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10.01.12

Links 1/10/2012: September News of Interest

Posted in News Roundup at 7:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The State of Open Source Spectrometry

    For those of you that slept through chemistry in high school, spectrometry (also known as spectroscopy) is the process of measuring the spectrum of light that either passes through, or is reflected off, of an object. As different chemicals and compounds have different spectral emission patterns, the wavelength of the light entering the spectrometer can be used to determine the makeup of the substance being tested.

  • Learning from Diaspora

    As the remaining founders of Diaspora hand the project over to the community, Glyn Moody asks what lessons we can learn from the success and failure of a free software project and considers the importance of thinking about what happens next.

  • FXPAL open source’s DisplayCast
  • Building Blocks for the Modern Web Application

    Planning on building the next Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr? Forget what you know about the LAMP stack, SQL-based databases, and web hosting. The building blocks for the modern web app are independent, shared-nothing, infinitely scaleable, and cloud ready. This is no longer the way of the future, it’s the way of right now.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Accelerates Firefox 18 with IonMonkey

        For better or for worse, the modern web relies on JavaScript. That’s why JavaScript engines are critically important in modern web browsers. For years, browser vendors have competed on JavaScript benchmarks (originally just SunSpider) and apparently they will for years to come.

      • Mozillux 12.09.1 Screenshots
      • Firefox OS Video Demo Released

        Firefox OS is put through its paces in this video showing off browsing the web and photos, as well as phone functionality and other features

      • Mozilla Lays Out Firefox Enterprise 17 Release Plans

        Enterprise users were never really fans of Mozilla’s insanely rapid release cycle for the open source Firefox web browser. So, in order to help out enterprise users, Mozilla launched the ESR (Extended Supported Release) with Firefox 10. That ESR is still maintained with security updates as Mozilla updates the mainline branch currently at Firefox 15.

        Mozilla developer Alex Keybl has now detailed the plans for how Firefox ESR 10 users will migrate (or not) to the next ESR release. The plan is for the next ESR to be based on Firefox 17 which should be out around November 20th.

      • Mozilla Firefox 15 Key Features | Download Firefox For Desktop And Mobile

        The final stable release of Mozilla desktop and Mobile browser version 15 is now available to download. Mozilla Firefox 15 brings several improvements for the desktop and mobile, which will allow you to have a better web browsing experience in desktop and mobile as well. Check the key features and installation instructions of Mozilla Firefox 15 down below.

      • Mozilla previews “command line” in Firefox 16 Beta

        Web developers will be able to drive Firefox from the command line thanks to one of the new features that has appeared in Firefox 16, which has just arrived in the Firefox Beta channel. The Developer Toolbar sits at the bottom of the browser’s window and provides quick, keyboard-driven access to many of the developer features in Firefox.

      • Mozilla Thunderbird 15 Officially Lands in Ubuntu
      • Firefox 15 Officially Lands in Ubuntu
      • Firefox 15 Goes on a Memory Diet

        Although Firefox has managed to stake out a sizable chunk of Web browser market share, it’s long been regarded by many users as something of a memory hog. Firefox aims to put those gluttonous ways behind it in the browser’s latest version. Firefox 15 includes a new memory management system, along with several other new features.

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • PostgreSQL 9.2 works faster and smarter

      The new release of PostgreSQL, version 9.2, has arrived, four months after the appearance of the first beta version. The new release includes read and write performance boosts, index-only scanning, new web-oriented functionality, and support for range data types. As shown in the beta, the new version promises to be much faster than its predecessor primarily thanks to index-only scanning, which allows searches to avoid reading the underlying tables and instead search only indexes. This new feature is used automatically, though there are caveats as to how effective it can be all situations, but where the required data is already indexed, for example in “big data” scenarios, the boost in performance can be huge.

    • Commercial multi-master replication for PostgreSQL

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox Finds the Meaning of Open Source Life with Version 4.2

      In the spirit of full-disclosure, let me first tell you that I love VirtualBox. I use it every day and it is a core component of my workflow and my digital life.

      The new VirtualBox 4.2 release out today is now going to make my life, a bit easier. The new release enables the grouping of VMs, which is a simple, yet great idea. So now on my test box I can group multiple versions of a given Linux distro together for example, instead of scrolling through a (massive) list.

    • Journeying Itinerants Hijack Open Office For Profit
    • Openness is Alive and Well (and Living in Europe)

      The first quarter/half of 2013 will be the most exciting period for Linux Desktop – ever(!?) so far. This has to do mostly because many major distros are going to drop XServer for the shake of Wayland.

      While GTK3 port in Wayland is expected to be complete and stable by 3.8 around in March, some popular applications like Gimp, Libre Office, Firefox, VLC isn’t sure if they make it.

    • Whither now, OpenIndiana?

      Alasdair Lumsden, the project lead of OpenIndiana (OI), resigned from the project a few days ago. Following proper protocol, he announced his resignation in an email to the OI developer mailing list.

      If you do not know what OI is, it is a desktop-cum-server fork of OpenSolaris, which itself is an open source fork of Solaris. For a time, the guts of OpenIndiana was based on that of OpenSolaris, then it was recently changed to that of illumos. And, of course, illumos is a fork of OpenSolaris. Ok, this is the last use of the word fork in this paragraph, hopefully in this article.

  • CMS

    • Badgeville brings gamification to Drupal

      This week, Badgeville announced a partnership with Acquia, the enterprise Drupal integrator, to bring Badgeville gamification to Drupal installations.

      Badgeville uses gaming principles to drive positive user behavior. Peter Guagenti, vice president of products at Acquia, sees this as a logical partnership for his company. “Badgeville’s gamification platform is a natural extension of our Drupal Commons social business software, or any web experience built in Drupal,” he said.

  • Healthcare

    • Moorfields NHS trust deploys open source clinical modules

      ICT team at NHS trust roll out next phase of open source patient record system developed in-house

      Moorfields eye hospital NHS foundation trust has said that it has added three new modules for prescribing, operations notes and correspondence to OpenEyes, its open source (OS) e-patient record system.

      OpenEyes was developed by an in-house team, led by consultation surgeon and former medical director at Moorfields, Bill Aylward. He told Government Computing that the trust needed to replace its existing e-patient record system and decided to develop new software itself because of the lack of a suitable commercial system.

  • Funding

    • Google donates to an Eclipse performance test lab – update

      Google has contributed $20,000 to the Eclipse Foundation for hardware to assist in the task of performance testing the foundation’s integrated development environment (IDE). The extra contribution from Google’s Open Source Programs Office is over and above Google’s membership, and comes after the Eclipse community raised concerns about the faltering performance of Eclipse 4.2 especially when compared to Eclipse 3.8.

    • Google Donates $20,000 to Eclipse Foundation

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

    • Do We Need an Affero Cloud? Nah.

      Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk has argued that the “infrastructure stack” needs an Affero LGPL to prevent the dreaded fragmentation. Do we? I’m not convinced that it’s necessary, desirable, or likely to catch on at all.

      Donnie’s argument is that an Affero LGPL (as opposed to AGPL) would be workable because it would allow businesses add proprietary bits that link to the stack, but be forced to open up their changes to the actual infrastructure stack itself.

    • jQuery dropping GPL from licence
    • Addressing license and source code concerns

      I will not change the license of Mayan EDMS. I will also continue to work on the software as scheduled. There were never plans for Mayan to go closed source or to stop being released under the GPL. Still, I gave the benefit of the doubt regarding the license choice and the opinion of the community echoes mine. My only concerns were for those that were not following the terms of the GPL license and that were infringing on my copyrights. I was not insinuating any type of adverse action against those complying with the GPL license. I understand your concerns regarding Mayan EDMS, and appreciate the fervor with which you have defended it. Rest assured knowing that Mayan EDMS is and will continue to be released under the GPL.

    • Mayan GPL Dispute Examined

      It’s been an interesting few days for the Mayan Electronic Document Management System (EDMS). Mayan’s developer, Roberto Rosario, made quite a stir when he spoke out against forks of his software which he believed to be violating the GPL. Reactions over Roberto’s claims and his resulting actions have been varied, and give interesting insight on the application of the GPL in the real world.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Openness is Alive and Well (and Living in Europe)

      Last week I took something of a trip back through time. The transition began somewhere over the dark Atlantic, on my way to Brussels via Heathrow, when the person sitting next to me struck up a conversation. Improbably, I found myself discussing ODF – the OpenDocument Format – with a former Sun engineer who had followed the ODF–OOXML contest with great interest back in 2005 – 2007. I was sorry to tell him, and he was sorry to hear, that things had not gone so well in the years that followed, and that many of the bright hopes of those that had supported ODF remained to be realized.

    • Digital IPA: The QR-Packing Open Source Beer

      If you’re reading this site, we can safely assume you’re a supporter and user of open source software. If you’re a serious about it, you may even drive an open source car. But are you hardcore enough to drink open source beer?

  • Programming

    • Author Interview: Jan Erik Solem Programming Computer Vision with Python
    • Crack 0.7 Released

      After the release of version 0.6.1 early this year, we were hoping that our next release would be 1.0. Unfortunately, implementing compiled module caching (a featured we deemed critical for 1.0) proved to be more difficult than expected, and we’ve ended up doing several big coding sprints interspersed with lots of other smaller scale improvements without ever quite making it happen.

    • A Brief Tour of the Go Standard Library
    • Python 3.3.0 Released 130
    • Review: Manjaro Linux 0.8.0 Xfce

      I was busy at home for the last two weeks with many people coming and going; plus, I never had any other reason to post much else. Well, now I’m into the last few days of my break at home before getting back on campus and there haven’t been as many people coming and going, so I’ve gotten some time to do a review. On DistroWatch, I read of the release of Manjaro Linux 0.8.0, and while I initially didn’t think about it further, I saw quite a few articles reviewing it and other press about it, which convinced me that I should review it as well. That is what I’m doing now.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • HTML5 UI editor Maqetta gets a visual makeover

      The Maqetta HTML5 user interface (UI) designer has been given a visual styling makeover for the new Release 7. The Dojo Foundation-hosted project offers an IDE-styled environment for the creation of HTML5 UIs, whether for the desktop or for mobile devices. Release 7′s makeover also includes new collapsible palettes of elements on the left and right side of the in-work user interface design, a streamlined HTML file creation interface and redesigned toolbar. The update comes with a number of performance improvements in both the page editor and the preview-in-browser mode, which now incorporates Dojo’s Zazl for server-side rendering.

    • The Document Foundation joins OASIS standards organisation

      The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced that it has joined OASIS (Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), the international standards development consortium which focusses on ebusiness and web service standards, as a Contributor. According to Document Foundation director Italo Vignoli, TDF will primarily focus its efforts on the Technical Committees for the Open Document Format (ODF), representing the open source productivity suite LibreOffice which it sponsors and governs.

Leftovers

  • 60% of the apps on the Apple App Store have never been downloaded

    Looking at the Apple iPhone App Store, if I spend 30 seconds reading about each App to decide whether I wanted it or not, it would take me 150,000 minutes, or 2,500 hours or 104.17 days to go through them all.

  • Finance

    • A Rare Look at Why the Government Won’t Fight Wall Street

      The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption. People on the outside have speculated and come up with dozens of possible reasons, some plausible, some tending toward the conspiratorial – but there have been very few who’ve come at the issue from the inside.

  • Censorship

    • Apple Feels Reporting Drone Strikes ‘Objectionable And Crude’ And Rejects App

      It seems that today you can’t spit in the wind without hitting a story about some US drone killing a bunch of people in a country somewhere overseas. Every known drone strike is accompanied by news reports of the location and the number of people killed. Yet, even with all these stories about drone strikes, it can a daunting task for those interested in following them to keep up with them all. So what is a drone enthusiast, or someone just appalled by the frequency of the strikes, to do?

  • Copyrights

    • Former Copyright Boss: New Technology Should Be Presumed Illegal Until Congress Says Otherwise

      One of the reasons why we live in such an innovative society is that we’ve (for the most part) enabled a permissionless innovation society — one in which innovators no longer have to go through gatekeepers in order to bring innovation to market. This is a hugely valuable thing, and it’s why we get concerned about laws that further extend permission culture. However, according to the former Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, under copyright law, any new technology should have to apply to Congress for approval and a review to make sure they don’t upset the apple cart of copyright, before they’re allowed to exist. I’m not joking. Mr. Oman, who was the Register of Copyright from 1985 to 1993 and was heavily involved in a variety of copyright issues, has filed an amicus brief in the Aereo case (pdf).

    • Feds Charge Activist with 13 Felonies for Rogue Downloading of Academic Articles

      Federal prosectors added nine new felony counts against well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz, who was charged last year for allegedly breaching hacking laws by downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database via an open connection at MIT.

      Swartz, the 25-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. He surrendered in July 2011, remains free on bond and faces dozens of years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted.

    • Letting the baby dance

      WHEN Stephanie Lenz in Pennsylvania put a video on YouTube of her 18-month-old son bopping to Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy” she did not expect a lawsuit. But four months and 28 views later, the musician’s recording company, Universal, howled that the 29-second “performance” infringed its copyright and demanded that YouTube take it down.

      That was in 2007. Since then computers, smartphones and the internet have made copyright law look even more obsolete. But the response so far has been not to update the laws but to widen their scope and stiffen the penalties. In January websites including Wikipedia briefly shut down in protest against tough anti-piracy laws promoted by the entertainment industry in America and elsewhere.

    • Why Johnny can’t stream: How video copyright went insane

      Suppose I could offer you a choice of two technologies for watching TV online. Behind Door Number One sits a free-to-watch service that uses off-the-shelf technology and that buffers just enough of each show to put the live stream on the Internet. Behind Door Number Two lies a subscription service that requires custom-designed hardware and makes dozens of copies of each show. Which sounds easier to build—and to use? More importantly, which is more likely to be legal?

09.30.12

Links 30/9/2012: Slackware 14.0 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 11:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 9 things to consider while migrating from Windows to Linux

    1. Linux is not windows

  • Linux Event TV: One-on-One with Open Source Visionaries

    Linux Foundation events are studded with Linux and open source community leaders, as well as some eccentric personalities. What better place than one of these events to sit down and talk to the people who are making innovation happen in software development and cloud computing?

    We took advantage of this unique opportunity at LinuxCon North America where we were able to talk to folks like Amir Michael of Facebook and the OpenCompute project; Josh Berkus with PostgreSQL; Sam Ramji, former Microsoft executive and today VP at Apigee; Erica Brescia, CEO at BitRock; and Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier of CloudStack, among others. We asked each of these insightful people what they’re working on, what inspires them about Linux and open source software, and to which technologies or trends they’re paying particular attention.

  • The Linux Setup – Emmanuel Revah, Systems Administrator/Web Developer
  • Poll: Which Linux board would you use to create your next project?

    Recently, we compared Raspberry Pi, Allwinner and CuBox Linux hardware boards. Then, some folks from our open source community shared with us their experiences with Raspberry Pi and Makey Makey. There is much enthusiasm over turning ordinary items into new inventions and doing mundane tasks in completely new ways.

  • $99 Parallella supercomputer appears on Kickstarter

    The launch of the Raspberry Pi has been a huge success story, and promises to get cheap computers into the hands of kids and hobbyists around the world. But it has also had another effect–it has inspired others to look into alternative methods of developing cheap computing platforms.

    One company taking inspiration from the Raspberry Pi Foundation is Adapteva, which focuses on semiconductor technology and has developed a very efficient multicore microprocessor architecture. Now they intend to use that architecture to offer up a $99 supercomputer with the help of Kickstarter.

  • Parallella, A $99 Supercomputer Running Ubuntu

    The Parallella is a new pocket sized computer based on the Epiphany multicore chips developed by semiconductor start-up Adapteva.

  • The automotive industry accelerates its Linux commitment

    The automotive industry took a major step forward in its commitment to open source yesterday, as announced by the Linux Foundation. The Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup (AGL) is a new group that will facilitate industry collaboration for Linux development.

    Major automotive companies like Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan and Toyota are some of the first carmakers to participate in AGL. Other members include Aisin AW, DENSO Corporation, Feuerlabs, Fujitsu, HARMAN, Intel, NEC, NVIDIA, Reaktor, Renesas, Samsung, Symbio, Texas Instruments Incorporated, and Tieto.

  • Linux Nonsense

    To sound this clever yourself, check out the aptly named nonsense. In essence, nonsense is a clever generator of, well, nonsense. Just extract the archive bundle into a directory of your choosing and you are ready to go. No compiling and no nonsense (pardon the circular reference). Nonsense is a Perl script that works with a collection of templates. If you look in the directory you just created, you’ll see an executable file called nonsense and a number of data files as well as a few HTML templates.

  • Desktop

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • I still need Xfce’s Gigolo, even in GNOME

      I get why they called it Gigolo. It’s the Xfce utility that “mounts anything without complaining.”

      The things it mounts include ftp and sftp over the network, WebDAV and Windows shares. I’d rather not use it at all, but in Xfce’s Thunar file manager, you still need Gigolo to access these remote filesystems.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • Hanthana 17 Screenshots
    • blackPanther OS – A nice-looking distribution

      This distribution we chose to show you today sure is an interesting combination. According to their Distrowatch page, it’s a combination of features from Mandriva, on which is based, Fedora and Ubuntu, and can be used at school, work or home. Are these rather bold statements true? Stay tuned to find out. You don’t need to have any special knowledge, just 10 minutes of your time is all we’re asking. If you have questions on how to try blackPanther or you already tried it and have an opinion, please visit our linux forums and share!

    • Video Review: Voyager 12.04

      After reading a comprehensive review at dedoimedo.com on the latest release of Voyager 12.04 I decided to do a short video review of this Linux OS Distribution. I chose to install this distribution to my hard drive. I have always been a great fan of Xubuntu, so I was excited to see what Voyager would look like and compare it’s performance to Xubuntu.

    • Finnix Linux 105 Review – Command Line to the Rescue

      Finnix is a live CD rescue distro, and it’s one for the CLI-junkies because it doesn’t come equipped with a desktop.

    • 5 highly rated Linux OS distributions

      First released in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, Linux is an open-source operating system derived from the UNIX OS. The philosophy of such open-source operating systems is that they are community-driven; Linux evolves to meet the demands and wishes of its users. There are many great Linux distributions to choose from, each boasting their own advantages and niches. Some designed to be very user-friendly, others intended to give power users greater control over their systems. Here are five of the most highly rated Linux distributions on offer today.

    • Epidemic 4.0 Screenshots

    • New Releases

      • Slackware 14.0 is Finally Here

        Slackware 14.0 is has been released. A post on slackware.com said, “the long wait is finally over and a new stable release of Slackware has arrived!” The official announcement said, “We are sure you’ll enjoy the many improvements.”

      • Superb Mini Server 2.0.0 Is Based on Slackware 14

        The developers behind the Superb Mini Server (SMS) Linux server operating system proudly announced earlier today, September 18th, the immediate availability for download of the Superb Mini Server 2.0.0 release.

    • Gentoo Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Multiseat computing can feed a multitude

          The ancient alchemists tried to turn iron into gold. While they didn’t succeed, they did leave us with a wonderful metaphor. Last week I experienced something akin to alchemy when I installed Fedora 17 onto a donated Dell Dimension 3000 tower computer.

          I then created two extra users for this computer, grabbed some spare USB keyboards and USB mice, and plugged an extra keyboard and mouse into each of two Plugable multiseat devices (which sell for $65 each). With bated breath, I plugged each Plugable device into a USB port on that free computer. Voila! Like magic, a computer that had no value to someone else suddenly turned into a fully-functioning three-seat computer.

        • Fedora 18 Alpha out now!

          Get your first taste of the Spherical Cow, and help test the new features expected to come to Fedora 18, such as a new Hot Spot feature and updated Samba

        • Fedora 18 Alpha KDE Live CD Screenshot Tour

          The Alpha release of the upcoming Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) Linux operating system has been announced earlier today, September 18th, featuring KDE 4.9.

    • Debian Family

      • My Raspberry Pi experience with Debian-based Linux distribution Occidentalis

        It’s an ominous name for an ominous fruit: the black raspberry. As the owner of a new Raspberry Pi, I realized that I was going to have to, at some point, open the box and do something with it.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Open Week 2012: 24th – 26th October

            Canonical announced today, September 18th, that the Ubuntu Open Week for Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) will take place between 24th and 26th October, 2012, on the usual Ubuntu IRC channel, #ubuntu-classroom.

          • Canonical Ties Ubuntu Server Development to OpenStack

            Along with RedHat, Rackspace and many others, Canonical has been steadily marrying its cloud strategy to the open source OpenStack platform. In February of last year, we discussed how Canonical was deepening its relationship with OpenStack, and it has kept doing so. Now, in a new blog post, Canonical’s Mark Baker notes that Canonical has released the Cloud Archive for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server, an online software repository from which administrators can download the latest versions of OpenStack, for use with the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu.

          • Everpad Integrates Evernote With Ubuntu Unity (AppIndicator, Lens)
          • New Cinnamon 1.6 Release Adds 2D Session, New Applets And More Customization Options

            Cinnamon, the GNOME Shell fork used by default in Linux Mint 13 (Cinnamon Edition), has reached version 1.6, getting many new features: a new 2D session, workspace OSD, new applets and lots more!

          • Multi-Tasking in Ubuntu

            Ubuntu 12.04 includes a desktop interface that is a strong departure from previous versions. One of the most striking differences upon logging into the system is the launcher. The launcher is a vertical bar that, by default, resides along the left side of the screen. It is similar to the dock in Mac OS X and aims to make your user experience more efficient and intuitive.

          • Ubuntu 11.04 reaching end of life

            Canonical has reminded folks that Ubuntu 11.04 will no longer be supported after October 28th, 18 months after its launch

          • Goodbye Ubuntu 11.04

            Dear Ubuntu users, the time has come to say goodbye to the Natty Narwhal release of the popular Ubuntu operating system, Ubuntu 11.04, as on October 28th it will reach end of life.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi 2.1.0 Screenshots
            • Pear Linux 5 review

              Pear Linux is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu, but unlike its parent distribution, which uses the Unity desktop interface, Pear Linux features a modified GNOME Shell called Pear Shell decked out to look like a MacOS X desktop. Not that it is a succeeded, but it is good attempt. Apple has nothing to worry about. The latest edition is Pear Linux 5. Code-named Sunsprite, it is based on Ubuntu 12.04, using (Linux) kernel 3.2.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Adapteva announces Raspberry Pi competitor

      Semiconductor start-up Adapteva has announced plans to create an open-source experimentation board with a massive amount of parallel processing power, and it’s found a novel way to raise the funds it needs: Kickstarter.

    • Phones

      • Open webOS 1.0 lands 28

        Following the roadmap laid out back in January, HP has delivered Open webOS 1.0 to the masses as planned. Last month saw the release of two betas, one for desktop Linux and the other for assorted devices thanks to OpenEmbedded integration, and today we’re seeing the finalized versions of each. Improving on the last go around, the OpenEmbedded version (Open webOS OE) now has a user interface to match the the Linux-style Open webOS Desktop, which itself has the same user interface as webOS 3.0 on the HP TouchPad.

      • Tizen 2.0 Alpha SDK With Source-Code Released

        An alpha release of the Tizen 2.0 SDK with source-code was released this week.

      • Android

        • 10 Best Android apps this week

          The flow of notable new Android apps quietened down a bit on the Google Play store this week, which is why this post has dropped down to a list of 10 rather than 20 – see the note at the bottom for a bit more on that.

        • Android control code issue affects almost all manufacturers

          An Android control code vulnerability originally reported as a Samsung problem in fact appears to affect most smartphones and UMTS tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich (version 4.0.x) or earlier versions of Android. Google updated the dialling software code in version 4.1.1 so that control codes are no longer executed automatically.

        • Hacking for Fun: Programming a Wearable Android Device

          A look at Recon Instruments’ MOD Live Heads-Up Display and the ease of creating and programming useful, on-person computing devices.

          If you had the chance to watch (or were even one of the lucky attendees at) the Google I/O 2012 opening keynote, you may recall the exciting moment when Sergey Brin proclaimed the arrival of the Google Glass prototypes to the attendees. Alas, Glass prototype pre-orders cost a cool $1,500 for some future delivery date. This led many developers, including me, to reassess their desire to build an Android-centric, HUD-based application.

        • Apple’s Wozniak Hopes IPhone Photos Beat His Samsung Galaxy’s
        • Android Powered Desktop Announced By Motorola Mobility

          Motorola Mobility has just launched a fairly interesting Android powered computer over in China that hosts a ton of different home entertainment options. The “HMC3260″ boasts of a 18.5 inch LED touchscreen that will be able to play TV shows, movies, games, browse the web, and with it being powered by Android, it will be able to run Android apps as well. Motorola had apparently partnered up with a cloud service provider called WASU to load the Android computer up with content.

Free Software/Open Source

  • The new software hygiene: Declare a license or risk losing participation

    I had the privilege of working with David Tilbrook almost 25 years ago. He was the first person with whom I ever worked that clearly articulated proper software construction discipline for collaborative endeavours and captured a summary of it under the title, Washing Behind Your Ears: Principles of Software Hygiene.

    David articulated these practices pre-World Wide Web. We weren’t yet living in a world where the Web had so completely removed the friction of time and space from sharing and collaborating on software that even the early Internet enabled.

  • FTL Debuts on Linux, Joins Diaspora In Top-Tier Space Sims

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox’s birthday present to us: Teaching tech titans about DIY upstarts

        As mainstream users came to equate Internet Explorer’s logo with the Web, Microsoft worked to lock in its advantage with increasingly proprietary technology like ActiveX. It surely would have done so, too, but for the seemingly futile Mozilla browser, née Firefox. Born in the ashes of Netscape’s failed browser business 10 years ago this month as Phoenix, Firefox 1.0 is arguably the most important technology developed in the last 50 years.

      • Introducing the 2012 Mozilla Festival: making, freedom and the web

        This year’s Mozilla Festival will gather more than 800 passionate people with diverse backgrounds and skill-sets. The goal: push the frontiers of the open web, learn together, and make things that can change the world.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Joomla 3.0: Major version jump for the open source CMS

      The Joomla developers have released version 3.0 of their open source CMS. The major version jump is justified as Joomla 3.0 offers many new features along with standard templates for the web site and administration interface that comply with the responsive web design guidelines, producing good results on large screens as well as on mobile devices. The basic Joomla platform was updated to version 12.2 and the web-based install has been reduced to three steps and is now simpler to use. It also includes several sets of sample data that are now available during installation.

  • Healthcare

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • 70,000 Transactions Per Second With NGINX

        It is good to have your architectural decisions validated by someone else, even better when that validation blows you out of the water. If you’ve chosen to go with NGINX for your load balancing needs, give yourself a pat on the back. WordPress.com made the same decision, and is now pushing 70,000 transactions per second and over 15 GBs through their NGINX load balancers, as explained by a guest post on High Scalability by Barry Abrahamson from Automattic.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry (September 2012)

      To get announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html). You can use the url http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

  • Project Releases

    • PHPUnit 3.7 and related tools arrive

      Developer Sebastian Bergmann has released new versions of his PHPUnit utility and related tools. The open source unit testing framework for PHP has been updated to version 3.7.0, while the PHP_CodeCoverage, PHPUnit_MockObject and DbUnit components were made available as version 1.2.0.

    • Xen 4.2 Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Tears of Steel: Fourth Official Blender Movie Released!

      Blender movies have always amazed us all with its interesting little stories and sophisticated visual graphics. While Elephants Dream was of sci-fi kind with mind-bending ideas and graphics, Bug Buck Bunny was a light-hearted comedy. The third one, Sintel, also had splendid graphics to back-up its unique storyline (watch all the official Blender movies till date). Tears of Steel is different though. It is not a full-fledged end-to-end animation movie per se like its predecessors. Tears of Steel is more like a normal movie with impressive visual effects.

    • Coding for good: Highlights from the open source humanitarian movement
    • World’s first Arduino flashlight ships soon

      Following a highly successful Kickstarter project and over a year of development, HexBright, billed by its creator as the “world’s first open source Arduino flashlight,” is now in production with initial shipments planned for December.

    • Using open source for disaster response planning

      Peak hurricane season is always a reminder that natural disasters are never easy to handle. If there’s anything we can take away from them it’s that planning and preparedness can save the lives of those risk. The World Bank and OpenGeo find themselves at the unique cross section of disaster management and enabling technology. OpenGeo’s software is built to share information on on the web, which is a critical component of any disaster management plan. Various implementations of our software have been used to facilitate strategic disaster management planning.

    • Creative Commons applied to government, business, and journalism

      For people wanting to learn about Creative Commons and its application in different sectors, there is a sea of materials available online. In particular, Creative Commons international affiliates create a huge number of educational resources that cross language and cultural boundaries.

      A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my work sorting through some of these resources to identify some of the best, focusing on Creative Commons license use for public sector information, for publishing content on a variety of digital platforms, and for generating revenue. As promised, today I’ll highlight some of the resources I’ve discovered.

    • Free books and reports on open innovation, co-creation, and crowdsourcing
    • Coding for good: Highlights from the open source humanitarian movement

      HFOSS, Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software, is a movement inspired first by the December 2004 Asian tsunami, and then by other humanitarian needs in the health, civic, finance and academic sectors (especially for women and people of color).

    • Open Data

      • Open source music-making lab resonates in the Congo

        In July this year, two UNC-Chapel Hill professors trained 16 motivated Congolese students in the art of beat making. They called their group The Congo Beat Making Lab and collaborated with Yole!Africa to strengthen a larger goal they all share: to connect people (including musicians) around the world.

        Apple Juice Kid (professor, producer, DJ, and drummer) and Pierce Freelon (professor and MC), developed the Beat Making Lab curriculum at UNC-Chapel Hill to connect students with music and students with students. They took this curriculum to Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo and the results were remarkable—this short documentary features a full song and video the group produced using free, open source music-making software.

      • Open data: Is there a business case?

        It’s very easy to ascertain that ‘open is good’, but is there a clear business case for opening up your data? That’s been a key question at the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, and not one with easy answers.

      • Humble Indie Bundle 6 Brings Torchlight To Linux, Ubuntu
      • Humble Indie Bundle 6 has been presented

    • Open Hardware

      • LinuxCon: Open hardware for open hardware

        Open hardware platforms like the Arduino have turned device development into a hobbyist enterprise in recent years, but the $20 price tag of a microcontroller board seems a lot less tantalizing when one adds in the costs of testing and debugging it. At LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego, David Anders addressed this issue and offered some guidance on finding and selecting tools for open hardware development, the majority of which are open hardware themselves.

  • Programming

    • Announcing My New Powered-by-Perl Projects

      While Onyx Neon still occupies a lot of my attention, I’ve been working with a local company called Big Blue Marble to develop small web-based businesses. This has taken me through a crash course in things like search engine optimization and statistics that I hadn’t figured I’d ever need to know.

      (Half the fun of small business is realizing that there’s something you should have started doing months ago, that no one available has any experience with it, and that one of you has a week to get to a basic level of competence with it before you move on to the next crisis. The other half is realizing that the next time you tackle a problem like this, you’ll be that much better at it.)

    • JSR 310′s Date and Time API added to JDK 8

      JSR 310, the long-running Java Specification Request for a date and time API to replace the existing complex and hard to work with date and time support, has been added to the feature list for OpenJDK 8 and Java 8. Expected to arrived in January 2013′s milestone 6 release, the inclusion of JSR310 in Java 8 is the result of work done over the summer to simplify and refine the API so that it could be included.

    • Slashdot, SourceForge, FreeCode sold to jobs site company

      Slashdot has been sold again. Dice Holdings, the company behind the Dice.com career site, announced today that it had purchased Slashdot, as well as the SourceForge and FreeCode websites, from Geeknet for $20 million in cash. According to a statement from Geeknet—the company formerly known as SourceForge, VA Software, and VA Linux—the sale price was approximately equal to what the three sites have brought in over the last year.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Five major stardards organizations speak out

      Earlier this month, the IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society, and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) signed a joint agreement to affirm and adhere to a set of principles that establish what they call The Modern Paradigm for Standards.

      For those who have lived in the technical standards world, you will find nothing overtly revolutionary in the Paradigm affirmed by these leading standards development organizations (SDOs). Indeed, the principles appear almost boilerplate from prior descriptions of voluntary, industry standards.

    • W3C presents draft of browser Web Cryptography API

      The W3C web standards consortium has presented a first Public Working Draft for integrating a Web Cryptography API into browsers. The JavaScript API will provide features such as hashing, key generation and verification, as well as encryption and decryption. For example, it will enable web applications to check a user’s identity in more secure ways than are currently possible between browsers and HTTP servers.

Leftovers

  • Buford Krispy Kreme to Celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day

    Shiver me timbers! If it be doughnuts ye be craving, head to yon Buford Krispy Kreme on Sept. 19 and jabber like a pirate.
    Krispy Kreme is celebrating the international Talk Like a Pirate Day by giving away a free doughnut to anyone who comes into the store and talks like a pirate. Anyone who dresses in full pirate regalia will get a dozen free doughnuts.

  • Finance

    • Still No Position Limits on Speculation for Goldman Sachs

      Two Associations (the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association) sued the CFTC stating that position limits on the number of contracts would damage their business. A federal judge ruled against the CFTC.

      It is passing strange that those who brought down the financial system in 2008 still cannot see why they should be regulated so that another crisis will be averted.

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Patdown Assault Trauma Syndrome: fear, shaking, sleeplessness, nightmares, and flashbacks

      As one reads the letters from victims of TSA patdowns released last week, strong patterns emerge. Nearly every letter uses one of these turns of phrase: demeaning, degrading, dehumanizing, humiliating, violated, traumatized, sexually assaulted.

    • Don’t Think Different: Apple Adds Straitjacket Mode to iOS

      Business iPad users beware. Your halcyon days of loading whatever the heck you want onto your tablet may be coming to an end.

      Apple is set to introduce a couple of new features that will give corporate IT new ways to lock down the iOS 6 operating system, which powers the iPad and the iPhone, according to Zenprise, a mobile device management company that was briefed on the features by Apple.

09.28.12

Links 28/9/2012: GeeXboX 3.0, Distros Screenshots

Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • The Open Source Technology Behind Every Tweet

    SAN DIEGO. Twitter has become one of the most pervasive forms of real time social media interactions in recent years and it’s largely powered by open source technology. That’s the message coming that Chris Aniszcyzyk, the open source manager at Twitter, delivered today at the LinuxCon conference.

    Twitter’s infrastructure runs on open source technology using the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and the Scala programming language. Aniszcyzyk noted that Twitter was first built with the open source Ruby on Rails framework, but ended up moving away from Rails for performance reasons.

  • Diaspora’s move to community not the end

    Just over two years after their now-famous Kickstarter fundraiser that generated ten times the amount of funds they were seeking, the founders of Diaspora have announced they will shifting control of the project to the Diaspora community.

    Diaspora is one of the flashy success stories of the social media age. Conceived by four NYU students as an open source, distributed answer to Facebook, the project received a lot of media and hacker attention in 2010, just as the apex of concern for Facebook’s data privacy policies was being reached.

  • Diaspora Is Now Community Property: ‘It Was Never Supposed to Be a Startup’
  • Is Twitter open source-washing its image?

    Twitter seems to have a somewhat cynical approach on how to treat developers these days. The news that Twitter is joining the Linux Foundation comes just days after the microblogging company angered many in its development community with tighter restrictions on its APIs.

    The timing for joining the Linux Foundation seems rather suspect–observers have already called Twitter on trying to spin the negative response it received when the company announced the changes to version 1.1 of the Twitter API on August 16.

  • MapBox Aims For Open Source, Digital Map Revolution

    “What a crazy week,” said Eric Gundersen, CEO of MapBox, a cloud-based digital map publishing company, in an interview with TPM.

    Gundersen’s point is well taken, given his small 25-person startup, based in Washington, D.C., just won a $575,000 grant from the journalism innovation nonprofit the Knight Foundation.

  • Events

    • Open Source in Action: LinuxCon 2012

      I participated in a panel discussion at LinuxCon today with other journalists who cover Linux and open source goings-on, including our own Alex Williams. One of the questions that was asked was “What was the most important story for you this week?”

      The answers from my peer journalists were interesting, and reflect the diversity in interest (and beats) between us all. From Google’s admission to using — and paying for support for — Ubuntu on the desktop, to Linus’s revelation of a Linux 4.0 release within the next couple of years, the things that piqued our various interests covered the spectrum of what happened this week.

    • Linux Australia needs the LCA

      The Australian national Linux conference appears to be becoming a victim of its own success, with no team putting up a bid to host the event in 2014.

      But the sponsor, Linux Australia, has no choice but to keep finding an organising team – the conference serves as its main source of funds. Else, it would not be able to spread its wings as it has.

    • How Do You Define Open Source?

      It’s not as easy a question as you might think. For me, I used to (perhaps naively) believe that any license approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is open source. Those licenses are all supposed to conform to the Open Source Definition.

      Speaking at the LinuxCon conference, Red Hat lawyer Richard Fontana led an awesome session that really illuminated by view of the whole discussion.

    • LinuxCon 2012: OpenStack and Open Clouds
    • LinuxCon and the Promise of CloudOpen

      The fourth annual LinuxCon conference is getting underway this week here in Sunny San Diego. Over the last four years, LinuxCon USA has emerged as one of the preeminent Linux events on Earth, bringing together the best and brightest in a weeklong Linux love-in.

      LinuxCon filled the gap that was left behind after the collapse of LinuxWorld (remember that show?) as a vastly superior, technology focused show. The 2012 event by all indications will be another epic bonanza for Linux aficionados. While there have always been co-located conferences at LinuxCon, this year the Linux Foundation is co-locating its newest conference CloudOpen with LinuxCon.

    • ApacheCon Europe 2012 details announced

      The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the speaker lineup and program for Apache Con Europe 2012 which is taking place 5 – 8 November at the Rhein-Neckar Arena in Sinsheim, Germany. According to the ASF, the conference is mostly targeted at “technologists currently developing Apache-based solutions, as well as those interested in committing code to an Apache project, contributing to the Apache Incubator, or enhancing their Open Source products and community practices.”

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome for Android Is More Sticky Than Slick

        Pitched as a browser for searching and browsing fast, with accelerated page loading, adjectives like “quick” and “speed” gave me the impression I was in for a Web-based speed record. That was not to be the case. I experienced sticky page scrolling at the image-heavy CNN website compared to scrolling on the stock browser.

    • Mozilla

      • Ubuntu One Added to Thunderbird 15 Filelink

        Mozilla officially released the Mozilla Thunderbird 15.0 email and RSS client to the world on August 28th, 2012, bringing a few interesting new features.

      • Mozilla Delivers Beta of Its Persona Streamlined Sign-In Project

        The Mozilla Foundation is out with a public beta of Persona, a browser-centric system for logging in to online sites that could do away with managing lots of usernames and passwords. Mozilla has been working with the idea of Personas online for a long time, ranging from schemes to customize browser skins and the like to streamlining online log-in processes. Mozilla claims that the new public beta can do a lot to simplify online identities.

      • Firefox 15 Accelerates Browsing for Desktop, Phones and Tablets

        Mozilla has been waging a multi-year battle against memory bloat in its open source Firefox web browser. With today’s Firefox 15 release, Mozilla is firing a major salvo in that battle, claiming a reduction in memory usage.

        The memory reduction comes by way of plugging memory links in the way that third party add-ons consume memory.

        In a blog post detailing the memory fix, Mozilla developers estimated that the memory improvement could be as much as a 4.8x improvement over the previous Firefox 14 release.

      • Mozilla and National Science Foundation seek developers to build “apps from the future”

        Today, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation announced eight winning ideas that offer a glimpse of what the internet of the future might look like. Next up: invite developers everywhere to make these and other big ideas a reality.

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • Open source MongoDB gets richer query commands

      In an effort to improve how MongoDB supplies its data to external applications, MongoDB keeper 10gen has extended the open source data store’s query language, providing developers with more sophisticated ways to extract and transform data.

    • Updates for PostgreSQL 9.1 and 9.2 fix critical bugs

      The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released updates to the 9.2.x and 9.1.x branches of its open source relational database. According to the project’s developers, these updates fix two critical bugs that could lead to potential data corruption and which were accidentally introduced “as a side effect of performance optimisations and new features, mainly Unlogged Tables”.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle CIO: Linux is Fundamental

      Oracle CIO Mark Sunday has a lot of users he needs to support and he’s using Linux to do it. The tech leader took the stage at the LinuxCon conference this morning to discuss how Oracle uses and develops Linux.

      “Linux is our platform of choice across a wide variety of services,” Sunday said. “It is how we build products and how we provide services to our customers.”

      Oracle is a massive organization of over 125,000 employees spread across 49 countries and according to Sunday, they all depend on Linux. Linux is the core technology that powers Oracle’s core collaboration, including email and its primary systems.

    • Oracle woos open sourcers with free Java web framework
    • Oracle Claims MySQL IS Safe With Them

      If the accusation Oracle is incrementally withdrawing MySQL from open source is FUD, as an Oracle VP claimed this week, then it’s time for Oracle to take concrete steps to prove ‘open’ is their chosen path.

    • Larry couldn’t, but we can: Upstart Waratek touts cloudy Java love

      A startup has pledged to deliver for Java what the brains of Larry Ellison’s mighty Oracle and the entire Java community cannot: cloud scalability – now.

      It also hopes to spread the love to Java-hating sysadmins.

      Waratek is planning the general release of its Cloud VM for Java at JavaOne next week. The Cloud VM product is a virtualisation engine built by Waratek to deliver multi-tenancy and elasticity for Java apps. It will also release APIs that let you build for Cloud VM for Java at the event.

    • Oracle offers tiny tools for pint-sized Java devices

      Oracle has announced two new Java products for embedded systems, with the aim of getting the object-oriented language running on as wide a range of devices as possible, including ones with very limited resources.

      Tuesday’s new addition to the database giant’s Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) lineup, Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2 shrinks Java’s footprint down to levels that are almost unthinkable in the modern PC era. Derived from the version of Java ME that runs on feature phones, it supports devices with ARM processors and as little as 130KB RAM and 350KB ROM.

  • CMS

    • Drupal at Warp Speed

      Doesn’t it give you a warm feeling when you’re asked to do a week’s work in twelve hours or less? It should. It should give you a warmer feeling when you can do it in far less time. Give your C-Level suitors this one in under an hour and they’ll think you’re as magical as Mr. Scott aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. Mr. Scott often surprised the always demanding Captain Kirk with his ability to fix just about anything within the very tight time constraints placed on him. Instead of dilithium crystals and altered phaser electronics, you’ll have to work with Ubuntu and Drupal.

    • WordPress for Android updated with all-new stats

      Support for featured images and all-new stats are the most notable features in the recent 2.2 release of the WordPress for Android mobile application. This new version now lets users set Featured Images from directly within the app; previously this could only be done using the web interface. After adding an image to the post, users can enable this option by tapping on it and selecting “Use as featured image”; the developers note that this requires WordPress 3.4.1 or later.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.5 Through 4.8 For AMD’s Bulldozer

      While the new AMD Trinity APUs are what’s exciting and being benchmarked at the moment, here are some updated compiler tests from earlier this month on an AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer system.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • A tour through open source creative tools
    • Keep calm and innersource on

      Winston Churchill was known as a charismatic leader and statesman, able to rally his country to great things when they needed it most. He was also fond of the occasional salty outburst when needed—I won’t repeat one of his more famous ones here, except to paraphrase it a bit…

    • Is open source democratic?

      In his recent post, Glyn Moody asks an important question: “Can open source be democratic?” He describes how free software emerged as a distributed, bottom-up system of writing code. The central defining aspects of that culture are a uniquely open process not just of programming but also of its organization, and a close relationship between programmers and users. Effectively, users and programmers together were both contributors, they collaborated on the project. Glyn goes on to explain how this community effort changed over time to become more institutionalized, more corporate and more dull—”becoming a ‘Firefox Affiliate’, hardly something that sets the pulse racing.” Ordinary users no longer play an important part in open source projects.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open source hardware answers the problem of mobile device obsolescence

        Perhaps you read my, “No iOS 6 for my original iPad? Now, I’m an Angry Bird” post that describes, in detail, my irritation with Apple for no longer supporting my iPad 1. If you haven’t, you should so that you’ll understand this post. Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you to finish before I continue.

        Now, that you’re back, I’ve come up with a solution to this overt obsolescence dilemma facing tens of millions of disappointed customers–not only from Apple but from other companies as well. Just read the comments from the original post and you’ll see that we all face this, “Buy our newest stuff” marketing ploy regardless of your device source.

  • Programming

    • Should we require that open source is developed openly?

      Of course I went out to re-read both the open source and free software definitions so I could prove him wrong…but I can’t. He is right, the definitions of both free software and open source software say nothing about being developed in the open, but as those of you who have attended one of my workshops (or read my book) know, I disagree.

    • Python Development on Linux and Why You Should Too
    • Open source Java projects: GitHub

      If you’ve been curious about GitHub then this short tutorial in the Open source Java projects series is for you. Get an overview of the source code repository that has changed the way that many developers work, both individually and collaboratively. Then try GitHub for yourself, using common Git commands to branch and commit your own open source project.

    • Open Source Programs Aim to Meet Global Demand for Developers

      I recently wrote that to master technology, you must master software. It is software that differentiates one device or computing experience from another. And since nearly all software today is built using open source projects and code, knowing how to collaborate and contribute to an open development community is a requirement for any developer or company regardless of industry.

    • Google launches its third junior Code-in event

      Stephanie Taylor from Google’s Open Source Programs Office has announced the launch of the company’s third Code-in contest for pre-university students. The annual event is open to students aged 13 to 17 from around the world and is designed to introduce them to open source software development.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • HTML5 to be completed by the end of 2014

      The chairs of the W3C’s HTML Working Group have presented a plan to approve a stable HTML5 specification before the end of 2014. The plan proposes to formally define a stable set of features as HTML 5.0, but when the HTML Working Group will approve this plan is as yet unknown. Features for which no stable specification is available by then could be moved to an extended “HTML 5.1″ set of features that could be completed by 2016.

Leftovers

Links 28/9/2012: NVIDIA 304.51 Linux Graphics Driver, ZaReason Tablet

Posted in News Roundup at 6:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux: It’s Where the Jobs Are

    The U.S. unemployment rate is slowly getting better, thank goodness. But with the unemployment rate at 8.3%, few people are saying the great recession is over.

  • PC-in-a-Keyboard Comes with Ubuntu Linux Preloaded

    The past six months or so have seen a veritable flurry of tiny, Linux-powered PCs descend upon the market, including not just the widely embraced Raspberry Pi but also the Mele A1000, the MK802, and the Oval Elephant, to name just a few.

  • Vandals break into congressman’s office, install Linux on PCs

    A US congressmen has been left incensed after miscreants installed Linux on computers at his campaign office, possibly thrashing some data in the process.

    Michael Grimm, a Republican who represents a district in New York covering Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, has slammed the weekend break-in to his offices on as a “politically motivated” crime against the democratic process.

  • How I Saved a Mac Using Ubuntu

    As a general rule, OS X is not really best buddies with its Linux distribution cousins.

    The reasons vary, depending on who you ask. But at the end of the day, the division is a solid one. Still, it is worth mentioning that since today’s Mac runs with an Intel CPU, most Linux distributions run great on it.

    As luck would have it, the Mac’s compatibility with Linux recently saved my bacon after my wife’s iMac went into a bit of a meltdown.

    This is a walk-through detailing how Ubuntu 12.04 saved my wife’s Mac (data).

  • Linux and the Samsung Series 9 NP900X3C
  • ‘Cotton Candy’ Linux PC-on-a-stick ships at last

    There’s been a seemingly endless parade of tiny, Linux-powered PCs entering the market in recent months, including most recently the $49 Cubieboard and the $89 UG802.

  • Linux Top 3: Linux 4.0, Leadership and Goobuntu

  • Desktop

    • Future of the Desktop

      Could Mozilla’s announcement of the Boot to Gecko roadmap, along with the continued development of other web-based operating systems, make which Linux distro you’re running less important than the desktop environment?

    • In a Retail Competition in Portugal for Notebooks, GNU/Linux Won 10% Share

      All this talk of GNU/Linux not making it on the desktop is hypothetical. Where GNU/Linux was tried it has done well. In Portugal, some locally-built PCs were produced in several models. One of them had GNU/Linux and because of that had a lower price for software and better hardware. The result? It earned a decent share of the market, 10%. So, the fools who proclaim GNU/Linux has only 1% share due to geeks miss the effect of barring GNU/Linux from retail shelves, something totally on the supply-side. Consumers will choose GNU/Linux if it is offered.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Fragmentation Of The Ext4 File System In Ubuntu

      “Data in the computer is stored in files that are written on the hard disk which is like a giant closet with millions of drawers and each drawer has the same capacity (usually 512 bytes). If the data is stored in contiguous drawers, it can be accessed faster than if it was in a discontinuous (fragmented) order into the closet. So far, it is understood that “things” can be found faster in an ordered closet than in a messy one. The problem is to know how to keep the closet organized when it is frequently used.”

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE Needs You: Make Randa 2012 Happen

        KDE is one such project which is purely driven by a community which believes in free software, which believes in giving complete control of the system to its users.

        I recently switched to KDE and am really impressed with the work developers have done on it. These developers don’t have magic wand or heavy corporate backing to create what you and I use every day. These mortals work with each other to create one of the oldest desktop environments (KDE was founded in 1996, Gnome/Xfce in 1997), they mostly community through the web, but nothing can match face-to-face real world interaction where these developers meet with each other and discuss various aspects of KDE.

      • Can KDE’s Plasma Active Run On Android?

        Initially the idea was to get all the source code for the software running on one of the many tablets which are sold with Android. But the idea faced problems because only binary drivers are provided by the vendors which are useless for Mer.

        Even if enough source code

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Cinnamon 1.6 nearing feature freeze

        The next major update to the Cinnamon desktop environment is nearing its feature freeze and is well on its way to a release. In a blog post, Linux Mint founder and lead developer Clement “Clem” Lefebvre says that the development team is “extremely active” working towards the next 1.6.0 release of Cinnamon and he provides various details of the current state of development, including a list of planned features.

      • GNOME 3.6 Released – See What’s New

        The GNOME Project has released GNOME 3.6 today, the new version bringing many enhancements and new features, including a redesigned Message Tray, smarter notifications, improved Activity Overview layout, new design for Files (Nautilus) and a new lock screen. Let’s take a look at what’s new!

  • Distributions

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia Linux: A Delightful OS for Work or Play

        Mageia Linux is a distro brought to you by the same people who previously produced Mandriva Linux. The new distro, first released in September 2010, provides an easy to use environment for Linux newcomers or experts. It is particularly suited for game play and works well with various processors, sound and graphics cards.

      • Cotton Candy Tiny Linux PC Joins a Crowd of Them

        While the Raspberry Pi has grabbed the most headlines as a tiny, ultra-inexpensive, pocketable computer running an open source operating system, it’s actually only one of many tiny LInux computers being heralded as part of a new “Linux punk ethic.” As we’ve noted, there are various pocket-size Android devices selling online for under $100 (see the photo). For example, these thumbdrive-style mini PCs are available on AliExpress for $74, which includes shipping. Now, some of the most talked about Linux PCs-on-a-stick are shipping: the “Cotton Candy” devices.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Stock Down 3% After Earnings, Forecast Miss

        Shares of enterprise software maker Red Hat (RHT) dipped 3.3% in midday trading on Tuesday, after the company late Monday reported a mixed bag of financial results.

      • Red Hat Cloud Exec Scott Crenshaw Joins Acronis
      • Red Hat Price Target Raised to $58.00 at Goldman Sachs (RHT)

        Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) had its price target upped by Goldman Sachs to $58.00 in a research report sent to investors on Tuesday morning.

      • Infor open-source plan: Embrace Red Hat stack, MySQL

        Infor has certified some of its products for Red Hat’s Linux and JBoss middleware and added support for the MySQL and MariaDB databases, as part of a new push into open-source software, the companies announced Wednesday.

      • Fedora

        • Is Fedora Linux Becoming Business-Friendly?

          Fedora Linux has not typically been closely associated with the business world. That realm was instead the purview of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), which sponsors Fedora as a community project and uses it as a proving ground for technologies that often later appear in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But if the upcoming release of Fedora 18 is any indication, the open source operating system may be poised to become more business friendly in its own right.

        • Pimp up XFCE 4.10 in Fedora 17

          The default look of the XFCE desktop in Fedora 17, is a little boring, but this post, show how to pimp it up to look really great.

          I started with a standard XFCE 4.8 Fedora installation and upgraded to XFCE 4.10.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Canonical loses Ubuntu marketing exec to Mozilla Firefox OS project

            John Bernard, the marketing manager for Canonical’s OEM unit, will be leaving his position at the end of this week in order to move across to Mozilla’s mobile Firefox OS unit.

            A Canonical spokeswoman confirmed Bernard’s decision to change roles in a statement on Tuesday.

          • Get Ready For The 24-Hour Horsemen Marathon

            See that motley crew above? That is my team, the Community Team at Canonical. I am blessed to have such a wonderful team; not only are they all fantastic community leaders, but they are just a fun bunch of guys in general to be around.

          • Ubuntu Unity Aims For More Affiliate Revenue
          • Canonical Ubuntu management tool gets hefty upgrade

            “We have really been cranking up the level of effort with Landscape over the past year or so,” said Federico Lucifredi, Canonical’s Landscape product manager. “Landscape is a very important piece of our enterprise strategy, and so Canonical’s commitment has increased dramatically.”

          • Canonical Debuts Ubuntu One Music Store for the Web
          • Ubuntu One Music Store comes to mobile and web, skips the plugins
          • Ubuntu One Music Store Goes Online: Free Access For 6 Months
          • Ubuntu 12.10 to Support Remote Desktop Login

            As an operating system that proclaims itself “cloud ready,” Ubuntu ought to make it as easy as possible to log in to remote PCs and servers from the Ubuntu desktop. And that’s just what users will be able to do in Ubuntu 12.10, which will feature a remote login feature in the greeter screen. Read on for a look.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1: Preview
          • First beta of Ubuntu 12.10 released

            The first beta version of Ubuntu 12.10, code-named “Quantal Quetzal”, has been released for testing ahead of its October final release. The new version brings together a range of enhancements the developers have been working on, from reducing the number of install images, to making 3D accelerated desktops run on non-3D hardware, and switching to Python 3.0.

          • Edgy penguins test-fly Ubuntu’s Quantal Quetzal
          • Canonical Targets Corporate Desktops for Ubuntu

            You’ve probably heard the promises that desktop Linux is more secure, faster and cost-effective than proprietary platforms. But did you know it can also increase employee satisfaction? So says Canonical in its latest effort to promote Ubuntu in the workplace. Read on for a look at this and other talking points.

            Admittedly, the suggestion that installing Ubuntu on your business’s workstations “will actively improve the efficiency and job satisfaction of employees” is only one of the many reasons Canonical gives for switching to Ubuntu. And Canonical doesn’t discuss the claim in detail. That claim, by the way, came in an email announcing the availability of a white paper from Canonical titled, “Ubuntu Desktop for the Enterprise.”

          • Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 Arrives For Testing 175
          • First alpha of Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10

            The developers of the GNOME desktop-based Ubuntu derivative have, under the name Ubuntu GNOME Remix, released their first alpha version of the distribution. Based on the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” release, the developers describe the Remix as a developer snapshot to “give a very early glance at the next version”.

          • Fans Create Ubuntu Gangnam Style Cover
          • Ubuntu 12.10 adds Photo Lens for searching photos stored locally and online
          • Canonical aligns Ubuntu Server with quick-change OpenStack

            Canonical, the distributor of the Ubuntu variant of Linux, wants to be on the cutting edge and be stable at the same time. And as anyone who has dated knows, that is a tough balancing act that few people can manage. But a new strategy from Canonical will line up the fast-changing OpenStack cloud control freak that is part of the latest Ubuntu Server distribution with the Long Term Support stable version of the company’s Linux.

          • Ubuntu offering 20GB cloud storage, 6 months music streaming for 70p
          • Pre-release Ubuntu 12.10 has partial support for manual LVM and disk encryption

            About three weeks ago, I published automated LVM and disk encryption in a pre-release version of what will become Ubuntu 12.10, aka Quantal Quetzal.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 284
          • 12.04 Music Player Review – CPU Usage
          • 5 Best Free Apps For Ubuntu 12.04 – Part 1

            We have shared a wonderful post on few must have apps for Ubuntu 12.04 and I would like to extend that list the below post. Before I get into this post, best free apps for Ubuntu 12.04, I would like you check the previously linked post.

          • Desktop Dis-Unity: Ubuntu Adds Web-Search to the Desktop

            The Linux desktop has always been a balancing act between convenience on the one hand and security and privacy on the other. However, Ubuntu’s recent decision to add results from Amazon to desktop searches creates such an imbalance that I wonder just whose convenience is being considered — Ubuntu’s, or the users’?

          • I Feared Uncertain Doubt
          • Ubuntu, Dash and Amazon – Great news?

            I’ve been reading with interest the issues raised by some over the recent news that Dash search results in Ubuntu 12.10 are to include searches with Amazon. As with any new announcement (and in particular with a big name distro such as Ubuntu) feelings are strong. ”It’s the end of the world”, “Canonical have shot themselves in the foot” and a cacophony of cries proclaiming the end of the world. The reality is somewhat different, but then especially with the more vocal names on the net, why let reality ruin a good end of the world story?

          • [Full circle] issue 65
          • Canonical adds a ‘kill switch’ for Ubuntu’s Amazon search

            The new integration of Amazon search results in Ubuntu Linux 12.10 has stirred up quite a hornet’s nest of controversy over the past week or so among observers unimpressed by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth’s calm assurances that users’ privacy would be maintained.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2: Preview

            GNOME and Windows 8 developments have resulted in some controversial changes for Ubuntu 12.10 (codenamed Quantal Quetzal), which has now reached the Beta 2 stage. Fortunately, solutions now seem to be in place in time for the 18 October release to proceed as scheduled. Canonical has generated further controversy by introducing online scope results, specifically from Amazon, into the Dash search.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 13 Maya review

              With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as its underpinnings, Linux Mint 13 (Maya) was recently released in three versions, KDE (new), Xfce, and Gnome-Cinnamon. We tested each version separately and while we still like Mint, we’re accumulating a nagging list of bugs – some of which are the fault of Ubuntu, and some are the twists that Linux Mint takes on its own.

            • Explaining Linux Mint 13

              Ubuntu’s reign on Linux desktop dominance may soon be under threat with two new releases from Mint, but far from simply being a different take on a user-friendly desktop, the new Mint 13 is important because it diverges dramatically from Ubuntu, upon which it’s based. And it does so because it’s challenging the very direction Ubuntu is taking.

            • Ubuntu Studio: A Distro for Recording
            • Peppermint OS Three: between the cloud and the desktop

              The cloud era is coming. Some people can argue whether this is good or bad. Maybe that’s only the fashion. Maybe not. Although more and more people think of the cloud as if it were the inevitable future.

            • What’s on tap in Zentyal 3?

              Zentyal is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu Server. The current stable edition is Zentyal 2.2, with Zentyal 3 as the next stable version. Unlike other distributions that release at least two versions per year, Zentyal takes a less rapid-fire development model, releasing only one stable version per year.

            • Introducing Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10

              We are proud to announce today, September 3rd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Alpha release of the upcoming Ubuntu GNOME Remix 12.10 operating system.

            • Linux Mint 13 – Everybody’s best mate?

              I had Linux Mint 12 installed on my laptop for quite a while but I was never settled with it. The reason for this was the choice of desktop.
              The Samsung R20 laptop does not seem to handle the Cinnamon desktop at all well and the Gnome classic desktop was just a bit rigid.

              I therefore had wanted to use the Mate desktop. The trouble was that panels kept disappearing and once they had disappeared it was a real hassle to get them to come back again.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Linux-based Tizen mobile platform LIVES!

        The Linux Foundation has released the source code and SDKs for the first alpha version of Tizen 2.0, its Linux-based smartphone OS, further fueling speculation that Samsung might be close to releasing a handset based on the platform.

        You could be forgiven for assuming Tizen was dead in the water – if you’ve heard of it at all. It’s a combination of Nokia’s Maemo, Intel’s Moblin, and the two companies’ joint MeeGo project, none of which enjoyed any market success. We’ve heard nary a peep about it here at El Reg since the Linux Foundation announced it last September, and no phones running the OS are available commercially.

      • Software release suggests Samsung could soon launch a smartphone running Tizen

        Tizen 2.0, the open-source smartphone operating system, is now available as an alpha release with an accompanying Software Development Kit (SDK), the Tizen project announced on Tuesday. The release lends credence to rumors that project member Samsung Electronics is planning to launch a version of its Galaxy S3 smartphone running Tizen instead of Google’s Android.

      • Huawei sees smartphones leading growth in consumer devices

        Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the world’s sixth-biggest maker of mobile phones, is looking to its smartphones to outpace global growth rates and drive a consumer gadgets business that will rival its flagship telecoms gear in revenue.

        [...]

        “Whatever consumers like, we’ll develop,” Wan Biao, CEO of Huawei Device, said in an interview on Monday at the company’s headquarters. “We’re also devoting resources into coming up with a phone operating system based on our current platform in case other companies won’t let us use their system one day.”

      • Ballnux

      • Android

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • KDE Tablet Vivaldi Launch Delayed

        The launch of the KDE tablet Vivaldi has been postponed for now, following major setback. The project received a severe blow after the manufacturer of originally chosen Zenithink C71 tablet modified the system board of the device. This means that the numerous adjustments that were made to the Linux kernel to support the previous board have all gone waste and the developers now have to start the development work from scratch.

      • ZaTab: ZaReason’s Open Tablet

        Quite a few options exist as far as Android tablets go. Some of them are great choices for personal entertainment and media consumption. Google’s new Nexus 7 is a powerful little beast designed to serve up media from Google Play. Amazon’s Kindle Fire is a great device for tapping Amazon’s extensive content offerings. Undoubtedly, these tablets were designed to direct more of your money to the tablet-maker’s on-line content marketplaces. The glaring lack of SD card expansion on these devices confirms this. The ZaReason team designed a tablet that can be what the user wants it to be—one that supports users’ own content, that is not necessarily tied to a particular content store and that can be used as far more than a simple consumption device. Have they succeeded in creating the world’s first open tablet? Let’s find out.

      • Acer introduces 7-inch Iconia Tab A110

Free Software/Open Source

  • Diaspora slowly becoming a community-run project, but is it too late?

    We’ve followed Diaspora for a while now, since its beginning when it was the largest project Kickstarter had seen and was being called “the Facebook killer.” Two years later, the “open source social network” is becoming more open by turning into a community-run project, and the Diaspora team is launching a new project, Makr.io

  • By the numbers: India saves and grows with free and open source software

    Free and open source software (FOSS) plays an indispensable role in developing countries. As it is often a substitute for more expensive proprietary software, it can impact the economy and progress of a country, like India, in a very positive way.

  • Marketing open source is made for geeks

    Up until about ten years ago, it was extremely unfashionable to be a geek. Geeks were considered the black swans of the social world: they were perceived as having limited social skills, little interest in non-programming activities, and few friends.

    Fast forward to today, and things have changed significantly for the geek. Geeks today run the coolest companies, create the most cutting-edge trends, and are popular guests on the social circuit. And as the geek has evolved, so too has his or her skills: today’s geeks are not just clever programmers, but they also know how to finance and market their products.

  • Open Sourcer miffed by Raspberry Pi

    There are moments when Open Source religion gets in the way of a jolly good thing. Raspberry released a cut price computer with Linux on board to help kids learn programming. What could be wrong with that?

    Everything, according to Peter Zotov, who is a noted Open Source developer. Writing in White Quark, Zotov damns the Pi for not obeying the rules of true Open Source and therefore ruling it out for education purposes.

    He said that kids will not understand the reality of computing because the Pi is “a black box tightly sealed with patents and protected by corporations. It isn’t even remotely an open platform,” he wails. Apparently kids can only learn programming if everything is completely open source, true and pure as God, or Richard Stallman, intended.

  • GNU Octave: An interview with John W. Eaton and Jordi Gutiérrez

    [John] I’m the original author of GNU Octave and have been it’s maintainer from the beginning, in 1992. When I first started working on Octave I was post-doctoral researcher and systems administrator at the University of Texas. Then from 1995 until 2008 I was a researcher at the University of Wisconsin. But most of my time from 1992 until 2008 was spent working on Octave. Now I have my own software support company focused on supporting Octave.

  • Gotye’s YouTube Orchestra Remix: The Sweetness Of The Open Source Pop Star

    In 2009, an artist named Kutiman launched a project called Thru-YOU (a play on YouTube) that aimed to show what open collaboration could be on the internet. He played the “YouTube Orchestra” for a series of video remixes that made the network effects of music video on the web powerfully clear.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Experience Movi.Kati.Revo, A New Chrome Experiment

        At Google I/O earlier this year, developers were given a glimpse of Movi.Kanti.revo, a new sensory Chrome experiment designed by Cirque du Soleil and developed by Subatomic Systems. For people who are not acquainted with Cirque du Soleil, it is a Canadian entertainment company, whose performances are described as a dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment.

      • Chrome 22 Out In Stable Version, Includes Gaming Enhancements

        Google has released Chrome 22 in a final, stable version as the browser continues to grab substantial global market share. The release includes improvements for gamers, JavaScript performance enhancements, support for new, high-definition screens and more. Also this week, Google released a new version of Chrome for iOS that supports the iPhone 5. Here is more on what to expect in Chrome 22.

        Chrome 22 is available now as a download for Windows, the Mac and Linux. As noted on eWeek:

      • Google Releases Chrome 22 Stable for Linux

        On September 25th, Google has unleashed the stable and final release of the Google Chrome 22 web browser, supporting the Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Chrome Frame platforms.

      • Microsoft dismisses Google’s open source browser benchmark

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla measures interest in their open source projects using site metrics

        David Boswell has a couple of interesting posts (here and here) about how he is using metrics to measure how effective Mozilla is at attracting and engaging people who express an interest in helping contribute to the Mozilla mission.

      • Mozilla and National Science Foundation Honor Eight “Ignite” Concepts

        Back in June, the Obama administration along with The National Science Foundation and Mozilla unveiled Ignite, “an initiative to promote US leadership in developing applications and services for ultra-fast broadband and software-defined networks.” The initiative was described as an incubator ecosystem that will hook people up with novel technology ideas with fast networks, advanced infrastructure and more. Mozilla said the program would identify developers who can “build apps for the future.”

        Now Mozilla and The National Science Foundation have announced eight winners in the program, with ideas that “offer a glimpse of what the Internet of the future might look like.”

        You can find out more about the winning projects here. They include an innovative open source web conferencing app and a 3D interactive telepresence application. The competition features $485,000 in prize money, and here are the initial eight winning concepts:

      • Mozilla shares an in-depth look at the design philosophy behind Firefox OS

        Additionally, Mozilla showed off its homescreen, app grid, and lock screen, which feels like a nice mashup of WebOS and Android, while some of its built-in apps share a small bit of iOS’ skeuomorphic tendencies while being much more elegant and less gaudy. Overall, it’s a handsome-looking OS that appears to have had a lot of thought put into it long before a phone would be available in consumers hands — we imagine that it won’t need to go through the same major visual revisions that Android did over the years.

      • MOZILLA Y U HATE RSS?!?
      • Mozilla Fails to Bring Firefox Home on iOS

        Back in 2010, Mozilla’s was all over the place promoting the open source browser vendor effort to sync Firefox on Apple iOS devices.

        I first wrote about Firefox Home in May of 2010, then again in July 2010 when the App officially debuted.

        Now, two years later, Mozilla is throwing in the towel, giving up on Firefox Home.

      • 3 Hidden Features In Firefox 15 You May Want To Enable

        Firefox 15, which has been released a few days ago, comes with some cool features disabled by default: native PDF viewer, preferences in tab and click-to-play plugins.

        These features have been in testing for quite a while, but they are not 100% ready so they aren’t enabled by default and there are no options in the Firefox preferences to enable them. But, if you don’t mind an occasional glitch, you can enable them using the about:config tool.

      • SolusOS 1.2 Legacy Features Firefox 15

        Ikey Doherty proudly announced yesterday, September 2nd, the immediate availability for download of Legacy Edition of his SolusOS 1.2 Linux operating system.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice Community announces broad program for its Berlin conference

      Tracks on development, marketing, migration and community success
      The Document Foundation to host official ODF Plugfest and ODF Plugtesting

    • New Document Foundation Committee Members Chosen

      The Document Foundation Membership Committee administers membership applications and renewals. This is an important job because without them, LibreOffice wouldn’t get new contributers. The Document Foundation recently announced the results of the Membership Committee election.

    • The Document Foundation Turns Two

      Has it been two years already? Apparently so, because today Italo Vignoli posted to The Document Foundation mailing list, “The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary and starts fundraising campaign to reach the next stage.” They’ve come a long way in just two short years.

    • Review: VMware Workstation 9 vs. VirtualBox 4.2

      When it comes to virtualization on the desktop, two products stand front and center: VMware Workstation and VirtualBox. The former is the long-standing original keeper of the flame, from the company that gave us PC-centric virtualization technology as we know it. The latter is an open source project now under the stewardship of Oracle, with its own strongly competitive set of features.

    • The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary and starts fundraising campaign to reach the next stage

      Berlin, September 28, 2012 – The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary since the announcement of the project on September 28, 2010. During the last 12 months, the foundation was legally established in Berlin, the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee were elected by TDF members, where membership is based on meritocracy and not on invitation, Intel became a supporter, and LibreOffice 3.5 and 3.6 families were announced. In addition, TDF has shown the prototypes of a cloud and a tablet version of LibreOffice, which will be available sometime in late 2013 or early 2014.

  • CMS

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • ACE Code Editor Version 1.0 Released

      ACE is an open source embeddable code editor. The developers have just launched version 1.0 of ACE along with their new website. ACE is written in Javascript, its features and performance is claimed to match that of native editors such as Sublime, Vim and TextMate. It can be easily embedded in a webpage or Javascript application. It supports syntax highlighting for more than 40 languages and can handle documents with up to 4 million lines of code.

    • GStreamer 1.0 out now

      Upgrade to the latest version of GStreamer now for bug fixes and plenty of new optimization tweaks

    • W3C Announces Plan to Make HTML5 Standard By 2014
    • GStreamer 1.0 out now

      Upgrade to the latest version of GStreamer now for bug fixes and plenty of new optimization tweaks

  • Public Services/Government

    • French Government Urged to Adopt Open Source

      French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has issued a missive to French ministers, including a complete action plan urging government usage of LibreOffice and PostgreSQL. But the action plan calls for more. As noted on Slashdot: “He also wants them to reinvest between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money they save through not paying for proprietary software licenses, spending it instead on contributing to the development of the free software. The administration already submits patches and bug fixes for the applications it uses, but Ayrault wants to go beyond that, contributing to or paying for the addition of new functionality to the software.” This is just the latest example of strong pushes in the direction of open source going on in Europe.

    • French government to use PostgreSQL and LibreOffice in free software adoption push

      French government agencies could become more active participants in free software projects, under an action plan sent by Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in a letter to ministers, while software giants Microsoft and Oracle might lose out as the government pushes free software such as LibreOffice or PostgreSQL in some areas.

    • A time for change: Citizens empowered by open government

      Do you see government as an institution without much room for growth and change? The open source way is creating a path for citizens to become empowered and help their community make improvements where traditional methods have failed—through active participation, gained knowledge, and a two-way conversation with city officials.

    • Can citizens use open source to create legislation?
    • French Government Outlines Plans for Free Software Adoption

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Access/Content

      • California Passes Nation’s First Open Source Textbook Legislation

        Only a signature away, Governor Jerry Brown will have an opportunity to lower the cost of college textbooks by creating the nation’s first free open source digital library for college students and faculty.

        Friday, the California State Senate unanimously passed the first of its kind open educational resource digital library, or (OER), offering students free access to textbooks in the most commonly taken lower-division courses at public postsecondary institutions.

    • Open Hardware

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • Wall Street Rolling Back Another Key Piece of Financial Reform

      Wall Street lobbyists are awesome. I’m beginning to develop a begrudging respect not just for their body of work as a whole, but also for their sense of humor. They always go right to the edge of outrageous, and then wittily take one baby-step beyond it. And they did so again last night, with the passage of a new House bill (HR 2827), which rolls back a portion of Dodd-Frank designed to protect cities and towns from the next Jefferson County disaster.

    • SEC Charges Goldman Sachs, Former Banker With ‘Pay-to-Play’ Violations

      The SEC announced today that it has filed a “pay-to-play” case against Goldman, Sachs & Co. and one of its former investment bankers. The SEC alleges that Goldman and Neil M.M. Morrison, a former vice president in the firm’s Boston office, made undisclosed campaign contributions to then-Massachusetts state treasurer Timothy P. Cahill while he was a candidate for governor.

  • Censorship

    • Brazil judge orders arrest of Google president

      A Brazilian judge ordered the arrest of the head of Google’s operations in Brazil for failure to remove YouTube videos that attacked a mayoral candidate, which runs counter to the South American nation’s strict pre-vote electoral laws.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • US calls Assange ‘enemy of state’

      THE US military has designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies of the United States – the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency.

      Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with “communicating with the enemy”, a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death.

09.26.12

Links 26/9/2012: 1.3 Million Android Activations a Day

Posted in News Roundup at 2:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • 10 things the “Average Joe” won’t know about Linux

    Last night my son was trying to install something called Tekkit which has something to do with Minecraft.
    I am not really savvy when it comes to Minecraft and I had no idea what Tekkit was. My son asked whether he could download and run the Tekkit Launcher and if so could I help him install it.
    The first thing I noticed when visiting the site is that there is a download button on the right hand side for both a launcher and a server. What is lacking however is any real information about what Tekkit is, how to install it and how it works.

  • Why Linux Will Never Suffer From Viruses Like Windows

    In the Linux world, there are dozens of companies and security researchers that constantly run scans over the entire ecosystem of software in their repositories – not just the software they’ve developed themselves.

    Open source code also tends to lend itself to re-use. In the Linux world, devs are not even going to be tempted to go implementing a security-centric feature like SSL libraries themselves, when there are perfectly working ones available for their open source apps to use for free. Having that code open, such that they can step their debugger into and fix any underlying bugs themselves, is a great asset.

  • Linux Jobs Are On The Rise And In High Demand– Report

    Dice and The Linux Foundation have published an infographic which shows the state of Linux jobs in current market. The report looks interesting, and hopefully will encourage more people to choose Linux as their career. The infographic is posted below:

  • Using GNU/Linux is cooler than using Windows: Laura Lucas Alday

    This is the last interview of the trinity series and in this interview we spoke with Laura Lucas Alday the woman power behind the latest release of Cheese. She was responsible for enhancing cheese to support svg overlays. Laura finds GNU/Linux better than Windows.

  • US Congressman Office Vandalized, Linux Installed

    The campaign office in Staten Island of the Republican Congressman Michael Grimm has been vandalized, the computer hard drives were erased, and a Linux operating system was installed.

  • Celebrating GNU/Linux

    GNU/Linux has come a long way and continues to grow. It is one of the great operating systems and a great cooperative project of the world. It is something to celebrate, to use, to enjoy and to be thankful for all the good people who contribute their time and resources to produce.

  • Desktop

    • The challenges of Desktop Linux
    • Apple v GNU/Linux

      No. GNU/Linux on the desktop is thriving. MacOS is catching up if anything. GNU/Linux is used everywhere from US military to Hollywood on desktops and servers. MacOS? Not so much. The main reason? Cost.

    • Lenovo Acquires PC Maker in Brazil

      This should allow Lenovo a bigger share of Brazil and perhaps South America where PCs are a growth industry and GNU/Linux is popular.

    • Evolution of IT in Estonian Schools

      In 2004, it was reported that 47% of servers in schools were GNU/Linux but only 3% of PCs were running GNU/Linux.

    • Linux on the Desktop: New Opportunities

      Lately we’ve been treated to (or bombarded by) a slew of articles and blog posts proclaiming the failure and/or the death of Linux on the desktop. I could describe what I really think of these articles but my language would be a bit more colorful than would be appropriate. Suffice it to say it’s all bunk as far as I am concerned.

      I have written about why I believe Linux remains under 10% of the desktop market: the lack of preloaded systems available in stores and the slow uptake of Linux on the enterprise desktop. The enterprise desktop is critical if Linux is to make progress on the consumer desktop without a presence in big box stores. People use what they know and like. If they use and like Linux at work they may well want to use it at home as well.

    • Caitlyn Martin Points Out The Obvious, GNU/Linux on the Desktop Works for People
    • Unbiased Web Stats For Germany

      Here’s a promising site. It’s in German but it seems to be about sports and has good volume with 64K unique visitors and so on. There are thousands of visits per day and hundreds of thousands of hits per day. According to Netcraft it runs on GNU/Linux, from 2004 to 2011 with Suse and then with CentOS. The result?

      * 81% That Other OS,
      * 8.1% */Linux, and
      * 7.6% MacOS

    • Correlation of IE Usage and GNU/Linux Usage
    • Who helped you get started with Linux?

      That’s the question of a poll I found on a German site, Pro-Linux.de. The answer they found?

    • World’s first Linux Ultrabook laptop costs as much as a Windows version

      Everyone is excited for the new slate of Windows 8 Ultrabooks to arrive in a few weeks — everyone, that is, except for Linux devotees. With the new ZaReason UltraLap 430, they finally get an Ultrabook of their own.

      The UltraLap is the first laptop that ships with Linux and could fall under Intel’s Ultrabook platform specs. The base model features a 14.1-inch, 1,366×768 LED-backlit screen, Intel Core i3-3217U processor, Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics, 4GB of RAM, 32GB solid state drive, and your choice of Linux flavor: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, or Fedora (or no OS pre-installed at all). If the base model isn’t powerful enough for you, you can upgrade to a Core i5-3317U CPU for $49, 8GB or 16GB of RAM, a larger SSD and/or a hard drive, and additional warranty protection beyond the standard one year.

    • But what happened to the desktop?

      Only one of well over 150 technical sessions is directly related to the desktop, a polished version of which SUSE releases under the name SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED).

      This session, Use Cases for SUSE Linux Desktop, was held yesterday by Stefan Behlert, senior project manager, and Jan Weber, product manager (both pictured above).

      Additionally, there is one session devoted to LibreOffice, the office suite that is part and parcel of most Linux distributions, and an additional session on openSUSE, the upstream of the enterprise distributions, which could be considered to be revolving around the desktop as well.

    • Two Solitudes: Desktop GNU/Linux and Server GNU/Linux

      In fact, RedHat which is doing very well on the server has lots of clients using GNU/Linux and OEMs are shipping millions of units.

    • Side by Side Comparisons of PCs with and without That Other OS

      In all other respects, these three models of Acer’s Veriton N are identical. The logical conclusion is that other OS costs $50 or $100 depending on the level of lock-in you desire…

  • Server

    • Where Competition Thrives, M$ Dives

      In 1995 M$ was just beginning to have a presence on the web. When Lose ’95 was inflicted on the world, M$ bundled its browser with the OS and did anti-competitive actions to boost its presence. It’s web server, IIS, rapidly grew to ~22% by 1998, when US Department of Justice went after them for their illegal war on Netscape. After the complaint in 1998, IIS levelled off and except for a few bumps where they bribed large customers to use IIS for periods of time, and reached 36% at most, IIS has declined gradually ever since.

  • Kernel Space

    • Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup Brings Open Source To Automobiles

      You can easily notice that many in-car infotainment systems are custom-built by their manufacturers, and locked down completely. The Linux Foundation is trying to change this concept and wants our cars to take up the open source route that we would find in an Ubuntu box.

    • Graphics Stack

      • NVIDIA’s Driver May Support Wayland Eventually

        If Wayland’s adoption takes off and that it indeed is being widely used by tier-one Linux desktop distributions and the future direction of Linux is clearly with Wayland over X11/X.Org, the necessary pieces will fall into place within the NVIDIA binary graphics driver for supporting Wayland. That was heard while having dinner with a certain individual last week in Germany.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE 4.8.5 Now Available For Ubuntu Users

        Users using the KDE desktop in Ubuntu, or using the Kubuntu distro, will now be able to update to KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform 4.8.5. This is the last release in KDE 4.8 series. This release mostly consists of bugfixes and stability enhancements.

      • Community News: Stabilizing Kolab 3

        The past weeks the Kolab Community has been busy working on the upcoming release of Kolab 3. We had people trying out fresh Kolab installs, or upgrading their existing installs to Kolab 3 alpha following the growing documentation. Also community members Michael Kiefer and Paul Klos worked on Debian packaging while Johannes Graumann is still testing their work. Jeroen van Meeuwen was working on making our awesome PHP LDAP capabilities generally available and wrote about why your system should have a proper FQDN. He also wrote a little script that assists users with migrating their Kolab 2.3 LDAP data to Kolab 3. This script still needs some feedback. So if you have a Kolab 2.3 server running, please check it out!

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome Shell 3.6 Out

        The Gnome Foundation have announced the release of Gnome Shell desktop environment version 3.6. This is a test version not suitable for enterprise and business environments. Install it on your own risk.

      • Gnome 3.7 May Release On October 24, Gnome 3.8 On March 27th

        A release candidate of Gnome 3.7 is already out and Gnome 3.6 stable release is scheduled on September 26. However, development never stops in Linux world, and the developers are already making plans for the next releases. Currently, you can suggest some features for future Gnome releases as we announced earlier, and Gnome 3.8 feature freeze is on October 22nd this year.

      • GNOME 3.5.92 Release Candidate Is Now Available

  • Distributions

    • CrunchBang ‘Waldorf’ R20120806 – What a Shame
    • Manjaro Linux 0.8.1 XFCE Review: Fast, complete and looks awesome!

      Last time when I reviewed Manjaro 0.8.0 XFCE, I really liked it. I didn’t feel it wasted too much of RAM while using it, but there were criticisms from some corner. Possibly, I haven’t really used it that much as Manjaro was never my primary distro. But, it is good that the developer, Roland Singer, came up with another version 0.8.1 XFCE, which LXDM instead of LightDM and built up a really good looking theme over LXDM. Once I read the release note at Distrowatch, I was quick to download it. I download the 32-bit version and there is a 64-bit version available as well.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Increases Sales but Misses Estimates on Earnings

        For the quarter ended Aug. 31 (Q2), Red Hat met expectations on revenues and missed estimates on earnings per share.

      • FactSet Net Soars, Red Hat Net Declines
      • Red Hat: We’re Not Just About Linux Anymore

        Red Hat reported second quarter fiscal 2013 results late Monday that continues to show revenue growth.

        Growth isn’t just coming from Red Hat’s core Linux business, it’s also being fueled by the company’s expanding portfolio, which includes middleware, cloud and storage technologies.

        For the quarter, Red Hat reported revenue of $323 million — up by 15 percent year-over-year. Net Income came in at $35 million or $0.18 per share, which is a decline from the $40 million reported for the second quarter of 2012. Moving forward, Red Hat provided third quarter guidance for revenue in the range of $336 million to $339 million.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora gamers rejoice…with Mumble!

          As Fedora is one of the “pure Gnome” distributions, it is very possible that it concerns a large part of our readers so here are some good gaming news for you!

          Mumble RPMs can help you with the popular Humble Indie Bundle game collections that don’t include an rpm package, thus not integrating well under your distribution (not taking care of dependencies, not offering easy install/uninstall option etc).

        • Root Account To Be Disabled By Default In Fedora 18
        • Fedora Project Officially Turns 9 Today

          Red Hat’s testing ground and all around number 2 Linux distribution Fedora, turns 9 today. A post by Fabian Affolter reveals on planet.fedora the historic day in which the project’s homepage was first registered.

        • The Fedora Project Turns 9

          Red Hat sponsored and community maintained Fedora Project has turned 9 years. This was just a few days after the upcoming Fedora 18′s alpha was released with some major changes and desktop overhaul.

    • Debian Family

      • Demand for Debian GNU/Linux Spreads

        In short, APT is absolutely fabulous and alone is reason enough to use Debian GNU/Linux for all your IT. For those unsatisfied with the speed of the web an organisation can keep a local repository mirror or cache to transfer software to computers at the speed of a LAN. That’s awesome.

      • AMD64 Now Debian’s Most Popular Architecture

        Bill Allombert announced today via the Debian-devel mailing list that the X86_64 version of Debian has now surpassed all of the other supported architectures by a narrow margin. The most surprising part of this announcement however, and accompanying info-graphics provided on the Debian Popularity Contest page, is that this was not already true.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • More Information About Online Dash Search Privacy

            Recently there has been some concerns about the privacy of the new feature we recently added to the dash in which it can query external resources to provide related results. I just wanted to follow up with some further details about how these searches are performed, the privacy protections that are put in place, and further work going on.

          • On The Recent Dash Improvements
          • Developer Of Ubuntu’s Amazon Search Lens Talks About Privacy Issues
          • Mark Shuttleworth Explains About Inclusion Of Amazon Search Results In Unity Dash
          • Gwibber To Become Faster And More Stable In Ubuntu 13.04

            Gwibber is a powerful and full-featured social client for Ubuntu, and though it supports a wide range of social services, its slow, buggy and also has occasional crashes. The good news is that developers have taken a note of users’ mishaps and the backend is being completely rewritten. So hopefully we will see a faster, sleeker and robust Gwibber in Ubuntu 13.04.

          • Ubuntu Help Lenses Makes It Easy For New Users To Use Ubuntu

            Unity already has a hell lot of lenses that makes the Unity desktop just wow. But one of the lens that is most helpful for new Ubuntu users is definitely the help lenses.

            The lens searches your query from both online (AskUbuntu, AskLibreoffice) and offline(man pages) sources. A set of results are displayed in the dash itself and clicking on one opens up the relevant help document or web page.

          • Getting Started with Ubuntu for Windows Users

            The New York Times has an interesting post up that caters to Windows users who have no Linux experience but would like to dip their toes in the water. It’s a short “Linux on a Stick” post that discusses how to use a Flash drive to begin using Ubuntu. We’ve covered the topic before at length, and if you happen to be a Windows user who wants to give Ubuntu a spin, here is a complete set of resources for doing it quickly–and you don’t have to ditch Windows to do it.

          • Ubuntu 13.04 Release Schedule

            Now that we’re all waiting for the final version of the Ubuntu 12.10 (Qantal Quetzal) operating system, due for release on October 18th, we can take a look at the release schedule for the next major iteration of the OS, Ubuntu 13.04.

          • 20 Must Have Ubuntu Apps for Productivity

            For me, the ability to jump from one Linux desktop to another depends on whether the applications I depend on will be available to me. Luckily for me, the applications I rely on for productivity are readily available from the Ubuntu Software Center.

            In this article, I’ll share my top twenty productivity picks with you, and explain how they lend themselves to a more productive workstation environment.

          • In Spain, Hundreds of Thousand of Students Get Ubuntu Access

            Canonical has been very busy raising the profile of Ubuntu internationally for a couple of years now. As we’ve reported, Dell Computer has been a significant partner in this effort, helping get PCs pre-loaded with Ubuntu into the hands of users in India and China. Jane Silber, Canonical CEO, has discussed the companies’ plans to bring Ubuntu systems to 850 retail outlets in India. Now, Canonical is making a big push into the educational system in, of all places, Spain. There, 220,000 Ubuntu-based systems are being deployed for students.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Ubuntu Christian Edition 12.04 Is Based on Ubuntu 12.04.1
            • Linux Mint founder calls Nautilus 3.6 “a catastrophe”

              Linux Mint founder and lead developer Clement “Clem” Lefebvre has provided further insight into his team’s decision to create Nemo, a fork of GNOME’s Nautilus file manager, and their plans for the new project. In a new blog post, Lefebvre says that he and his fellow developers chose to fork Nautilus because of the recent controversial design changes in version 3.6 of Nautilus, calling it “a catastrophe” as it “removes features we consider requirements”.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Open webOS – Promise and Delivery

        It was pretty exciting stuff when HP introduced WebOS a while back. Quickly they abandoned WebOS for unknown reasons but promised to open the source code. Now they have delivered:

      • The dead reanimates as HP ships Open webOS beta

        As promised, HP has shipped the beta release of Open webOS, the open source version of the web standards–based webOS mobile platform that was the last hurrah of the former Palm before HP absorbed it in 2010. More surprisingly, however, HP actually seems to be staffing up its webOS development team – an odd reversal of recent trends.

      • Android

        • Got an Old *TX PC Kicking Around? Newegg Can Help You Turn It Into An Android Desktop for $64.99
        • Google: 1.3 million Android devices activated every day

          Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said that his company now sees approximately 1.3 million Android devices activated per day, up from 1 million in June. Schmidt was speaking at Motorola’s press event in New York City yesterday where the Google subsidiary was launching three new Android-based smartphones. Looking back to the end of 2010, Google was activating just 300,000 Android-based devices each day; in May of last year that number rose to 400,000. Of those 1.3 million daily activations, Schmidt said that around 70,000 were for Android tablets, and he put the installed base of Android devices at around 500 million devices.

        • Android developers: Go all-in with the Kindle Fire HD

          The Android landscape is vast with 1.3 million device activations per day. The target audience is big enough to obtain success with good app development, but only if apps get noticed by customers. Given the difficulty in getting an app noticed in the huge Google Play Store, a good alternative is writing apps for the Kindle Fire and releasing it first in the Amazon Appstore.

          More: Amazon’s gadget as a service theme: Hardware becomes irrelevant soon | Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD family: The highs and lows you need to know | Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD will give Apple’s iPad fits | Amazon just put Android tablets on notice with the Kindle Fire product line | Amazon changes the game in tablet market with Kindle Fire HD pricing | CNET: Amazon’s new Kindles: Everything you need to know | First take | Full coverage | Amazon statement

        • 7 Great Android Apps You Can’t Get on the Kindle Fire

          So, Amazon doesn’t exactly highlight this, but all of its Kindle Fires are Androids on the inside. Amazon slaps a heavy skin on top, so it’s not at all recognizable, but it’s Android all the same. Great, so you get access to all of the Android apps, right? Not exactly.

        • Can Android Replace Windows?

          The growing popularity of tablets within the pantheon of end-user computing devices has helped drive BYOD and cloud projects within the enterprise, made cell-phone networks a common remote-access option and brought relief to laptop-lugging road warriors worldwide. They’ve also made an even more fundamental change in the mix of devices for which corporate networking gurus are responsible, and, with Android, have given Microsoft the first really credible competitor to a major new version of Windows in more than a decade.

        • Hold On Microsoft, Quickoffice Pro HD Coming To Nexus 7

          Quickoffice is a very important tool for hundreds of thousands of Android users that allows them to open, edit and save to Microsoft’s Office files compatible with many Android devices. Some would even say it’s currently the best in its class. It provides a plethora of useful features from the ability to create new documents to the ability to sync to many popular cloud storage options and many more options in between.

        • New Tech From Walmart.com

          Interestingly of the 88 items, 15 are reported to have an operating system:
          “Operating System

          * Google Android (14)
          * Windows OS (1)

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Tablets keep UK IT’s head above water

        Retail sales were up 2.8 per cent in volume and 11 per cent in value in comparison to July 2011, pointing to a big fall in sales through other channels, which benefit less than shops do from shiny new items like tablets and e-book readers.

      • Archos 101 XS 10.1in Android tablet review

        Archos has built a decent business making budget Android tablets, so I suspect the word ‘merde’ echoed loudly around the Igny HQ when Google pulled the rug asunder with its low Nexus 7 pricing. Archos hasn’t given up though and has now released a new device pitched as a budget alternative to the Asus Transformer Pad.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Adobe Releases Open Source Monospace Font

    Following the release of Source Sans Pro Last month, Adobe has released another font as free in SourceForge named Source Code Pro. This is mainly because of high response of last font which was downloaded over 68 thousand times and appreciated by the community, mainly Linux users and free software lovers.

  • 7 Questions to Ask Open Source Vendors
  • LSI CTO touts promise of flash, open source
  • Leaving on an (open source) jet plane

    We’ve seen open source hardware architecture grow significantly within the last eighteen months as well as open technology development even touching areas like car design.

    No surprise then that the sky is the limit (ouch! sorry for that!) and that open source should also extend to planes.

    MakerPlane says that its mission is to create innovative and game-changing aircraft, avionics and related systems and the transformational manufacturing processes to build them.

  • Apache OpenMeetings Moodle Plugin 1.4 Incubating released!
  • Central control is the big enemy of software freedom

    Quick: name one big difference between Linux and Android. And no, penguins and robots don’t count.

    The truth is, there are lots of differences between the two platforms, despite their common connection to the Linux kernel. But the one that’s most on my mind today?

  • Apache and RESTful Web Services
  • 3 open-source Javascript libraries for developers
  • Netflix open sources Eureka mid-tier load balancer

    With Netflix running so many services on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) cloud, it needs to be able to find those services easily so that it can balance loads and manage failover. The video-streaming specialists have now open sourced Eureka, the software they use to meet that challenge. Eureka includes a REST-based server that allows servers to register with it when they come up and detects when they are down, and a client which talks to that service and does basic round-robin load balancing. Netflix has more sophisticated balancers in-house designed for their own needs.

  • To Master Tech You Must Master Software — And Open Source — Even If You’re Apple

    During my keynote at LinuxCon, I showed a picture of five smart phones from five different manufacturers with their screens blacked out. Think you could tell them apart? Without a UI they are all virtually indistinguishable from each other. When their screens are enabled, it’s easy to tell the difference between Blackberry’s and iPhone’s, Samsung’s Android devices and Nokia’s Windows based machine. My point? Software is where the heart of differentiation lies.

  • Spanish region of Extremadura confirms commitment to open source

    The government of the Spanish autonomous region of Extremadura considers the use of open source as strategic and as a requirement for technological sustainability. The region will continue to overhaul its IT environment, switching to open source software where possible.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chromium 20 Finally Arrives In Ubuntu Precise

        After a long delay and a rumor that Chromium browser is being unmaintained, Canonical pushed an update of the browser silently today. Previously, Ubuntu 12.10 users had the old Chromium 18 browser running on their machines.

      • Why Chrome Hasn’t Killed Mozilla Firefox

        Four years ago, Google launched Chrome. At the time, I wrote a commentary piece that it wasn’t likely that Chrome would kill IE.

        As it turns out, I was (mostly) right. IE still exists, though it has its lowest share in years, thanks in no small part to Chrome’s growing share.

        Chrome however isn’t just growing entirely at IE’s expense. It has also had an impact on Mozilla’s Firefox too.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Plans More Non-Invasive Health Reporting in Firefox

        Mozilla has always been respectful of user privacy. But they also have to somehow get information from user’s browser to improve the product.

        Since at least Firefox 7 with something called Telemetry, Mozilla has had an opt-in mechanism for monitoring the performance of the open source browser on user machines. Telemetry is opt-in.

      • Canonical Marketing Guru Leaves Ubuntu For Firefox OS

        Canonical’s global marketing expert, John Bernard has left Ubuntu to join Firefox. The news was reported by marketingmagazine.co.uk. Benard is among top ten marketers in UK and has a track record of working with big companies like Sony Ericsson and LG.

  • SaaS

    • OpenStack Foundation Nears Launch

      The OpenStack Foundation is almost officially alive. The open source group that will have oversight over the OpenStack cloud platform project was first announced nearly a year ago and is now ready to launch.

      The Board of the new Foundation had its first full meeting at the CloudOpen Summit in San Diego last week. In an interview with Datamation, Jonathan Bryce one of the founders of the OpenStack effort at Rackspace detailed the road ahead.

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • On-line Poll: 33% Use LibreOffice in Finland

      Tietokone IT magazing did a poll which shows that LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org combined have a bigger share than M$’s office suite and LibreOffice has 33% share. Not too shabby… Did they poll readers about GNU/Linux? Nope, but they did ask about FLOSS in government.

  • CMS

    • Google Tries to Compete with Moodle. Good Luck!

      Google has decided that building course websites is something they can help the world do. They have developed a method that requires knowledge of HTML and JavaScript… That cuts out about 90% of teachers, likely.

  • Education

    • Google open source code-in contest for school students

      Google has announced its Code-in contest will begin this November, introducing pre-university students to the world of open source development.

      From late November to mid January, students will be able to work with 10 open source projects on a variety of tasks, says Google. The contest starts November 26, 2012.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Results: Free Software voice & video testing

      The 25 sets of results were recorded, and can be browsed, sorted, and searched below.

      Six audio tests succesfully passed (24%), as did five video tests (20%). Mumble was the most successful client, passing 100% of tests (audio only, video is not yet supported). XMPP passed four out of 14 audio tests, whereas SIP passed only one out of ten (both vide and audio). Of nine apps tested, only Mumble, Pidgin, Jitsi, and Google Talk’s we client achieved passes.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • French guideline favours the use of free and open source

      France’s Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, signed a guideline favouring the use of free and open source software by the country’s public administrations, last Wednesday. Switching to this type of software lowers costs, increases flexibility and increases competition in the IT market, the Prime Minister writes in his introduction to the policy.

    • Italy making way for open source

      On 7 August, a law was passed by the Italian Parliament that requires the use of open source software by public administrations where possible. Article 68Italian language link of the Italian Digital Administration Code (Codice dell’amministrazione digitale) states that, from 12 August, public administrations looking for a new software solution must either use an application which they have already developed in-house, develop their own new program, use open source software, or any combination of these.

    • Report shows meagre rise in use of open source by parliaments

      Parliaments around the world are only slowly increasing their use of free and open source solutions, according to the World e-Parliament Report 2012, published last week. Most parliaments (80 %) now use at least one open source application. In most cases this type of software is used to run servers (50 %), for webpublishing (36 %), databases (31 %) and email (31 %).

    • My government is software-stupid

      I just checked, and my State government’s website here in Australia has 43 pages with the message that Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed if I want to view the page’s downloadable PDFs.

    • Kenyan gov’t embraces open source

      According to a report in Business Daily, the migration away from proprietary systems will see related costs go down by 20% initially but by as much as 80% within three years of the move having taken place.

    • Malaysian Government Marches Onward to FLOSS

      A workshop promoting self-reliance and increased comfort with FLOSS took place on 4-5 September 2012 at the Multipurpose Hall of the Ministry of Rural and Regional Development, Putrajaya.

    • Costs Drive Adoption of FLOSS by Government of Kenya

      Yes, she can do the maths. Migration to GNU/Linux is a little short term pain for long term gain. For databases on servers etc. there is always a way to migrate the data and the computers can do most of the work. When it’s done, you are running FLOSS and never have to pay another round of licences. The same advantages apply to the client systems. Good news from Kenya.

    • FLOSS Preference – non-Free Software To Be The Exception in Malta

      The document is rife with references to things I like in IT like re-use and efficiency. Lock-in to monopoly is not associated with either of thse things. The result will be better IT for the money with all the good benefits of FLOSS: interoperability, openness, performance and freedom to use IT the best way possible. Having restrictions placed by EULA or lack of interoperability is going the way of the dinosaur. It’s about time. More governments should adopt such policies.

    • French Prime Minister recommends Free Software in public administrations

      This happened after Italy’s new law on software procurement clearly stipulating that the use of Free Software is to be prefered upon other alternatives.

      This text is mainly based on a report from the cross-ministry IT services. Its main idea rests on their consideration of Free Software as an “educated choice” that must be spread among all the ministries.

      The introduction acknowledges Free Software’s advantages for public administrations such as: “costs, flexibility or the balance of power with software editors”.

  • Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

  • Security

    • 3 years later, hackers who hit Google continue string of potent attacks

      The hackers who breached the defenses of Google and at least 34 other big companies three years ago have unleashed a barrage of new attacks since then, many that exploit previously undocumented vulnerabilities in software from Microsoft and Adobe, a new report has found.

    • See? IE is Spaghetti Code

      This is characteristic of spaghetti-code. The stuff is running every which-way and off the plate… That the application does something for no reason/illogically/for no benefit, and that action causes the application to melt shows that the code was hidden under the spaghetti somehow.

    • Microsoft offers workarounds for IE bug

      Microsoft has detailed a method users of Internet Explorer can use to secure their computers from the recently discovered exploit allowing malicious code to run on a PC.

  • Finance

    • ‘Why Wall Street Always Wins:’ Post-Crisis Banking
    • ‘The Payoff’: Wall Street Wins, Again

      If you feel like justice was thwarted during the financial crisis, if you feel like the market’s been rigged for the insiders and there’s no check on it, you’ve got an ally in Jeff Connaughton.

    • How Goldman Sachs And Its Henchmen Are Starving The World

      For today I had intended to write another installment on what happens when the Republicans get their way and the so called “free market” is left to regulate itself. Then, a picture on Facebook caught my attention (the picture to the left) and it reminded me of a much more immediate problem. I was planning to discuss the South Seas Company founded in England in 1711. I’ll come back to it in a later article.

    • Woody Brock: Capitalism is Great, but Our Corrupted, Bastardized, Crony Capitalist System Stinks; It’s Rigged
    • Goldman Sachs Analysts Say Bank Slowdown Isn’t Temporary

      New bank regulations and capital requirements are “structural” changes to the industry that are more to blame for declining profits than the U.S. economic slump, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) analysts said.

      “The operating environment is unlikely to change any time soon, and we see shareholders of challenged banks becoming more demanding in asking management teams to lay out a path to unlocking value in the near term,” analysts led by Richard Ramsden in New York wrote in a report published today.

    • FDIC Sues Banks and Depositors Over MBS Fraud
    • Too Big To Jail: Wall Street Executives Unlikely To Face Criminal Charges, Source Says

      A last-ditch effort by federal and state law enforcement authorities to hold Wall Street accountable for nearly bringing down the U.S. economy is unlikely to lead to any criminal charges against big bank executives, according to a source close to the investigation.

    • Goldman at last gets a conflicts comeuppance

      Goldman Sachs is at last getting its comeuppance over conflicts of interest. The bank is forfeiting a $20 million fee after playing both sides of Kinder Morgan’s $21 billion El Paso deal. It’s peanuts compared with Goldman’s other profits from the transaction. But on the heels of a similar outcome for Barclays, Wall Street is getting an education about skewed incentives in terms it can understand.

    • Dan Kervick: Shamanistic Economics

      The Fed did something on Wednesday: it announced a new program of open-ended quantitative easing, and it announced that it likely won’t pull back on the new round of monthly asset purchases once the economy begins to recover more strongly, but will keep the purchases going for some indefinite period of time afterward. After what exactly was left unsaid. The Fed apparently has a target it intends to overshoot, but hasn’t said exactly what the target is. But whatever it is, we have been given forward guidance that the reaching of that unspecified target won’t stop the asset purchases – at least not right away.

    • Matt Taibbi: The People Vs. Goldman Sachs
    • Fiat Justitia? Breuer fires blanks on elite financial frauds
    • Goldman CEO sees tougher regulation as necessary

      Tougher regulation of financial institutions and higher capital ratios at banks are necessary in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the head of Goldman Sachs on Wednesday, even as he acknowledged that such safeguards carried some costs.

      Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of the largest U.S. investment bank, said he sees financial regulation evolving now just as it did in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

    • AT&T Presents: Your Congressional Representative™ Brought to You by Goldman Sachs

      The roar of the crowd, the flashbulbs, the excitement, the spirit of competition the… corporate logo-addled uniforms?

      One might be describing a NASCAR event, or perhaps even an NBA game in the near future if NBA commissioner David Stern gets his way. Or, one could be describing a political campaign rally, if Congress was as willing as the NBA and NASCAR to proudly display the logos of the big corporations that finance them.

      We recently launched the Suits for Sale campaign (suitsforsale.org) to bring attention to the dominance of big money in politics. It’s no secret that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, super PACs have flooded campaigns with more money than ever before. So what better way to inform voters of who they are really voting for then to adorn our elected officials with the very corporate logos that brought them to power?

    • NASSIM TALEB: Former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin Represents Everything That’s Bad In America

      In the piece, he interviews Nassim Taleb, who has some choice words for Rubin, President Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary and former Citigroup executive.

    • Richman v. Goldman Sachs Group: CDOs and Wells Notices

      Plaintiffs are purchasers of Goldman’s common stock between February 5, 2007 and June 10, 2010 (“Plaintiffs”). Defendants are Goldman Sachs & Co (“Goldman”), Goldman Chairman and CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman CFO David Viniar and Goldman COO Gary D. Cohn (“Individual Defendants.”) Plaintiffs claimed that Defendants made misstatements and omissions about Wells Notices the company received from the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), and about the conflicts of interest arising out of Goldman’s role in structuring the CDOs known as Abacus, Hudson Mezzanine Funding (“Hudson”), Anderson Mezzanine Funding (“Anderson”) and Timberwolf I.

  • Censorship

09.25.12

Links 25/9/2012: Linux Used at Airbus, Linux 3.6 RC7 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 5:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A Dying Tux in an Airbus

    When I was on an airplane several days ago, an entertainment screen broke. As it rebooted and printed the console debug information, I found out that these computers actually ran Linux. But the reboot didn’t finish properly…

    There was nothing I could do about it, so I just watched it struggle. In this story I pour upon life and death in digital era, and how computers demonstrate human-like feelngs.

    A couple of days ago I took a transatlantic flight on an Airbus A330. It is a large plane where each seat is accompanied by a computer named “Entertaintment System”. It contained games, movies, and stuff like inflight information (plane location mapped onto the world map, and flight progress details, which is kimda reassuring given that the flight lasts for 10+ hours.) A killer feature of such system is its USB port useful when you want to read/watch something on your mobile phone (or type this story, for instance.)

  • Automotive manufacturers gear up for open source push

    Both the Linux Foundation and the Genivi Alliance have announced new open source initiatives at the Automotive Linux Summit, which is currently under way in Warwickshire, England. The Linux Foundation has founded the Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup with the goal of streamlining the development of software for automobiles, while the Genivi Alliance has said that it will concentrate all of its development on open source projects going forward.

  • Desktop

    • Why Are We Still Buying Desktop OSes, Anyway?

      That’s essentially what the return on investment will be when hundreds of thousands–perhaps millions–of enterprise desktops get upgraded to Windows 8. Surely we can figure out something better to do with all that money, even if we have to move some cheese in the process.

      And that’s where my inner finance child starts struggling with my tech self who’s committed to keeping things rolling along. I see my staff and users happily and productively ensconced in the Windows world. I want them to be happy and productive, but I want to get rid of unnecessary ongoing expenses, too, even if it causes temporary pain.

  • Kernel Space

    • Twists and Turns for Linux on Intel’s Slippery Clover Trail

      “I just can’t buy Intel’s explanation for this, since it would be easy for Intel’s own Linux kernel developers to add the needed support to Linux,” said consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack. “There must be some other reason, and I bet that reason is that Intel is desperately hoping that Windows 8 will extend the Intel/Microsoft juggernaut from the PC market into the tablet market.”

    • On to better booting

      More than a few Linux distributions have pulled up their stakes in the decades old System V method of booting and quietly moved to a better way of booting. Better, faster, easier to maintain, and less prone to problems. I say “quietly” not to imply that there haven’t been announcements, banners waving, and proper cheers from some segments of the Linux user community, but to emphasize how little disruption has occurred and how little those of us who have been living in the slower-to-change Linux environments have had to pay attention. But the changes are nothing short of huge.

    • Linux 3.6-rc7
    • 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: Jiri Slaby
    • LPC videos on Linux & UEFI, ARM and ACPI 5.0

      The organisers of the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) 2012, which was held at the end of August in San Diego, have released videos, notes and presentation slides from the conference presentations. The talks are primarily concerned with Linux software that deals with the interaction between hardware and the user interface.

    • Ask a kernel developer: maintainer workflow

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Interview with XFCE’s Nick Schermer

      After the release of Unity and Gnome Shell, XFCE gained more popularity, fans and support for being the reliable “traditional” desktop environment. Fast, modern, mature, light and beautiful, XFCE is naturally becoming the default DE on big distributions like Debian.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • DigiKam Software Collection 2.9.0 Out

        “After one month since 2.8.0 release, digiKam team is proud to announce the digiKam Software Collection 2.9.0, as bug-fixes release. This will be the last 2.x release. Next one will be 3.0.0, currently under development, following GoSC 2012 projects, listed here.”

    • GNOME Desktop

      • First Look Of Gnome OS Boot Screen

        The Gnome Foundation had earlier announced an operating system mainly focused for Gnome development, known as Gnome OS. The OS is still in early development stages and developers are currently busy in designing and planning phase. William Jon Mc Cann posted some insights as hoe the boot screen will look like in Gnome OS and its features in Gnome Live! Here is a screenshot below:

      • Making GTK3 themes – Part 4: Porting GTK2 themes

        This is the 4th post from the “Making GTK3 themes” series. The older posts can be found here, here and here.

        Gnome 2 had some really great themes. And now we miss them with GTK3. Porting is not that much hard, but still, not that easy. But with some little tricks, you can ease porting GTK2 themes to GTK3.

      • Gnome 3 vs. Gnome 2 vs. change
      • Desktop Linux: The GNOME 3 Release Series Extensions

        Extensions — plugins that add specialized bits of functionality to a Linux desktop — have helped many free software projects succeed, including Vim, LibreOffice, Firefox, and Amarok. Could they do the same for the often-beleaguered GNOME 3 release series?

        The GNOME Shell Extensions site has been running for a little less than a year now. Technically, it’s in beta, but, if my experience is any indication, the problems are few.

      • What’s going on with GNOME?

        GNOME release manager Frederic Peters shares insight into the excitement surrounding the GNOME project…

  • Distributions

    • Vector Linux review

      After a very busy month, I finally had some free time to try Vector Linux, a distro that a facebook friend told me to take a look at. For those of you that dont know, Vector Linux is a distro that has been around for quite a long time. It is based on Slackware, with Xcfe, KDE and LXDE as the available desktop environments. According to the official website, the aim of Vector is to keep the distro simple and small and let the end user decide what their operating system is going to be.

    • New Releases

      • Tiny Core 4.6.2
      • Updated Waldorf testing images: 20120924

        The previous CrunchBang 11 “Waldorf” development images have now been replaced by some updated builds. The updated images include the Debian Installer 7.0 Beta2 release. Other changes have been kept to an absolute minimum. For more information and to leave any feedback, please see the forum announcement.

      • Slackware 14.0 RC5 Is Now Ready for Testing

        Patrick Volkerding has announced last evening, September 19th, the immediate availability for download and testing of fifth Release Candidate of the upcoming Slackware 14.0 Linux operating system.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • First look at PCLinuxOS 2012.08

        The PCLinuxOS distribution is an interesting creation. The project, originally based on the Mandriva distribution, is now an independent project with its own base, its own packages and its own vision. The project provides a rolling release distro which tries to balance being modern with being stable. It also attempts to balance modern software with a familiar look & feel. Finally, and perhaps most unusually, PCLinuxOS uses RPM software packages, but manages them with the APT package management utilities. It is a unique creation and all the more welcome in a world full of simple re-spins.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon Linux 10 Has MATE and Linux Kernel 3.5

        Fabio Erculiani proudly announced on September 13th, the immediate availability for download of the Sabayon Linux 10 operating system.

        Sabayon Linux 10 is powered by Linux kernel 3.5.4 (with BFQ iosched), and it features the GNOME 3.4.2, KDE 4.9, Xfce 4.10, and the new MATE 1.4.1 desktop environments.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat narrows full-year revenue forecast

        Red Hat Inc (RHT.N), the world’s largest distributor of Linux operating software, reported a lower-than-expected adjusted profit as costs rose, and lowered the top end of its full-year revenue outlook on slow growth in its services business.

      • Is Red Hat looking to a model of the past?

        A recent blog post from Red Hat raises some interesting questions about the paradox that exists between what large enterprises want in terms of their IT future requirements, and what the cloud is now able to offer. And perhaps the first question is whether one of the key drivers now in play is not the issue of what large enterprises want but the perception of established IT vendors as to what the large enterprises ought to want.

      • FactSet Net Soars, Red Hat Net Declines

        Carnival Corp. third quarter net nearly flat to $1.33 billion. FactSet fourth quarter net jumped 19% to $48.5 million. Neogen first quarter net climbed 12%. Paychex first quarter net grew 3% to $153.1 million. Red Hat second quarter net declined 13% to $35 million. Vail Resorts loss narrowed.

      • Red Hat Delivers New Beta Version 5.9 of RHEL

        On Monday, Red Hat reported that while its revenues were up, its quarterly profit was short of analyst estimates as its cost of doing business rose. Buried within the report were several nuggets of promise for the first-ever billion dollar a year open source company, though. The company’s subscription support business rose 17 percent, and Red Hat has a beta version of an updated 5.9 release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The new release will greatly expand RHEL’s support for newer hardware, among other enhancements.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 Nears Release

        Not every enterprise updates to the latest version of new software from Linux vendor Red Hat, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be updated.

      • Red Hat: Linux on ARM Is No Joke

        There was a time when x86 was the only major chip architecture Linux vendor Red Hat cared about. That time has now come to an end as the Linux giant is now taking a serious look at ARM.

      • Red Hat’s Latest Legal Battle? Storage.

        Red Hat is the most successful pure play open source company on the planet, generating over $1 billion in revenue a year. Its success is rooted in a strong legal basis and understanding of how open source software works.

        Red Hat is using its open source expertise to its advantage in a new legal battle over alleged storage patent infringement with the Gluster filesystem. Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011 for $136 million. The Gluster technology is now the cornerstone of Red Hat’s Storage technology, which recently hit its 2.0 release.

        Backup storage vendor Twin Peaks Software filed a complaint in July with United States District Court, Northern District of California, San Jose Division, alleging patent infringement. The alleged infringement deals with United States Patent Number 7,418,439, (the ’439 patent), titled “Mirror File System,” which Twin Peaks owns.

      • Red Hat CEO: ‘This Is a Good Market For Us’

        Shares of the Raleigh, N.C.-based company are up 35% year-to-date, and Whitehurst said that the stock’s performance is based on strong growth and solid guidance provided in March. Wall Street analysts have been predicting that Red Hat’s organic growth would eventually slow to that of GDP growth, currently at 1.7%. Red Hat, however, has been able to continually deliver growth of 20% or more on a constant currency basis. “Our job is to beat the fade,” Whitehurst noted. “If we can continue to grow 20% every year, that will drive the stock.”

    • Debian Family

      • Linux Mint Debian update pack 5 shows maturity

        With relatively little fanfare, Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 5 was released on Monday last week. It is a sign of the improving stability and maturity of this distribution that unlike previous Update Packs, this one brings only incremental updates — albeit lots of them — rather than the eagerly awaited and badly needed bug fixes and distribution changes that have come before it.

        On the four systems I have updated so far, the download was between 900MB and 1GB, and it took quite a while to install — 30 to 60 minutes after the download completed. If you prefer to wait for updated ISO images incorporating this Update Pack, the Linux Mint teams said in their release announcement that those should become available over the next “weeks or months”.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Opening Ubuntu Up To the World

            Recently I have been working with David Planella and Michael Hall on my team around a new specification for empowering app developers to deliver their content in Ubuntu. This post provides some background information around this work and the problem it seeks to solve.

            Like many of you, I am hugely proud of the progress we have made with Ubuntu over the years. We have worked together to create a simple, powerful experience underlined with the foundation of our core Ubuntu values of creating a free platform, available to all, in your language, irrespective of (dis)ability.

          • The Ubuntu 12.10 Desktop Includes Amazon Search Results–Users Revolt

            While some are calling it a tempest in a teapot, Ubuntu loyalists are expressing fury that the next version of Ubuntu includes shopping suggestions from Amazon directly in desktop search results. Version 12.10 is imminent, and many Ubuntu users feel like the Amazon inclusions are nothing more than adware. What does Canonical get out of this arrangement, and will the company reverse its decision? Mark Shuttleworth has weighed in.

            Version 12.10 of Ubuntu has a lot to like, and it has an updated version of the Unity desktop environment, Unity 3D, which includes a range of desktop effects achieved through hardware acceleration. However, Ubuntu fans of up in arms over the inclusion of Amazon results in the desktop search function, and many are concerned that their personal data will be picked up by Amazon.

          • Ubuntu on Air!: Beta
          • All your base are belong to Canonical
          • On The Recent Dash Improvements
          • Ubuntu: Re-Doing the Possible

            There’s some sort of push back going on regarding the Ubuntu shopping lens. It’s a neat little feature that I wouldn’t want to be in the home screen, but would like to have in it’s own category.

          • Ubuntu 12.10: What to Expect

            According to my sources, it’s almost October, and that can mean but one thing: The debut of Ubuntu 12.10 is almost upon us. To prepare, here’s a look at some of the biggest changes to expect in the forthcoming release of one of the world’s most popular open source operating systems.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Will Have an Improved Unity Interface

            With last night’s update, Canonical published a major update to the Unity interface of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system, due for release next month.

            The improved Unity interface brings new lenses, such as a Shopping Lens for your online shopping needs and a Google Docs Scope for searching through your online stored documents. Also, price and user ratings ribbons were added on suggested apps – information taken from Ubuntu Software Center.

          • Desktop Linux: Has Ubuntu’s Unity Surpassed the Mac?

            At OSCON in 2008, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, challenged the crowd, “The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop. Can we not only emulate, but can we blow right past Apple?”

            The challenge was a defining moment for desktop Linux, coming near the start of an era in which KDE, GNOME, and Ubuntu would all attempt to rethink the desktop.

            Four years later, speaking again at OSCON, Shuttleworth implied victory. “We’ve leapt ahead of some of the competition,” he said, claiming that Ubuntu’s Unity desktop was now the second easiest to use after Windows, and showing specific elements in which he felt Unity surpassed Mac OS X.

          • New Update of Landscape Is Part of Ubuntu’s Enterprise Push
          • Canonical Updates Ubuntu Linux Landscape

          • Flavours and Variants

            • ArtistX 1.3 Is Based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

              Marco Ghirlanda has announced a couple of days ago, on September 23rd, that the ArtistX 1.3 Linux distribution is available for download.

              ArtistX 1.3 is based on the popular Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system and is powered by Linux kernel 3.0.0.

              With over 2,500 open source multimedia applications on-board, this release of ArtistX features the GNOME 3.4 and KDE Software Compilation 4.8 desktop environments.

            • Peppermint OS Three: between the cloud and the desktop

              The cloud era is coming. Some people can argue whether this is good or bad. Maybe that’s only the fashion. Maybe not. Although more and more people think of the cloud as if it were the inevitable future.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Using Raspberry Pi as a Photo Station

      Although Raspberry Pi (RPi) is not powerful enough for heavy-duty image processing, you can still put it to some photography-related uses. For example, as an amateur photographer, I take a lot of photos when I travel, and I upload the photos to my Raspberry Pi at home which neatly organizes and keeps them safe till I get back home.

      To turn RPi into a photo station, I opted for the Debian Wheezy minimal image. The only thing I needed to install was the usbmount tool which automatically mounts and unmounts external USB storage devices. Although it’s possible to save photos on the SD card, I decided to keep them on a dedicated 16GB USB stick which usbmount tool mounts at /media/usb0. Since the minimal image comes with an SSH server enabled by default, I only had to configure my router to make RPi accessible from the Internet.

    • Raspberry Pi: Turbo – Warranty safe overclocking

      Raspberry Pi’s can now shift into turbo by changing some configuration settings and getting a 50% power boost, all without voiding the warranty

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Vivaldi KDE tablet delayed following major setback

        KDE developer Aaron Seigo has announced that the release of the Vivaldi KDE tablet has been postponed for now. The 7-inch tablet will use the Mer Project’s Linux distribution as its operating system, and KDE Plasma Active as its default desktop user interface. However, the manufacturer of the originally chosen Zenithink C71 tablet has modified the system board of the device at short notice. Having made numerous adjustments to the Linux kernel to support the previous system board, the developers must therefore restart their development work almost from scratch.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Study urges CIOs to choose open source first

    CIOs looking to replace legacy systems should consider open source options over proprietary software or public cloud services, according to a study by prominent British IT academic, Professor Jim Norton.

    Norton’s study, released today and commissioned by travel industry processing giant Amadeus, assessed the role of open source software in critical transaction systems.

  • Google’s Code-in Contest Is Ideal for Teens Interested In Open Source

    Google has announced its third annual Code-in contest for high school students, an international contest introducing 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source software development. According to the announcement: “The goal of the contest is to give students the opportunity to explore the many types of projects and tasks involved in open source software development. Globally, open source software development is becoming a major factor in all industries from governments, healthcare, and relief efforts to gaming and large tech companies.” This looks like one of the better opportunities for young people picking up technical skills to differentiate themselves from the pack.

  • The Open Source Column – It pays to help

    The vast majority among the Linux community? Incredibly helpful. The minute minority? Less so, suspects Simon…

  • How to pay for open source

    We often think of open source as “free software.” That’s a good association. Many people follow the tradition, dating from the ’80s, of referring to software that offers users the liberty to deploy, study, modify, and distribute its source code as “free software.”

    But that’s “free” as in liberty, not “free” as in beer. Like it or not, the idea of getting something for nothing still drives many customers to open source solutions — and can deceive them into into thinking it’s wrong to pay people for open source software.

  • Open NASA – An Interview with Nick Skytland from NASA

    An interview with one of the talented people behind NASAs Open Government initiative.

  • Pentaho, Cisco Partner on Open Source Big Data Solution

    Big Data often requires “Big Hardware.” In other words, to process and analyze large stores of information, organizations usually need a lot of computing power, which brings with it its own set of demands and maintenance costs. Eying opportunity in this challenge, open source Big Data analytics company Pentaho has partnered with Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) to deliver a complete hardware and software solution for business analytics. Here’s the scoop.

  • Rackspace Hands Over Keys to Open Source Cloud

    When Rackspace and NASA started OpenStack — a collection of open source tools for building Amazon-style clouds in any data center — Rackspace shouldered the responsibility for organizing the community.

    But as that community grew, it became clear that the project needed a more neutral steward, and the company started taking steps to hand the project over to the non-profit OpenStack Foundation.

    On Wednesday, that transition was completed, as Rackspace handed over the OpenStack trademark, and the foundation officially took over governance of the project. From here on out, the OpenStack Foundation is responsible for all legal, financial, marketing and operational management issues.

  • 80 Open Source Replacements for Audio-Video Tools

    Multimedia creation and consumption continue to be among the most common uses for PCs and mobile devices. Consider: According to recent research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 46 percent of U.S. Internet users have posted original videos or photos online. Seventy-one percent of online Americans have used a video sharing site like YouTube or Vimeo.

    Recording industry trade association IFPI reports that more than half of record company revenues from the U.S. come from digital music, and those digital music revenues continue to grow every year. Global Industry Analysts forecasts that mobile entertainment, including video and music, will be a $67.6 billion industry by 2018.

  • British Academic Advises CIOs to Choose Open Source
  • Open source in 2012: Bigger and better than ever

    This year’s Best of Open Source Software awards includes a whopping 125 products in 7 categories. The real story is the technology leadership so many of these products display

  • 5 Free Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Office

    While Microsoft Office is the industry standard in terms of , integrated applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database management, email and desktop publishing. However, it’s important for small business owners to know that these types of office applications are also available in free and open source office productivity applications.

    Open source office software has come a long way in recent years, so choosing free software over expensive proprietary software doesn’t mean you’ll lose features and support. Today’s open source office productivity software is feature-rich and provides ample access to online documentation and large communities of users and developers.

  • 5 Best Open Source Tools to Create Scalable Online Social Networking Platforms

    While Facebook and Twitter is the core of the Internet’s social networking world, some companies and organizations may have reasons to set up their own social networking applications. For some companies, setting up their own social network is a good option because the public Internet may not be secure enough for certain conversations concerning sensitive proprietary information or customer contact information.

  • How Successful CEOs Leverage Open Source Software
  • Open source education software unveiled by Google

    Online education startups such as the Khan Academy, along with new efforts by MIT, Stanford, and Harvard have helped spur interest in and add legitimacy to the notion of remote learning. Now Google is lending its brainpower to the rapidly growing area by releasing a tool called Course Builder, open source software designed to let anyone create online education courses.

    The Course Builder project came by way of another program Google ran earlier this year called Power Searching With Google. The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which attracted approximately 155,000 students from 196 countries, allowed Google to marry some of the practices now common to online instruction with the company’s robust array of collaboration and communication tools. A new Power Searching session begins in two weeks.

  • Open Source Ceph Storage Filesystem Advances with Inktank

    Sage Weil started the Ceph filesystem as a research project. Today that research project is a bona fide enterprise option for Big Data and cloud storage purposes.

    Ceph is now in the Linux kernel and Weil is the CEO of startup Inktank, which provides commercial support for Ceph.

  • Events

    • Linux Event TV: One-on-One with Open Source Visionaries

      Linux Foundation events are studded with Linux and open source community leaders, as well as some eccentric personalities. What better place than one of these events to sit down and talk to the people who are making innovation happen in software development and cloud computing?

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • ZTE Will Be Mozilla’s Smartphone Partner in China

        As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Chinese telecom company ZTE will be launching smartphones based on Mozilla’s new “Firefox OS” mobile operating system. Based on open standards, the mobile OS is being aimed at primarily emerging markets around the world. With Qualcomm and Telefonica in place as existing Mozilla partners, the ZTE hookup implies that Mozilla’s play in the smartphone arena may have some real legs.

      • Mozilla Firefox Completes 10 Successful Years

        Firefox is the third most popular browser in the world

      • Meet the Mozilla OS Developer Phone

        It’s no secret that Mozilla has been working on a mobile OS. Previously codenamed Boot2Gecko, the project focused on a purely HTML5 based system that worked in many ways like current mobile devices. As the project grew into Mozilla OS, the company has laid out a partnership with ZTE that will have real world devices in certain markets early next year. Testing for this OS had previously consisted of a compiled ROM that would be flashed over a handful of Android devices. Now, Mozilla has moved into full fledged product evaluation mode with their own custom developer phone.

      • Why is Open Source WebKit the Weak Link in Apple Security?

        bout a month before the recent HP mobile pwn2own event, I told the event organizers that is extremely likely that the mobile vulns they find will be WebKit related.

        As it turns it out I was right and I’m not surprised.

        The iPHone 4S was hacked by way of a WebKit vuln and I strongly suspect the NFC attack on the Samsung Galaxy had a WebKit component too. WebKit vulnerability fixes also rank highly (by my count over 50 percent) for all security fixes made in the recent Apple iOS 6 update.

        WebKit vulnerabilities also accounted for over 100 flaws fixed in Apple’s latest iTunes update.

      • Next Firefox ESR release planned

        Enterprise users of Firefox should get ready for the next cycle of Firefox ESR, which will begin on 20 November 2012. The Mozilla developers have clarified their plans for the next release of Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release), the version designed for enterprises and other organisations that require a stable qualified version of the browser for inhouse deployment.

        The process, as designed, sees a Firefox ESR release being cloned from the mainstream version of Firefox at a particular point in time, in this case the release of Firefox 17 at the end of November, to create Firefox ESR 17. Then, over the next two cycles of mainstream Firefox development, Firefox ESR is tested and bugs fixed in it creating versions 17.0.1 (alongside Firefox 18 on 8 January 2013) and 17.0.2 (alongside Firefox 19 on 19 February 2013).

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle broadens support for open-source R analytics
    • Exclusive Interview | Alasdair Lumsden

      At Unixmen, we were lucky enough to score an exclusive interview with former Project Leader of the OpenIndiana, Alasdair Lumsden.

      Since Alasdair’s resignation, it has not only sparked discussion on the reasons of Alasdair’s resignation from OpenIndiana, but also generated a lot of interesting discussion on development and the future of OpenIndiana.

      I want to really thank Alasdair for taking the time to chat with Unixmen and reveal all in this very intimate and honest view of OpenIndiana from the very inside of the project.

  • CMS

  • Semi-Open Source

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Spotlight on … “free France!”

      It is certain that with just some little errors that contains the form 35837 like the article 3.2.2 about the free software license are not another form of law, but international law for computers an industries and another error in the 3.2.6 which seems to misunderstood Free Software and Open Source.

  • Project Releases

    • Joomla 2.5.7 Released
    • Version 2.6.0 of Avidemux video editor released

      With the recent release of version 2.6.0, the cross-platform Avidemux video editor has had all of its internals rewritten and now supports more scripting languages. Avidemux is a basic, open source video editing tool designed for simple tasks such as cutting, filtering and encoding; these tasks can be automated using project and job queues, or with Avidemux’s built-in scripting capabilities. Supported formats include AVI, DVD-compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, as well as a variety of codecs.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Open-Source Software Licenses

      To some people’s surprise, even open-source software has a license attached to it. And with that license comes a description and agreement for what can and can’t be done with the source code of any particular product or service. What exact license the specific open-source software lies under is generally up to the developer(s) and/or current maintainers of the original code.

      Open-source software licensing is not something that I have really taken particular notice of in previous and recent times. In fact, all code I have ever created or modified has been done so with no regard to what the license is. I am guilty, yes, as are probably a lot of open-source developers and programmers.

    • Open sourcing legal docs for small business

      Open source is one of the concepts that has taken off in a variety of implementations: hardware, cars, and… legal documents?

      Sure, why not? Docracy, is a start-up that provides free, open-source legal documents to individuals and companies that need them, as well as a framework on which legal agreements can be negotiated and signed electronically.

      As a freelance writer, I have used e-signing services myself to get contracts signed so I can get paid. So far, everything has all worked well, in the sense that I am getting paid. But I also wonder how well such electronic signatures would actually stand up in court should I or one of my vendors decide to get squirrelly?

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Baccus open-source robotic arm hits Kickstarter

        Baccus is an open-source robotic arm project aimed primarily at educators and researchers, but because it is seeking funding on Kickstarter, it also poses value to robotics enthusiasts or people who just want to see the latest and most unique crowdfunded scientific advancements.

  • Programming

    • 9 key career issues software developers face

      The path from birth to death is filled with choices about where to work and what kind of work to do. Sometimes the world is nice enough to allow us some input. These days, developers have a lot more say in their employment, thanks to rising demand for their services.

      Whether you’re an independent contractor or a cubicle loyalist with a wandering eye, programming want ads abound, each stirring its own set of questions about how best to steer your career. For some, this is entirely new territory, having fallen into employment with computers simply as a means to scratch an itch.

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • The Omerta Surrounding Goldman Sachs: A Documentary

      On September 4th, the French-German Television channel, Arte, will show a documentary based on the book The Bank: How Goldman Sachs Rules the World by London-based correspondent for Le Monde, Marc Roche. Last week I spoke with Mr. Roche and co-director of the film Jerome Fritel in London and Paris, respectively, about the new documentary. Every time I think I have heard enough of how bad the banks are and what new thing has been discovered on or off their books, and proven to be legal, if immoral, I am always surprised by how far certain players go to make a profit.

    • Who Will Bear the Brunt of “Deficit Reduction”?

      A sort of joke making the rounds a few years back had (billionaire) Bill Gates walking into a working class bar. The joke was that the moment he did everyone in the bar on average became a billionaire. Understand—he didn’t give away any money or, other than possibly ordering a beer and paying for it, did any money change hands. But through the miracle of statistics the gargantuan difference in wealth between Mr. Gates and the other bar patrons was converted to faux equitable distribution under the measure of ‘average’ wealth.

    • Citigroup, Goldman, UBS Sued Over Mortgage-Backed Bonds
    • Goldman Sachs Sued Over Mortgage Bonds
    • Better investment = better innovation: a radical shift for EU research in ICT

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Romney and “Investments” by the 1%?

      “People can invest what they want,” billionaire industrialist David Koch recently told Politico.

      Koch wasn’t discussing the stock market or oil futures. He was talking money in politics: wealthy donors “investing” in elected officials, apparently with the expectation of getting a return. In total, donors like the Kochs, along with Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, and “outside” groups have pledged to raise a total of $1 billion this election to elect Republicans, particularly President Barack Obama’s opponent Mitt Romney.

    • Response to DfE consultation on parental controls

      The consultation followed a code of conduct signed by the main UK ISPs in October 2011, in which they promised to give new customers a choice about whether they wanted parental controls set up on their account. Shortly afterwards, Claire Perry MP launched a campaign for more internet filtering, and ran an inquiry into the issue. The report, which was sponsored by Premier Christian Media, recommended that ISP level filtering be switched on by default.

  • Censorship

    • CleanIT: bad policy making

      Thanks to an EDRi leak, European proposals for widespread action against “terrorism” were revealed last week, with press coverage in the Telegraph and elsewhere.

      The project – Clean IT – moved swiftly to deny that they had been a closed project, which is partly true. They also tried to reduce the significance of the document they had produced, saying it was “for discussion” (even though page one of the leaked document suggests the contents are ‘detailed recommendations’).

      The plans include measures for upload filtering, corporate censorship, plus procedures for flagging dubious content.

  • Copyrights

    • Another Judge Blasts Copyright Trolls

      We’ve been seeing more and more judges reacting negatively to copyright trolls. What’s interesting is that they seem to be getting more aggressive in their statements against the trolls, and it seems clear that fewer judges are falling for their antics. The latest is from Judge Harold Baer in the Southern District of New York, who you could say is not impressed by some copyright trolling cases that have ended up in his court, coming from Media Products and Patrick Collins. He had allowed for expedited discovery, which is what copyright trolls want, but it seems quite clear that Baer regrets that decision and now seeks to reverse it. Expedited discovery basically gives the trolls what they want: it lets them subpoena ISPs to find out contact info of users based on the IP addresses they’ve collected. From that point on, they have no intention of ever proceeding with the actual lawsuit. They just want to start pressuring people into “settling.”

09.24.12

Links 24/9/2012: New Distros, GNOME 3.7 is Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 11:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • New Workgroup Will Deliver a Standard Linux Platform for Cars

    Vehicles have been an emerging platform for Linux for some time now, with much of the momentum driven by auto makers and a few technology standards bodies, plus steadfast support for the trend from The Linux Foundation. Now, The Linux Foundation has announced the Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup (AGL). It will “facilitate widespread industry collaboration that advances automotive device development,providing a community reference platform that companies can use forcreating products,” according to the Workgroup announcement. News of it arrives amidst other news related to Linux in vehicles.

  • The Linux Foundation Announces Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup

    The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup (AGL). The Workgroup will facilitate widespread industry collaboration that advances automotive device development, providing a community reference platform that companies can use for creating products.

  • The State of Linux in 2012

    Every year for the past four years, Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation gets in front of thousands of Linux developers and users at the LinuxCon conference to detail the success and the State of Linux.

  • This Week in Linux: Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, and More
  • Becoming a completely Linux household Clip to Evernote

    That’s something I’ve been wanting to happen for a while. Until recently, we were 2/3 the way there – with the laptops and mobile devices that my daughter and I use all running Linux or Android. But I finally got my wish of living in a completely Linux household a few weeks ago, all thanks to my wife’s laptop.

    It all started one Saturday morning when my wife wanted to scan some documents. Her laptop went into rather scary boot-shutdown loop, and the hard drive started clicking. This had happened a few months ago, and as it turned out the particular model of hard drive used in her laptop (which the manufacturer replaced) is one that’s prone to failure.

  • From My Linux Soapbox!

    One of the strong points about Linux is its hardware detection at boot time.

  • Desktop

    • Google Drive File Management Is a Big Deal for Chrome OS

      It’s the end of August, and in case you missed it, Google closed out the month by delivering a new stable release of Chrome OS that does a few things that many users have been clamoring for. As noted on VentureBeat, the update “…finally gives the browser-based operating system file management to match the original product vision: a thin layer on hardware that puts intelligence and storage in the cloud. Now, users will have the option to save a file directly to Google Drive, instead of being forced to save it locally and then upload it.” Indeed, the update solves long-standing file management problems that Chrome OS has had.

    • Why It Makes Sense for Google to Rent Chromebooks

      This is a wise strategy from Google as it seeks to turn the enterprise into its next large market to conquer. Putting Chrome OS-based hardware in enterprises could be the final step in validating the operating system.

    • How would you fix the Linux desktop?

      I was reading the back-and-forth between Miguel de Icaza and Linus Torvalds (with special guest star Alan Cox) over the holiday weekend, and I was hardly surprised by the amount of finger-pointing going on.

      In case you missed it, de Icaza got the ball rolling with a blog entry a week ago opining on What Killed the Linux Desktop. The fault, de Icaza stated, lay in the way that Linux developers would consistently deprecate APIs just to improve them, coupled with the myriad of configurations between each separate distro.

    • The System76 Gazelle Professional: Just How Good Is It? [Review]

      The Gazelle Professional is the flagship laptop from Ubuntu computer maker’s System76.

    • The History of Linux

      Linux history teaserLinux has been around for more than 20 years and serves happily in both desktop and server roles. But it didn’t show up overnight. Linux is the result of the collaboration of lots of people over the years.

    • History of Early Linux Distros

      If you haven’t noticed, if you’re looking for a Linux distribution, you’re spoiled for choice. Sites like DistroWatch list hundreds of different Linux distros on the site. But where did they all come from?

      Since Linux is just a kernel, as Richard Stallman is fond of pointing out, it’s not really that useful by itself, and regardless of how you feel about the GNU/Linux naming controversy, it really is a misnomer to call Linux an operating system. As a kernel, it just does basic things like storing files on a hard drive or accessing a network. It requires utilities to make it useful.

  • Server

    • Software Defined Datacenter – All You Really Need is Linux

      vmwareMaybe I’m getting old. Perhaps that’s why I just don’t get it anymore when I see the direction of the virtualization industry, and specifically, VMware. The virtualization giant has been swinging around the buzzword, and of course, accompanying acronym, “Software Defined Datacenter”, SDDC for short, to explain their take on how VMware can be the center of the IT world. However, when I look at their latest offering, I see layers upon layers of complexity, hiding beneath the veneer of their slick GUI. I have a simpler solution, a programmable datacenter.

    • Supercomputer Built From Lego Blocks And Raspberry Pi ARM Boxes

      How cheaply can you build a supercomputer? A group from the University of Southampton just made one using 64 Raspberry Pi ARM GNU/Linux boxes ($25 each) and Lego blocks. The machine, named “Iridis-Pi” after the University’s Iridis supercomputer, runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket and uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet.

    • Cambridge Uni publishes free Pi-OS baking course

      Cambridge University has joined the ranks of terribly prestigious universities giving computer science classes away online, releasing a 12-step course teaching how to create what it calls a “basic terminal Operating System” for the Raspberry Pi.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Skateboarding with Greg Kroah-Hartman

      After the Linux Kernel Summit was done, the Linux kernel panel had wrapped and the LinuxCon and CloudOpen keynotes were finished, there was only one thing left to do at last week’s event: Skate. You might have heard rumblings and seen pictures of the skateboards that were given away as speaker and VIP gifts at this year’s event (you might have even scored one). Well, on Friday we took them out to the curb and put them to work – - with a little help from Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman.

    • 10 Insights from Linux Leaders in the Open Cloud

      How do the Linux and open source communities define the open cloud? Our Leaders of the Open Cloud series posed this key question, along with many others, to industry heavyweights in the 10 weeks leading up to the CloudOpen conference in San Diego last month. Here, we’ve distilled their answers into a slideshow to illustrate the range of participants and viewpoints as well as some areas of contention.

    • Linux 4.0 Coming in 2015?

      Linus Torvalds took stage tonight at the LinuxCon conference in a panel discussion about the state of Linux. Lucky for me they took questions from the audience via Twitter – though apparently i was the only one that asked questions over Twitter…

      I asked about the naming issue – many of us were almost caught of guard by how the whole Linux 3.0 name came about, with Linus pretty much saying at the time that the numbers in the 2.6.x series had simply just gotten too large. The last 2.6 kernel was the 2.6.39 kernel.

    • If Linus Torvalds Got Hit By a Bus Would Linux Die?

      As was the case in the beginning, Torvalds remains the leader of Linux and is responsible for maintaining the mainline kernel and pushing out its new leading-edge releases. One of the questions that has long been asked, and was asked again at the LinuxCon conference on Wednesday night, is the question of succession known as, “What if Linus gets hit by a bus?”

    • Kernel Log – Coming in 3.6 (Part 5): Infrastructure

      Similarly to current versions of Mac OS X and Windows, Linux is now capable of a hybrid sleep state. The 3.6 kernel also provides improved randomisation and reduces the work load of EFI bootloaders.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Linux Multi-Monitor Support Could Be Improved

        While some want Linux multi-monitor support removed, others are looking for it to be improved. Multiple display support for Linux has improved over the years with X.Org and desktop environment advancements, it’s still generally less than ideal, especially for Linux gamers.

        With the liaising earlier this week between a long-time Linux desktop developer (circa 1996) and a game company, besides talking about the AMD Catalyst driver being on his blacklist of junk, he had many thoughts to share on the state of Linux multi-monitor support.

      • Wayland 1.0 Stable Release Is Imminent

        Kristian Høgsberg spoke this week at XDC2012 about Wayland and Weston. Here’s a short recap plus some videos that include new demos of this promising project.

        Kristian began with a Wayland/Weston status and overview where he reiterated information about the desktop technology that has advanced in recent months — pretty much what’s already been covered by past Phoronix Wayland articles.

      • The Future Of OpenGL On Linux Looks Better

        The discussion was around providing a new Linux OpenGL ABI to better focus around today’s needs and technologies rather than sticking to a decade old ABI. Backwards compatibility, however, will be maintained. That article has more information on the background of the original proposal by NVIDIA for coming up with a new Linux OpenGL ABI.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • A real update on the progress of Wayland in KWin and KDE

        Of course I was asked quite often about the current state of Wayland in KDE and I honestly replied which resulted in rather incorrect “news” postings about Wayland in KDE not happening “any time soon” (whatever that is supposed to mean) to “Wayland for KDE will be delayed” (given that we never had a schedule in the first place, it cannot be delayed).

      • An Improved Apper For KDE Users Is Coming

        KDE, while extremely customizable, always lacked a tool which resembles the eye candy Ubuntu Software Center. One may argue that USC is not as powerful as plain Synaptic Package manager, yet it is polished enough to attract average user. KDE’s own Apper comes close but there are some missing features which keep it below the USC.

      • Randa Fundraising Success!
      • New KDE Telepathy 0.5 Adds Improved Images And Video Support In Chat
      • Qt 5 Beta Released, Promises Improved Graphics

        Qt, a C++ GUI and application framework is up for a new major release. Lars Knoll announced the release of Qt 5 beta in the Qt Labs developer blog and this release has got some exciting features.

        Among the major changes, developer will enjoy improved graphics and advanced UIs for apps written in QML and JavaScript. For those who wish to make their Qt apps more connected with the web, Qt 5 will be a blessing. High performance and better tools are also some major milestones achieved in this release.

      • Randa begins and Lernstick

        The sun has risen this morning to reveal the beautiful valley which a some 20 or so KDE community members have gathered to work on 3 main topics (multimedia, accessibility and Plasma). People were awake and hacking here in Randa until the early hours of the morning of our first day here. In the Plasma room we spent the day catching up with each other and what we’re working on as well as starting in on libplasma2, the next version of the underlying Plasma library, with the goal of having it in top shape for inclusion in the first release of Frameworks 5.

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 22nd July 2012

      • GNOME Desktop

        • Choose your Gnome distribution!
        • Gnome Shell 3.6 Preview

          Gnome 3.5.92 has been released few days ago and nothing more than translations and bug fixes will arrive till the stable release at September 26.

          Gnome Shell and Nautilus were the two modules that received huge development from 3.5.91 to .92 and more development is expected in 3.6.1 version in October 17. Gnome Shell 3.6 brings major changes in optics and huge improvements underneath.

        • A place for GNOME?
        • Input Sources in GNOME

          Today I want to take a look at one of the bigger new features in the upcoming GNOME release, Input Sources. I have written some early code for this, but the credit for getting it all working and completed really goes to Rui Matos and Takao Fujiwara.

      • Gnome 3.7 May Release On October 24, Gnome 3.8 On March 27th

        A release candidate of Gnome 3.9 is already out and Gnome 3.6 stable release is scheduled on September 26. However, development never stops in Linux world, and the developers are already making plans for the next releases. Currently, you can suggest some features for future Gnome releases as we announced earlier, and Gnome 3.8 feature freeze is on October 22nd this year.

      • Gnome 3.8 Accessibility improvements!

        Accessibility is an always important factor for Gnome designers/developers. All the people of the world should be able to use and contribute to our favorite desktop environment no matter their physical disabilities.

        Two new accessibility oriented/related features are now discussed and initiating with the purpose of being ready for the 3.8 release. These are the color tinting in Gnome Shell and the focus-caret tracking.

      • Gnome Sudoku: Final Look

        In Google Summer of Code this summer, Gnome apps and games got major enhancements and bug removals. One of the games that specially was given importance was Gnome Sudoku. Chris Baines has posted a screenshot on his blog about the final look of this game.

      • Preview of GNOME 3.6

        The Activities Overview has seen some improvements too that Clasen says will make a big difference in one’s overall GNOME experience. He explains, “Applications can now be accessed using the grid button in the dash, rather than by clicking on the applications tab. This improves the layout of the overview, and enables us to highlight the all-important search bar. It also addresses an issue that we saw when observing people use GNOME 3, where the applications button sometimes went unnoticed.”

      • Cinnamon 1.6 To Support Keyboard Navigation, Configurable Panel Heights And Notifications Applet
      • Gnome Shell 3.5.91 Released

        A new version of Gnome shell is out. This version is mostly a bug fix release and will be merged with the 3.6 release cycle. As its quite unstable, its not recommended to be installed as default work environment. You can, however, install it to get a taste of Gnome 3.6 and report bugs to the Gnome team.

      • Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer’s Redefined Looks

        With Gnome 3.6 release coming closer, a lot of visible improvements are arriving in the desktop front. Some applications have got some renovated looks, namely Nautilus, Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer, Empathy and the Gnome Message Tray. Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab) has got some visual improvements and looks cleaner now. Some screenshots below…

      • GNOME Answers Criticisms

        Since GNOME 3 was released in April 2011, the criticism has often been harsh (and, yes, I contributed to it myself). Seventeen months later, it shows few signs of ending, and Linux Mint has released Cinnamon and Mate, two popular re-creations of GNOME 2, as an alternative. Yet aside from the occasional comment from individuals, the GNOME Project itself has refrained from answering.

      • GNOME is simply losing its grasp

        The GNOME development team shot another bullet in their foot when they removed some beloved features from the Nautilus file manager. Read Jack Wallen’s take on how this serves as the final blow to GNOME’s relevancy.

      • 13 years old hacker Esteban is announced developer of the month! ..and the Cinnamon 1.5.8!

        Some great news come from Mint camp this month. First, Mint has been ranked “Best Distro 2012″ by Linux Format! Then, Mint is proud to have in his side one of the most talented hackers, the just 13 years old Esteban -esteban1uy- who was announced as the developer of the month (in Mint).

      • Senior GNOME dev says users not being ignored

        Despite public perception to the contrary, GNOME developers pay a great deal of attention to the opinions of users, senior GNOME developer Vincent Untz told iTWire today.

        Untz is in Orlando, Florida, to attend the first SUSECON, the first annual conference of the Linux company; the quiet-spoken Frenchman, who was on the GNOME Foundation board from 2006 till 2010, has been working for SUSE since 2008.

  • Distributions

    • New Distro Manjaro Linux Based on Arch

      There’s a new distro in town and it is not based on Ubuntu. In fact, almost the opposite – it’s based on and completely compatible with Arch Linux. Well, maybe not opposite because they aim to make Arch easy to install and use. The main version features Xfce 4.10, but they also offer GNOME and KDE DVDs. Best of all, it’s an install live CD/DVD.

    • Secure Your Network With pfSense

      One of my first experiences with network security was building firewalls for small offices and Internet cafés. Our boss at the time was adamant that we use open source, and directed us to OpenBSD and “pf”, their packet filtering firewall. It was a good call. OpenBSD proved to be rock solid, and pf was easy to configure and easy to maintain. Fast-forward a little over a decade and I’ve just finished installing a new pf-based firewall, this time as an entire FreeBSD distribution called pfSense.

    • Too Many Geeks, Too Much Choice

      One of my favorites is a quote from King Linus himself. “Everything would be easier if there was no choice.” That’s his way of saying freedom is messy. Many think freedom always results in more choice and that’s always a good thing.

      The problem with Open Source Software and freedom is that sometimes no one chooses the difficult or seemingly boring and unappreciated aspects. However, many times someone comes along and improves the product, Magiea and LibreOffice are two prime examples. But sometimes they don’t, like Symphony OS. Ultimately, consensus seems to be that the benefits of Open Source minus the problems associated with it are still preferable to the disadvantages even with the advantages of popular but proprietary software.

    • Warren Woodford and the Linux distro market | Interview

      Warren Woodford is the man behind MEPIS, one of the first ever GNU/Linux distributions that tried to be more friendly to the user. In this quick interview he talks about the distribution market, the different strategies that are followed and his opinion on what all distributions should do in order for the Linux desktop to grow and prosper.

    • SolusOS 1.2 Eveline Review

      SolusOS is a lightweight distribution which uses Gnome 2 as its desktop interface and it is geared towards novice Linux users or those who do not need a heavy distribution.

      Coming off the heels of an impressive first release earlier this year, we are back with an updated version of this distribution. The main focus is still the same but it now has some updated offerings.SolusOS 1.2 now comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors which for those who have more than 4GB of memory can now access all of it making a huge improvement in performance and multitasking. This distribution still comes as a Live media so you can try it before installing it.

    • SolusOS Eveline 1.2 Review

      After recently installing the Debian based edition of Linux Mint operating system on my home office desktop, I decided to take a look at another Debian based Linux distribution, SolusOS.

      This is my first time trying SolusOS, so I dived in with an innocent fresh mind. Upon booting the LiveCD, I couldn’t help but notice how fast the SolusOS boot process is. Whether it has been tweaked by the developers or whether it is due the lightweight nature of the distribution, I’m not too sure.

    • Snowlinux 3 E17 Crystal Review: Fast, very fast!

      The world of preferred Linux window manager is dominated by Gnome, KDE, XFCE and LXDE primarily. About 90% of the new releases I see are based on either of the four desktops because of the extremely elegant graphical interfaces they offer. However, with changing priorities and a need to provide aesthetically pleasing visual effects, Linux world is also undergoing tremendous transformation, specially Gnome 3. Most of the today’s highly sophisticated Linux distros no longer run well on low resource environment or support desktops less than 512 MB RAM.

    • New Releases

      • Parted Magic Team Releases 2012_09_12
      • ArtistX 1.3
      • Mandriva and Fedora Release Alphas

        The Linux world received two exciting announcements recently. Two popular distributions have released alphas of their next versions. Fedora 18 Alpha “offers a preview of some of the best free and open-source technology currently under development” and Mandriva 2012 Alpha sports “quality closer to what one would expect from a RC.”

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS KDE 2012.08 Review: Better than ever!

        To start with, I became a big fan of PCLinuxOS since February this year. First time, I used PCLinux (I am still a Linux n00b) when I downloaded the Feb’12 release and installed it in one of the systems I have. I am not a KDE fan but PCLinuxOS is different! I have used Ubuntu mostly in last 2 year or so and I could never successfully update Ubuntu – I had to do fresh install every time! PCLinuxOS is actually the first Linux OS which I could upgrade without breaking anything. Also, there’s a knowledgeable and helpful forum in place to help you out of issues like screen not displaying proper resolution and stuff like that!

      • September 2012 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine Released!

        The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the September 2012 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo Picks Screenshot Contest Winners

        I used Gentoo for several years a while back, but I still remember the monthly screenshot threads. Gentoo users posted their screenshots to show off their customizing prowess or how minimal they could get. So, it always catches my eye when the Gentoo Website announces their official yearly winners. Today we found out the winners for 2012.

      • Sabayon 10 Released with Four Desktop Choices

        Sabayon 10 was released recently bringing lots of updates and your choice of four different desktop editions. Fabio Erculiani said, “If you really enjoyed Sabayon 9, this is just another step towards World domination (yay!).”

      • Sabayon X Gnome Screenshots
      • Sabayon 10 Review: Gentoo on steroids!

        Gentoo Linux is one Linux OS I haven’t tried yet. But, surely this week I am going to try their 2009 Special DVD edition. The best feature of Gentoo is, it is version-less and once you make an emerge update, it has the most up-to-date packages. There are step-by-step guides available to install Gentoo and once I try it, I’ll know how complicated or easy it is!

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News – September 17th, 2012

        Joerg Jaspert sent some bits from the FTP Team, announcing the ongoing sprint during which the team is working on optimising the current code behind the main archive, finalising a proposal for Debian Personal Package Archives (PPAs), and merging backports.debian.org into the main archive host. This year, participation in the Google Summer of Code initiative helped the team in implementing a true multi-archive capability, making it possible to merge separated parts of the Debian archive (like security and backports) into the main archive. Joerg also added a call for volunteers: if you are a Debian Developer and want to help one of the key teams of the Debian infrastructure, please consider joining them.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.10 will have a shopping lens
          • Ubuntu 12.10 Wallpapers Chosen
          • New Look Default Wallpaper Lands in Ubuntu 12.10
          • First Images Of Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 Arrive For Testing

            It’s here. We have been writing about the ‘official’ edition of Ubuntu Gnome for almost a year now and it’s finally here. The first ISO (alpha) images of Gnome Shell edition of Ubuntu is now available for download and testing, Jeremy Bicha just told me on Google+.

          • GNOMEbuntu Will Be Available This October

            As a long time Ubuntu user I was essentially a Gnome user but Unity changed everything. Unity did bring a new UI but it also enabled Canonical to drive the development of Ubuntu in the direction they wanted to increase the market share of Ubuntu. We are noticing the results in the market as Ubuntu’s adoption is increasing.

            Unity is extremely rich when it comes to new features and services. You can keep an eye on OMG! Ubuntu or our Ubuntu section to see how Unity is shaping up. However, there are Gnome users who are still looking for the pure GNOME experience on top of the stability and app ecosystem of Ubuntu.

          • The New ‘Pure GNOME’ Ubuntu Linux Is Coming This Fall

            Earlier this month fans of the good old GNOME 2 desktop environment got some exciting news when it became clear that a version of Ubuntu Linux featuring the classic desktop was in the works.

          • Encrypted Installation Arrives In Ubuntu 12.10

            As days advance towards the Ubuntu Quantal release, new and exciting features are being added to Ubuntu; the old features and bugs are being squashed and Canonical is making sure that Ubuntu 12.10 will be the best Ubuntu release ever.

          • Canonical To Drop Ubuntu Alternate Installation CDs

            Canonical has decided to drop alternate Ubuntu installation CDs from the next Ubuntu release. This CDs were previously used to install Ubuntu with encryption and also configure RAID arrays for data storage. As per Ubuntu developer Steve Langasek, Ubuntu 12.10 default installation CD will support encrypted installations. Also RAID can be configured easily after installation.

          • Touring the Ubuntu Unity Desktop

            Ubuntu 12.04 is an alternative to the Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X operating systems. It features a functional and intuitive desktop environment.

            Ubuntu’s Unity desktop has similarities to both Windows and OS X, meaning that users considering the switch to Ubuntu should not have much difficultly becoming familiar with this alternative operating system (OS), which is based on Linux, a popular open-source OS.

          • Ubuntu provides magic that Windows 8 doesn’t

            Linux is the supreme software conquest for me, and one particular distribution has tormented my early adopter “lifestyle” — Red Hat Linux. It’s now long gone, abandoned by parent company Red Hat, though it was given a new lease on life through Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

            Ten years ago, I stumbled upon a magazine that came with a copy of Red Hat Linux 7, and I was so tempted to try it and see how it felt to run something other than the Windows editions of the day. My experience was less than ideal back then, but I’ve re-encountered Ubuntu and the spark has reignited…

          • Buying A Printer For Ubuntu
          • 5 golden rules

            Any company that wants to save a bundle in software licensing fees and build a productive, stable and secure computing environment for its users should download a free workbook entitled “Five Golden Rules for a Successful Ubuntu Desktop Migration.”

            Produced by Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, the book offers some pragmatic advice to companies that want to migrate from a proprietary system like Microsoft Windows to a free and open source platform.

          • Ubuntu Software Center Not Working

            Now go ahead and try to install something via apt-get. Chances are, it’s working now! And that is awesome. Sadly though, Synaptic and the software center still aren’t working quite right. So let’s fix that issue next.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Beta1 Screenshots

            The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Quantal Quetzal Beta 1 Release of Ubuntu 12.10 give you a preview of the next version of Ubuntu.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1: Preview

            The first beta build of Ubuntu 12.10 drops Unity 2D, retains Nautilus 3.4 and adds a new Dash preview, a Photo lens and new centralised Online Accounts management.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Beta 1 Released.
          • Five Must Have Ubuntu Apps for Music

            For me one of my favorite things is listening to music and I use music as an aid to help make me more productive when working on projects. Luckily there are a variety of applications that “just work” on Ubuntu to help me get my music fix.

          • Five new features in Ubuntu 12.10 ‘Quantal Quetzal’ Beta 1
          • My impressions of Ubuntu/Unity – Ubuntu 12.04

            I’ve been using Ubuntu 12.04 on my MSI netbook for about a week now. The netbook is a 10″ model with a 1.66 Gig dual core Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1 Gig of RAM and Intel Mobile 945GSE Integrated Graphics, 3 USB ports, VGA out, and Microphone and Headphone sockets, and an SD card slot.

            I’ve been using Ubuntu 12.04 on my MSI netbook for about a week now. The netbook is a 10″ model with a 1.66 Gig dual core Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1 Gig of RAM and Intel Mobile 945GSE Integrated Graphics, 3 USB ports, VGA out, and Microphone and Headphone sockets, and an SD card slot.

            I’ve been using it with Ubuntu Studio, with XFCE desktop and Audio applications, but became quite annoyed with it because it kept losing the network applet, and it never seemed to connect with the wireless network unless I was within a meter of the transmitter.

            So as I had a copy of Ubuntu on hand, I decided to give that a go.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1 (Report #3)

            Just a quick update on my experience running the pre-release version of Ubuntu (this time upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1!). Not a whole lot new to report – Beta 1 is basically the same as Alpha 3 but with the addition of an option to connect to a Remote Server directly from the login screen. Unfortunately the bugs that I have filed so far have yet to be resolved, but I’m still hopeful someone has a chance to correct them prior to release.

          • Online Shopping Feature Arrives in Ubuntu 12.10
          • Should Ubuntu’s Minimize Button Be Vertical?

            When was the last time you paid any attention to the icons used inside Ubuntu’s window controls?

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal Beta 1 Review

            The beta version of the next Ubuntu release – 12.10 Quantal Quetzal – is now available for testing. There are several new and interesting features added and whether you like it or not, the Unity desktop is here to stay and it is getting better with each release.

          • Ubuntu Unity: A beginner’s walk-through

            You may have noticed that over the last year, I’ve spoken quite a lot about Ubuntu Unity. More specifically, I’ve become quite the champion for Unity being one of the most efficient desktops on the market. I thought it might be helpful to take you on a walk through of the default Ubuntu desktop to help you see just how it could be that a completely different desktop could possibly be so user-friendly and efficient.

          • Shuttleworth defends Ubuntu Linux integrating Amazon

            You’d think someone had just kicked some Ubuntu Linux fans’ puppy. Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, has added Amazon search results to the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 Unity Dash search function. Some users hate this and have declared Ubuntu to be adware. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, has replied that this response is FUD. Here’s what’s really happening.

            First, yes, when you do a search from Unity Dash in Ubuntu 12.10, besides the usual search results you’ll also see a More Suggestions results box. This will contain, not ads, but search results from Amazon. This is part of the integration of Web apps into the Ubuntu desktop. In addition to the Amazon integration into Ubuntu search, there’s also a separate Amazon search app. More than 40 other “Web site apps” such as BBC News, Facebook, and Reddit also will be available.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • First look at Linux Mint 13 “KDE” edition

              Before I get into my review this week I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge a good suggestion I received earlier this year. One of our readers pointed out that burning distribution images to CDs and DVDs was wasteful as, eventually, the discs typically end up in the trash. The reader suggested switching to a USB thumb drive in order to be more environmentally friendly. At the time I had been testing most distributions on two machines, one of which was old enough that it did not support booting from a USB device. This situation limited my options and was the main reason behind using optical media. Still, after some consideration I decided that reducing my environmental footprint is more important to me than testing distributions on hardware which I rarely use any more.

              With that in mind, I have switched to using a (second hand) USB drive in place of optical media. It is rare these days that I encounter Linux distributions which do not run smoothly on both of my test computers and I feel that the additional testing and use of resources does not provide significant benefit to justify the time and media expended. Going forward I intend to limit hardware testing to one machine and load distributions onto the hardware using a USB drive. Should you have any thoughts on this change one way or the other, please feel free to comment below or e-mail me.

            • Ubuntu vs Linux Mint

              Ubuntu or Linux Mint. This is the question most people ask me when they set mind to install first Linux distribution in their machine. When you plan to use Linux, you are surrounded by the choice. There are 100′s of Linux distribution available, each having their own specialty. People pick their favourite distros because they find it convenient and easy to use. The same distro can be disgusting and ridiculous to other people. So, its the choice that matter. however this articles will helps you to visualize the differences between Ubuntu and Linux Mint and helps you to find the appropriate choice for you.

            • Bodhi Linux 2.0.1 – performance with pizzazz

              The path to Enlightenment is long. In fact, Enlightenment 17 has been in the works for 12 years now. The first version of this unique desktop environment was released by Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler) in 1997. Version 0.17 (E17) was born in December 2000, and is a complete rewrite of E16. A number of distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, to name a few) have long included an E17 package. However, these versions have so far failed to exploit the amazing eye-candy potential of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL).

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Wind River Introduces Yocto Project–Based Embedded Linux Platform

      Wind River has introduced the latest version of Wind River Linux, which was developed from the Yocto Project open source development infrastructure and has achieved Yocto Project Compatible registration. Wind River Linux supports an array of hardware including ARM, Intel, MIPS and Power architectures.

    • Breaking out the Raspberry Pi

      With flexible I/O options and Linux capability, the Raspberry Pi offers enormous potential for hardware development. Andrew Back takes us through the possibilities with his hardware-hacking getting-started guide for the credit-card-sized Linux computer.

    • Phones

      • The World’s First Firefox Phone Will Launch In A Few Months

        Mozilla, the company that makes the popular Firefox browser, is working on a mobile operating system that will launch on a smartphone built by ZTE, Reuters reports.

      • Android

        • BlueStacks App Player Now Runs Android Apps on the Mac

          Android continues to win market share despite being a very young mobile operating system, and as that happens, the number of impressive applications for it is rising too. Many of us have favorite Android apps, but we use them almost exclusively on smartphones or tablets. As we’ve covered before, you can also run Android apps on your desktop computer or laptop. BlueStacks App Player has been available for some time for Windows users who want to run Android apps on PCs. Now, BlueStacks App Player is out in an alpha version for Mac users.

        • Android Turns Four: What a Wild Ride

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Announcement: Diaspora* Will Now Be A Community Project

    We have been overwhelmed with your support the past week after our announcement of Makr.io and the opening up of signups on joindiaspora.com. This week, we are excited to share with you some important Diaspora announcements.

    When we started Diaspora two years ago, the project kicked off with amazing reception and support from people that believed in our ultimate goal: giving users ownership over their data. It’s a powerful idea, one that captured the imaginations of millions of people across the world. This vision has expanded and evolved over the past two years that we have been working on it as the project has grown.

  • Diaspora, the Open Social Network, Gets Handed Over to the Community
  • How Twitter tweets your tweets with open source

    Some people may have been surprised when Twitter recently joined The Linux Foundation. You couldn’t tweet about your dinner, your latest game, or the newest political rumor without open-source software.

    Chris Aniszczyk, open-source manager at Twitter, explained just how much Twitter relied on open source and Linux at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technology conference. “Twitter’s philosophy is to open-source almost all things. We take our software inspiration from Red Hat’s development philosophy: ‘default to open.””

  • Bossies 2012: The Best of Open Source Software Awards

    It’s back — and bigger and badder than ever! Our sixth annual Bossie Awards call out more than 100 open source products in seven categories

  • How To Evaluate Open Source Software

    One of the best benefits to open source software is how it can fill in the gaps when developing applications. At times it makes sense to look around and see if anyone else has already solved the problem you are looking at, especially if it is a common feature. Unfortunately, not all open source projects are built the same, and deciding to adopt someone else’s code into your project must be carefully considered. Here are seven steps to starting a successful long-term relationship with an open source project.

  • Rethink Robotics’ Baxter Robot Leverages Open Source

    For more than a decade, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. As we’ve noted, there is now even an Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). While companies such as Willow Garage have grabbed most of the headlines on the open source robotics front, a new one is generating buzz: Rethink Robotics. It’s the brainchild of noted roboticist Rodney Brooks.

  • Woman Force In Open Source: Eilidh McAdam Interview

    I’m a graduate student at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland. I got my BSc in Computing then was accepted for a PhD studentship in 2008 – I’m currently writing my thesis on biological metaphors for critical infrastructure networks. I also work remotely part-time for the open source consulting company Lanedo. I believe that open data and communication can have a massively positive impact on how the world connects, so a job programming open source software is a dream come true. I’m fascinated by coding (C, C++, Python, Ruby, Java), music (composition and consumption), physics, mathematics and more generally, learning how things work. FLOSS is a fantastic bridge for all of these things and has the additional benefit of bringing people the world over together. I also like functional programming languages, reading (particularly but not exclusively sci-fi and fantasy), gaming (Valve’s recent porting efforts are very hopeful), electronics, writing and drawing.

  • Rating Open Source Desktop Notification Systems

    It’s a problem as old as the microprocessor: How do you provide important information to users without getting in the way of their workflow? On most open source platforms, the answer to this conundrum currently lies in passive notification popups or bubbles. And while some interfaces get it right, others — especially GNOME Shell — could do a lot better. Here’s how.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • New Firefox Health Report to Aid Performance

        Users have complained about the performance of Firefox for years and although each release promises better resource management, the complaints keep coming. Now a new feature will help users and developers pinpoint the reasons Firefox may not be as peppy as it should be.

      • Faster Firefox 15 Released, Install From PPA

        The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of the popular and free browser, Firefox. Firefox 15 comes with major changes that will make the browser more lightweight and prevent memory leaks.

      • Thunderbird 15 Comes With Instant Messaging Support

        Following the release of Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of their email client: Thunderbird. Now along with E-mails, you will be able to chat with your online buddies right from the application. For the time being, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, IRC, Twitter and XMPP/Jabber are supported. You can read about the configuration instructions from here.

      • Mozilla’s Firefox OS: Take It Seriously

        Back in February, we reported on how Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm to become a serious player in the smartphone arena with its own open mobiile operating system. And, just recently, we reported on Techweek Europe’s posts of a series of screenshots, seen here, showing Mozilla’s mobile operating system with a look and feel that Mozilla claimed was non-representative of the final OS. What’s being called “Firefox OS” looks very compelling, and is even showing up for the Raspberry Pi.

      • Mozilla’s Firefox OS Is Headed for Developing Mobile Markets

        The Mozilla Foundation has been moving ahead quickly with its plans to become a big player in the smartphone business, and is retaining its focus on emerging markets, according to several recent update posts. And, photos of its “Firefox OS” have been appearing everywhere, including collected updates found here. Many people don’t have a firm grasp on Mozilla’s strategy, though, and recent comments from Mozilla’s CTO can clear any confusion up. Here are details.

        As Mozilla jumps into the smartphone and mobile operating system arenas, its big partners are Qualcomm and Telefonica. As we’ve reported, these big telecom players can help Mozilla compete in emerging markets. Telefonica, for example, has a huge presence in Latin America.

      • Mozilla Festival 2012
      • Firefox 15 launches tomorrow, downloads already available

        If everything goes as planned, Mozilla will release an update for Firefox 14.0.1 that will bring the version of the Internet browser to 15.0. The stable version of the browser won’t be the only version that will receive an update in the coming days. Firefox’s extended released support version will be updated tomorrow as well, followed by updates for Firefox Beta on August 30, and Firefox Aurora on August 31 (you can check out the regularly updated Mozilla Firefox Release Schedule to find out about future Firefox releases).

      • Firefox 16 Goes Back To The Command Line

        Even before the bits have dried on Firefox 15, Mozilla want to talk about Firefox 16. One of its big “innovations” is a command line for debugging but this isn’t your father’s command line – it’s all new and reinvented.

        Firefox 16 is still in the beta channel, but you might want to check out its new developer feature – a command line. It doesn’t add much that is completely new, just a keyboard-oriented way of getting at the existing developer tools.

  • SaaS

    • IBM’s Angel Diaz: 3 Projects Creating User-Driven Standards for the Open Cloud

      To seasoned software standards expert Angel Diaz, today’s effort to create interoperability in the cloud is reminiscent of the mid-90s when HTTP emerged as a state-of-the-art technology. Every application server had to do that same function but there was no standard, he said. And so IBM helped create Apache web server software and the standard code for building web pages.

    • The OpenStack Foundation Launches, Wields Lots of Cloud Might
    • Defining the Open Cloud
    • Quotes from the Kernel Panel at LinuxCon in San Diego
    • Slideshow: LinuxCon and CloudOpen Highlights
    • OpenStack Foundation Moves Forward, Taking VMware With It

      In the past two weeks, many momentous announcements have arrived surrounding OpenStack, the open source cloud computing framework. As we reported, Rackspace, which has begun calling itself “the open cloud company,” announced the release of Rackspace Private Cloud software, built on OpenStack and designed for companies that want to install, test and run a multi-node OpenStack-based private cloud environment. That news, of course, immediately followed Red Hat’s announcement of its upcoming OpenStack-based cloud platform, already available in a preview edition. And now, as it releases a significant update to Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical is also doubling down on its OpenStack focus.

    • OpenStack Foundation Launches to Promote Open Cloud

      It’s official: OpenStack, the open source cloud platform, has formed an independent entity, the OpenStack Foundation, to promote the project and open source cloud computing more generally. Here’s the scoop, and what it means for the open source channel.

      Founded in 2010, the OpenStack project has enjoyed broad support from a host of big names for some time. In addition to Rackspace Cloud and NASA, which launched the project, several major companies in the open source channel and beyond have worked closely with it for a while. The platform provides the main cloud computing solutions for the Ubuntu and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Linux distributions, and is endorsed by Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO), Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD), among other organizations.

    • ownCloud Offers Three-Hours Test Drive To Business Customers
    • Red Hat Opens Its OpenStack Kimono

      Upon the occasion of the launch of the OpenStack Foundation, which will put an enormous amount of backing behind the open source cloud computing platform, the OpenStack team at Red Hat is out with a post that discusses how the team will transform OpenStack into a meaningful product. As we’ve noted before, and as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports, Red Hat intends to do for OpenStack what it did for Linux. There are several reasons to believe that Red Hat can do just that, not the least of which is that Red Hat knows exactly how to provide world-class support for open source software.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 3.6.1 Released

      The Document Foundation has announced a new bug-fix release of the open-source office suite, LibreOffice. LibreOffice 3.6.1 is fixes some of the bugs and enhances stability of the application. LibreOffice 3.6 was released last month and this version includes some enhancements over that release.

    • Oracle: Leading with Linux, Then and Now

      Adopting Linux as a platform has helped change Oracle over the past 15 years from a fragmented, decentralized behemoth to a sleek, consolidated service provider, said Senior VP and CIO Mark Sunday in Oracle’s LinuxCon keynote presentation Friday morning.

    • LibreOffice 3.6.1 Available for Download
    • The Other Oracle

      I’m starting to realize it’s like pulling teeth to get Wall Street analysts to say something indiscriminately positive when discussing the prospects of database giant Oracle (ORCL).

    • Be wary of LibreOffice 3.6!

      f you’re considering upgrading to LibreOffice 3.6, my advice — at least for the present — is DON’T. Or if you do, proceed with caution. (Instructions below.)

      In the past, upgrades have been flawless, but I do still regularly backup my Profile folder. The wisdom of doing so was proved at the weekend when I upgraded from LO version 3.5 to 3.6. It all went swimmingly as usual, but when I can to use the new version I discovered some anomalies. Gone: 40+ macros I’ve built up over years of using OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. Gone: some basic settings such as Page Format (A4 went back to Letter) and Measurement Units (Millimetres went back to Inches).

  • CMS

  • Funding

    • Open source champ Mark Shuttleworth invests $1M in Ceph storage startup

      Ceph is an open-source storage subsystem that proponents say is more adaptable and less expensive than proprietary storage systems. Probably more to the point, it is also a competitor or alternative to the Swift storage system that is part of the OpenStack cloud platform. Ceph claims API compatibility with both Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • An Improved Apper For KDE Users Is Coming

      The first ever professional grade GIMP Magazine will launch on September 5th this year.

      Steve Czajka of GIMP Magazine tells Muktware, “GIMP Magazine features the amazing works created from this world wide community. Photography, digital arts, graphic arts, web design, tips & tricks, step by step tutorials, master classes, help desk questions, product reviews and so much more are showcased and explored in this quarterly publication. This publication is available for free and is licensed Creative Commons CC-AT-SA 2.5.”

    • First Issue of New GIMP Magazine Released

      GIMP is one of the most important applications for Linux users. It gives them some of the capabilities found in other popular image manipulation programs without the expense. Well, a group of enthusiasts have banded together to produce a new magazine just for GIMP users. GIMP Magazine “features the amazing works created from an enormous community from all over the world estimated at around 8-10 million people.”

    • A platform for everyone

      Software freedom activist Richard Stallman, speaking at IIT-M, argued that non-free software created a system of “digital colonisation” and applauded the states that have introduced GNU/Linux operating systems in their schools. He declared, “More Indian states should open their windows to free software. It is safer and cheaper than available alternatives.”

      I was impressed. When a Linux-lover offered to change the OS on my desktop to Ubuntu (Linux), I nodded. I was thrilled this would let me modify and personalise programmes on my PC. It was a 160-GB version of 12.04 LTS (long-term-support for five years) and free, free!

    • Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory

      Join the FSF and friends on Friday September 21st, from 2pm to 5pm EDT (18:00 to 21:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

    • GCC 4.7.2 Compiler Released

      GCC 4.7.2 has been released with fixes for regressions and serious bugs on GCC 4.7.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Belgium Government Open Sources Code Of Voting Machines

      A day after the Federal elections were over, Belgium government has open-sourced the code used for voting machines. The move is, however not for sharing and reuse, but for showing that the machines were not fraudulent.

  • Licensing

    • Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0

      Over the past several years, Creative Commons has increasingly recommended free culture licenses over non-free ones. Now that the drafting process for version 4.0 of their license set is in full gear, this is a “a once-in-a-decade-or-more opportunity” to deprecate the proprietary NonCommercial and NoDerivatives clauses. This is the best chance we have to dramatically shift the direction of Creative Commons to be fully aligned with the definition of free cultural works by preventing the inheritance of these proprietary clauses in CC 4.0′s final release.

    • Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0
    • GPL Violations Are Still Pretty Common, You Know?

      As I’ve written about before, I am always amazed when suddenly there is widespread interest in, excitement over, and focus on some particular GPL violation. I’ve spent most of my adult life working on copyleft compliance issues, so perhaps I’ve got an overly unique perspective. It’s just that I’ve seen lots of GPL violations every single day since the late 1990s. Even now, copyleft compliance remains a regular part of my monthly work. Even though it’s now only one task among many that I work on every day, I’m still never surprised nor shocked by some violation.

      When some GPL violation suddenly becomes a “big story”, it reminds me of celebrity divorces. There are, of course, every single day, hundreds (maybe even thousands) of couples facing the conclusion that their marriage has ended. It’s a tragedy for their families, and they’ll spend years recovering. The divorce impacts everyone they know: both their families, and all their friends, too. Everyone’s life who touches the couple is impacted in some way or other.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Source Will Power The Solar Steam Engine

      Open Source is everywhere. When fossils fuels are depleting fast and humanity is worrying about how to supply power to the next generations, Zenman Energy is building a solar steam engine that will be affordable to the masses and also cost fraction of current photovoltaic solutions. On the top of it, it will be open-source.

    • ENCODE DNA Data Project, Inspired and Built By Linux

      Scientists celebrated a breakthrough in their understanding of the human genome this month – the results of a large collaborative project driven by big data and built with Linux.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Stanford’s Class2Go to Offer Free Courses This Fall

        Many universities, including U.C Berkeley and M.IT. have been involved in e-learning for a long time, and, not long ago, M.I.T. and Harvard teamed up to deliver online learning to millions of people around the world, through their new edX initiative. Not to be outdone, Stanford University is going to offer 16 courses and two new, interactive e-learning platforms this fall. Here are details.

  • Programming

    • I will teach you C
    • Thank You!

      The abundance of you that have contacted me regarding my offer to teach you C is heart warming and clear evidence of GNOMEs future potential.

    • Get your Bachelor’s degree from Gnome University!

      Gnome University Project (GU) is an effort by Christian Hergert to push people in Gnome developing. GU is all about C and Gnome technologies, but it also a nice way to start learning C programming within a big scale project.

      GU is still on early stages and it is a work in progress but there is already a repository with some beginner chapters.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • How to fight a food crisis

      The drought that descended on the United States this summer will translate into higher prices for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The inevitability of this scenario introduces an old question that has become new: When weather strikes, what can curb food inflation?

      Recent suggestions cover a wide range of complicated approaches, from GPS-guided drip irrigation techniques to genetically engineered crops and from new federal biofuel standards to new farm insurance programs to new commodity-markets regulations. How ironic that the oldest agricultural technology of them all may provide the simplest and most timely solution.

  • Finance

    • Shareholders sue insurer Amerigroup

      A group of shareholders has filed a lawsuit against health insurer Amerigroup Corp. and its adviser, Goldman Sachs & Co., alleging that the company eschewed more lucrative offers from other companies before agreeing to be acquired by WellPoint Inc. for $4.5 billion.

    • Payoff in the Pit of the Plutocracy

      This book is about corporate crime – although that phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in its 288 pages.

    • 11 Reasons Why America Would Be A Better Place Without Goldman Sachs

      Unfortunately, corruption is so endemic on Wall Street that Goldman Sachs really does not seem out of place. The truth is that a lot of the things that are said about Goldman could also be said about JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley.

    • Wall Street And Washington Share Millions Of Dollars, Lot Of People

      The close relationship between Wall Street and Washington belies their 200 mile separation and theoretically differing goals.

      By spending money on campaigns and lobbyists, The financial industry has managed to give itself something of a voice in the halls of Congress, regulators’ offices and even the White House. Of the top ten firms with employees donating to Romney’s campaign, eight are big banks, according to Federal Election data cited by Bloomberg. In addition, Wall Street spent more than $100 million last year on lobbying while the provisions for the Dodd-Frank financial reform law were being finalized, according to The New York Times.

    • The Quiet Coup

      One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.

    • More Details on the Goldman Sachs Sukuk Debacle

      Back in the first quarter of this year, SFW covered Goldman Sachs’ ill-fated sojourn into the world of Islamic bonds (sukuk). Goldman had planned on floating a $2 billion sukuk but the entire project was shot down by Shariah scholars.

    • Barclays bank made nearly $800 million speculating on food

      When central bankers talk about more quantitative easing to help spur markets, remember this. While millions around the world go hungry or pay more for food, the bankers are cashing on enormously on the crisis. Barclays is being named here but don’t forget that both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley also operate in this space.

  • Copyrights

09.22.12

Links 22/9/2012: September Catchup

Posted in News Roundup at 3:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Is Aliyun OS really Linux? Android? A rip-off of both?

    When Acer was ready to announce a new smartphone running Alibaba’s Aliyun operating system, Google responded with force. If it were to be released, Google would end its partnership with Acer, which uses Android for 90 percent of its smartphones.

  • The Linux Setup – Jayson Rowe, Server Administrator
  • The Linux Setup – NuxRo, Stella GNU/Linux
  • Linux nonsense
  • Video Art: Experimental Animation and Video Techniques in Linux

    Animation and video editing in Linux can be treacherous territory. Anyone who has tried working in these media probably has experienced the frustration of rendering a huge file for an hour only to see the program crash before the export is finished. A bevy of tools and applications for manipulating video exist for Linux, and some are more mature than others.

  • Desktop

    • A Call for Common Sense

      For years now, there has been a lot of talk about the “fractured” Linux Desktop environment. It’s an easy argument to make, given the number of distros, desktop choices the user has and the number of apps that may perform the same function.

      [...]

      Previously I preferred a “clean” install of Gnome, uncluttered with KDE dependencies and apps but recently, I’ve had a change of heart

    • Five things Desktop Linux has to do to beat Windows 8

      In 2007, thanks to netbooks and Vista, Linux briefly exploded onto the desktop. Microsoft soon realized they were losing the low-end laptop market and they brought XP back from the dead and practically gave it away to original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s. It worked. Linux’s popularity receded. In 2012, Microsoft is once more bringing out a dog of a desktop operating system, Windows 8, so desktop Linux will once more get a chance to shine… if it can.

    • Linus Torvalds on the Linux desktop’s popularity problems

      And here is where Torvalds disagrees. Torvalds wrote, “One of the core kernel rules has always been that we never ever break any external interfaces. That rule has been there since day one, although it’s gotten much more explicit only in the last few years. The fact that we break internal interfaces that are not visible to userland is totally irrelevant, and a total red herring.”

    • Preview of ROSA Desktop 2012

      The alpha version of what will become ROSA Desktop 2012 has been made available for download. It comes about a week later than planned, but that is no big deal. The most important thing is that it is here. Let the bug hunting begin!

      For those reading about ROSA Desktop for the first time, it is a desktop Linux distribution published by ROSA Laboratory, a Linux solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia. ROSA Desktop is actually the end-user version of ROSA Marathon Enterprise, the desktop edition for businesses.

    • Torvalds pours scorn on De Icaza’s desktop claims

      Linux creator Linus Torvalds has poured scorn on claims made by the co-founder of the GNOME Desktop project, Miguel de Icaza, that he (Torvalds) was in any way to blame for the lack of development in Linux desktop initiatives.

      De Icaza made the claim in his personal blog on August 29 when he wrote: “Linus, despite being a low-level kernel guy, set the tone for our community years ago when he dismissed binary compatibility for device drivers. The kernel people might have some valid reasons for it, and might have forced the industry to play by their rules, but the Desktop people did not have the power that the kernel people did. But we did keep the attitude.”

    • Handbags drawn in dawn war in the Linux world

      Torvalds said that Gnomes were in total denial about what their problem really is and were blaming everybody except themselves.

      De Icaza puffed that his involvement with Gnome stopped about five years ago, so it is unfair to the Gnome guys to attach my position to their project.

      But he claimed that the fact that kernel guys ruled Linux did stuff up everything for the rest.

      He said that Torvalds had a strong personality, and so do a lot of the people that surround him and like it or not, that influenced the attitudes of people.

      “My take is that you are brilliant, clever and funny, and you can also be mean and harsh. Many people tried to imitate you, but they were neither brilliant, clever or funny. They just turn out to be mean and harsh and this attitude spread on the mailing lists,” he wrote.

      He agreed that when it came to CORBA, both the KDE guys and GNOME had it wrong and the same applied to .NET.

  • Server

    • Apple, Microsoft, VMware: Everyone’s building open-source software

      At LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technical conference, Jim Zemlin’s, the Foundation’s executive director said, “If you are going to master software development, you must master open source.”

      Why is it important for businesses to master open source? Zemlin said it’s because “Software is the future of IT. Hardware is important to enable software, but what I mean that the value that end-users sees from technology increasingly comes from the software.”

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Intel’s new Clover Trail chip will support Android & Linux

      When the “news” came out that Intel wouldn’t be supporting Linux on its new Atom CPU, Clover Trail, I didn’t buy it. This next-generation Intel Atom processor was always meant primarily for Windows 8; but with Intel’s x86 instruction set, it would also always support Android and Linux.

    • Torvalds touts Linux’s advances in power, ARM and cell phones

      Linus Torvalds rarely appears in public these days, and has little to say when he does.

      “There’s nothing interesting about me,” Torvalds asked, when asked along with his fellow panelists to name something interesting about himself that no one knows. “I’m in a bathrobe reading email. I read email and answers and merge code written by others.”

      His appearance at LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego yesterday was no different, but he did reveal a few interesting factoids after being questioned by the audience.

    • How To Get Your Ph.D. Project Included In The Linux Kernel

      The Linux kernel is the world’s largest collaborative development project. Almost 3,000 individual contributors work together to create and maintain an operating system kernel that works on everything from wristwatches and mobile phones to mainframes, along with all the peripherals imaginable for each platform. Linux creator Linus Torvalds sits at the top of a loose hierarchy of kernel maintainers and acts as final arbiter for what does or does not get included.

    • The Future is Forever

      It’s been a year since Kernel.org was hacked by intruders. Still no report publicly explaining what happened.

    • Wait and watch on systemd

      I have been pondering the systemd situation for a while. My biggest concern has been that Debian and Ubuntu have not made decisions to adopt it as default, especially when Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mageia, and others have. Maybe Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 will include it as well. So it seems like on the init system level, two fragmented groups are emerging: those who use systemd and those who don’t. My second concern is the ability for a casual/intermediate user to transition from a systemd-using system to one that doesn’t use it.

    • Why the Linux Foundation Works (and Why the OSDL Failed) [VIDEO]

      Not all Open Source foundations are created equal. Over the last 15 years that I’ve been actively engaged in open source activities I’ve seen more than my fair share of open source foundations go bust. I’ve also seen a few do really well.

      Remember the OSDL?

      The OSDL was the pre-cursor to the Linux Foundation. It was an organization that I personally never really liked and neither did Oracle. Back in 2006, Wim Coekaerts (then the Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle) told methat OSDL was all about business and Oracle knew how to deal with the Linux community on its own.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Why I don’t like game rendering performance benchmarks

      It’s benchmark season again and as I have raised some concerns about the results of the published benchmark, I was asked to properly explain my concerns without making it look like a rant. So this is what I try with this blog post.

      Given the results of the published benchmark, I could go “Wooohooo, KWin’s the fastest!”, but instead I raise concerns. I don’t see that in the data and I hope nobody else sees that in the published data.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • 5th release of KDE Telepathy Instant Messaging suite

        The KDE Telepathy team is pleased to announce the fifth major release of the new KDE Instant Messaging suite. The immediately available 0.5 version brings polish in many places, better stability, 58 reported bugs fixed and some nice new features too, making the instant messaging experience in KDE Workspaces more pleasant and enjoyable. Special attention was given to the log viewer, which received improvements galore.

      • nobody will do it for you (and therefore they will)

        Indeed, in spite of the disbelief, people do realize that it is up to them to make things happen, that it is unrealistic to wait for it to magically occur at the hands of others and so they dig in and get it done, thankfully often with great joy. (Most of us working on Free software love what we do.)

      • supporting Randa 2012

        The Randa meetings have hosted discussions on KDE’s libraries, Plasma, multimedia, messaging and more.
        These discussions resulted in significant decisions being made that were unlikely to be achieved with the quality and quickness experienced at such a meeting. Those decisions translated into improvements in our software … a lot of improvements. This time around the topics in focus are education, accessibility, multimedia and the Plasma Workspaces. Each of these four topics has a group of committed developers and contributors coming to Randa to work on them. Yes, it’s four developer sprints in one!

      • Who is Randa for?
      • Randa Makes a Difference

        21 year old twins from Greece are two of the dedicated people headed for Randa, Switzerland to work on KDE software. Giorgos and Antonis Tsiapaliokas are working on Plasmate, the KDE Software Development Kit for Plasma Workspaces. Giorgos wrote about his KDE background and what is motivating him to be part of the intensive coding in Randa.

      • Call for Host for Akademy 2013 Still Open

        The hosting proposal needs a strong team of local volunteers who have an eye for detail that is able to organize and host our annual community summit.

      • KDE Ships September Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform

        Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform.

        These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.9 series. 4.9.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.9 series and are recommended for everyone running 4.9.0 or earlier versions. The release only contains bugfixes and translation updates so it is a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.

      • Kubuntu 12.04 – Two months later

        Truth to be told, I’m writing this article something like three, three and a half months after my original Kubuntu Pangolin rather lukewarm review, but to be in line with the same take on SUSE, which took place 60 days after the initial piece, the title here was chosen as it is, just slightly misleading. Anyhow, it’s been a while since I first installed the latest Long Term Release version of Ubuntu, the one adorned with the KDE desktop. Overall, I was somewhat disappointed by the spring edition, as it showed a definite neglect when compared to its sweet big brother. In a way, it got the attention you reserve for bastard children, in a medieval setting, of course. Today, everyone loves their children equally, right.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome 3.8: Fallback Mode – The first feature under discussion

        With Gnome 3.6 still being on beta (3.5.90), the discussions about the features of the upcoming 3.8 have already begun. It is not surprising that the first feature that is under examination is Fallback Mode.

      • Trisquel GNU Linux, the “most Free” Gnome Distro :)

        Yeap it is official by FSF Free Software Definition. Fedora isn’t free software. Linux (kernel) isn’t free software. Firefox isn’t Free Software. Pretty much there isn’t Free Software (FS), but we can baptize things by occasion as FS.

        Trisquel according to FSF is one of the nine distributions that they meet the FSF’s strict guidelines by completely eschewing proprietary components.

      • Gnome Shell 3.6 beta on Ubuntu – first impressions

        Few days ago I installed Gnome Shell 3.5.91 in my Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal beta setup. and I’ve a mixed feeling about the new version of Gnome Shell, which is going to be called as Gnome Shell 3.6.

        This new version introduces many changes and improvements and is definitely worth an upgrade. So I’m sharing my feelings about this version of Gnome Shell on Ubuntu. Note that Ubuntu 12.10 is still in beta and so is Gnome Shell. Though there shouldn’t be any visible changes since feature freeze and UI freeze is already over.

      • We are almost there: Web in 3.6.0
      • A look at Gnome 3.6 beta

        Gnome 3.6 beta has been out for a while, but not available for testing without compiling the software, so I was pleased to see that a live image is available- basically running on an alpha release of Fedora 18.

        I was familiar with what was coming from a post at As far as I know. There are descriptions of changes with screenshots there, so I’ll just add a few personal comments.

      • Upcoming Features of GNOME 3.8

        Even if GNOME 3.6 has not yet been released, the GNOME developers published some of the features that will be implemented in the next major release of the desktop environment, GNOME 3.8.

        According to the GNOME developers, it looks like GNOME 3.8 will fix or even drop the Fallback Mode, because it has become less and less useful and because it does not work as it should. More details can be found here.

  • Distributions

    • Building a Linux distribution from scratch | Interview

      Here’s a quick interview with Constantine Apostolou who is the creator and maintainer of the Cinux Linux distribution. Creating an operating system from scratch has its difficulties, but also its good parts. Constantine explains this process and gives us more details about his own baby – Cinux!

    • Linux From Scratch 7.2 relies on latest GCC

      The start of the month has seen the latest release, 7.2, of Linux From Scratch (LFS). The new edition of the guide that shows users how to create their own Linux system from the source code is now based on a toolchain that uses glibc (GNU C Library) 2.16.0 and GCC (GNU compiler collection) 4.7.1. There are, in all, 26 other components that have had their instructions in the DIY Linux guide updated, including Linux 3.5.2, Kmod 9, Perl 5.16.1 and, Udev 188 (extracted from systemd).

    • Zorin OS 6 Educational: the operating system for students’ and pupils’ home computers

      Just a few days ago I wrote about Edubuntu, the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution targeted to the “market” of teachers, students, pupils and everyone in the industry of education.

      You can install this operating system on a Linux Desktop or Laptop, which you bought for your child or yourself.

    • SolusOS Has Something Cool for Veterans, Novices Alike

      A huge factor in this project’s early success is its ability to maintain state-of-the-art Linux components without compromising on the Gnome 2 user experience. SolusOS’s development team has molded a classic Gnome 2 menu using Gnome version 3.4.2 with no new user interface.

    • Big distributions, little RAM 5

      Once again I’ve compiled some charts to show what the major, full desktop distributions look like while running on limited hardware.

    • blackPanther OS – A nice-looking distribution

    • New Releases

      • Manjaro 0.8.1 XFCE edition released
      • Manjaro Linux 0.8.0
      • Baltix 12.04.1
      • Tails 0.13 is out
      • SMS version 2.0.0 Released!
      • Parted Magic Team Releases 2012_09_12
      • Slackware 14.0 RC4 Announced

        Pat called another round of testing due to changes and more bug fixes towards a stable Slackware 14.0 release by announcing RC4. While some may be disappointed due to delay to the release, but they must understand that Patrick has it’s own standard when talking about stability and security in Slackware. He never prefer to have early release when he thinks it’s not ready yet. So, please test this release and make sure all the major bugs has been resolved.

      • Slackware 14 Almost Ready To Go

        Slackware is bound to be about ready, Patrick’s on his fifth release candidate for Pete’s sake. Fortunately, his steganographical message in the latest changelog said, “Really, this time it is not a drill! Everything is in place and ready to release at this point.”

      • GeeXboX 3.0

        A shiny new GeeXboX release has arrived! GeeXboX 3.0 is a major upgrade that integrates XBMC 11 “Eden” and adds the long-requested PVR functionality. This means you can finally use GeeXboX to watch and record live TV too! In addition to our usual x86 ISOs, this release is also available for several embedded platforms, with working full HD video and graphics acceleration for most of them.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • On the PCLOS 2012.08 KDE release

        Katherine Noyes wrote her opinion about the new release of PCLinuxOS here. When I read it, I did not pay a lot of attention mainly because of one reason: I had installed PCLinuxOS 2011.6 in both my desktop and experimental laptop and I was very satisfied with its performance. Therefore, I thought, is it really necessary to bother downloading the PCLOS 2012.08 .iso, burning it to a DVD, and installing it if my computers are doing OK? After all, as a PCLOS newbie, I did not want to break a system that was working as expected.

      • Playing with Gnome Boxes Beta in Mageia Alpha!

        Mageia Foundation released the first Alpha version towards to Mageia 3 (March 2013) three days ago, with UsrMove! If I am not wrong Mageia is just the second popular distro (after Fedora) that migrates to UsrMove, and that shows that the people there, chancing the optimal solutions.

        Speaking of popularity, Mageia’s market trend grows rapidly and by taking into consideration that Mageia 3 is a huge improvement from version 2, it won’t be long till Mageia will look Ubuntu in the eyes.

      • Mageia 3 Alpha 1 brings /usr/ merge
      • Mageia 3 alpha 1 is now available
      • What money can buy…

        It’s no mystery that Mageia depends on the conjunction of many contributors and many donors. Totally. Some provide the financial and technical means for the project – some provide their skills and time to make it go ahead.

        So here’s a quick, mid-year, report of how we have used the money we received. Mostly – for building our technical infrastructure.

        For 2012 alone, to this date with a budget of about 10k€:

        *

        about 80% has been invested in our infrastructure; this means: domain names, certificates, hosting and most importantly, server hardware: in July and August, we purchased and installed 2 new, rather expensive servers in Marseille Lost-Oasis datacenter, to improve the distribution’s building and packaging;
        *

        about 10% has been used for transportation, people to events or to go to the datacenter for maintenance operations;
        *

        about 7% percent has been used for marketing materials.

      • Mandriva specialist ROSA releases enterprise distribution

        ROSA, previously known for ROSA Marathon 2012, a Mandriva fork with five-year support, has now released a test version of an enterprise Linux server distribution. According to the release announcement, the beta version of ROSA Enterprise Linux Server (RELS) “Helium” is based on Red Hat and Mandriva server solutions.

      • Enough with the command line. Say hello to MSS 2.

        Since its inception, Mandriva has been known for delivering solutions that are easy to use.
        Since the beginning of 2012, many things have happened ; and very soon you will see the release of new products that help businesses with the tools they need for their infrastructure and their IT.

      • Mandriva releases Mandriva Class, the real-time Education Solution
      • The underdog is on the loose! A glimpse of Mandriva 2012 Alpha1

        Breaking news! Mandriva is not dead. Or maybe it was and came back to life, not as a zombie (Bernie Lomax) this time, but as a modest, yet persistent dog that simply refuses to give up the race.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat plans to do for OpenStack what it did for Linux

        In 2002, Linux was on its way to becoming a major business operating system, but it wasn’t there yet. Then, Red Hat dedicated itself to make Linux an enterprise operating system. Ten years later Red Hat was the first billion dollar pure play open-source company. Today, Red Hat announced a similar plan for the OpenStack cloud.

        Just as with Linux, Red Hat knows there’s no way it can make OpenStack the de facto cloud software of choice for the enterprise by itself. In a blog posting, Red Hat’s OpenStack team wrote, “A huge community is contributing to OpenStack. More than 180 participating companies and 400 contributing developers have produced six software releases in just a little over two years. Some organizations will choose to leverage all that innovation directly by implementing, testing, patching and supporting community releases on their own.”

      • What’s happening at Red Hat?

        Red Hat, Inc. is expanding its engineering headquarters at 413 Littleton Road from 75,000 square-feet to 175,000-square feet. The shell of the addition is expected to be completed by the end of December, according to project manager David Ferreira of the Gutierrez Company of Burlington. Gutierrez is overseeing the ongoing project.

      • ‘IT procurement practice hinders growth of open source industry’

        The current practice of public procurement of IT solutions is a barrier to the development of a healthy industry of open source service providers, says Jim Whitehurst, the Chief Executive Officer at Red Hat. He also says that public administrations and open source software are a natural fit, since this type of software allows them to share and reuse software solutions.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora + Cinnamon – Second attempt, great success!

          The last time I tried to install and run the Cinnamon desktop on top of Fedora, I hit a snag and the review ended with a rather uninspiring screenshot of a failed loading of the desktop. This happened after using an external repository source for the Cinnamon installation.

          Since, I’ve been mailed by lots of people, including the Fedora Community Chief Simian, as his very signature proclaims, and they all told me that Cinnamon is now available in the official repositories and that I should retest with this new source. Which is exactly what I did. I will not keep you in eternal suspense, so I’m going to tell you upfront. It worked this time. But what about my overall satisfaction? Ah, well, you will have to scroll down a bit for that. Fedora + Cinnamon, take two. Action.

        • Kororaa Linux 17 – now with bubbles

          The Konqueror web browser has been replaced by Firefox, for example, and VLC has replaced other video players. This reduces the amount of time a new user needs to spend hunting down software packages and makes the environment feel more friendly. In addition, Kororaa comes with several third-party repositories enabled, allowing users to simply open their package manager and find the software they need, rather than manually searching the web for repositories, enabling them and then searching for the package. Kororaa’s approach takes the headache out of finding software, or at least most of it. The graphical front-ends for YUM are still quite slow, but at least having YumEx available in the default installation makes up for the waiting by having an attractive and flexible interface.

          Packages and management of the same aside, Kororaa does a nice job of being a friendly desktop-oriented operating system. It’s cutting-edge, it is responsive and it comes with some great administrative utilities. The KDE edition provides a powerful, flexible desktop with a traditional layout and the distribution is easy to install. Despite some early problems I faced with updates and the boot loader, things got straightened out and Kororaa was, after that first day, a pleasant distribution to run. It’s modern, it comes with good software, a manual with a few helpful tips and the interface generally stays out of the way. If you’re a fan of Fedora and want to stay on the cutting edge without the hassles that upgrades and fresh installs bring, then Kororaa is a nice, friendly way to achieve that. It is essentially a ready-out-of-the-box desktop edition of Fedora and a welcome member of the Fedora/Red Hat ecosystem.

        • Fedora 18 Alpha Wallpaper

          It’s rather old news, but today it has been finally set as default—yes the wallpaper for Fedora 18 Spherical Cow release. It took so much time because I didn’t manage to update the package that sets the defaults in time before Alpha freeze.

        • Fedora 18 postponed a third time

          The Fedora project has postponed the release of the Fedora 18 alpha by a further week. The delay was caused by various problems with the Anaconda installer, which is being given a face lift that required major restructuring work in this version of the Linux distribution. A proposal to continue using the version of Anaconda that was used in version 17 of Fedora was recently dismissed by the Engineering Steering Committee.

        • A great service for Fedora and Humble Bundle

          I think most people are aware of the Humble Bundle which have been releasing a range of cool and great games on Linux since they started up. The games though has usually tended to be distributed as a tarball and doesn’t automatically integrate itself into your Fedora system like you would like. Well thanks to the cool effort called Mumble RPMS you can now turn all those tarballs from the Humble Bundle into nice RPMS for Fedora. So a big thanks to the author of Muble RPMS for doing this work!

        • Fedora 18 and Firewalld

          When Sperical Cow hits the digital shelves sometime in late October or early November, users will have to get used to a new firewall management application. Sperical Cow is, of course the code-name for Fedora 18, the next stable release of Fedora.

          On current versions of Fedora, the firewall management application is system-config-firewall, a static firewall application that requires a refresh of the firewall with any rule change. The new application will provide a dynamic system that will not require a refresh or reload of the firewall, even after a rule change.

    • Debian Family

      • The newsletter for the Debian community

        Joerg Jaspert sent some bits from the FTP Team, announcing the ongoing sprint during which the team is working on optimising the current code behind the main archive, finalising a proposal for Debian Personal Package Archives (PPAs), and merging backports.debian.org into the main archive host. This year, participation in the Google Summer of Code initiative helped the team in implementing a true multi-archive capability, making it possible to merge separated parts of the Debian archive (like security and backports) into the main archive. Joerg also added a call for volunteers: if you are a Debian Developer and want to help one of the key teams of the Debian infrastructure, please consider joining them.

      • Things to do after installing Debian Wheezy
      • Debian Project News – September 3rd, 2012

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 (Report #1)
          • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 (Report #2)

            Running an alpha version of an operating system, Linux or otherwise, is quite a different experience. It means, for instance, that you are not allowed to complain when minor things have bugs or simply don’t work – it is all par for the course, after all this is alpha software. That doesn’t mean however that when you do run into problems that it doesn’t still suck.

          • Ubuntu vs Windows 8

            Ubuntu and Canonical have come a long way since their 7.04 Feisty Fawn release, which followed Microsoft’s Windows Vista. Back then, Canonical failed to capitalise on Vista’s universal rejection by its users. But it’s now 2012, and things are different. Does Ubuntu 12.04 have what it takes to position itself as a more usable alternative to Windows 8? We put both operating systems in front of 18 testers to find out…

          • The truth about Goobuntu: Google’s in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux

            Most Linux people know that Google uses Linux on its desktops as well as its servers. Some know that Ubuntu Linux is Google’s desktop of choice and that it’s called Goobuntu. But almost no one outside of Google knew exactly what was in it or what roles Ubuntu Linux plays on Google’s campus, until now.

            Today, August 29th , Thomas Bushnell, the tech lead of the group that manages and distributes Linux to Google’s corporate desktops unveiled Goobuntu from behind Google’s curtain at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technical conference, First things first, can you download Goobuntu to run it yourself? Well yes and no.

          • The five best things coming in Ubuntu 12.10 Linux

            Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions around. The next version, 12.10 aka Quantal Quetzal, has just reached beta phase. Here’s what looking to to be the new Ubuntu’s best features so far.

          • Canonical updates Ubuntu Landscape management platform

            The Ubuntu sponsor last week released an upgrade of its Landscape systems management platform that offers a bevy of new features including enhanced reporting capabilities for compliance management, roles-based access control, a robust API, bare metal provisioning capabilties and better integration with the Ubuntu 12.04 platform.

          • Ubuntu 12.10, due in October, said to be ‘Cloud for Human Beings’

            At LinuxCon 2012, and CloudOpen, Canonical touted its pioneering work with OpenStack and said it intends to position its next platform – Ubuntu 12.10 in October — with Juju and Charm technologies as the Cloud for human beings, much the way it positions its current OS as Linux for human beings. Its five-month-old Ubuntu 12.04 was the first commercial distribution to incorporate OpenStack.

          • Stephen Fry: “I Use Ubuntu”

            Stephen Fry is more than just a a revered actor, writer and comedian: he’s also an Ubuntu user.

          • Ubuntu to drop alternate installer

            The alternate installer, required when users want to configure cryptsetup, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) or software-based RAID arrays during installation, may disappear from Ubuntu as early as version 12.10. The idea is mooted in a proposal put forward by Steve Langasek, Engineering Manager at Canonical’s Ubuntu Foundation.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 280
          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 281
          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 282
          • Kiwi Linux 12.08 Review: Ubuntu Precise with Gnome classic

            Amazingly while Ubuntu is moving more and more towards Unity and Gnome 3, there are quite a few distro hugging the limelight with their remixed Gnome 2 offerings. Kiwi Linux is one such distro – it takes you back to the classic Gnome 2 days. I guess users of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will love Kiwi, 12.04 has changed a lot for many of them!

          • Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain
          • Edgy penguins test-fly Ubuntu’s Quantal Quetzal

            Forget colourful foliage and dropping temperatures, nothing says autumn for Linux nerds like the arrival of an Ubuntu beta. This season includes twice the fun, with Canonical plotting not one, but two betas for the coming Quantal Quetzal, or Ubuntu 12.10. The first arrived on Thursday.

            Quantal Quetzal comes hot on the heels of the 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release earlier this year and – at least for more conservative users – is unlikely to be a high priority upgrade. LTS editions of Ubuntu are delivered every two years and have extended support from Canonical.

          • Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) reaches end-of-life on October 28, 2012
          • New Unity Features will Generate Affiliate Revenue for Ubuntu

            Olli Ries, Director of Technology at Canonical shared information about some new features in Ubuntu 12.10 that will help in generating affiliate revenue for Ubuntu project.

            Music and Video Lenses, will have a “more suggestions” category that is added to search results obtained from the home dash. This will help users to find content available online in addition to what already resides on their device. All these results can be previewed from dash itself through new ‘Unity Previews’ feature available in Ubuntu 12.10.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Edubuntu 12.04: Let’s Learn It!

              Where do you live? I don’t know the rules of your residence country, but Russia, where I was born and spent most of my life, has a rule: the 1st of September is the start of the school year. Even if this day falls on a weekend, like we have it in 2012, schoolchildren must have their great event, especially those who go to school for the first time in their lives.

            • Emmabuntus 2.1.01 Review

              Today we review a fresh Linux distribution from France called Emmabuntüs. Their first major release of Emmabuntüs 2 1.01 is based on Xubuntu12.04. This distro was designed to facilitate the refurbishing of computers given to human help associations, especially Emmaüs communities (where the name comes from) and promote the discovering of Linux and GNU by beginners. The goal of this thousandth Linux distro is intended to be sleek, accessible, equitable.

            • Build Your Own Personal Linux Distro using Lubuntu

              If your like me, no Linux distribution or desktop environment suites you just right. I always seem to have to work around something or with something that just doesn’t suit me.

            • Cinnamon 1.6 in Romeo

              Cinnamon 1.6 (along with Muffin 1.1.0 and Nemo 1.0.1) was released yesterday. You can read the release announcement and an overview of the new features at: http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/?p=207

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi manufacturing comes home as production shifts to UK

      A major deal will see a Sony factory in Wales crank out thousands of the Linux mini-computers, proving that not all low-cost electronics need be made in China.

    • Raspberry Pi revision 2.0 board announced

      The Raspberry Pi finally saw a release on February 29 this year and is thought to have sold 200,000 units, with a million expected to ship before the year is over. That’s a lot of tiny PCs, but it’s also been an opportunity for owners to feedback any problems or tweaks they’d like made to the board.

      The Raspberry Pi Foundation has taken the feedback on board and today announced a revised design is being put into production. The new Raspberry Pi, known as revision 2.0 PCB, is expected to start shipping in the next few weeks. The only way you’ll be able to tell which version you have is when you receive it, hook it up, and type “cat/proc/cpuino” in a terminal. if the code that appears is 4, 5, or 6 then you have the new board, otherwise a 2 or 3 signifies the original board.

    • Phones

      • Open webOS August Edition
      • Why yes, thank you, I too would like a command line on my phone

      • Android

        • Android PC vs Hackberry A10

          After the Raspberry Pi, the APC and Hackberry A10 are the latest entrants in the hugely popular line of ultra small motherboards designed to run any thing from the Android OS to trimmed down Linux distributions. But keep in mind that these are development boards, not mobos that you can buy and build a standard desktop computer from.

          No wonder they are popular with tinkerers, developers and wannabe DIYers. No doubt that they will eventually go mainstream, but for now, these boards are a hacker’s delight. This article presents a casual comparison of the Android Personal Computer (APC) and the Hackberry A10.

        • New NASA Satellites Have Android Smartphones for Brains

          NASA is aiming to launch a line of small satellites called “PhoneSats” that are cheaper to make and easier to build than those it has produced in the past. To achieve this, engineers are using unmodified Android smartphones — in one prototype, HTC’s Nexus One, and in another, Samsung’s Nexus S — to perform many of a satellite’s key functions.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • An in-depth Nexus 7 review

        This highly detailed review introduces Google’s first Android tablet: the Nexus 7, made by Asus. After briefly comparing the device’s features and specs to those of several other leading 7-inch tablets, we’ll examine the Nexus 7′s Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) user interface, and then demonstrate a selection of useful Android tools and apps for system management, communications, social networking, media streaming, entertainment, and productivity.

      • a small update on Vivaldi
      • Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD will give Apple’s iPad fits

        I love my Nexus 7. It’s replaced my Apple iPad for daily use. But, at 7-inch display, people who want a full-sized tablet don’t like it as much as I do. For them, the new Amazon Kindle Fire HD with its 8.9-inch display, 16GBs of storage, and a price of only $299 may just hit their sweet spot

        Don’t think for a minute that the Kindle Fire HD is just for home-users. True, it’s got lots of consumerish features such as FreeTime, so your kids won’t spend all day on the tablet; Dolby audio for music and movies; X-Ray for Movies, which will let you get film info from IMDB while you’re watching a film; and so on. That’s all nice, but it was the business features that caught my eye.

      • Sony Takes Another Swing at Android Tablets With Xperia S

        The 9.4-inch Xperia Tablet S is Sony’s latest shot at an Android slate. “Every Android tablet has to be compared against the Nexus 7,” said ABI’s Jeff Orr. Like the Nexus 7, the Xperia Tablet S is based on the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. However, the Google tablet is priced at $200, while the Xperia Tablet S will be offered in three models starting at $400.

Free Software/Open Source

  • OSI Welcomes Five More Affiliates
  • Open source the vote

    The Democratic party has released a Ruby on Rails open-source program, Voter Registration that enables you to deploy a Web application that enables U.S. citizens to register to vote. There is also a version that you can simply embed on your site, which is branded for the Obama/Biden campaign. The open-source version is unbranded so there’s nothing on it that even a Tea Party member could object to.

  • Taking a peek at some Open Source software for writers

    Over the years, I’ve heard (and I keep hearing) that you can’t do this or you can’t do that or you can’t do the other thing using Linux or using Open Source software. And guess what? Most of those things I’ll never do or rarely, if ever, need to do. As I’ve written in this space and elsewhere, I really don’t care what other people think or what they use their computers and devices for. None of that has any bearing on what I need and what to do.

  • Vector graphics shoot-out: Illustrator v open-source

    We wrap up our investigation of vector graphics editors with a look at Adobe’s Illustrator, along with a selection of more specialist applications, including Microsoft’s Visio and the free, open-source LibreOffice Draw.

  • Lots of LUV on Software Freedom Day

    Melbourne is one of many cities around the globe that will mark Software Freedom Day next Sunday, September 15.

  • The Limits of Open Source

    Technology history is one of software platforms and control over those platforms. Generally, the more companies allowed to participate in a platform the more growth that platform can generate, because no one company can possess all the good ideas.

  • LinuxCon

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Concerns linger about corporate involvement in OpenStack Foundation

      The official debut of the independent OpenStack Foundation was welcomed by most as a big step forward to establishing an open cloud but the inclusion of two big league proprietary vendors, namely VMware and Cisco, has raised a few eyebrows.

      As the OpenStack Foundation prepares to launch its most advanced open source cloud platform code-named “Folsom” within weeks, the organization held a coming-out day to celebrate its official independence, its ability to attract more than 180 companies and an excess of $10 million in funding and the acceptance of last-minute bigwig members Intel, NEC and VMware.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Seven Reasons for Choosing LibreOffice over Microsoft Office
    • Libre Office in GTK3 and Wayland!

      The first quarter/half of 2013 will be the most exciting period for Linux Desktop – ever(!?) so far. This has to do mostly because many major distros are going to drop XServer for the shake of Wayland.

      While GTK3 port in Wayland is expected to be complete and stable by 3.8 around in March, some popular applications like Gimp, Libre Office, Firefox, VLC isn’t sure if they make it.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Health 1.6.3 released

      We are proud to announce the release of GNU Health 1.6.3, the Free Health and Hospital Information System. This version brings major improvements in the hospital information system, both from the administrative and patient management. Here is a quick summary of the main changes…

    • GNU Health workshop at the United Nations for African and Asian countries

      The United Nations International Institute for Global Health UNU-IIGH – have sucessfully delivered another GNU Health training, in their “Free Software Hospital Information System Development Workshop” .

      The workshop was held during September 10-14th, at the the United Nations University facilities in Malaysia. There were delegates from Indonesia, Myanmar, Laos, Philippines, Cambodia, Tajikistan, Sudan, Kenya and Morrocco.

    • OpenEMR 4.1.1 is released

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

    • The AGPL: Solution in Search of a Problem

      In the early days of commercial open source, misinformation was a major impediment to adoption. Many enterprises, for example, explicitly forbade usage of code released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). When asked about the justification for this prohibition, the most common response centered around difficult-to-articulate concerns about being compelled to open source code they did not wish to. The fear that this “viral” license would infect their private repositories was rampant.

      The truth, as became obvious following the mainstream adoption of GPL-licensed projects like Linux and MySQL, is that this was never the risk it was perceived to be. Simple usage of these technologies does not trigger the reciprocal provisions of the license, those that require modifications to be distributed under the same terms as the original source code, i.e. the GPL. More to the point, even if it was the case that applications built on top of Linux or MySQL were regarded as modifications, enterprises would not be subject to the terms of the license because of the so-called ASP loophole.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Leading Standards Organizations Assert Principles of a “New Global Standards Paradigm”

      The big news in the standards arena yesterday was a joint announcement by five of the standards setting organizations (SSOs) that have been most essential to the creation of the Internet and the Web: IEEE, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and Internet Society (the last three being closely affiliated entities).

      Joint announcements by SSOs are rare, and the subject matter of this announcement was more so: each organization was joining in the endorsement of a set of five principles that they assert support a “new paradigm for standards” development.

Leftovers

  • Windows – Now with added malware!

    The BBC have recently written about a sample of PC’s in a study being pre-loaded with malware intentionally prior to buying them , so with the best will in the world on behalf of the consumer, you’ve lost before you have begun.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Approval of New Chemical-Resistant GMOs Likely to Prompt Pesticide Escalation

      A decade and a half after farmers began planting the first genetically engineered (GE) crops, the future is clear. The scientists who pioneered genetic engineering thought of themselves as environmentalists, creating products that could reduce pesticide use. Instead, they have simply perpetuated the same “pesticide treadmill” as their pesticide-peddling counterparts resulting in the application of a greater volume of ever more toxic pesticides.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The Repricing of Oil

      Now that oil’s price revolution – a process that took ten years to complete – is self-evident, it is possible once again to start anew and ask: When will the next re-pricing phase begin?

      Most of the structural changes that carried oil from the old equilibrium price of $25 to the new equilibrium price of $100 (average of Brent and WTIC) unfolded in the 2002-2008 period. During that time, both the difficult realities of geology and a paradigm shift in awareness worked their way into the market, as a new tranche of oil resources, entirely different in cost and structure than the old oil resources, came online. The mismatch between the old price and the emergent price was resolved incrementally at first, and finally by a super-spike in 2008.

    • New Yorkers Rally to Urge Gov. Cuomo to Reject Fracking

      The future of New York’s water supplies and the health of its millions of citizens hang in the balance as Governor Andrew Cuomo decides whether to end the state’s moratorium on new wells to drill for “natural” gas through the controversial industrial process of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” Activists estimated that over two thousand concerned citizens joined the march in Albany Monday to try to persuade Cuomo not to lift the moratorium — statewide or in some counties — a decision expected to be announced some time after Labor Day.

    • Coordinated Actions Worldwide Call for Banning Fracking

      Concerned people from the U.S. and numerous other countries will join in a global campaign event Saturday to call for a ban of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” More than 150 events, on five continents, are planned for this weekend’s “Global Frackdown” — a day of action against fracking — coupled with the promotion of the expansion of clean, sustainable energy options.

  • Finance

    • Business making an anti-regulation pitch to voters

      The National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Business are working to make the anti-regulatory fervor their members share an issue in the last weeks of the campaign.

      The chamber and the manufacturers group have taken out issue ads saying the expense to business in complying with federal regulations is killing job creation. NFIB local affiliates are conducting tours and news conferences to let small business owners present their personal stories.

    • What Really Happened with Occupy?

      Despite the divide-and-conquer tricks of both the mainstream Left and the mainstream Right, Occupy and the Tea Party were originally protesting the exact same thing: the malignant, symbiotic relationship between big government and big corporations. Conservative and liberal protesters both railed against the unchecked power of the Federal Reserve.

    • Some Big Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes, Either

      On Sept. 13, Harold Hamm, chairman and chief executive of Continental Resources, testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce about achieving energy independence. He said his company, an oil producer, could produce much more if federal policies didn’t hold it back. Among them is the tax system. Mr. Hamm said his company paid an effective tax rate of 38 percent.

    • Since Romney Raised the Issue of Freeloaders, What Is Erskine Bowles?

      Since we seem destined to have a national debate on the topic of government freeloaders in the wake of the Romney fundraising video, it might be worth asking how we think about someone getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for sitting on a corporate board for which they did little obvious work. Erskine Bowles, a possible future Treasury Secretary, is of course the poster child for such people.

      Mr. Bowles has earned millions of dollars sitting on corporate boards over the last decade. The stock prices of the companies on whose boards he sat have mostly plummeted. Since 2003 the Erskine Bowles stock index has lost more than one third of its value. By comparison, the S&P 500 has risen by more than 50 percent. If Mr. Bowles was trying to serve shareholders, he has not done a very good job.

    • GSEs Remain Backdoor Bailouts for Banks

      The entire backdrop to this transaction is problematic. An FHFA official “wondered whether Fannie Mae squeezed Bank of America hard enough on price considering the bank was benefiting by “getting this stuff off their books.”

    • Asian stocks rebound despite global uncertainty

      Asian stock markets rebounded Friday, led by gains in technology and oil companies, despite uncertainty about the fragile global economy.

      Crude rose above $93, clawing back some of its recent large fall and helping to boost energy stocks.

      Strong orders for Apple’s iPhone 5, which went on sale Friday starting in Asia, gave a general boost to sentiment in the technology sector.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Chicago Teachers “On Strike for Better Schools”

      Negotiations between the Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) failed to result in a contract before Sunday, September 9, 2012 at midnight, sparking the first teacher’s strike in Chicago in 25 years. The strike is now in its second day.

      The last teacher walk-out in 1987 lasted 19 days. Many hope and expect that this strike will be short-lived, both sides of the negotiations say they are close to a compromise, but have yet to settle important issues such as how much teachers will pay for their health benefits and how teachers will be evaluated.

      This final set of issues comes on top of a long series of demands made by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration which included longer work days, a longer school year, new ways of evaluating and rewarding teachers, and an expansion of non-union charter schools in the city. CTU leaders also cited concerns such as a lack of professional development opportunities, and the lack of air-conditioning in many sweltering classrooms. The union was pleased however to restore through negotiations some of the art, music, world language, technology, and physical education classes cut by the administration earlier.

    • “Citizens for Fire Safety” Smoked Out: Front Group Folds After Exposé

      Manufacturers of flame retardant chemicals, an industry that got a boost from Big Tobacco’s shadow money decades ago, are being exposed to increased public scrutiny. In the fallout, a front group formed by the three biggest manufacturers, calling itself “Citizens for Fire Safety,” has been shuttered.

      The Chicago Tribune published its “Playing with Fire” series in May 2012, catapulting highly toxic flame retardants — present in many household consumer products — into the national spotlight. In the process, it not only highlighted the work of a handful of chemists who’ve been fighting to ban the most toxic of these chemicals, but it also exposed the “deceptive tactics” of the industry’s main front group.

  • Censorship

    • Government of India: Quiet all the way!

      An analysis of the orders issued by the Ministry of Communication & IT makes it difficult to discern the intentions of the authorities. The specific URLs sought to be blocked included the domains of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, BlogSpot, WordPress, Google Plus, Wikipedia, Times of India, Al Jazeera, FirstPost and other websites.

      Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 provides the Central Government, the power to block access by the public of any information, to maintain public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offense amongst other things.

    • Open Letter to the Prime Minister regarding parental internet controls

      We write to you as the consultation on parental controls closes. In recent years there have been two comprehensive reviews into the issue of child safety online, the Byron Review and the Bailey Review. They considered a wealth of academic expertise, parental concerns and technical input and both arrived at the same conclusion – parents are the best people to decide what their children can see.

    • When content is noticed and taken down – have your say

      Due to some problems with their website, the European Commission have extended the deadline for submissions to the ‘notice and takedown’ consultation. This is actually pretty good news for anyone who has yet to submit a response – you still have until Tuesday 11th September to have your say. The Commission are asking for responses to a questionnaire.

    • Porn filtering: stop the Daily Mail Nanny State
    • Make Your Voice Heard Against a “Clean Internet”

      The European Commission is holding a consultation -ending on the 5th 11th of September- about “A clean and open Internet”. Citizen input is critically needed to ensure that freedom of expression is protected, against the attempts of many lobbies to impose draconian repressive procedures to censor online content.

    • The Royals, the Web and a look at freedom of speech.

      It’s been a while since I wrote an article for OpenBytes. So I’m to look at a subject which is all over the news at the moment, but in this case take a look at it from a slightly different perspective.

  • Civil Rights

    • Cofounder of La Quadrature du Net Jérémie Zimmermann rewarded with an EFF Pioneer Award

      Tonight at 7:45pm PST (4:45am CET), Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder and spokesperson of La Quadrature du Net will receive his 2012 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) at a ceremony in the Project One Gallery in San Francisco. The whole team of La Quadrature du Net thanks EFF and congratulates Jérémie.

    • Photo May Prove Assange Innocent

      A photo published by the Mail Online, shows one of the two women who accused besieged Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange of “rape”, happily smiling with him at a party … two days after he allegedly “raped” her. This casts even further doubt on what is already a highly dubious story, as it seems very unlikely that a rape victim would voluntarily attend a party with her would-be “rapist” at all, much less be smiling about it for the camera.

      Although the woman, known only as “Woman A”, has had her face obscured in the photo “for legal reasons”, The Mail reveals she’s 33 years old, which by a process of simple elimination means she must be Anna Ardin (who also goes by the pseudonym “Bernardin”), the 33 year-old militant feminist currently in hiding in the American-Israeli occupied West Bank, not her co-accuser, 28 year-old Sofia Wilén.

      The basis for both women’s accusations is also highly dubious. In Ardin’s case her sole claim to “rape” is that Assange’s condom broke during sex, and Wilén’s complaint (which she only made under coercion from Ardin) is that he didn’t wear one at all, but she “couldn’t be bothered” telling him to put one on. Suffice it to say Sweden’s “rape” laws are quite bizarre, if they seriously want to extradite Assange on the basis of something as trivial as “condom incompetence”. And that’s assuming any of their claims are true at all, given that Wilén’s testimony was apparently “embellished” by the police, and Ardin found it necessary to subsequently delete SMS and Twitter messages to cover up her distinct lack of emotional trauma after supposedly being “raped”. In fact, quite why Sweden felt it necessary to issue a European Arrest Warrant to extradite Assange in the first place is a bit of a mystery, given that they had more than adequate opportunity to question him while he was in Sweden, but chose to let him go, then bluntly refused to question him in the UK later. This is by far the most suspicious “rape” case I’ve ever heard of.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Dominant Telcos Try to End Net Neutrality Through ITU

      For some months now, there have been intense discussions on the threats raised by the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). In December, the 193 Member States of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations, will gather in Dubaï for this important conference aimed at amending the ITU’s founding treaty, the “International Telecommunication Regulations” (ITRs).

  • Copyrights

    • Has Canada Effectively Shifted from Fair Dealing to Fair Use?

      The reverberations from yesterday’s Supreme Court of Canada copyright decisions will be felt for years (good coverage of the decisions include posts from Mark Hayes, IP Osgoode, Barry Sookman, Howard Knopf, the Toronto Star, and the CBC). While much of the coverage has focused on the music downloading issue, the continued expansion of fair dealing is perhaps the most significant development.

      I focused on the court’s expansive view of fair dealing in an earlier post, but I think it is worth digging a bit deeper to ask whether Canada has now effectively shifted from fair dealing to fair use. The Copyright Act obviously still speaks of fair dealing, but the expansion by the courts and the legislature may have effectively rendered it very close to fair use.

      Under a fair use system (such as that found in the U.S. or Israel), the list of qualifying categories or purposes is illustrative rather than exhaustive. In other words, the statute identifies purposes that may qualify as fair use, but acknowledges that the courts may add new purposes as they see fit. The key to fair use therefore lies not in the purposes – virtually any copying can qualify – but rather in the analysis that follows over whether the particular use is fair. The flexibility of fair use has been lauded as one of its great benefits, opening the door to new innovation that politicians might not envision when drafting the law.

    • Internet Archive Starts Seeding 1,398,875 Torrents

      The Internet Archive has just enriched the BitTorrent ecosystem with well over a million torrent files, and that’s just the start of “universal access to all knowledge.” The torrents link to almost a petabyte of data and all files are being seeded by the Archive’s servers. Founder Brewster Kahle told TorrentFreak that turning BitTorrent into a distributed preservation system for the Internet is the next step.

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