition IDE for programmers. Nvidia is looking to develop GPU-accelerated applications on Linux- and Mac OS X-based systems.
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05.16.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Linux Warehouse, the premier distributor of enterprise open source software for southern Africa, today announced the appointment of its new Managing Director, Jan-Jan van der Vyver.
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Desktop
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During the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) that took place in Oakland, USA, Thomas Bushnell from Google talked about how Ubuntu is used by Google developers.
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Is the Linux desktop catching up on Windows? TechRepublic’s Jack Wallen takes a look a the newest versions of Linux and tells why they’re moving in the right direction.
Whether or not you like GNOME 3 and Ubuntu Unity, who could deny the real innovation that the developers behind those desktops have brought to bear? If you then take desktops such as Enlightenment (above) and Xfce, you can make a very strong case for more innovation going on with the Linux desktop than in any other area.
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Server
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StrandVision Digital Signage recently announced that it is offering a preconfigured Linux digital signage player appliance that supports playback of digital signage content. The graphics-optimized unit is able to operate independently while automatically receiving content updates over the Internet.
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IBM announced boosts for its Linux support, including expert integrated systems and Linux-specific PowerLinux servers. While the IBM-Linux relationship is long-standing (Big Blue has provided Linux support since 1999), these developments underline a growing trend toward open source support by major IT vendors.
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I said last year that this would happen sometime in the first half of this year, but for some reason my colleagues and clients have kept asking me exactly when we would see a real ARM server running a real OS. How about now?
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The proven KePlast i5000 platform is KEBA’s high-end solution for the efficient control of all types of injection moulding machines, regardless of whether they are hydraulic, electric or hybrid.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The Linux community is one of the biggest and most prominent examples of open source software collaboration. Increasingly the community is gaining more recognition, particularly from the UK government, which has made a commitment to the open source movement in its ICT Futures agenda.
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These days, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva and a few other distributions use the systemd init tool for system starts. It includes its own tools for configuration and diagnosis, and the tricks it needs when the system doesn’t start are different from sysvinit’s.
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The Linux Foundation, in honor of Linux’s 21st birthday is having another t-shirt competition. So, if you really love Linux, can make cool t-shirt designs (That leaves me right out), then this contest is for you!
This year the theme is “Inspired by Linux” and calls on people from around the world to create a design with that in mind.
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Applications
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Over the years Barry by NetDirect has been my go to solution for using my BlackBerry with Linux. It was worth it just for charging your BlackBerry at a faster rate. Now it seems like there is another alternative called LinBerry that I am guessing is based off Barry but makes things a little bit easier to get off the ground. Michelle @CrackBerry noticed that the LinBerry project has come out of beta since its alpha launch in 2010 and allows you to perform a backup of your device and allowing you to do things live view, edit, and delete contacts. It also extracts cod files and performs other functions.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Like many nerds around the world this evening I am prepping for what, odds are, will be the first of many all-nighters involving Blizzard’s soon-to-be-released Diablo III (which releases tonight at midnight!). If you have been by my blog before then odds are you will know that I prefer to do as much of my gaming as possible on my operating system of choice: Linux. Something else you may or may not know is that I am also a large fan of the company Code Weavers that produces the commercial Wine software Crossover.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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With Krita 2.4 happily released, the Krita team is working hard on what will become Krita 2.5. Krita 2.5 should be released some time in July already, but that doesn’t mean that it will be a boring release! Here’s a short overview to whet your appetite:
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome users have a gripe that there is no pure Gnome flavour of Ubuntu which they can simply download and install without having to add PPAs or install extra packages. I have been a long time Gnome user (recently switched to KDE due to Unity) and have been looking for a pure Gnome-based version of Ubuntu. I dabbled with Gnome Shell Ubuntu Remix and liked it.
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The GNOME developers behind the Nautilus project, the graphical file manager for the GNOME desktop environment that makes it easy to manage your files and browse your filesystem, announced version 3.4.2.
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I’ve gotten a couple requests to review this distribution, and I’ve wanted to do it, but for a while all that was being released consisted of beta versions and release candidates. Now, however, version 1 “Eveline” has been released in its final form, so I am reviewing that now.
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ROSALabs, Mandriva’s partner on their last desktop, has been working on their own Linux distribution and have recently announced their latest release. If you liked Mandriva 2011, then you’ll probably like ROSA Marathon 2012. In fact, to the casual observer, it looks like ROSA 2012 is Mandriva 2011.
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The latest current version of Puppy Linux is 5.3.1, and it was released on the 25th of October 2011. This is the Puppy Slacko version, which tells you that the roots of this Puppy are in Slackware. I believe this is different from Puppy I have used before, because it was previously based on Lucid Lynx version of Ubuntu, hence it was named Lucid Puppy.
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Before the general hysteria of a new Ubuntu release starts, I wanted to slip in a note about one other distribution. There have been some comments recently, from @zdnetuk among others, about Linux distributions getting “bloated” because they are becoming too large to fit on a CD. In fact I have made the same observation myself to some extent, because I used to partition my disks in 4GB sections, and have plenty of room to load any Linux distribution I wanted into one of those, but there are a lot which will not fit in that amount of space these days.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Today marks the tenth anniversary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and many people who have followed the rise of the RHEL platform may be surprised that it is so young. Released while the burning embers of the dot-com boom were still smoldering, it–along with Red Hat’s comprehensive support for an open source platform–appealed to many businesses who wanted a low-cost way to facilitate useful workplace applications without massive IT headaches. And, as Red Hat itself notes, RHEL has also found a home in government installations.
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Red Hat held a press conference today to predict its ascendancy as the top dog in the cloud era, driven by its open source subscription model, open source community driven development model and cloud technologies.
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When Red Hat had its IPO in 1999, there was no such thing as Enterprise Linux. Back then there was just Red Hat Linux, a fast moving distribution that had new releases every 6 months. That all changed with the introduction of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) model that debuted 10 years ago.
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The developers of the Rocks Cluster Distribution have released versions 5.5 and 6.0 of their Linux distribution designed for creating high-performance computing clusters. The release, which is code-named “Mamba”, includes several new features such as support for the standard CentOS yum repositories and a common code base for the two versions of the distribution.
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Fedora
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While FreeBSD 10 is preparing to fully switch to LLVM’s Clang compiler and deprecate GCC, don’t expect such a compiler change to happen in the Fedora camp in the foreseeable future. Fedora engineers have issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to GCC and stance on “alternative compilers” within this Red Hat distribution.
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Debian Family
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The Debian project proudly announced a couple of days ago, May 12th, the immediate availability for download of the fifth maintenance release of the Debian 6 Linux operating system.
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Derivatives
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CrunchBang is a Linux-based operating system designed for speedy performance. It has a simple user interface based on Openbox and a core that’s based on Debian Linux.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu’s greatest successes are arguably among home PC users and developers who use it in test environments. But there can be little doubt that Canonical remains committed to making Ubuntu the open source desktop of choice for businesses as well. Its latest move in this vein was the recent release of an updated version of Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix. Read on for details, and what they reveal about Canonical’s long-term strategy in the world of the enterprise.
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Have you ever think of baking your own cloud within 5 Minutes? Have you ever think of Elastic Compute (Nova-Compute) within 5 Minutes? Have you ever think of Elastic Storage (Nova-Volumes) within 5 minutes? Have you ever think of your hands on Open Stack Dash Board (Horizon) within 5 Minutes? Now you should think of it. With release of Ubuntu 12.04, It’s time for Ubuntu Cloud Live 12.04. My friend Ante Karamati? has released Ubuntu Cloud Live 12.04, Hybrid Image, Burn on your DVD , CD or USB Stick, you can say Cloud On DVD, Cloud on Stick, Yes, it’s as easy as you reading this.
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In the Ubuntu world we have some common values that are not just focused on freedom, but also in how we build Ubuntu. Values such as cadence, design, quality and precision help guide us in building the best Ubuntu that we can.
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This time around, the Pangolin experience was a little rougher than before. However, in a weird sort of way, you could say it wasn’t the distro’s fault per se, although average users will not care where the problems stem from. But if suggestions can be offered, then a switch to kill with fire the open-source driver, and an ability to choose which version of Nvidia drivers to install, not only the latest ones, as sometimes regressions happen.
Anyhow, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin works well on this machine. All in all, it doesn’t offer any revolutionary advantages over Lucid Lynx, but perhaps that’s what long-term releases should be, a small improvement if that. There’s a bit of an aftertaste because of all the graphics card issues, which I’ve really not expected, but then the resolution was quick and simple. Well, I’ll keep you updated as I freshly test new things. Stay tuned.
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As a company, Inktank, one of the open source ecosystem’s newest commercial enterprises, is only days old. But it has already made a determined foray into the Linux server market with the announcement this week of integration of the Ceph distributed file system into Ubuntu 12.04. Here’s the scoop, and what it says about both Inktank and Ubuntu.
Launched earlier this month, Inktank is the creation of the Ceph development team, led by Sage Weil. Weil started writing the Ceph code in 2004 as part of his Ph.D. dissertation at USC Santa Cruz and continued to develop it after graduating in 2007.
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Having boldly gone where no-one had gone before, it was no surprise to learn that actor Wil Wheaton is concerned about the erosion of ’Net Neutrality‘ – the principle that all web traffic, users and means of access should be treated fairly and without favour.
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As the One Laptop Per Child initiative goes from strength to strength around the world, there are signs that Pakistan may be getting the message too, after the Punjab government began handing out 125,000 free Ubuntu-based laptops to college and university freshers.
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Flavours and Variants
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GNU/Linux and FOSS in general has changed the way in which we interact with Computers and with the World. It has opened gateways that none of us could’ve imagined. GNU/Linux contributes to the world in many ways but one contribution that I highly appreciate is that in the field of Education.
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My shiny tiny new Raspberry Pi arrived last month, bringing with it a lot of hoopla and renewed enthusiasm for computing. Now that my first task of getting Slackware ARM installed to it, and configuring it to run “headless” (network only, no video or keyboard connected), it’s time to turn my attention to some hardware hacking. I decided to try out some basic cooling systems for it, to see if they make any appreciable difference in the RPi performance.
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If you haven’t heard of the open platform-friendly, inexpensive Linux-powered computing platform known as Raspberry Pi by now, you will be for years to come. Just as the Altair hailed the era of the personal computer, the Raspberry Pi is ushering in a new era of powerful, stunningly low-cost PCs on a board not much larger than an Arduino Uno. Think of a traditional PC motherboard with integrated graphics, network, and keyboard/mouse (USB) IO shrunken down to the size and slightly higher cost of an Arduino, and you’ll get the idea of what the Raspberry Pi is all about.
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Here’s the thing about cloud storage for business: It’s not as cheap as you think. Pogoplug says small and medium businesses can do better by using existing hardware and still get the sort of shared storage and file access that have made Dropbox such a great success in the consumer realm.
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Phones
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Android
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MoboTap‘s popular Dolphin Browser has racked up over 16 million downloads worldwide, but that hasn’t stopped them from taking steps to expand internationally.
The company announced earlier this morning that they have entered into a new agreement with Japanese wireless carrier KDDI that will see their browser pre-loaded on a number of new Android handsets going forward.
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The firm’s latest research showed that Android picked up strong market share gains in most of the seven major nations around the world, including the United States, Australia, the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The gains were measured over a 12-week period up until mid April.
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The company’s Korean Samsung Tomorrow Web site (English translation) today published an upgrade guide confirming and explaining the path from Android 2.3 to Android 4.0.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Source code from Google and Samsung suggest that the two companies are on track to produce a Nexus tablet — a slate running a plain-vanilla version of Android. However, “it still appears that Android just doesn’t have what it takes to compete with the iPad,” Retrevo’s Andrew Eisner said. “Amazon’s Kindles had a competitive price, and that seems to have run its course.”
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This screenshot tour was created to accompany an upcoming in-depth review of Samsung’s new 7-inch Android tablet, the $249 Galaxy Tab 2 7.0. The tour comprises more than 300 screenshots, which showcase numerous aspects of the Android 4.0-based tablet’s user inteface, home screens, customization, and applications.
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Arista is one of the most useful open source transcoders. It comes with presets for your devices which makes it extremely easy to trancode videos for your devices. We interviewed Daniel G. Taylor, the creator of Arista to understand what drove him to create an open source project.
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At Interop 2012, there was one theme that dominated all others – Software Defined Networking (SDN). At the center of the SDN revolution is OpenFlow and the center of that is the Open Networking Foundation. I got the chance to catch up with Dan Pitt, Exec Chair of the ONF at Interop, where there was a high-activity OpenFlow lab.
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Events
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Two years ago, the first PyCon Australia, a conference devoted to the Python programming language, was held in Sydney because the local developer community saw the need for a targeted conference.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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While Mozilla is a leading light in the open source community, every so often I’m reminded that the same isn’t always true in the Linux community.
There has been an ongoing thread over the course of the last week about Mozilla’s lack of initial support for the Web Apps Marketplace on Linux.
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For those of you keeping score in the open source browser numbering acceleration, Google is now out with Chrome 19. As always, lots of security fixes, but what Google chose to highlight in their announcement blog post is a feature many of us have enjoyed for some time now – tab syncing across machines.
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According to a bug report filed against Mozilla’s web application Marketplace on the company’s bug tracker, the software will not support Linux at launch. The same bug report is being used by contributors to work on the problem and a first patch has also been submitted.
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This year’s CTIA Wireless conference in New Orleans is surprisingly short on major new smartphones. But at last night’s MobileFocus press event, I happened across a fascinating, one-of-a-kind handset which I hadn’t seen in person yet: Mozilla’s alpha version of a phone running Boot to Gecko, its project to turn the web technologies behind Firefox into a stand-alone mobile operating system.
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SaaS
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Individuals and firms can now build business around the open source office suite LibreOffice. The Document Foundation has announced the LibreOffice Certification Program, to foster the provision of professional services around LibreOffice and help the growth of the ecosystem of LibreOffice.
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LibreOffice has had a very successful time after its fork from the OpenOffice.org project last year, and Michael Meeks wants you to know it.
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It used to be that OpenOffice.org was the leading open source alternative to proprietary productivity suites like Microsoft Office, and it was included in pretty much all the major Linux distributions.
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CMS
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Healthcare
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ViSolve Healthcare IT team has extensive experience with OpenEMR. As a prominent member of OpenEMR Board, ViSolve team has contributed significantly towards Meaningful Use Compliance and helped attain ONC Certification successfully.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Open source Java will be brought to the PowerPC architecture for Linux and IBM’s AIX OS under a proposal floated this week that could eventually benefit the different Linux distributors.
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In ‘The Movie Vanishes’ short animation film by Pixar, Oren Jacob and Galyn Susman tell how a big part of Toy Story 2 was almost deleted because of an accidental Linux command ‘rm’ and poor backup system.
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Health/Nutrition
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A downer cow at a California dairy was recently found to be infected with an “atypical” strain of “bovine spongiform encephalopathy” (BSE), or “mad cow” disease. There has been some significant media coverage of the case, and the USDA wants the media to know they are not pleased.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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An online gun retailer has been criticized for promoting an advertisement for shooting targets that resemble 17-year old shooting victim Trayvon Martin. The target depicted a hooded figure holding skittles and tea with crosshairs on his chest. Martin was reportedly holding skittles and tea when he was shot dead — in the chest — by George Zimmerman in Florida in February 2012. The horrific shooting of the unarmed youth led to a national conversation about the NRA-crafted Stand Your Ground/Shoot to Kill law and the role the American Legislative Exchange Council played in spreading the Florida law across the nation.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Environmental activists at Greenpeace took their campaign to pressure cloud computing providers on energy to Apple’s headquarters today.
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Finance
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NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta, the most prominent corporate figure indicted in a U.S. crackdown on insider trading, has asked a judge to throw out more than two dozen phone conversations that the government has sought to present as evidence at his trial.
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Company documents show traders led by Michael J. Swenson sought to encourage a “short squeeze” by putting artificially low prices on derivatives that would gain in value as mortgage securities fell, according to the report yesterday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The idea, abandoned after market conditions worsened, was to drive holders of such credit-default swaps to sell and help Goldman Sachs traders buy at reduced prices, according to the report.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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ALEC announced it was dropping that task force in the wake of the controversy over the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin and so-called “Stand Your Ground” (SYG) laws. However, the co-leader of that task force, Rep. Jerry Madden (R-TX), revealed ALEC’s announcement to be a PR maneuver when he reassured The Christian Post that his task force’s work would continue through other ALEC task forces.
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Censorship
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The long and sordid Psystar saga creaked to its anti-climactic close on Monday: the US Supreme Court has refused to hear the hackintosher’s request to review an appeals court’s September 2011 decision not to overturn a December 2009 permanent injunction preventing the Florida company from selling Mac OS X–based clones.
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MP3tunes, a music locker service that has spent years locked in litigation with major record labels, announced last week that it was closing up shop. The startup scored a partial victory in court last year, helping to establish the legality of cloud music services in the process. But founder Michael Robertson says that “four and a half years of legal torment” forced his company to file for bankruptcy on April 27.
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Back in November, we wrote about one of a series of cases we had seen where trademark holders were going to court with a list of domain names that they insisted were selling counterfeit goods and getting the courts to issue injunctions that appeared to be quite similar to what SOPA would have allowed had it passed. That is, basically upon request, a trademark holder was able to get domain registrars to kill domain names, while forcing search engines and social networks to put in place blockades barring such sites from being listed. It appears that more trademark holders are taking notice. Jeff Roberts has the story of (regular IP extremist) Louis Vuitton trying the same thing.
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The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that are sweeping the United States are in a heap of trouble. After a Florida judge ruled that an IP-address is not a person, a Californian colleague has gone even further in protecting the First Amendment rights of BitTorrent users. The judge in question points out that geolocation tools are far from accurate and that it’s therefore uncertain that his court has jurisdiction over cases involving alleged BitTorrent pirates. As a result, 15 of these mass-BitTorrent lawsuits were dismissed.
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Earlier this month, the world lost a music pioneer when Adam Yauch, a.k.a “MCA” of the Beastie Boys, succumbed to cancer at the age of 47. A founding member of the Beastie Boys, Yauch expanded upon his success in the music industry to exert his considerable influence and contributions outside music. He had a strong interest in film, which resulted in him directing several of the Boys’ music videos and in 2008 led to him founding Oscilloscope Studios, which produces and promotes independent films. In the 1990s, Yauch adopted Buddhism and began getting involved socially and politically in a variety of charities and activism.
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ACTA
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Send this to a friend
05.15.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Scott came to my attention when I saw a great interview he did with Linus Torvalds for TechCrunch. I was very excited Scott agreed to share his setup, and as you read it, you’ll see some sharp commentary. Like Scott, I find myself doing less and less customization. Scott attributes it to the work it takes to restore personalizations, but I wonder if it’s because interfaces like Unity and GNOME 3 are getting better and because more and more work takes place in the browser, with both factors diminishing the need to mess with the desktop too much. As you read through, you’ll see a number of interesting points from Scott.
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In which we debunk the silly canard that Linux does not innovate, but merely imitates. And as a free bonus, suggest meaningful ways to contribute other than cranking out yet more Ubuntu respins.
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While it’s improved a lot recently, in the past setting up a multi-seat computer has been a pain in the ass with a lot of manual configurations needed and other peculiar steps to get the hardware/software combination working right. What if the process were a lot simpler? What if new seats could be added to a computer at a very low cost and the setup was effectively “out of the box” to the point that it’s truly plug-and-play? Well, we are now effectively at that point on the Linux desktop and there is a new Kickstarter effort to help in that initiative.
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Server
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At the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit, manufacturer Calxeda unveiled a rack-mountable unit powered by the company’s EnergyCore chips. Calxeda is developing ARM-based SoCs (Systems-on-a-Chip) that are designed to run energy-efficient servers.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Tux Linus Torvalds says “things have really calmed down” in the email that accompanies the release of the seventh release candidate (RC7) of Linux 3.4. He says he had considered making a release over the weekend “but felt that another week wouldn’t hurt”.
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The truth is that in the world of embedded systems applications range from electric toothbrushes and greeting cards to massive weapon systems. Linux is well-suited for some of these; a traditional RTOS is the right choice for others.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Popular Linux distributions make it pretty easy to encrypt your home folder or even entire partitions if you’d like, without many issues. This is a great option to have if you’re someone who needs their data, whether it’s the home folder or entire partitions, that need to be encrypted. In most cases, all you need to do is select a check mark, and it’ll take care of the rest.
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Games
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“Having another developer make games for Linux is always a good thing, but one developer will not make Linux a gaming platform,” said Mobile Raptor blogger Roberto Lim. “Left 4 Dead 2, the first game Valve plans for the Linux platform, is over two years old now. … The casual gamer on Linux will be happy to have a new game on Linux; those truly inclined for gaming will not be looking at a platform that gets games more than two years after its release.”
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Desktop Environments
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In years past, we’ve offered comparisons of KDE vs GNOME, along with comparisons of other desktop environments. But what about two desktop environments based on the GNOME shell?
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Version 0.11 of the Tails Linux distribution designed to protect user privacy and anonymity has been released. Tails, an acronym for “The Amnesic Incognito Live System”, is a Debian-based live system which includes a number of applications, such as a web browser, email client and instant messaging client, that have been pre-configured with security in mind. All of these programs are set up to use the Tor network, thus ensuring that all outgoing connections are anonymised by bouncing internet traffic between multiple nodes.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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While waiting for the Mandriva management to decide the future direction of the distribution, the community is taking matters into their own hands and beginning the planning stages for the next release, assumed to be Mandriva Linux 2012.
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Red Hat Family
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This week on Federal Tech Talk, Gunnar Hellekson of Red Hat joins host John Gilroy to talk about how to make the transition to open source sofware.
Hellekson is the chief technology strategist who helps to promote open source through an organization called the Open Source for America. This is a website that provides case studies on how open source software is the most economical way to make the key transition to the cloud.
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Red Hat has released a version of its Enterprise Linux 5 operating system that is capable of running various types of software platforms thanks to a built-in, kernel-based virtual machine hypervisor. Developed to run on IBM servers, the updated version of Linux is also certified to meet internationally recognized security standards.
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Fedora
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Fedora 16, thanks in large part to GNOME 3.2, was an awful Linux distribution. With this new version, and GNOME 3.4, Fedora 17 is back to being a useful Linux distribution.
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Debian Family
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The initial download images for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.5 were made available over the weekend. This is a “rollup” release, it forms a new installation base for the Debian 6.0 “squeeze” stable branch, it does not add major new functionality or features. If you have Debian 6.0.x already installed, it is not necessary to reinstall, you only need to install all the latest updates from your nearest mirror site.
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It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to publish another interview with the people behind Debian Edu and Skolelinux. This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor details get right before release.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is the latest Ubuntu release. Officially named as Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’, this operating system is by far the most advanced Ubuntu version. Currently its in Beta version, by has already surprised a great percentage of people with its features.
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Although I’m mostly writing about Slackware and Arch Linux related distributions I’ve got nothing against Ubuntu. I used it back with 5.10 ‘Breezy’ and was quite impressed. It even detected and configured all multimedia keys on the cordless Logitech keyboard, including the volume wheel, no mean feat at the time. That was when Debian Sarge was too old to be useful and X burped on my hardware, and I did not know enough to run Testing or Unstable branches.
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Ubuntu’s latest release called Precise Pangolin has managed to please its many admirers and silence the naysayers. Unity, the most contentious part of Ubuntu so far has turned out to be a dark horse in Canonical’s race for desktop domination. With new features like the HUD, video lens and more, Ubuntu 12.04 has even had the BBC waxing eloquent about its charm. That said, not everyone is happy with the latest release. There are, as always, some criticisms regarding the lack of a new icon theme and the absence of any major game-changing feature. Of course, the overall outlook towards Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’ is positive and there is absolutely no doubt that this is the best release by Canonical so far.
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The weeklong Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” wrapped up on Friday in Oakland, California. There was a lot of interesting notes shared on Phoronix from the UDS-Q event, so here’s a summary of the most prominent happenings last week as the future of Ubuntu Linux was plotted.
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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Oakland (California), Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s Vice President of OEM Services, has predicted that Ubuntu will be running on five per cent of all PCs sold next year. According to Softpedia, Phoronix and other publications, Kenyon said in his talk that Ubuntu was shipped pre-installed on eight to ten million computers worldwide last year. Canonical expects this to increase to eighteen million next year, which they calculate to be five per cent of the total market.
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Azul Systems announced that its Zing 5.2 Java virtual machine now features support for the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
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The Tizen project has announced that it is releasing source code and a version 1.0 SDK, code-named Larkspur. The Tizen project emerged as a replacement for the Meego project at the Linux Foundation after Nokia withdrew from active participation. Tizen involves Intel and Samsung, among others, who are creating a web application based phone with supporting native applications. This is in contrast to Mozilla’s B2G project which is implementing all of a smartphone’s functionality in a web browser view. The source code for Tizen 1.0 is described as providing a “solid baseline for device vendors and developers” and should provide all the technologies needed to create Tizen-based smartphones and tablets.
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Phones
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Android
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Smartphone announcements were limited, but they signal the steady adoption of Android ICS.
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Company scores 29.1 percent of the worldwide smartphone market last quarter and easily outpaces Apple’s 24.2 percent market share, IDC says.
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Samsung has announced the much hyped Android smartphone GALAXY S III. The phone lived up to its hype other in every department besides design and display.
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Open-source staple VLC has reached over a billion downloads, the VideoLAN Organization announced Sunday.
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Free software. In many ways it is an unfortunate term to describe what most people today know as open source software. Although the term is intended to convey the idea of freedom, it is often misunderstood as meaning ‘free of cost’. And while most open software is indeed available free of charge, there are still costs associated with implementing any software in a business. Open source software’s real value is not that it is cheaper than other alternatives, though that is more often than not the reality, it is that it offers a set of values that proprietary does not.
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One year ago, the new Swedish framework agreement for the procurement of open source became active. Five suppliers were contracted to provide software and services. Central government, the public educational sector, all twenty county councils, and 225 out of the 290 Swedish municipalities are participating. They call off mini competitions for contracts the suppliers then have to battle for. This model differs from the recommendations made in the European ‘Guideline on public procurement of Open Source Software’, aiming to overcome current barriers and increase the use of open source.
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Twitter, Facebook, the Library of Congress — all of these institutions have mind-numbing amounts of structured and unstructured data that must be indexed and searched quickly. In Twitter’s case, that’s about 300 million new pieces of information to index every day.
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The Linux Foundation announced that the OpenMAMA project has announced version 2.1 of the technology–the first release of open-source Middleware Agnostic Messaging API, or MAMA.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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By now, it should be easy to pick a browser. Most of you probably settled on a favorite ages ago, and it’s going to take some seriously cool new features — or a whole lot of crashing — to make you switch at this point. But even if you’re in love with your default you might be wondering if you’re running the right channel.
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While Mozilla is a leading light in the open source community, every so often I’m reminded that the same isn’t always true in the Linux community.
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Databases
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The PostGIS database project made its long-awaited 2.0.0 release in April, marking the culmination of more than two years of development. PostGIS is an industrial-strength geographical database that serves as the storage system for a wide range of geo-data processing systems, from map servers to analysis tools.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice is a comprehensive, professional-quality productivity suite that you can download and install for free. Works on all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Suse, etc.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Talend has updated all the applications that run on its Open Studio unified platform to version 5.1.0. Talend’s Open Studio is an Eclipse-based environment that hosts the company’s Data Integration, Big Data, Data Quality, MDM (Master Data Management) and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) products. The system allows a user to, using the Data Integration as an example, use a GUI to define processes that can extract data from the web, databases, files or other resources, process that data, and feed it on to other systems. The resulting definition can then be compiled into a production application.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Free software and GNU Linux icon Richard Stallman was taken ill at a weekend conference in Spain, reportedly being taken to hospital suffering from the symptoms of high blood pressure.
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The premier open source image manipulation tool has been upgraded with some new and updated features. Was it worth the development time?
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The GNU MediaGoblin project was announced just a year ago. The project, to build a decentralized, free software media sharing tool, has been going great guns ever since. To get an idea where the project stands today, we talked with lead developer Chris Webber. Here we share Webber’s comments on the history and future of MediaGoblin, new features, and the switch away from MongoDB to SQL.
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Project Releases
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The recently released PulseAudio 2.0 offers improved support for the jack detection feature that is available in modern sound hardware. If a user is running Linux kernels from version 3.3 and connects, for example, a second set of stereo speakers, the audio framework will detect this and offer separate volume controls along with other features. The PulseAudio developers plan to add further improvements in the future, for example to simplify the configuration of multi-channel environments.
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Public Services/Government
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In the statement, presidential candidate François Hollande also expressed his support for open source software. He agrees with Sarkozy that open source and open standards should be cultivated, especially in government and small and medium enterprises. Hollande is also strongly opposed to software patents and said that he “will ensure that the implementation of the Community patent is not an opportunity to legitimize software patents, mathematical methods and business methods.” President Sarkozy, on the other hand, is in favour of software patents.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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Just as retro ideas from a bygone era can inspire modern fashion, film, and TV trends, today’s researchers are being empowered by the revival of an innovative technology concept from the past: open-source hardware.
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Programming
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Adrian Holovaty, co-founder and developer of the Python-based web application framework Django, has announced that Django will be using GitHub for collaboration from now on. Correspondingly, the project has switched its internal source code management from Subversion to Git.
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Security
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On its May Patch Tuesday, Microsoft plans to release a total of seven bulletins to close 23 holes. The company has also announced that those responsible for releasing the Microsoft demo exploit have been found and excluded from the partner programme.
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Privacy
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I was expecting the usual. More crap that nobody asked for. More anti-competitive Microsoft tie-ins. More lock-in with Microsoft services. More EULA mess. More spyware. I found pretty much all of this.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.14.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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In April 2012, IQnection announced an agreement with Linux Online Inc. (owners of the Linux.org domain name) to create a new community oriented website, publish/maintain content and host the Linux.org site.
The Linux.org community was started in 1994. It quickly grew in size and popularity to become the Internet’s leading resource for Linux information. Unfortunately, Linux.org went offline in March of 2011.
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Desktop
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So, eventually the user was without their PC for long enough and I had to revert back to Windows XP, just to get things working for now. The PC had been brought to me because it was full of the usual Windows malware, and he wanted to switch to GNU/Linux to put an end to this. I am pretty sure that if I had more time, I could have fiddled with it and gotten things to work properly. But, it was requiring a lot of tweaking as I mentioned in a previous post about Fedora 16. I could have set up the PC to dual boot, however I decided not to get into this scenario right now as the user is a heavy gamer and it would result in booting frequently to both Linux and Windows, which I think is more hassle than it is worth. However, at some point we made a mutual agreement to try GNU/Linux again in a year or so, once different games and versions are out. Another application that is used frequently in this case during the gaming is TeamSpeak which has a Linux version available. Unfortunately, I never got that far to try and install it, but I’m sure it would have worked since there is a native Linux version available, unlike a lot of the popular games which are Windows/Mac only.
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Kernel Space
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Applications
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Yorba software group announced the new lightweight email client for Gnome desktop called “Geary”. It comes with a simple and organized user interface to ease the way you browse/read your emails. Also it’s written in Vala programing language.
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xplanetFX is realistic maps wallpapers and a sophisticated graphics handling produce nearly photo realistic images of our mothership. It’s GTK GUI makes it really easy to use and provides a lot of settings and a user friendly access to xplanetFX. And even the templating capabilities give xplanetFX an individual and stylish touch.
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For those of you who don’t already know about FAUmachine (FAU), it’s a virtual machine that allows you to install full operating systems and run them as if they were independent computers. FAUmachine is similar to VirtualBox, QEMU, and other full virtualization technologies. It is a project sponsored by the Friedrich Alexander University Computer Science Department in Germany (Erlangen-Nuremberg*). FAU is a computer simulator that is an independent virtual machine project. The CPU is based on the virtual CPU in QEMU.
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I work at a public library with 28 Linux stations made publicly available in four separate rooms. The room in which I spend most of my time has 10 computers, and elementary and middle school students stop by daily after school to use them. About 90 percent of the children use the computers for games, and about 10 percent use them for doing homework. Very few use the computer for creative graphics applications. I’m bent on changing that.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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OpenMW is a free and open source engine for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. It aims to be a fully playable and improved implementation of the game’s engine and functionality.
OpenMW is released under the GNU General Public License version 3, and all source code has been written completely from scratch. It also builds on various other open source tools, most notably OGRE for graphics, and Bullet for collision (and possibly physics).
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UFO: Alien Invasion is a free and open source strategy game featuring turn-based tactical combat against hostile alien forces (human or computer controlled) which are infiltrating earth at this very moment. The game is heavily influenced by the X-COM series (mostly by UFO: Enemy Unknown).
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Being present at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), Electronic Arts announced the immediate availability for download of two games in Ubuntu Software Center.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE is a free and open-source advanced desktop environment. It provides a Plasma workspaces and variety of applications for different cross-platforms. Now the latest KDE plasma and applications version 4.8.3 is available to update for Kubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin and for Ubuntu Precise derivatives as well.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome 3 developer Allan day blogged about some interesting new design concepts for future Gnome 3 releases.
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With GNOME Shell Extensions Updater, you can update all the extensions installed from extensions.gnome.org with a single click. This extension checks for updated extensions every 5 days and displays a notification in the GNOME Shell Message Tray with all the available updates:
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Democracy always wins!! It took almost two years for GNOME Developers to release that the majority of users were unhappy with the Suspend option instead of the standard Power Off.
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When Linus Torvalds sneezes the Linux world gets a cold. The father of Linux has praised Google Chrombooks for being more useful than Gnome 3 Shell.
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We interviewed Frederic Peters, the new Gnome Release Manager, to understand the future plans for Gnome 3.x, his opinion about Unity and Cinnamon and much more.
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Chakra is a desktop Linux distribution forked from Arch Linux. It is a “pure” KDE-based distribution, with a facility to run GTK applications through a Bundle System. The latest edition is Chakra Archimedes, and being a semi-rolling or half-rolling release distribution, Chakra does not need to be reinstalled when new updates become available.
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An uninformed comment on a Linux community blog has led to questions over the stability and finances of the Slackware GNU/Linux project, but its founder assures iTWire that the project is alive and kicking.
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New Releases
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Barry Kauler announced a couple of days ago, May 5th, the immediate availability for download of the Puppy “Slacko” 5.3.3 Linux distribution, based on the Slackware Linux 13.37 operating system.
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Ikey Doherty proudly announced a couple of hours ago, May 9th, the immediate availability for download of the first and stable version of the SolusOS operating system.
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Salix MATE 13.37 is now officially released! Available in both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, this release introduces the MATE Desktop Environment. For anyone not familiar with MATE, it’s a GNOME2 fork, that continues development of the GNOME 2.x branch. MATE uses the traditional desktop metaphor that was abandoned for newer GNOME 3.x releases. All of the GNOME parts that have been forked have been renamed, so that they don’t conflict with GNOME 3.x applications, but otherwise the functionality and behavior is exactly the same as it was in GNOME 2.32.x. For example, the Nautilus file manager is now named Caja in MATE, the Evince document viewer is now Atril and the File-Roller archive manager is now Engrampa. These forked applications will probably play a much bigger part in future Salix versions, for other editions as well, especially if Slackware doesn’t decide to move to GTK+3.
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Robert Shingledecker announced earlier today, May 10th, the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core 4.5.2 Linux operating system, including the Tiny Core Plus edition.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The French Mandriva GNU/Linux company has been given another lease of life it would appear from the company’s blog.
Chief operating officer Jean-Manuel Croset said in a post yesterday that a direction for the company would be announced in the third week of May.
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Red Hat Family
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When Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) recently announced its long-term strategy for OpenShift, I began to think about potential implications for cloud-focused application developers and emerging cloud consultants. Already, cloud developers are seeking to understand cloud platforms like OpenStack, CloudStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and VMware Cloud Foundry. Amid all that noise, can Red Hat attract developers to OpenShift? And equally important: Can cloud consultants explain OpenShift and its alternatives to business customers?
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Red Hat declined to provide specifics on the number of employees working in the centers.
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Its new agreement with Red Hat (RHT) is aimed at the enterprise market, specifically the telecommunications and security markets Red Hat has yet to crash but where Dell has a big presence.
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In an exclusive interview with Muktware Bryan Che, Senior Director (Product Management and Marketing for the Cloud Business Unit), Red Hat, explains what OpenShift is all about. We also talked about Red Hat’s cloud strategy.
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Fedora
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The final version of Fedora 17 does not arrive until May 22nd, 2012. I have installed the final Beta version, and it is the best version of the Fedora operating system that I have ever used. In TLWIR 37, I will look under the hood of Fedora 17, and let you know what you can look forward to in the “Beefy Miracle”.
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Debian Family
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The next version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, version 7 or Wheezy, will include software that allows users to easily set up their own cloud offerings using free software.
A media release from the project said people were increasingly storing data in the cloud, a term that refers to software as a service offerings.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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There’s no doubt about it, Apple hardware is hot these days. It seems like everywhere you look, someone is using an iPhone, iPad or Macbook. Apple is now the top computer maker in the world, outselling giants like HP and Dell. They also have some of the best consumer satisfaction ratings in the industry. Simply put, Apple is currently making the most reliable, desirable and fashionable computer hardware on the market. Some people, however, have issues with Apple’s OS X operating system and Apple’s ever growing control over the software that runs on their devices.
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Canonical announced at UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) that they plan to create a truly embedded rootfs builder, in order to make an absolute minimal filesystem to make Ubuntu run on hardware with extremely limited diskspace.
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I had written an article in beta days. I want to revisit the topic. No operating system is perfect, so to consider Ubuntu to be bug free is just like saying software does not have bugs. The reality is software always has bugs. Its the amount and severity of bugs that gives a good metrics of how usable a system is.
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There was a very interesting session at UDS by Google developer Thomas Bushnell. He talked about how Ubuntu, its derivatives and Goobuntu (Google’s customized Ubuntu based distro) are used by Google developers.
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In the final day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.10 that took place in Oakland, USA, the Ubuntu developers talked about a possible GNOME flavor of the Ubuntu operating system.
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Question: Referring to this bug about Microsoft market share, assigned to you in Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 With the number of other devices in the marketplace doing what desktop pc’s did in 2004, should this still be a critical bug?
Mark: Interesting question. I think the world is a much more balanced place now with iOS and Android so, perhaps we can consider that one fixed.
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A company that markets its own Java-compatible JVM, which is optimised for GNU/Linux, has extended its support to cover the Ubuntu distribution.
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Flavours and Variants
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So I’m in the live environment for Xubuntu 12.04, which aside from the ugly wallpaper (including every alternative wallpaper on the ISO image) is a great-looking and -working Xfce 4.8 desktop.
My main mission in running the live distro from a USB flash drive: Checking networked-filesystem support in the Thunar file manager.
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Today we share with you an interview with Dr. Leon Brin, professor, mathematician and maintainer of Mathbuntu a set of scripts that enhances an Ubuntu based distribution with mathematical software. Leon tells us the story behind Mathbuntu and how you can help the project. Enjoy!
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MagPI is a new dedicated magazine for Raspberry PI will be released monthly for free. This magazine aimed to provide a variety of tutorials, articles, how to setup your Raspberry PI and much more. It has been written by many volunteers with many levels in mind. Check more information about the first issue of MagPI down below.
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Phones
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Android
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A text editor is software used for editing plain text files. This type of software has many different uses such as modifying configuration files, writing programming language source code, jotting down thoughts, or even making a grocery list. Given that editors can be used for such a diverse range of activities, it is worth spending the time finding an editor that best suites your preferences.
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The way we travel has evolved a lot over the years. In the early days, people used to walk around with giant folded maps, asking for directions to random strangers. Not that anything is wrong with that, it was just that those methods weren’t as great as the ones we have now. For example, not only is using GPS devices more convenient than carrying maps and guides, it’s also much more time saving.
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Reddit is a popular content sharing platform where registered users submit content to the site in the form of links. The links typically point to news and blog articles, videos and pictures. Users have the ability to vote on these submissions, with the collective votes determining what content is considered good and what is regarded as junk. This voting mechanism enables submissions to be ranked on reddit’s various pages. As such, this social news site is an ideal place to find the latest news on a wide spectrum of subjects, and to share what interests you with others. Reddit receives in excess of 1 billion pageviews per month, which is testament to the power of social news websites.
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Chinese handset maker ZTE wants to get in on some of the emerging phone/tablet hybrid market that Samsung seems to own with the Galaxy Note. Speaking with reporters, ZTE’s head of handset strategy, Lv Qianhao, recently indicated that they would be looking to the combination experience for a pair future products.
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One screen good, two screens better. That seems to be the thinking behind one of Samsung’s latest awarded patent filings, spotted in the USPTO by Forbes. The patent shows a clamshell design not dissimilar to the Sony Tablet P, but using a larger, flatter form factor that’s more like a traditional laptop in shape. Also of note is a removable controller/pointer that slides into a slot along the hinge.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Some of my colleagues were keen on broader access to AT4AM, the amendment template software of the European Parliament. It is used by Members of the European parliament to draft amendments to legal text.
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In the process of achieving world domination, the philosophizing was largely factored out of the community. I mentioned a few individuals in the “founding philosophers” entry, and I think it is interesting to examine what happened with them.
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It’s often associated that open-source is referred to Linux and FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software). But as equally as important is the community. And what I want to touch base on is not only the open-source community, but how “open” the development community is as opposed to the development community of Microsoft Windows. And particularly at a corporate and managerial level.
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Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world with many gender, educational, and digital divides. Yet it is gradually being transformed by open source and digital technology. There’s little question that as Nepal seeks to help its citizens become a part of the global digital economy, it faces a series of challenges: political instability, remote physical access, poor infrastructure, and rural poverty. In April 2012, the World Economic Forum released a report that identified Nepal as one of the least networked countries in the world, at the bottom of world rankings.
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I put on my open source hat and asked myself these question:
1. Do I have the skills and know how to put on a good explanatory talk about Twitter?
2. Do I know how to record such a talk to video?
3. Do I know how to edit that video and upload it to the web?
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Events
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[ Author's note: In contrast to my usual style, the following article is a largely non-technical account. Future articles will focus on the configuration and use of particular pieces from the Linux audio applications stack. Meanwhile I hope you enjoy this report, my first for LWN.net. ]
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I found the conference very interesting, with speakers from around the world that have described several open source products and best practices on monitoring but also on configuration and management tools. A big surprise for me has been the strong push for alternatives softwares to Nagios for monitoring in particular Shinken and Icinga have received many praise.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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I’ve been using Google Chrome for Linux since it was first made available. I use Gmail, Google Docs (now Drive), Google Plus, Google Adsense, Google Analytics, Google Music, and many more. I am the original owner of an original CR-48 Chromebook, having received mine way back in Dec. 2010. I promote Google services at work and have worked hard to point my business’ compass towards their entire suite of offerings. I use a Samsung Nexus S with an official build of Android 4.04 and I’m only interested in official devices moving forward.
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Mozilla
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Back in the fall of 2011, we took a targeted look at Firefox responsiveness issues. We identified a number of short term projects that together could achieve significant responsiveness improvements in day-to-day Firefox usage. Project Snappy kicked off at the end of the year with the goal of improving Firefox responsiveness.
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Databases
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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After an intense week, I decided to forget about work this weekend and have some time for my hobby, software testing. So, I downloaded Mageia 2 RC, LibreOffice 3.4.5, and a Linux distro that I had never heard of: Liberté 2012.1.
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CMS
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This interview with Catalyst’s Director Mike O’Connor sheds light on how enterprise scaling of Lamp and use of CMS including DRUPAL and MOODLE can dramatically benefit companies.
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Hippo joined the growing parade of open source content management systems that are reporting big growth numbers.
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BSD
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For the first three months of the 2012 calendar year, the FreeBSD project achieved a lot when it came to advancing their open operating system. Here’s some of the interesting highlights from their quarterly status report.
The FreeBSD Q1’2012 quarterly status report can be read in full here, while below are some of the most interesting tid-bits.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Gimpshop is based on Gimp, but looks like Photoshop, and those who are used to working in Photoshop can use Gimpshop.
I knew that though Gimp and Gimpshop were excellent free programs, there were some features he offered his customers that were not available in Gimpshop. He said he would change normal pictures to sepia or black and white or add vintage effects.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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It is difficult to imagine the Federal government moving in one well-coordinated direction on any matter, and so it has been with the adoption of open source software. Some agencies were early adopters, especially the academic and research communities. As it did in universities, open source adoption in the US government originated in research settings, where sharing and collaboration were already part of the culture of pedagogy. In this way, the government had been using and creating open source software even before it was called “open source.” Other agencies and departments have been more conservative, for a variety of reasons, and are only just now bringing open source software into their operations. With this in mind, the history of open source in the US government is best understood as a series of individual stories that have collectively led to the pervasive adoption of open source we see today.
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Openness/Sharing
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The exploration of open government and civic participation in Kansas City has already begun. This weekend, a new chapter begins. A chapter that will include open source, open data, citizen engagement, a Bike Walk hackathon, and more. In fact, it might materialize into several chapters that could start with rapid-fire lighting talks and end with dueling mayors who are innovating beyond borders. And what would a CityCamp be without an unconference? That’s a whole chapter by itself.
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Standards/Consortia
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Recently, “cloud”-based music services, from big names like Amazon, Google and Apple, have been getting attention in the press. These services allow you to store your music on a corporate server and access it through your own Internet-connected device anytime you like. It’s easy to see the appeal of these services. This is the kind of thing the Internet is for, right?
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Finance
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Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he’d dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. “These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history,” the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. “In history.”
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Since the 2008 market crash, banking interests and economists have clashed over how much of their operations banks should fund with equity as opposed to debt. Bankers and others often say that, “equity is expensive.” By contrast, a recent paper, coauthored by three faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, argues that this conventional wisdom is incorrect, and that, “Quite simply, bank equity is not expensive from a social perspective, and high leverage is not required in order for banks to perform all their socially valuable functions.”
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Privacy
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CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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During the recent Civil Liberties Committee meeting (8 may) Pedro Velasco-Martins (Commission DG Trade) claimed that ACTA only targets WTO members as participating nations. I do not read that from the text of the agreement where it says prospecting nations. I do not see any provision which says that only WTO members are eligible to join.
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05.13.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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With the Linux Foundation Enterprise End User Summit coming up on April 30, we revisited the data collected for our Linux Adoption Trends report to find some of the global trends among enterprise Linux users.
While the report published in January focused on large enterprises with more than $500 million in sales or 500+ employees, this previously unreleased data highlights regional trends among enterprise users in Europe and Asia.
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In the battle of the desktop operating systems (OS), there are only three dominant players left – Windows, Mac and Linux. At some point, Windows was cast as the platform for the common man, Mac as the one for the artist, and Linux as the geek’s playground.
Linux found favour in powering servers, supercomputers, large businesses and even stock exchanges. And Google even used it as the platform to build its popular Android mobile operating system. But in the desktop and notebook space, it still failed to gain traction.
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From a software perspective, Alcatel-Lucent’s networking portfolio is also upgrading their Linux-based AOS operating system. The upgrade will provide SPB support as part of a mesh deployment to enable low-latency connectivity. SPB is an alternative to the older spanning tree protocol and it is competitive with TRILL (transparent interconnection of lots of links) effort that other vendors including Cisco are promoting.
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In order to attract buyers, car manufacturers have had to ramp up the amount of technology offered in their cars. Infotainment systems do a lot, like help navigate, set cabin temperature, adjust audio settings and more, but they tend to be a neat party trick, falling short in real-world use.
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The Access Company has developed various Linux application platforms in the market to go with its brands. These are generally the operating systems that aid in performing various jobs that suits the user. The following are the top 5 Linux Platforms in the market today.
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Last week when out in Bellevue to talk with Gabe Newell about Steam and the Source Engine on Linux, for being a former Microsoft employee his criticism was very surprising. As mentioned in last week’s article, “Listening to Gabe Newell talk about Linux for hours made me wonder whether he was a former ex-Microsoft employee (where he actually did work in his pre-Valve days in the 90′s) or the director of the Linux Foundation. His level of Linux interest and commitment was incredible while his negativity for Windows 8 and the future of Microsoft was stunning.” His criticism of Windows 8 made me very curious to try out this upcoming Microsoft OS, and he also wanted to know what I thought of it, so as soon as I returned to Chicago I downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. In this article are just some of my brief thoughts as I tried it out for a few days.
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Server
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Since the dawn of the computing age, data center servers have been 19 inches in width, fitting into racks that have an outer dimension of 24 inches. The Open Compute Project today announced a new Open Rack standard that will change the interior server width to 21 inches in a bid to improve server density for hyperscale computing data centers.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds keeps a copy of his Linux kernel project on GitHub, the wildly popular code-hosting website. But there’s a caveat. If you try to send him a patch or a bug-fix via GitHub, he’ll tell you to take a hike.
As he explained on GitHub Friday morning, he does not accept pull requests on GitHub. A pull request is GitHub speak for a suggested code fix, or patch.
The irony is that Torvalds invented Git, the software at the heart of the GitHub website.
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By default, the Linux kernel build used in the many open source distributions is the normal/default kernel which doesn’t support real time scheduling. If an embedded developer wants to compare the scheduling policies of Linux to a real time operating system it is more useful to compare RTOS performance to a version of Linux that does have real-time features.
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Linux has come so far since its initial release in 1991. In fact it beat all the odds to become the first commercially viable open source platform. The fair of hackers, computer enthusiasts and Enterprise alike there is a lot of love across the board for the little Unix clone that could.
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Graphics Stack
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If you are like me, who has this specification, you might be thinking not again. The pain of trying to copy paste lines of Ubuntu .. Natty/Precise.. installation guides and after sure failure at last restoring back to mesa.
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Applications
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In general a file manager is a program that gives some kind of interface to the file system and that show in a graphical or textual way the files and directory, usually a file manager allow to do some standard operations such as delete, rename copy/paste and other typical operations that you can do on files.
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Flickr user (and Arch Linux forum member) Paanini loves Arch Linux, and loves customizing his desktop. We love Arch too, and when we saw this beautiful twilight wallpaper, customized with some sharp-looking Conky scripts and a dash of Todo.txt, our favorite plain-text to-do list manager, we had to highlight it.
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Even a small business generates giant quantities of data, and a good business intelligence suite helps you analyze and make sense of it all. When you have an accurate picture of where you are, you’ll see where you can go, and any of these excellent Linux-based small business intelligence suites will take you there.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Linux brings with it many benefits, and we all have our favourites. For some, it’s freedom from viruses, or virii, or even virus, if you’re declining your Latin properly.
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Proxmox Virtual Environment is an easy to use Open Source virtualization platform for running Virtual Appliances and Virtual Machines. Proxmox does not officially support software raid but I have found software raid to be very stable and in some cases have had better luck with it than hardware raid.
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Games
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While there are indeed a fairly reasonable number of video game options for the Linux desktop, none of them are really the mainstream games many of us have come to know and love. This translates into many people either dual-booting their computers or perhaps instead, opting to green-light one of the various solutions that run Wine.
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ShiVa3D is a proprietary 3D game engine which handles advanced shading systems, physics engine, HUD rendering and the sound library.
You can create particle effects, trails, animation; design HUDs, materials, terrains, ocean, script AIs in Lua and assign sounds.
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Linux Game Publishing is a software company specialized in porting games to the Linux platform. Since 2001, LGP has accomplished many great things on a field that very few people had the guts to explore and invest in. On this interview, we talk with the new CEO of the company in an attempt to learn more about the difficulties of the past, as well as the plans for a brighter linux gaming future. Enjoy!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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On April 11, Calligra Suite announced its first release, version 2.4. This release takes Calligra several steps closer to being an alternative to LibreOffice, especially in its graphical applications.
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The upgrade will be trivial. Slackware-current was enhanced very recently with KDE 4.8.2 and all the software updates which that move required. Apart from the 4.8.3 release sources, I only had to compile a newer version of libbluedevil and bluedevil, and even those two will be updated in Slackware too, very soon (perhaps Pat already pulled the trigger).
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GNOME Desktop
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If you hated Ubuntu’s Unity desktop then the shock of your first encounter with the Gnome-shell likely caused your entire digital weltanschauung to implode. Make no mistake about it, it takes you right out of your comfort zone to a strange and unfamiliar place even if you’ve already tried Unity and decided to throw it back or put it in the keep net. Be shocked, very shocked.
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First off, Application Menu has not any similarity with Unity’s Global Menus. While Global Menus copy the Window App Menu from the usual spot (inside App) into Unity’s top panel -the Mac style-, Application Menu, is one single menu that steals some elements from Window App Menu and places them in a drop down – no submenu-ed – menu over Shell panel.
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The GNOME Project, through Frederic Peters, announced last evening, May 2nd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.6 desktop environment.
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Some Linux distribution are born to be big. Like Debian, Ubuntu and RedHat.
Other Linux distributions are born to die, because only limited set of developers are self-interested in them.
And there are distributions which are born to live small. They are changing maintaners and developers, but don’t change the supporting idea. The example is Kongoni GNU/Linux. This is one of the few distributions born with an idea of freedom. This is one of the distributions approved by Free Software Foundation.
Let me introduce you the person who is steering this project now: Robert Milasan.
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The quest for perfection is an endless one. Like the quest for freedom (material or spiritual), there is always one more step. It is just the nature of things in the physical universe. The best we can do is keep trying. And that is exactly what I have been doing with regards to the free operating systems that power my (desktop) computers.
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New Releases
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· Announced Distro: Snowlinux 2
· Announced Distro: Linux Mint Debian Edition 201204
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu Studio 12.04 LTS
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The developers at the ArchBang project have announced the arrival of a new version of their Linux distribution. Based on the Arch Linux rolling release distribution, ArchBang is described as a simple and lightweight system aimed at Linux users who want to customise it to suit their needs. Unlike Arch Linux, ArchBang uses the minimalistic Openbox window manager with support for its pseudo-tiling functions.
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The latest update of Rocks codename Mamba is now released. Mamba is available for both CentOS 5.8 (Rocks 5.5) and CentOS 6.2 (Rocks 6.0). The Rocks-supplied OS rolls have all updates applied as of May 7, 2012.
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Liberté Linux is a secure, reliable, lightweight and easy to use Gentoo-based LiveUSB/SD/CD Linux distribution with the primary purpose of enabling anyone to communicate safely and covertly in hostile environments. Whether you are a privacy advocate, a dissident, or a sleeper agent, you are equally likely to find Liberté Linux useful as a mission-critical communication aid.
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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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Linux Mint Debian is the line of desktop distributions from the developers of Linux Mint that is based on Debian. For the record, Linux Mint Debian is different from Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu Desktop.
The very latest edition, Linux Mint Debian 201204, was released on April 24. Installation images for 32- and 64-bit platforms for the Xfce and MATE/Cinnamon desktop environments were released. The MATE/Cinnamon edition has already being reviewed (see Linux Mint Debian 201204 MATE/Cinnamon review). This article is a review of the Xfce edition, using a 32-bit installation image. This boot menu is shown below,
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 12.04 aka Precise Pangolin has officially been released. This is the next LTS version of Ubuntu. One week back, I had downloaded Ubuntu 12.04 (then in final beta) with an intent to try it out. After I installed it on my machine and started using it, I was very impressed. It is my opinion that the Ubuntu team has pulled off a success here. Unity interface which many people (including yours truly) were eager to banish to the boondocks has made a comeback. It is now simple to use, efficient, and beautiful.
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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS will be released to the world this Thursday and it’s going to be fantastic. We’ve known for quite a while that Ubuntu is not only beautiful, but also usable and robust for individuals and a great platform for app developers. Those traditions continue in 12.04, with the added bonus of long term support (LTS) promise. This release will be our fourth LTS release, a significant milestone by itself, but it will also be the first in which we offer special consideration of hardware refresh cycles on the desktop and fast-moving technology developments in the cloud.
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Free of charge, free of viruses and designed to outpace its rivals on low-end systems – Ubuntu has some obvious advantages.
The operating system claims 20 million people use it a day. Not an insignificant number, but still a drop in the ocean compared to Microsoft’s Windows or Apple’s OS X.
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Ubuntu 12.04 is codenamed “Precise Pangolin.” But maybe it should be called “Linux that never sleeps.” And that wouldn’t be a compliment. Au contraire — the operating system’s lack of support for hibernation, or the ability to put the computer to “sleep” using no power, is a major flaw in an otherwise great Ubuntu release. And it doesn’t bode well for Canonical’s ambitions of conquering the desktop.
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Last evening, Chris Kenyon, Vice President & GM, Alliances & OEM Services at Canonical, announced at the Ubuntu Developer Summit that the Ubuntu operating system will ship on 5% of personal computers worldwide, doubling last year’s shipments to 18 million units.
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This upgrade is directly inspired from an article by Joey Sneddon over at OMG! Ubuntu. Joey upgrades a 10.04 installation to 12.04 and gets some really great results. The jump from Lucid to Precise is a significant one, so seeing his success, minus the loss of his wallpaper, is great news for those of us that are able to stick with this Jurassic release. I mean let’s face it, it just works. The fact that Lucid ‘just works’ is its greatest achievement. I remember when I was younger, a working computer was not such a big deal. My machines were routinely broken because I was trying this or that, or testing something just for the sake of it. That behavior has changed with age. My argument for using Ubuntu over other distributions is a simple, philosophical one; Do you need something to do or do you need to do something.
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On April 27, 2012 Ubuntu released its new operating system Ubuntu 12.04. Since then I have been playing around with it, and I’ve got to say that although I had my doubts about Unity it is turning out to be quite a nice desktop environment. So without further ado let’s take a look at what’s new in Ubuntu 12.04!
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Operating systems are like wine: They hopefully increase in quality as they age, and — unless you’re a Beaujolais nouveau fan — you often don’t want to drink one that hasn’t yet had at least a little time to mature. But the fact that Ubuntu 12.04 was released only days ago isn’t stopping a number of PC vendors from shipping the new release on their hardware already. Here’s a look at the status of Ubuntu 12.04 and OEMs.
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Canonical announced that the Ubuntu Open Week for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) will take place between 2nd to 4th May, 2012, on the usual Ubuntu IRC channel, #ubuntu-classroom.
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I have decided to review the new Ubuntu 12.04 ‘Precise Pangolin’ because after hearing mixed opinions of it I was very intrigued to try it for myself. I used to use Ubuntu as my main OS but changed to Linux Mint because I couldn’t get on with the Unity environment. I want to find out if the new Ubuntu has improved and if so, will it be enough to persuade me to go back to it?
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Yesterday, May 1st, we’ve announced that the Ubuntu Open Week event will take place on IRC from May 2nd to May 4th, and that Mark Shuttleworth will be present a day before the event to talk with the Ubuntu users.
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Linux and quirkiness tend to be synonymous, if looked from the perspective of a user who doesn’t want to fiddle or deal with workarounds to make things work smoothly. Release after release Ubuntu has been no different in this department, even when it seemed closest to the goal of a perfectly user-friendly system. It’s become somewhat of a running joke among some circles to go test out the shiny new hyped Ubuntu thinking this is finally it, and they’ve finally done it, and then leave with a bit of a disappointment. This has been going on for years.
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Flavours and Variants
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I have been a Gnome user from the very first day I started using GNU/Linux. Whether it was Fedora, Debian or then Ubuntu what I was interacting with was Gnome. The underneath OS was irrelevant to a great extent depending on who the user was. The reason I liked Gnome was its ease of use and simplicity. Gnome on top of Ubuntu was a perfect combo as Ubuntu also strives to keep things simple for an average user. I would say that I was actually a Gnome user and not an Ubuntu user.
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I know there’s not much new here, but I am amazed that Ubuntu, Linux Mint and friends ship with a Guest account present and enabled.
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Fuduntu is somewhat of a unique distribution, it has the feeling of Ubuntu but it is really a fork from Fedora. It is a distribution that releases quarterly updates with incremental changes which its goal is to keep on providing a better user experience.
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Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix is unofficial Ubuntu remaster in which Unity has been replace with GNOME Shell. Besides this, Ubuntu GNOME Shell Remix also comes with some applications that are a part of GNOME and aren’t installed by default on Ubuntu, such as Evolution, GNOME Sushi, Contacts or Cheese.
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In the world of Linux, there are many distributions out there that one can choose from and Ubuntu is one of the most popular distributions out there. LUbuntu, is a LXDE based version of Ubuntu distribution that is more lightweight and geared towards speed and lower end systems.
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Now that Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) has been released, we are proud to announce today, May 3rd, the immediate availability for download of the GNOME Shell Remix 12.04 Linux operating system.
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Well, it’s that time of the year again. Canonical just released the spring editions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Edubuntu (and with those have come releases of the officially-recognized derivatives Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and Mythbuntu). Today, I’m reviewing Kubuntu, for a few different reasons.
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Still waiting for news on your Raspberry Pi? You shouldn’t have to wait much longer, as element14 announces they will update all pre-order customers shortly
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Phones
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Today we are excited to announce Tizen 1.0 Larkspur, including the addition of new complimentary components, as well as source code that focuses on enhancing stability and performance. We believe that these updates and new offerings improve the experience for developers. We are also continuing to work on improvements and additions, and we will be doing frequent updates to the SDK and source code. There are a few additional components that we plan to add in the coming weeks, and we will continue to fix bugs and add additional features.
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Android
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Like almost everyone else, DeviceGuru initially dismissed Amazon’s $199 Kindle Fire as merely a vehicle for Amazon to generate ongoing revenue from ebook, music, videos, and Android app sales. But when I learned that Kindle Fire refurbs were going for $140, I couldn’t resist snapping one up and finding out what I could make it do. Turns out, it wasn’t hard to morph it into a relatively full-featured general purpose Android tablet, complete with Google services and apps.
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Anthony Favre used Linux for the first time as a student in 1997 and has since started two companies that specialize in Linux and open source technologies.
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Samsung Galaxy Nexus debuts on Google Play Store as the first hardware to be sold via the online store. Google also plans to sell select Android tablets through Google Play Store. The phone is priced at competitive $399, lesser than Amazon prices.
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An old idea about open source — that it’s all about cheap knockoffs of proprietary ideas — has been turned on its head. Today’s open source communities, where it’s easy to build on the work of others without constantly seeking permission, offer the most fertile soil for seeding new ideas and growing innovation.
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JAR files provide developers with a handy way of distributing Java class files, associated metadata and resources between projects on the Java platform, and Android is no exception. There are plenty of third party Android-compliant libraries that are packaged and distributed via the JAR format, which can add valuable extra functionality to your Android project. However, to leverage these JAR files, you must first add them as a Referenced Library within Eclipse.
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to add a JAR file to an existing Android project in an Eclipse installation, before showing you how to create your own Android-compliant libraries, for easily sharing resources between projects.
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Strong sales of the iPhone 4S are putting renewed pressure on Android to innovate. Ubuntu for Android could give the platform a key capability iPhone is still missing.
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The next version of the trend setting Galaxy S series was unveiled last night, with upgraded guts and a giant new screen
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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The hyped KDE Plasma tablet Vivaldi has been upgraded to 1GB RAM from the previously planned 512MB. Those who have pre-ordered the tablet will be getting the upgraded model with a whooping 1GB RAM for the same price.
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In March 14, 1999 Ethan Galstad released the first version of Nagios. Then, nearly exactly 10 years later (May 2009), Icinga (a fork of Nagios) was born. What happened there? Why a fork? In this article, I will shed some light about what made the Icinga developers decide to fork (although they still send patches to Nagios). In this article, I will talk to both Ethan Galstad himself, and Michael Lübben (one of the founding Icinga team members and Nagios addon developer). I will quote Michael and Ethan in the article. You get to read their points of view here.
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Analyst firm Forrester has encouraged businesses to recruit software developers who take part in open source projects, as it shows they are keeping their skills current.
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At that time, most open source vendors were trying to replicate what proprietary vendors were doing, or what they had failed to do. The value proposition was simple: vendors would say they were like X, but more open, more extensible, and less expensive. Take a few of the successes of the late 2000s and who they were compared to: MySQL (Oracle), JBoss (WebSphere), Jaspersoft (BusinessObjects), Talend (Informatica), SugarCRM (Siebel).
By and large, these vendors were successful. The first “billion dollar baby” of open source was MySQL, when Sun bought the company for $1 billion. At that time, Techcrunch headline was: “Sun Picks Up MySQL For $1 Billion; Open Source Is A Legitimate Business Model.” And indeed, 2008 marked a turning point for open source: more and more enterprise deployments; acquisitions, like in the “real” corporate world; more and more funding. The 451 Group tracks the history of VC funding in open source – the graph in this post shows that investment in 2008 was at an all-time high, which would only be matched again in 2011.
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The lead developers behind open-source storage system Ceph have launched a company, called Inktank, to commercialize the software. The company describes Ceph as a “fully open source, distributed object store, network block device, and POSIX-compatible distributed file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability.” It’s uniqueness comes in part because Ceph does all these things within a unified platform.
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Twitter, Facebook, the Library of Congress — all of these institutions have mind-numbing amounts of structured and unstructured data that must be indexed and searched quickly. In Twitter’s case, that’s about 300 million new pieces of information to index every day.
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Many parents in recent years have chosen to homeschool their children. The reasons for this vary, but most include some measure of the understanding that to truly pass on one’s values to one’s children one needs to be the primary source of information for that child. To place one’s child in a school, public or private, is to give up at least part of one’s responsibility to and for that child. There is usually also a desire to have more control over what that immature mind is experiencing as it grows. Some life events should be shielded from a growing mind until that mind is mature enough to handle such events in the context of the desired values imparted by the parents.
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I have studied Physics in Bonn, did my PhD in Biochemistry at a Max-Planck Institute in Göttingen and got my habilitation (In Germany and Austria you need such a licence to teach) at Innsbruck University in the Pharmacology department. I worked most of the time at the Max-Planck-Institute for molecular physiology in Dortmund. It always was somewhat strange, being a physicist working in biochemistry, chemistry and pharmacology. For a physicist, an equation or a reaction scheme is easy, because it is logical and precise. For a chemist, reaction schemes often seem to be incomprehensible and equations may lead to immediate paralysis when used in lectures. In contrast, chemists can perform complex chemical reactions which are admired (not really conceived) by physicists. I have spent most of my scientific life trying to help life scientists to bridge that gap.
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Events
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For the past two days, we’ve held our annual Enterprise End User Summit at the New York Stock Exchange. Besides the fun of ringing the bell during our evening reception, it’s been an incredibly valuable event, fueling collaboration between kernel maintainers and enterprise end users who are pushing Linux to its edge.
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The 19th Croatian Linux Users’ Convention will be organized this year between 23-25 May. The convention will be held in Croatia’s capital city, Zagreb (Croatian chamber of economy, Nova Cesta 5, 10 000 Zagreb).
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(Sacramento, CA, USA: May 2, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, announced promotional exam labs for their Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) at Southeast LinuxFest (SELF: http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org/), June 8-10 in Charlotte, North Carolina. During the conference LPI will also host an information booth and an LPIC-1 Exam Cram session.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Canonical announced earlier today, May 4th, that the Mozilla Thunderbird 12 email client landed in their supported Ubuntu distributions.
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SaaS
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With the recent buzz around the OpenStack project, momentum behind open source cloud development is building. We’re now seeing an early ecosystem of companies and products built around OpenStack – a goal that Rackspace’s Lew Moorman laid out for the project when it launched two years ago.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Lo and behold, it takes you to then-Sun employee Tim Bray’s blog back on the day that Sun released Java under the GPL. I wonder if Oracle followed that link, because if I were Oracle, it’s the last thing I’d want the public or the jury to see. Bray explains the choice of the GPL by Sun and says that he not only expects forks, he approves of them. Let me show you.
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CMS
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For the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA), the decision to dump its aging content management system (CMS) was easy. Running 65 state government websites on two different versions of proprietary software — Vignette 6 and 7, one of which is no longer supported — had become cumbersome and costly. And moving all sites to Vignette 8 was too much of a “force fit,” said state CTO Steve Nichols.
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All Things Digital reported last week week that the company behind WordPress could generate almost $50 million in revenue this year.
If you blog at all, you know WordPress is a big deal, but fewer people are aware that there is a company behind the platform called Automattic. The public face of Automattic and WordPress is Matt Mullenweg.
Recently we published a story that WordPress was the platform of choice on 48 of the world’s top 100 blogs. According to Mullenweg’s “about” page on the Automattic site, it accounts for 15 percent of the world’s websites.
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Business
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When open source software gets used in production grade environments, commercial support businesses tend to show up. That’s exactly what is now happening with the open source Ceph distributed storage filesystem.
Ceph is now backed by Inktank, a commercial venture led by Sage Weil, founder of Ceph. The company had originally incorporated under the name Ceph Inc, but it decided to take a different route to help preserve the integrity of the open source project.
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Lately, I’ve been recording music in my spare time. Since I try to use as much Free and Open Source software as possible, I found the free digital audio workstation Ardour. When I went to download the software, I was asked for a donation before I could download it. Intriguing!
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Semi-Open Source
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If current trends hold, then sometime late this summer, Microsoft’s Internet Information Services will fall to the number three web server position in global domains, behind two open source web server platforms: Apache and nginx.
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A couple of days ago, Malcolm Davenport posted here about Certified Asterisk, a new series of Open Source Asterisk releases being produced by Digium. Since that post went out, there’s been some discussion (almost confusion) in the Asterisk community about exactly where the Certified Asterisk releases are coming from, and what they contain. In order to try to help describe how this whole process works, I’ve created this page on the Asterisk Wiki which includes a diagram showing how all the current development and releases branches relate to each other, where tags (and releases) are made, and most importantly, how the Certified Asterisk branches are produced.
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Technology giant IBM is replacing CRM vendor Siebel and replacing its CRM systems with cloud-based SaaS provider SugarCRM.
According to reports in the Wall Street Journal, SugarCRM is set to snap up the contract to manage sales, marketing and customer relationships for Big Blue. The contract sees Oracle-owned 67,000 Siebel seats swapped out for the open-source vendor.
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Funding
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Of all the many examples of excellent free and open source software out there, GIMP is surely among the best known examples for offering a no-cost and yet power-packed alternative to an extremely high-priced proprietary market leader.
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Project Releases
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The first development version of the upcoming Empathy 3.6 instant messaging client for the GNOME desktop environment has been announced last night, April 30th.
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Solving non-linear least squares problems comes up in a broad range of areas across science and engineering – from fitting complicated curves in statistics, to constructing 3D models from photographs in computer vision. Today we’re happy to announce the release of a solver we use at Google.
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Public Services/Government
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MAILBAG A roundup of some of your recent comments on our coverage of the debate over open-source software in the Canadian government
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Openness/Sharing
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University have teamed up to deliver online learning to millions of people around the world, through their new edX initiative. “Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone,” the edX site reports. (If you’re familiar with MITx, it is now a part of edX.)
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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The Hungarian government has committed to invest just over a million pounds (370 million HUF) in the development of applications that use the open document format (ODF), according to a report on the European Union’s Joinup web site. Two organisations will benefit from the funding: the Department of Software Engineering at the University of Szeged and the open source development company, Multiráció. In December of last year, the Hungarian government announced that from April 2012 all official documents would need to be prepared in internationally recognised open-standards-based formats.
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Few web video standards are truly open or free, and the major players have no interest in pushing them, says Richard Hillesley…
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Health/Nutrition
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Americans might remember that when the first mad cow was confirmed in the United States in December, 2003, it was major news. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had been petitioned for years by lawyers from farm and consumer groups I worked with to stop the cannibal feeding practices that transmit this horrible, always fatal, human and animal dementia. When the first cow was found in Washington state, the government said it would stop such feeding, and the media went away. But once the cameras were off and the reporters were gone nothing substantial changed.
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Herbicide manufacturer Syngenta had an interesting way of celebrating Earth Day this year, touting the joys of pesticides.
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As a new film highlights water contamination throughout the U.S. Midwest from Syngenta’s flagship herbicide atrazine, the world’s largest pesticide company has mounted a PR counter-attack downplaying the human and environmental health risks of a chemical linked to birth defects, low birth weight and certain cancers. Atrazine was banned in the EU in 2003, leaving the U.S. market as one of Syngenta’s most profitable and vigorously guarded markets.
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Security
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When a corporate laptop goes missing, do you worry about the risk of a data breach? There is good reason for concern: According to recent research by Symantec, 34 percent of data breaches are the result of lost or stolen devices such as laptops.
The good news is that this is a preventable issue. A Full Disk Encryption (FDE) solution can ensure that sensitive information isn’t exposed in the event that one of your organization’s laptops is lost or stolen.
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The updates to PHP versions 5.3.12 and 5.4.2 released on Thursday do not fully resolve the vulnerability that was accidentally disclosed on Reddit, according to the discoverer of the flaw. The bug in the way CGI and PHP interact with each other leads to a situation where attackers can execute code on affected servers. The issue remained undiscovered for eight years.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In some sense, TED is the techno-innovators’ version of the faith expressed by neo-liberal economics, in which the market solves nearly all of its own problems. The enduring posture at TED, therefore, is one that acknowledges serious world problems, ranging from war to famine, water and food availability, but which nearly always concludes that amazing and ingenious people – geniuses – are working to solve the problem. The Great Man theory of history would find each TED conference a comfortable place to be.
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Finance
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The Washington Post was a strong supporter of NAFTA at the time the deal was approved. It continues to be a strong defender of the pact nearly two decades later. It has repeatedly shown itself willing to make up facts or just ignore them to push its pro-NAFTA line.
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To avoid social discontent and, in addition to stimulate the economy, China has embarked on a (serious?) policy of building cheap housing for the urban poor. A total of 5mn homes are expected to be built this year, with goal of reaching 36mn by 2015. However, the financing for this proposed rapid build out is questionable. The Government has increased central funding for low income housing by +23% to 212 Yuan this year, though the expected bill for the 36mn homes comes in at Yuan 5tr !!!. Local Governments, however, are not keen on spending on social housing. In addition, corruption has, in the past, meant that affordable homes have been sold to relatives/friends etc, etc – estimated at near 80% !!!! (Source GK Dragonomics) and authorities classify certain building programmes as social housing, when they are clearly not. As a result, I remain totally sceptical of this programme;
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President Obama’s reelection campaign is likely to have more money than any presidential campaign in history. Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign, when you factor in the super PACs supporting him, could have even more money than that.
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Goldman seems to be making a renewed effort at PR in the wake of the letter by derivatives staffer Greg Smith accusing the firm of caring only about profits and treating customers as stuffees (“muppets” was revealed to be the new term of art). That observation probably came as no surprise to anyone save Goldman staffers, most of whom probably thought they had conned their clients into believing otherwise, and a few like Smith who believed the party line.
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The London arm of Goldman Sachs paid only £4.1m in corporation tax to the Treasury last year despite making pre-tax profits of £1.92bn, annual accounts have revealed.
Goldman Sachs International (GSI) had a corporation tax bill of £422.3m but it deferred £418.2m – or more than 99 per cent of the amount – that it had to pay immediately in “current tax”. The Wall Street giant, presided over by Lloyd Blankfein, was able to postpone payment because of “timing differences”, according to the accounts.
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Several of my savviest readers wrote expressing disappointment and consternation with the Frontline series on the crisis, “Money, Power, and Wall Street.” The first two parts of the four part series have been released, and it’s probably safe to say that this program is far enough along to be beyond redemption.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) (GS) closed Sigma X Canada today, shutting down the dark pool for equities seven months after starting it.
The stock trading venue stopped taking orders, according to a statement from the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada. Since all orders expire daily on Sigma X Canada, none will be open after it closes, the agency said.
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In theory the post of next Governor of the Bank of England won’t even be advertised for several months.
In reality, the scheming and jostling for position are already in full flow. A new name in the frame today is Jim O’Neill, the affable Goldman Sachs economist now chairing the bank’s asset management division.
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Goldman Sachs may dominate financial markets, but there is one frontier it has not yet conquered: social media.
So the Wall Street firm that many on the Internet love to hate plans to hire a “social media community manager,” according to a posting on its Web site. The position involves overseeing the firm’s online communities and developing a “positive online presence.”
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So we have yet to be completed incremental staffing of a grand total of 15? 65 people pursuing to the biggest consumer fraud in American history, when the savings & loan crisis had 1000 FBI agents tasked to it?
The worst is the insulting five financial analysts. Tell me how “financial analysts” are supposed to get up to speed on securitization. There aren’t that many people who are experts who are willing to educate people going against the banks, and I’d bet big money that the Feds won’t be able to hire anyone of that caliber (they’d make more doing expert witness gigs).
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) (GS) won dismissal of some claims in a lawsuit brought by CIFG Assurance North America Inc. over $275 million in residential mortgage-backed securities.
The insurer sued Goldman Sachs in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan in August, accusing the investment bank of making misrepresentations in connection with the securitization of a portfolio of 6,204 mortgage loans.
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Perhaps because we don’t trust our government, our big corporations or our other institutions to do anything very helpful for the country. Indeed, we don’t trust our government, big corporations and other institutions to even allow a fair playing field where we have a chance of competing fairly to get ahead on our own initiative.
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The U.S. anti-bribery law that Wal-Mart may have violated in Mexico has ensnared leading companies from virtually every sector of the economy as federal prosecutors increasingly crack down on a wide range of transgressions, from improper accounting to giving foreign officials computers and bags of cash.
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The City of Oakland should find a way to get out of its interest rate swap agreement with Goldman Sachs, a deal that costs the city $4 million annually, according to a city staff report. The problem before the city council now is figuring out the best way to do that without costing the city more money.
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Recent price spikes in global food commodities – most notably the bubbles of 2008 and 2010-11 – have exposed a fundamental fault of economic analysis: although speculation in the world’s food supply has long been suspected, no one has been able to prove it. The world’s most precious resources may have been transformed into a casino for high rollers such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Barclays and Deutsche Bank, but it’s nearly impossible to figure out who is betting how much.
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Censorship
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Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) advises developing countries against signing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, BMZ official Frank Schmiedchen said during a meeting of the Committee of Petitions of the German Parliament yesterday.
The committee discussed a petition signed by over 60,000 German citizens calling for a stop to the ratification of ACTA by the German Parliament.
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Privacy
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A popular Firefox add-on appears to have started leaking private information about every website that users visit to a third-party server, including sensitive data which could identify individuals or reduce their security.
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Civil Rights
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Today, 3 May, is United Nations World Press Freedom Day. For me this is a chance to remember the fundamental rights, including to self-expression, that are safeguarded for all of us in the European Union – whether you’re a journalist, blogger or ordinary citizen.
And a chance to remember those people around the world who don’t have those protections, and are often restricted in what they can say or investigate.
In places without human rights safeguards, the right to express oneself is all the more important. People who struggle for democracy must have a voice. People like Eynulla Fatullayev: Azerbaijani journalist, human rights activist and winner of the 2012 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize. He dared to speak up to defend freedom of expression — and was for a time imprisoned for having done so. I salute his brave work.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The Netherlands became the first EU country to adopt a law protecting Net neutrality. This initiative must set the example for the rest of Europe and France.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The last week has been terrific for “Lunatics”. We’ve cleared the licenses on almost all of the music — and certainly the most important pieces. However, for a moment, I want to focus on the little problem with the one minute of music we probably won’t get to use, and the right and wrong way to relicense your art if you are ever in that situation.
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The European Court of Justice ruled this morning that the functionality of a computer program and the programming language it is written in cannot be protected by copyright.
Europe’s highest court made the decision in relation to a case brought by SAS Institute against World Programming Limited (WPL), effectively leaving the door open for software companies to “reverse engineer” programs without fear of infringing copyright.
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Traditionally, application programming interfaces (APIs) have been presumed to be non-copyrightable, because unlike other elements of a software, which involve creativity, APIs are typically comprised of facts that enable one specific task: how does my software program talk to your software program and vice versa?
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Google’s ultra high speed Internet project aims to bring Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri Internet speeds 100 times the current U.S. average. This has Hollywood petrified. Will users with gigabit connections pirate enough movies to decimate the movie industry’s revenue? Will piracy crush Hollywood in the way that it crushed the music industry? Not if Hollywood is smart: they need to CAREFULLY study how the Linux kernel is developed, and how Free Software is developed in general.
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ACTA
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The MEP F. Castex asked about the public access to ACTA preparatory documents.
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This morning, member of the EU Parliament Dimitrios Droutsas presented his draft report on the impact of ACTA for fundamental freedoms to his colleagues of the LIBE (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs) committee. This draft report is a very fortunate acknowledgement of ACTA’s dangers for fundamental rights and democracy, which must play a key role in leading the rest of the EU Parliament to reject ACTA.
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Dimitrios Droutsas is the rapporteur for opinion on ACTA in the LIBE (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs) committee of the European Parliament. Below is an abstract of his draft report that demonstrates an insight and a democratic commitment that should act as an example for his colleagues and for policy makers everywhere. In particular, other committees such as the JURI committee should realize that it is vain and offensive to democracy to use procedural tricks in order to prevent the Parliament from taking a clear and timely decision to reject ACTA.
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Send this to a friend
05.12.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Dracut is a new system to generate, in the same way for all Gnu/Linux distributions, the special programs and files that make Linux boot.
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I came across the GNU/Linux-libre almost by accident and have enjoyed taking Trisquel and Parabola gnulinux for a test drive. I found both communities friendly and helpful.
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OSHackers is a website that aims to count GNU/Linux users and place them geographically using their Linux distribution as the marker. You can visit OSHackers and put yourself on the map, and you can search for people that use Linux around your area.
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Optimus has already long been causing issues for those not after Linux pre-loads but installing Linux by themselves on laptops with an integrated Intel GPU and discrete NVIDIA GPU. AMD’s technology is also in a similar sour spot, but at least it’s less popular than NVIDIA’s hybrid technology.
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For the last few weeks I’ve been working on an experimental new print spooler called printerd. It was designed in collaboration with Richard Hughes and it aims to be a modern print spooler for Linux.
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Desktop
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Linus Torvalds, Linux’s primary creator, hasn’t been happy with the direction his formerly favorite Linux desktop interface, GNOME, has gone. In fact, Torvalds downright hates GNOME 3.x. He’ll get no argument from me. I hate GNOME 3.x too. Recently though, Torvalds has start toying with Google’s new Chrome operating system’s Aura interface and, guess what, he kind of likes it.
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Server
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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A variety of distributions now let systemd, rather than sysvinit, take care of bringing the system up. The newest of the three big init system promises to speed up booting and requires no explicit system service dependency configuration; as a side-effect, it also eliminates some distribution-specific peculiarities.
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Linux is compatible with more hardware than any other OS bar none. That certainly includes Windows. Try installing Windows 7 on some random laptop from scratch and see how much is missing or unsupported without third party drivers. My experience doing Linux installs for my customers is that a lot of off the shelf hardware “just works” and the rest needs proprietary drivers downloaded to make it work, just like Windows. There is, indeed, some hardware that doesn’t work with Linux and years ago that was a real issue. The fact is that more and more manufacturers are supporting Linux well and other drivers have been adequately reverse engineered.
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Linux 3.4 includes a whole host of changes to drivers for AMD, Intel and NVIDIA graphics chips. The new kernel, expected to be released later this month, also contains a new USB DisplayLink driver and lays the foundations for better support for hybrid graphics technologies such as NVIDIA’s Optimus.
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Graphics Stack
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Here’s an interesting look at the state of the Ubuntu bug count as it concerns Linux graphics driver issues.
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Here’s some other interesting notes from the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit this week in Oakland.
- The Compiz compositing window manager will move from using OpenGL 2.x to using OpenGL ES. The porting of Compiz to OpenGL ES (GLES) was originally done by Linaro and will now be used within Ubuntu. While designed for the benefit of mobile users, the Linux desktop graphics drivers — including those using Mesa/Gallium3D — do support OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0. This change in moving from GL to GLES for Unity’s compositing window manager may initially cause some pain with broken plug-ins, etc. Notes here.
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Applications
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Still haven’t found a task manager that fits your needs? Perhaps you should take a look at Nitro. It doesn’t offer any revolutionary functionality, and the current version doesn’t even allow you to sync data across different platforms and devices (although this feature is in the works). But this no-frills task management tool offers all the basic features that can help you to keep tabs on your tasks and to-dos with a minimum of effort. For each task, you can specify priority and deadline, and color codes make it easier to identify the urgency of each task. Tasks in Nitro can be organized into lists, and the application features a few built-in date-based smart lists which can help you to keep tabs on your tasks. You can easily move tasks between lists and rearrange them using the mouse, and the search feature allows you to find tasks that match specified criteria.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Last month I wrote about a new GLSL back-end for the Doom 3 engine by Oliver McFadden. This week he’s now shared his work done to bring OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL support to this game engine.
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Electronic Arts are delivering two games into Ubuntu, Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances and Lord of Ultima. They are currently available in the Ubuntu Software Center.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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When Calligra 2.4 was released there was a flurry of interest resulting in a number of articles in the press and blog posts. Some of these were regular reviews of higher and lower quality. One of them, which I think was one of the better ones, was this one by Påvel (in Swedish). In the review he says that Calligra has a good foundation, he likes it but there are obvious problems with it. I find that an honest and true assessment, especially since it is obvious that he has really tried it and been bitten by some bugs. (Some of these bugs are already fixed in 2.4.2, most of the rest will be gone in 2.5.)
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Our good friends over at opentablets.org have posted a video from aseigo’s blog demoing the beginnings of the Make-Play-Live content store. No word yet on whether that name is official, but it does drape itself quite dramatically across the application’s login screen.
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Today is a day in which I find myself passing through many doorway as all sorts of milestones for our little project are coming up at once.
As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, we’ll be shipping the Vivaldi tablet computer with 1GB of RAM .. and today I can tell you even more good news: we’ve doubled the internal storage to 8GB as well. We’ll be settling on the USA pricing shortly as well, and I think people will be pleasantly surprised with where that lands.
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With Unity, Cinnamon, and Gnome 3 getting all the buzz, it’s easy to overlook other interesting projects that attempt to rethink the traditional desktop metaphor. Case in point, the KDE Plasma Netbook interface. Despite its moniker, the KDE’s alternative interface is not limited to netbooks, although it’s designed for devices with small screens. KDE’s alternative interface has been around for a while, but I only recently started using it as a primary environment on my trusty ASUS Eee PC 1005HA netbook, and I grew fond of it for a number of reasons.
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LaKademy brought together 19 Latin American participants, including developers, translators, designers and promoters. The full report has more information about major LaKademy outcomes related to artwork, localization, promotion, and developing.
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Agustín Benito Bethencourt (aka “toscalix”) recently joined the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. He will be presenting the KDE Community Keynote at Akademy 2012 in Tallinn.
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME Shell has been criticized for lacking many familiar features found in GNOME 2, but you can add them yourself with extensions. If you’ve installed GNOME Shell and didn’t like it, don’t write it off until you try some extensions.
If you’re using Ubuntu, check out our guide to installing GNOME Shell and getting started. GNOME Shell is the default desktop on Fedora and should be available in most distribution’s package repositories.
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Ubuntu systems team has forked Gnome Control Center as Ubuntu Control Center which will be used in Ubuntu from 12.10 onwards.
Bilal Akhtar, a young Ubuntu developer writes, “Gnome-contacts will be installed by default, clutter will be on the CD, totem will be updated to the latest version, and Ubuntu 12.10 should ship with a near-complete GNOME 3.6 stack (sans Shell, of course, and control-center).”
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Distro is short for distribution which in the software world mainly means Linux and BSD these days.
Now, as good as the existing distros are (I use a bunch of different versions of Fedora Linux including fc1, f10 and f14, and also Vector Linux Classic and OpenBSD) they all have one irritating problem in that their software repositories disappear. OpenBSD 4.7 disappeared recently and Fedora Core 1 disappeared ages ago.
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Internet is the the “Alpha and Omega” of our daily experience with computers, dominating, enriching and engulfing everything we do. This is the case with almost everyone around the world, but somewhere out there, there are computers that are not connected to the internet for some reason that we will not analyse in this article. What would be the ideal GNU/Linux distribution for such systems? Are there any linux distributions that can cover almost every need of an off-line user? Yes there are!
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The release candidate for Mageia 2 was released earlier today along with the note that the final release date had been changed. The changes are hard to see in the release notes, but perhaps prospective users might want to pay more attention to the errata list.
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In a corteous and somewhat longer-than-usual post, Jean Manuel Croset has communicated with the Mandriva community again to inform some details of the situation (always mentioning that he is unable to disclose as much information as he would like) and to throw a new date on the table. This time, it is the third week of May, the moment in which the company will unveil its roadmap.
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Red Hat Family
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The announcement Tuesday of a new partnership between Dell and Red Hat could mark a further expansion of open-source software use in the enterprise.
OEM customers looking to Dell for custom products will now have additional open-source options. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss join SUSE as standard choices for Dell OEM.
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For a long time, corporate IT was managed by IT professionals. Such management had a lot of drawbacks. IT professionals are not easy people to get along with, they have strong opinions, talk to other people like children who don’t understand simple things. Unfortunately, they are usually right. Their strong opinions are based on knowledge and experience. And other people really don’t understand how IT works.
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CEO and President James Whitehurst sold Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) shares for $6.78 million, according to an SEC filing.
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It had $209 billion of assets on its balance sheet, and $128 billion of that was in the form of goodwill and other intangible assets. Goodwill is simply the difference between the price paid for a company during an acquisition and the net assets of the acquired company. The $128 billion of goodwill in this case was created when AOL and Time Warner merged in 2000.
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As it prepares for battle against VMware on the cloud front, Red Hat announced today that it will launch later this year its fee-based PaaS service with support and will begin shipping this summer integrated PaaS solutions that enterprises can deploy on premise that give its developers freedom to innovate while allowing IT to manage how apps are developed and deployed
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Fedora
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Fedora 17′s grub2 screen won’t be the ugly black and white thing you saw in Fedora 16. The reason for the ugliness in Fedora 16′s grub splash is that it was the first release we used grub2 and there were some missing files that prevented the theme from working at all. We punted on it because grub’s splash is not shown by default and we had higher-priority issues to work on for Fedora 16.
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This week Dave Le Sage, Suz, and I discuss Fedora 17, the upcoming release of the Free and Open Source Llinux computer operating system Fedora.
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The Fedora Project is still trying to clarify its process of naming major releases, a process that has been met with calls for revision within the Fedora community.
To address the problem, Fedora Advisory Board member Toshio Kuratomi is working to build a new naming process that will avoid some of the pitfalls of the most-recent naming concerns.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Discussed on Monday during the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit were the plans to introduce a new sound theme to the Quantal Quetzel.
Through a community-driven submission process, they’ve narrowed down the sound theme they’re looking for but are still trying to make it sound “more human and less robotic.” With Ubuntu 12.10 they’re also looking at the ability to customize sound themes and briefly discussed at UDS-Q was the ability to have a LightDM start-up sound.
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As part of his keynote at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced the Ubuntu project’s first open hardware device. The Canonical created VGA Switch (VGAS-01) allows the disconnection of a VGA display from a system with the push of a button.
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This week the Ubuntu Developer Summit is going on in Oakland, California, and Mark Shuttleworth and others have been filing some interesting reports coming out of the conference. According to Shuttleworth, today will be “Cloud Day” at the meeting, with speakers including Richard Kaufmann, CTO of HP Cloud, Randy Bias of Cloud Scaling, and Mark Collier of Rackspace. Perhaps the most interesting points coming out of the summit so far, though, have to do with new market share claims for Ubuntu.
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Mark Shuttleworth, father of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, proudly announced earlier yesterday, May 7th, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Oakland, USA, the goals for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 operating system.
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Ubuntu 12.04 has already received first post release Unity update and its only second week since final Ubuntu 12.04 was released.
This release, specifically Unity 5.12 brings numerous fixes and optimizations including improved HUD and multi-monitor support, compiz fixes, dash improvements, music/video lens fixes and many more.
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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week, Dell announced an effort they’re calling Project Sputnik. The basic idea was Dell’s latest and greatest XPS hardware pre-provisioned with developer infrastructure: a developer laptop, in other words. As Barton George discussed, this was in part – full disclosure – an idea of mine. One of the questions we’re fielding from the media following this announcement is why? What’s the point of a developer laptop? I cannot speak for Dell on their motivations or the project logistics, but there are two primary reasons I believe a developer laptop program broadly makes sense.
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Ubuntu Friendly — the Canonical-spawned initiative for the community to try to provide information on computer hardware that’s “friendly” to run Ubuntu Linux — is not being actively maintained.
Just months after it launched, Canonical QA engineers are more or less letting Ubuntu Friendly stand still and wanting to hand the work off to others. Ubuntu Friendly basically came down to a hardware database that listed computer systems and their components known to be compatible with Ubuntu. Ubuntu Friendly never really took off as a community success and evidently have too much on their table to maintain, so a session on Tuesday was held where they were kicking around some ideas or how to make it a success. They want to “hand the project to better hands.”
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In a UDS session for Gnome 3 stack in Ubuntu 12.10, Canonical discussed about future plans of Unity interface.
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For reasons mentioned in yesterday’s blog item, I’m not at the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Oakland. Oh, I could go up there and attend — it’s only 80 miles from the cozy confines of the Felton redwoods — but I value my life and I’d like to keep it, thank you very much.
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In the name of security, Ubuntu developers are looking at ways to lock-down or verify the way third-party Debian packages are handled on Ubuntu Linux.
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Precise Pangolin is a big step up in many regards. The new Ubuntu OS is friendlier with legacy hardware. It’s peppier and more responsive. I find it is far less sluggish on my older gear. It flies on my newest hardware. However, while its Unity interface has been improved somewhat, it’s still too limited and too confining, at least for some experienced Linux users.
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LINUX VENDOR Canonical has pulled out all the stops with Ubuntu 12.04 to get enterprises to give its Linux operating system a go, and on the whole it succeeds, even if some features might put off traditional users.
Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04 is known as Precise Pangolin and it is the firm’s fourth long term support (LTS) release with extended support for both desktop and server distributions for five years. As part of Canonical’s push into the enterprise, Ubuntu 12.04 rolls up the big changes seen in the four Ubuntu releases since Ubuntu 10.04 rather than introducing new ones, and the result is an operating system that feels more complete than other recent Ubuntu Linux releases.
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In a UDS session today, Canonical discussed plans to implement Wayland Tech Preview in Quantal.
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- When it comes to the kernel side, as mentioned already, for Ubuntu 12.10 they are looking at shipping with the Linux 3.5 kernel or possibly Linux 3.6 depending upon the features and schedule.
- They’re undecided whether to ship X.Org Server 1.12 or 1.13 in Ubuntu 12.10. X.Org Server 1.13 should be out in early September and will feature more input improvements, GLX_ARB_create_context support, and various other enhancements. Shipping xorg-server 1.13 comes down to there being NVIDIA/AMD binary blob support in time, whether the 1.13 changes end up being too invasive (namely if Airlie’s DDX driver rework is merged), and their bug count.
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Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) is out. By now there are a zillion reviews of it already, but I wanted to take a little more time to use it before writing one of my own. Before I get into this review, I want to be clear that I’m not going to be reviewing Unity. By now most people know what it is, and either like it or don’t. There really isn’t any point in complaining about it any more. If you hate it then do not use Ubuntu, just find another distro.
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Last year plans began to surface for Ubuntu TV — a version of the popular Linux distribution intended to be deployed by television manufacturers — and during the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week there was much talk about the Ubuntu TV plans.
Back in January at CES I checked out the interesting Ubuntu TV prototype, which did use a modified version of Unity and was looking interesting. Ubuntu TV though has yet to ship.
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Ten years ago, just ahead of a trip into space, Mark Shuttleworth took out an insurance policy on his reproductive future. “I put a couple swimmers on ice,” he says. “There was going to be a gamma ray source about a foot from my balls under my seat on the Soyuz. So I made a deposit in a secret location before I flew.”
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Today, we released the latest version of the Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix, based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
Most businesses deploying Ubuntu on corporate desktops perform a similar set of tasks – from removing consumer-focused applications and integrating with existing infrastructure, to installing commercial software for application virtualisation.
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While things are coming to a close in Oakland at the last day of UDS-Q, there was an interesting session that concerns the future of third-party driver installation on Ubuntu 12.10 and future releases.
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If you were hoping that Ubuntu 12.10 would mark the switch from Upstart to systemd for its init daemon, there was no surprise announcement and the Ubuntu developers are continuing to push for the advancement of Upstart.
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Flavours and Variants
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Most of the machines I use are laptops or tablets, but I also have a desktop that I use for recording my music. On that desktop, though, I have two different hard drives split in three (roughly 250GB) partitions, something that allows me to have different distros installed on it. Since late 2010, that machine had Ubuntu 10.10, PCLinuxOS KDE and Ubuntu Studio 9.04 spread across those three partions available. It was about time I went for a change, for a number of reasons, including the fact that Ubuntu 10.10 recently went out of support (needless to say, so did Ubuntu Studio 9.04). On top of that, PCLinuxOS had been stuck on KDE SC 4.6.5 for about a year, so I wanted a fresh update on all my partitions to get fully supported distros and up to date applications and features.
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Thanks to growing user-interest, it looks like there is going to be a GNOME Shell flavor of Ubuntu to satisfy those who aren’t fond of the direction of Canonical’s Unity desktop.
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Canonical announced at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.10, that they plan to stay with the good ol’ EXT4 filesystem for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) distribution.
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Following the official release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), I took the plunge and upgraded my main work PC from Ubuntu 11.10. Up until the release I had been running the 12.04 beta on a second machine. Although I can switch to GNOME 2 (Classic) quite happily on this system, for some reason — yet to be resolved — I can’t do this on my work PC. So I decided it was time to scrutinise the latest version of Unity running on the latest version of the OS. Some of the observations that follow relate to new features and some to features already present in Ubuntu 11.10 and earlier versions.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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For years, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative drew major headlines even as promises made by the initiative’s organizers were routinely missed. The original idea behind OLPC was to create $100 computers that could arrive in the hands of poor kids all around the world. Too bad that $100 price point was never achieved, and other problems arose.
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Willow Garage sets its open-source software free to attract software developers and help make robots commonplace, but detractors say giving the software away is bad for business.
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Nvidia Corp. said Wednesday (May 9) that LLVM, a popular open source compiler, now supports Nvida GPUs.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Fourteen years ago, as a lawyer for Netscape, Mitchell Baker created the open source license that made Netscape’s code free. It was a fateful event for both Baker and the web: Baker ended up leading a small skunkworks project called Mozilla that was eventually spun out into a standalone foundation devoted to making the web better generally, and to offering an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer specifically. With its Firefox browser, Mozilla is now bigger and more influential than ever, and Baker still serves as its chair.
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Firefox 13 is going to be pretty grand. I’ve been using the beta for a while now and it’s faster than the few previous versions that we’ve seen. What makes Firefox 13 the speediest release of the browser to date? A host of improvements thanks to Project Speedy.
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Open Source Suites
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In 2010, Libre Office, a new fork of OpenOffice was created. The main goal was to return control of the premiere free office suite to the community and creating new processes that would reinvigorate its development. By all accounts, it succeeded. Developers are getting behind the project, as are companies, and it seems that there’s something of a feature gap opening up between the two projects.
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Today the Apache OpenOffice Project announced the availability of their inaugural release of Apache OpenOffice, version 3.4. Apache obtained the rights and code to OpenOffice last year and have now ‘vetted” and built “a solid and stable codebase, with significant improvement and enhancements over other variants.” But some are wondering if anyone cares?
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Last week I spoke briefly with Jürgen Schmidt about the Apache OpenOffice 3.4 release, and he was able to give us a little insight into what was involved in getting this release out, and what’s coming in future versions. (Official Release Announcement)
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Sixteen months after its last release. OpenOffice.org has released version 3.4, its first as an Apache Incubator project. The release was covered matter of factly by The H (http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Apache-OpenOffice-3-4-0-debuts-1570353.html), and with a dash of skepticism by Brian Proffitt (http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Apache-OpenOffice-3-4-0-debuts-1570353.html). A week ago, it was even trash-talked by LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks (http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-04-26-ooo-comparison.html), whose eagerness to discredit it was just a bit too obvious.
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While the news about the ongoing Oracle-Google trial in the US has been holding my attention, there have been a sequence of news releases about desktop productivity showing up over the last few weeks. It’s all too good to miss, so here are summaries in the order the news broke:
* First, Calligra Suite is starting to look interesting. They have released version 2.4.1 of Calligra Suite, and it’s a fine step forward. With its roots in the K Desktop Environment (KDE) it’s only realistically available for GNU/Linux at present, but there’s an experimental Windows build and talk of a future mac build. The user interface is clear and appealing and there’s support for the important Open Document Format (ODF) file format. It’s available online. The project has also announced it’s Google Summer of Code student activities, which will add useful new capabilities when they are ready.
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Once upon a time there was KOffice, all full of unrealized potential. And then it was forked as Calligra Suite. The first release of Calligra was on April 11, 2012. Is this a contender, or another niche productivity suite?
It’s a tough row to hoe, building an office suite. The applications are complex, even without thinking about interoperability. Microsoft Office is the tail that has long wagged the office suite dog, with all of its flaws and lard and barriers to interoperability and portable data. If an office suite doesn’t have MS Office compatibility it’s going to appeal to a limited audience. But times change, and now the Open Document Format (ODF) is nearly universal, which (theoretically) means that we can open our files in any application that supports ODF. And thus even the most stubborn titan of lock-in must eventually succumb, and now even MS Office claims ODF support.
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Open source desktop productivity suites are experiencing an injection of enthusiasm, as recent burst of news releases confirms
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Here the issue. What makes a document? The physical form? The logical frame? Sheer convention? So, too, the “office” document. A generation has come to expect of a suite those things that are found in the prevailing application. But that assemblage is, however useful, nevertheless rather arbitrary. It was also spawned by the desires of white-collar workers in large corporations, not by the needs and desires of those outside of the corporate walls. Times have changed. Today, and even more so, tomorrow, virtually all people will have access to some form of a computer, and they will be wanting to create, edit, distribute their works. The number of those coming to this 21st century table is not small, it’s in the billions.
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CMS
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When it comes to CMSs, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal are the three leading names today. All three are open source software, and are free to use and customise. Each has its own community and user base, as well as a well-maintained repository of themes/templates and plugins/extensions. And all three have their pros and cons.
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Business
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Some are dead, some are thriving, and many have repositioned for cloud computing, Big Data and other buzz words. Here’s a belated update from The VAR Guy in alphabetical order…
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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There’s no denying the incendiary nature of the topic of desktop Linux, which tends to gets rehashed in heated detail every so often both on these pages and beyond.
What some may not remember, however, is that there’s another recurring Linux subject that can be equally controversial. It hasn’t appeared in some time, but apparently some slow fires have been burning all along, because they just flared up anew.
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Reports state that Stallman was admitted to the hospital, but has since been discharged. Reports from Spain say Stallman was most likely suffering from symptoms of high blood pressure. The short note on www.fsf.org states that “he did not have a heart attack, as has been reported in some places.”
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Standards/Consortia
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Nearly a decade after that original discussion at OSI – which itself was in the context of fairly established thinking – the UK Government seems to think this is still an open, undecided question. Why is that? It appears to be because industry bodies with a deep interest in protecting their existing, proprietary interests in the UK Government have lobbied that Government to re-open the issue. Moreover, during a change of leadership the responsible individuals in the Government decided to give those incumbents a second chance.
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Censorship
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Silly parents! Are you all up in arms and legs about your little dumpling watching pornography online, like the subjects of this recent Guardian article? Well, I can’t sympathize. Worse yet, I am here to destroy all hopes that you will ever have for (a) an all-wholesome web, or (b) getting your kids to practice wholesome viewing habits.
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Send this to a friend
05.11.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
![GNOME bluefish](/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/120px-Gartoon-Bluefish-icon.png)
Contents
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Desktop
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I mentioned this before: desktop computers are quickly becoming an endangered species seen only on corporate campuses. Laptops, which are still the mainstay of the industry are slowly losing ground to ultra-portable tablet devices. Everyone seems to agree that future is mobile computing. We are boldly moving into a new era where consumer facing devices are portable, wearable and touch controlled – and era that some started to call “post-PC”.
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While every *buntu and *edora moving towards Unity, Gnome3, Cinnamon or MATE, only two distributions remain practical for desktop productivity and fun, they are CentOS 6.* and Debian 6.*. They both will support the good old gnome2 line at least couple years more. However, they are a lot different from each other. Here’s a short description on each of them vis-a-vis desktop use.
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Jack Wallen found many people had strong opinions about his claim that Ubuntu 12.04 nailed the desktop to near perfection. As a result, Jack questions whether the “perfect desktop” is attainable.
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What is it that web developers want? That’s what Dell is trying to find out with its just-launched Project Sputnik, an “experimental” laptop bundled with Ubuntu Linux plus utilities, and with an easy on-ramp to github repositories coming soon. Sputnik looks like Dell’s attempt to wrest the attention of the many web developers that have defected to OS X, but chafe at the restrictions Apple’s walled garden imposes on them.
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Server
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In New York’s Financial District, Linux is your MAMA. The Linux Foundation (that’s Greg Kroah-Hartman in the center and to his right is Jim Zemlin) rang the closing bell at the NYSE yesterday.
The Linux Foundation is in NYC for their End User conference, which also served as a backdrop for an OpenMAMA announcement.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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If you’re in the UK this Saturday, why not head over to Manchester for the fantastic UCubed open source unconference. There are only 40 tickets left!
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Kernel Space
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Btrfs will work faster and handle errors better, Linux 3.4 already supports chipsets that Intel won’t release until next year, and Greg Kroah-Hartman is putting pressure on Zcache developers to finally improve their staging code.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Linux MultiMedia Studio is a remarkably feature-filled application for creating music and sounds. It has tools to go beyond just creating musical sounds. It lets me re-arrange sounds and rhythms with a click-and-drag action. I can layer the tracks to create songs. In fact, it’s so packed with possibilities that newcomers may be a little intimidated by its interface.
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At first glance Linux Live USB Creator looks much like UNetbootin, theUniversal USB Installer, and every other tool that aims to help you download and create a bootable Linux environment for your PC. And as those existing tools are generally very good it’s not immediately obvious why we might need another.
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It’s been quite a long time since Microsoft first unveiled Windows Media Center. The entertainment tool catered to a special group of users who wanted to convert their computer into a full-fledged media center. And though Redmond’s ambitious endeavor never really got the expected response, the idea of having a media center on a computer appealed to many users.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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After a week of interesting Valve Linux news on Phoronix, Friday afternoon there was a special Linux delivery at Valve’s offices for their “Linux cabal” — the team of Valve developers that are working to provide the Linux versions of the Steam client and various Source Engine-powered games natively on Linux.
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Linux Game Publishing is a software company specialized in porting games to the Linux platform. Since 2001, LGP has accomplished many great things on a field that very few people had the guts to explore and invest in. On this interview, we talk with the new CEO of the company in an attempt to learn more about the difficulties of the past, as well as the plans for a brighter linux gaming future. Enjoy!
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Speed Dreams is an open source, multi platform (works on Windows and Linux) motorsport simulator that was forked from the open racing simulator TORCS with the purpose of adding new features such as new cars, tracks, AI opponents and making the game more enjoyable and realistic.
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Desktop Environments
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The developers of the Xfce desktop environment have released the newest version of their suite of applications. Xfce 4.10, which was released roughly fifteen months after its stable predecessor Xfce 4.8, comes with new orientation modes for the panel, a rewritten application finder and more fine tuning to its overall look and feel.
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Choice is one of the best parts of the desktop Linux world, where there’s a distribution to suit virtually every taste and purpose.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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It has been several years since I spent any significant amount of time with the productivity suite known as KOffice. The project, designed to work hand-in-hand with the KDE desktop, has maintained a small niche over the years by being an office suite with a small foot print that features an interface designed to fit in with other KDE/Qt software.
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May 4, 2012. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.2 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.
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ROSA, on the other hand, has unveiled its new release candidate of Marathon EE (EE is the version including non-free stuff, like the extinct Mandriva ONE). I downloaded, gave it a run in Live mode, and this is what I found:
ROSA presents some animated bars as the Live environment is becoming ready to launch. After a while of waiting (the wait was shorter than with Mandriva Desktop 2011, I must say), you are greeted by this desktop:
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There is wide variety of Linux Distros in the market. Each one differs in size, design, support and layout, although the basic function is the same. Each distros offers several unique features apart from main features. There is a heavy competition among distributors to create and develop unique features. Each of these distros offers different types of support systems such as forums, live chat, and other means. That is why it is necessary to select the distributor based on your requirement.
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It is the mystery of mysteries, the one that ranks up there with the Gordian Knot, crop circles, and how many licks does it take to get the center of Tootsie Pop: what is the greatest Linux distro of all?
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This is part one of a multi-part series about my experiences creating a LFS system for the first time.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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In his usual man-of-a-few-words manner today, Jean-Manuel Croset, Mandriva COO, announced that enough funds have been secured to allow Mandriva to keep its doors open and continue development. With Croset saying little else, users at least have a nugget of good news to sustain them.
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Mageia 2 RC was planned for today but tests and debug are still going on to finalize it. We hope to deliver it in coming days.
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Gentoo Family
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I have been running Sabayon Linux (Xfce) for the past couple of months and figured I would throw a post up on here describing my experience with it.
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Red Hat Family
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As previously announced, Red Hat has open sourced its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. The community version of the product, which has been named OpenShift Origin, can be downloaded as a Fedora-based live CD that may be used to set up an OpenShift instance on a spare machine or using VirtualBox.
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Her responsibilities with the open source technology provider include overseeing the system integrator community that provides services to the public sector.
Corddry is a well-versed technology veteran, serving with companies including NetApp and systems integrators firm Unisys. She recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz about her experiences at each firm, Red Hat’s subscription model successes and market opportu
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Fedora
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Some of you may have noticed that Fedora 16 and Fedora 17 basically have the same kernel. The astute of you might have also noticed F15 does as well [1]. All three main Fedora branches are currently sitting at the Linux 3.3.2 release, with Linux 3.3.3 already committed to the git repository. So if they’re all based on the same kernel version, that means they’re all identical, right? And if so, why bother upgrading, right? Well, not quite. There are some differences, and I thought I’d take a minute to explain what those are and why.
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Tatica broke the news about the Fedora 18 release name in Vienna to Emichan and me and we have been discussing it tonight. We all have some concerns with it.
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There’s one feature In the upcoming Fedora 17 release that is immensly useful but very little known, since its feature page ‘ckremoval’ does not explicitly refer to it in its name: true automatic multi-seat support for Linux.
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Debian Family
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The primary version of Linux Mint uses Ubuntu as its source, but to think that it is the only source would be wrong; there’s also the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE).
Apart from its Debian roots, LMDE differs from regular Mint versions by being a rolling release; meaning that the system is constantly and gradually updated, rather than having a massive update every six months bundled into a new release of the distro that demands a new installation or comprehensive updating sequence. Hence, LMDE should only ever need be installed once.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) has just been released. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is a long-term support release, which means it is supported for five years. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Ubuntu 11.10 desktop and server installations to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
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My first experience with it dates back to testing Ubuntu 5.10. I made the switch not too long afterward with the Ubuntu 6.06 release. Coming away from a KDE-centric distribution, I found the switch to a Linux distro offering GNOME as its preferred desktop to be interesting. Previously I had used KDE almost exclusively, so having an opportunity to spend some time with GNOME piqued my interest.
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buntu 12.04, codenamed Precise Pangolin, was released last week, and I’ve been updating my Linux boxes to the shiny new version of the operating system. The upgrade system has gotten a lot smoother in recent years, but I still like to do a fresh installation for each release on my PC and netbook. In this short roundup, I’ll look at some great third-party applications that you can get from the Software Center to augment your Ubuntu installation.
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Well, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an Ubuntu 12.04 review, with pictures, videos, step-by-step instructions and everything else imaginable. So rather than write yet another, I am going to take a different approach – a quick result run-down and a few comments about installing it on the various computers around here. As I have a fairly wide variety of hardware, in both configuration and age, this should cover a lot of different situations, and perhaps offer hope and encouragement to those considering upgrading (or especially those considering installing for the first time), and consolation to those who might have tried and run into trouble.
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So what is/are Ubuntu Accomplishments? To keep it short, imagine achievements on console games that get added to your profile when you complete a certain action in a game. Its a nifty idea that extends the playability of game and surprisingly (though I would not have thought it before) acts as a very inspiring means to get people involved with Ubuntu.
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This morning Matthias Klose announced Quantal open for development. While it has not even been a week since the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, with the six-month release cycle it’s already time to get working on the Ubuntu Quantal release. Coming up next week is also the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit where some of the new features will be discussed for this release expected to land in mid-October, per the Ubuntu 12.10 release schedule.
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The release of Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) hasn’t exactly made critics warm to Ubuntu’s Unity interface. However, Unity having gone through several versions, a definite tone of acceptance — or maybe resignation — colors discussion of the new release. Although Unity isn’t a critical favorite, the pundits are at least resigned to the fact that it isn’t going away.
Partly, this change is simply the result of the passage of time. Obsessive outrage is hard for most of us to maintain for more than a few months. A couple of years of testing and use is also enough for the shock of the new to be blunted and replaced by a closer approximation of objectivity.
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With roughly 98 percent of the desktop and laptop market spoken for, you’d be forgiven for thinking your only choices for powering your computer were Windows or Mac OS X. There is another way, though. Linux may only run on a tiny sliver of consumer PCs, but the number is growing and one of the biggest players propelling its popularity is Ubuntu. Since bursting on the scene eight years ago, the distro has grown to dominate the desktop Linux market and made plenty of fans (and a few detractors) along the way. Truth is, Ubuntu is completely unique and, at least compared to other distros out there, very user-friendly. It also happens to have a very active community of developers and users willing to lend help to those in need, which makes it appealing to Linux vets, enterprise users and *nix n00bs alike.
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Ubuntu spans the whole open source ecosystem. I think it’s convenient for Ubuntu’s competitors to talk about a split between Ubuntu and GNOME. But I know lots of GNOME developers who don’t see things that way at all, they write apps because they want them to be used, and Ubuntu is an amazing conduit for their work to millions of users.
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He’s the founder of Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical, and is the creative force behind not on the Unity desktop but its expansion to new form factors.
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It seems to be quite a common belief among potential Ubuntu contributors, that it is very difficult to contribute source code to Ubuntu. I have met with such opinion many times, in bug reports, comments at OMG!Ubuntu!, at AskUbuntu. There is quite a lot of people who might help and write some real code, but are not willing to do so, because they are overwhelmed by the size of the project.
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I’m confident that any version of Ubuntu released in the last five years will have absolutely no problem beating [Windows 8],” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. Of course, “after the success of Windows 7, this is Microsoft snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” she added. “What’s the logic? Did Steve Ballmer secretly invest a fortune in Apple stock or something? Off his meds? Run out of chairs?”
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I am officially kicking off the start of the spring hunting season with a long review of Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. ‘Tis a silly name, but it’s a five-year Long Term Support (LTS) release. Previously, Ubuntu would only offer three years, and anyone using RedHat or CentOS would laugh at this. Not anymore, five years is a respectable figure, by all means.
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The new version of Ubuntu–12.04, codename “Precise Pangolin”– is officially here, meaning two things: I get to be really happy about new features, and some people get to complain about Unity in the comments. Horray!
It’s been a year since Ubuntu made Unity the default interface, and man: many of you were not happy. I was thrilled, however: in my opinion Unity is better looking and easier to use than any other Linux user interface. Sure: there were some rough edges in that release, but overall I got the Linux desktop I’d been trying to hack Gnome into becoming for years.
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The arrival of Ubuntu 12.04 attracted a lot of attention just over a week ago, both from users and critics alike. In fact, Ubuntu’s new long-term support tempted attracted so many people that I was unable to connect to the project’s download servers on the day of the release and had to turn to the torrent files to get the latest version.
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In this phenomenal times for Linux Gaming there are even more great things to come for Linux soon. As some of you know, Ubuntu Developer Summit is going to take place in California on 7–11 May this year. As usually it is going to be an event for discussing new ideas, plans and solutions for the next Ubuntu release. However this time there will be a special guest talking to the audience, one of the biggest video games publishers – Electronic Arts.
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Flavours and Variants
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Kubuntu’s new financial backers – Blue Systems – have ‘no plans’ to change the way Kubuntu is run or built.
The Kubuntu Community will continue to decide and manage the direction of the KDE-based distro as they have done in the past.
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Kubuntu is the second child in the line of Canonical kings, hence it gets less attention compared to the royal heir and favorite son, Ubuntu. Now, to add to the drama, starting and ending with Precise Pangolin, the company decided it will no longer officially support Kubuntu from its own resources, and it will become a community distro, like the other flavors. This means Kubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin will be the last in-house Ubuntu spin with the KDE desktop.
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Xubuntu 12.04 is the only lighter weight distribution that is getting Long Term Support (LTS) from Canonical. Support for Xubuntu LTS will be for 3 years compared to the life-cycle of 18 months and shorter than the 5 years given to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
Xubuntu uses the XFCE 4.8 desktop which is less resource hungry than Unity or KDE and comes in two flavors, 32 bit and 64 bit. It is also an installable Live distribution and is based on Linux kernel 3.2 series.
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The Raspberry Pi is one of the most eagerly-awaited computers of 2012. With more than 350,000 people on the Raspberry Pi waiting list, it’s an enthusiasts’ machine with mainstream appeal.
The computer provides exceptional value. It’s a $40 computer with a range of intuitive programming tools and the capability of an average PC – browsing the web, running office software or playing HD video. The Pi is also suited to projects as diverse as controlling robots and building an in-car computer.
But in its present form novice computer users – weaned on the simplicity of Windows PCs, smartphones and iPads – may struggle to get to grips with the Raspberry Pi.
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Phones
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Android
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I am encouraged by the the release of ebook readers and their massive popularity. As readers of this blog and listeners to the audio-cast will know, I am not a big fan of TV & Film, infact if it wasn’t for the PS3 and the once a year tradition of Doctor Who, I’d happily throw the insidious device away. Maybe the book will start to gain more ground on the film? You are probably wondering where I am headed with this article, but all will be revealed.
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Has the Apache Software Foundation overextended itself by taking open source projects like OpenOffice and Cloudstack off the hands of proprietary giants while its famed HTTP web server continues losing ground to NGINX?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 12, which streamlines the update process and improves on the numerous developer tools that are now part of the popular open source browser.
If you’re already using Firefox there’s no need to do anything; you’ll be automatically updated later today. If you’d like to give Firefox 12 a try, head over to the Firefox downloads page and grab a copy.
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After taking a second look at Firefox 13, it is time to look at the current aurora version of the Firefox browser. Mozilla plans to introduce many new features in Firefox 14. Some of the features had been announced for previous versions of the browser but were postponed for a variety of reasons.
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Just as the company pledged it would early last year, Mozilla is marching ahead with its rapid release cycle for the Firefox browser. Version 13 of Firefox is out in beta now, and while it is a testing-focused version, it adds a number of notable features. Meanwhile, silent updates–a controversial feature disliked by those who like to tightly manage their own browsers–have arrived in Firefox 12, and Mozilla is taking steps to move people away from Firefox 3.6. Here is more on what to expect in Firefox 13.
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Mozilla is working on a revamp of Firefox to synchronize its various versions — desktop, tablet, phone and Windows 8 Metro — into a single visual style, according to documents posted by members of its user interface (UI) design team.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Michael Meeks is a long-time OpenOffice, now Libre Office, contributor and employee of Novell, now Attachmate.
We caught up with him to get the inside perspective on the massive changes they, and desktop Linux as a whole, have gone through in the past few years.
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The very short form: WPL created a re-implementation of the SAS Language, using the original documentation of SAS and a freebie version for personal and educational use. SAS claimed they thus infringed on copyright etc.
Seems SAS lost big time.
Now you can almost directly compare this case with Oracle v Google. Simply replace SAS Language with JAVA and watch this drama unfold. Note: IANAL but it seems Oracle wouldn’t have a chance in the EU with the current set of arguments used in the US case.
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CMS
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Hardware
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In a 1965 paper, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double approximately every two years. This prediction has proven to be uncannily accurate over the years and has come to be known as Moore’s Law. But it’s not going to hold true forever, is it? Well, it’s believed that like all things good, Moore’s Law too will come to an end one day. The question that remains, though, is when. Noted theoretical (and often theatrical) physicist Michio Kaku feels he has the answer.
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Security
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Censorship
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We’ve just learned that issue 154 of Linux Format, the one with ‘Learn to Hack’ on the cover, was removed from Barnes and Noble bookstores in the US after a complaint was made. We’d like to apologise if you were affected and couldn’t find a copy.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The Pirate Party UK has hosted a proxy (tpb.pirateparty.org.uk), allowing people to connect to the Pirate Bay via Pirate Party servers since the 19th of April 2012. We provided the proxy as a tool for users on networks where the Pirate Bay is blocked through filtering, and in support of our sister party in the Netherlands. It continues to be a legitimate route for those affected by court orders issued to some (but not all) UK ISP’s requiring the site to be blocked. Whilst some providers continue to allow access to the web in an unfiltered manner, others are limiting access to specific parts of the internet.
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