• Distributions

Open Source: Multitasking with X and Linux

Another restriction is with multi-user on Microsoft. With my Linux desktop PC I have a user for work related tasks and a user for relaxation and gaming tasks. I can keep the work user logged in, switch to a Linux console using Ctrl Alt (F1-F6), login the game user, start a second X GUI session with startx startxfce4 — :1 and play a short game while “stuff” keeps running under the work user in the first X session. If I am playing a buggy 3D game that may crash X, I have no worries about my tasks in the other X session as they would be unaffected if a poorly designed 3D game took down the second session. I can do this “out of the box” on a typical Linux distribution installation. If you are from the limited Microsoft universe you have no concept to compare to this on a standard, out of the box, Microsoft desktop PC. Yes, you can switch users. But if you switch users as I do to play a game that crashes the Microsoft GUI called “Windows” it all crashes. Not just the session where the faulty program broke the GUI. It is also truly simple to switch between or among multiple sessions of X on a Linux PC. Just use Ctrl Alt F# to switch back and forth, where # is the virtual terminal number for an X session. For example, my first session is on virtual terminal 8 and my second session is on virtual terminal 9. To switch between them I use Ctrl Alt F9 and Ctrl Alt F8.

The Age of the Icon Is Full Upon Us

It is pretty clear that whether you use Apple, Linux, or Windows (to be scrupulously alphabetical about it) you are going to be at least offered – and more likely stuck with – a highly iconified desktop in any current or future offering of an operating system. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re using a phone, a tablet, or a Real Computer.

Why I Support Free Software

At a Linuxworld trade show I heard three people arguing about the proper way to decompose applications to work on a high-performance Linux-based supercomputer. The three people were two engineers from Hewlett Packard and an eleven year-old programmer. The interesting part was that the two engineers from HP were wrong and the young programmer was right.

Choosing a Desktop (#noapple)

When it comes to operating systems, the most “free” distro out there is Debian. I run Debian on more than half of my servers. Unfortunately, native Debian is a poor choice for a desktop, especially on proprietary hardware like my iMac. While I have no doubt that I could get things to a useable state with Debian, one of my stated goals is easy of use, and from the desktop standpoint Debian ain’t it.

The broken dreams of a Linux system administrator

After some studies, or perhaps a specialist course or presentation you’d like to start to implement in your company the best practice you have learnt, and perhaps start a new and better era for your IT department.

But it seem that something always go in the wrong way or there are unexpected difficulties that make all your plans, and dreams, fails; and after some fight you usually end saying “ok that WAS the best practice and we are sure to don’t follow it”.

This is my list of things I’ve found impossible to realize in some years of work.

[...]

To make the things easy the best solution would be: to have 1 distribution at the same level on all servers, use only 1 application stack to deliver services (java, ruby, php).
I can understand this can become too strict, over time new release of the distribution come out and it’s not so easy to upgrade all server, or different group can use different software.

Dear Windows,

You were good to me at first, we had plenty of laughs you and I. You introduced me to a lot of people. We were good together. But then you started ditching me all the time. Only co-operating when it suited your mood, getting angry at me a lot, telling me what I was and wasn’t allowed to do. Cutting me off when I was in the middle of something, or getting rid of my stuff without permission. That’s not cool. But, I stayed with you. I felt comfortable being with you, everything was familiar, and simple. Until you wouldn’t let me in, you said I was doing something illegal when I wasn’t. You know me, we’ve been together since I bought you in the store, I’d never do something like that. But I gave up on you today, I’ve finally had it.

Top secret productivity recipe

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman on 20 years of Linux @ LinuxCon Japan 2011

• Linux 3.1-rc2 Is A Fairly Calm Release

  Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.1-rc2 kernel on Sunday afternoon. There isn’t too much to see and Linus notes that this is a fairly calm release for coming just one week after the close of the Linux 3.1 kernel merge window.

Applications

• Three Quake like drop-down terminals for Linux

  If you use Linux, chances are you use the terminal. Desktop environments like Gnome and KDE have done a good job of hiding the complexities of the underlying OS, but there are some tasks that you just have to do in a terminal.

  I have become a big fan of drop down terminal windows, modeled after the Quake console, instead of having a terminal window sitting in the background that I have to switch to for every command that I want to run. You just press a keyboard shortcut, run your command, and hide the window again. There is no mucking around with virtual desktops, and you don’t have to try and find a terminal window buried beneath all you other applications.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • HowTo: Microkorg XL Sound Editor on Linux

  • Solving the Sunday Puzzle with coreutils

  • Cnotify, get notifications for console events

  • Easy Ubuntu 64bit DLNA Server Setup + Bonus MKV Converter Script

• Games

  • Help Fund “In The Dark” !

    pement Studios, In The Dark, Platform
    0

    The indie company Escapement Studios are working on a new unique platform game called In The Dark.

Desktop Environments

• E17 Enlightment Rocks

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Which languages are people writing Plasmoids in?

    Python 46%
    C++ 44%
    QML 6%
    Javascript 4%

  • Wireless on Plasma Active MeeGo image

    Since MeeGo uses Connman instead of Networkmanager to handle network connections, that means there is not (yet an user interface to control in right from the KDE workspaces.

    If you happen to have one of the Desktop summit Exopc with the Contour user interface that there has been installed on several devices, here are some easy steps to get the MeeGo tablet Connman ui installed and be able to connect to a wireless network.

  • Dragon Player – KDE Video player focus on simplicity

    Dragon Player is a multimedia player where the focus is on simplicity, instead of features. Dragon Player does one thing, and only one thing, which is playing multimedia files. It’s simple interface is designed not to get in your way and instead empower you to simply play multimedia files.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Did GNOME Shell Miss the Mark?

    Having played with a couple of tablets over the last week it occurred to me that these are the sort of devices the GNOME 3 Shell is said to be intended to run on, a reasonable assumption when looking at the design. However, the current breed of tablets PC’s come with their own interfaces already, and they seem rather streamlined and efficient at what they’re doing. Android tablets, HP webOS, the Blackberry Playbook and of course the iPad all have rather good interfaces in my view that are more than up to the job they’re intended for, and probably superior to the Shell because they have been designed with just that one purpose in mind.

  • Classic Gnome panel vs. Unity

Distributions

• Review of Puppy Linux on an Old Server

  Puppy has become familiar to many as a Live CD option for aging PCs that sit on people’s desktops at home, maybe even at some offices. Puppy recently became more of a derivative of Ubuntu (arguably, depending on the definition of “derivative”), but its legacy and/or its strength was mostly associated with its version that I used. It contains JVM and it can also use other lightweight desktop environments.

• Big distributions, little RAM 3

• New Releases

  • Top Five New Releases of the week you need to watch

    Here are some just released distros that are interesting and great to work with. Monomaxos is a refreshing Greek distro for those who prefer an out-of-box Linux OS. dyne:bolic, Plop Linux, Toorox and Network Security Toolkit have just released over the past week and will make for an enriching experience.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu In The Wild: Have You Seen ‘Ubuntu’ In Public?

        When reader Fabio Bier mailed in a photo of this familiar looking emblem atop a drain/man hole cover (spotted in Seville, Spain, fact fans) it got me thinking: does the ‘Ubuntu’ logo ever crop up in urban landscapes?

      • Flavours and Variants

        • WattOS R4 – An alternative to Lubuntu

          I have always been interested in lighter weight desktops, and having a laptop I also am interested in saving power and maximizing battery life. WattOS promises both of these by offering a Lxde desktop. It’s also based off of Ubuntu 11.04, so it is up to date and has a great amount of packages.

          I do all of my testing in Virtualbox for lack of a spare machine to install to. I dedicated one gigabyte of RAM to Virtualbox for testing out WattOS. Booting from the iso image took two minutes and two seconds, which isn’t too long of a time, but I have certainly seen better. Still, it was soon up and running with the lxde desktop. The desktop has a nice silver colored panel and a wallpaper with some sort of insect clinging to a blade of grass. The icon theme is the ever popular Faenza, and the Openbox theme is the default for Lxde, which goes by the name of Onyx. The GTK theme is Clearlooks, which is simple but looks nice with pretty much any setup. The desktop is fast, and did not slow down noticeably even when I ran nearly every pre-included program, something that can’t be said about many distributions.

Setting up a new project – 4 tools you can’t miss the first time around

Just ask them, I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to tell you about it. Adding wheels to a kitchen table, or jet packs in your blue blazer, everyone is an inventor in their own mind. Sooner or later you every person on the planet will have a desire to strike out on their own and make a go at bringing their idea to life. Whether you’re building a consultancy or rocket ships, there a few key apps that need to be rolled out on Day One. If you don’t have these ironed out from the very beginning, things tend to spiral out of control and make it hard for a project to ever get on track, much less stay there.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • The GPU Acceleration Situation In Firefox 6

    Mozilla Firefox 6.0 is to be officially released on Tuesday (it’s already out if you look on FTP mirrors) with faster performance, better start-up times, improved plug-in management, greater HTML5 support, more permission controls, and several other features. What’s not talked about much, but is huge for the affected Linux users, is that the GPU acceleration situation begins to be sorted out.

  • The New Firefox Permissions Manager

  • Mozilla Firefox 6 Final Now Available For Download

Security

• XSS Injection Vulnerability in WordPress 3.2.1

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Eriks Zelenka’s diary

  Fuh, I spend half of my day today at police station because some paranoid guy called the police. We had a conversation with him and I tried to explain him what I’m doing, with no success.. The area I mapped had quite a few burglaries recently. But still they arrested me with no evidence, after I explained them what and why I’m doing. Three cars, six policeman, six hours enclosed for nothing.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks: Bulgaria, US Mulled New Refinery to Rival Neftochim

  Bulgarian and American officials discussed two years ago the construction of a new, mid-sized oil refinery to compete with Neftochim, controlled by Russia’s giant Lukoil, diplomatic cables, revealed by WikiLeaks, show.
  “The gas cut-off [in the winter of 2009] has reinvigorated Bulgarian efforts to diversify away from Russian energy sources. We are urging Bulgaria to think big,” former Ambassador Nancy McEldowney writes in a diplomatic cable, entitled “Bulgaria – digging out of the energy hole”.

• Wikileaks Makes the World More Civilised

  Earlier on in the day, Wikileaks’ official account echoed my tweet to over a million followers, which is rare (I have posted over 50,000 tweets and never was I mentioned by Wikileaks). For whatever reason, people still associate Wikileaks with crime, even though its only connection to crime is that it helps expose crime. In this world and in this strange age of oppression, exposing crime is criminal if the criminals are very rich. If they are poor people who commit petty crimes, nobody seems to care — neither about them nor those who expose them.

• The Evolving Media Portrait of the Wikileaker

  On May 24th PBS aired a Frontline documentary about alleged Wikileaker Bradley Manning called “WikiSecrets.” Billed as “The inside story of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and the largest intelligence breach in U.S. history” it focused exclusively on Manning’s struggles in the military as a data analyst and closeted homosexual who’d gained access and subsequently released tens of thousands of classified government documents. Omitting Manning’s stated motives or the content of the leaks, it put forth the “angry gay man” narrative that Bradley leaked the information primarily because he was frustrated by bullying and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the military policy in place until September 20, 2011 that prohibited military personnel from disclosing or discussing homosexual relationships. As PBS told it, Manning was angry and wanted to exact vengeance on the establishment before going bonkers.

• IQ2: Is Wikileaks a Force for Good?

  US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a big fan of the concept of open governance, famously opined that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”. Yet even the world’s liberal democracies have claimed that sometimes they require a place in the shade, condemning WikiLeaks for publishing their confidential information.

  Are governments justified in their condemnation of WikiLeaks and merely being responsible in protecting their secrets? Could the world really survive an unbridled commitment to transparency?

  Tackling this thorny topical issue at an IQ2 Debate in Sydney were two teams featuring, on one side, a former foreign minister in Gareth Evans … and, on the other, a Wikileaks insider in the form of Icelandic investigative journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson.

• Review the Charges Facing Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Founder

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• EPA’s Proposed Standards Would Limit Mercury, Arsenic, and Other Air Toxics from Power Plants for First Time

  The Environmental Protection Agency took a critical step toward cleaner air on March 16, 2011, by proposing its air toxics standards for coal-fired power plants. The proposed rule would limit emissions of mercury, arsenic, and other air toxics from power plants for the first trime.

  These protections were called for in the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, but they haven’t been implemented, and they are long overdue. Toxic mercury, arsenic, and other pollutants have been spewing uncontrolled from power plants even though we fully know how bad they are.

• Raw Footage From The Gulf: Beaches In Bay Jimmy “stained Black”; Grand Isle Oyster Beds Choke Under Heavy Sheen

  BP and its boosters say we dodged a bullet. They beat their chests and shout from the treetops that the 200-million-gallon spill off Louisiana’s coast didn’t break the back of the Gulf like all the “doomsdayers” said it would. They talk of safe seafood and booming Gulf tourism. They tell us the oil is gone, that it’s time to move on. In fact, according to BP, the Gulf has made such an unexpectedly fast recovery that “future loss” claims to victims of the spill should be shut down. No more damage so no more damage claims, or so argues BP’s legal team on into the night.

Finance

• Welcome to Chicago, America’s capital of volatility

  This is where America comes to profit from fear.

  One storey above Chicago’s main financial strip, beneath three towering screens of ever-shifting neon green financial data, 60 people gather every day to helm the “fear index.”

• For members of deficit-cutting supercommittee, ‘doomsday’ defense cuts hit close to home

  For the dozen lawmakers given the task of producing a deficit-cutting plan, the threatened “doomsday” defense cuts hit close to home.

  The six Republicans and six Democrats represent states where the biggest military contractors — Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics Corp., Raytheon Co. and Boeing Co. — build missiles, aircraft, jet fighters and tanks while employing tens of thousands of workers.

• What happened in London? Just an adjustment of the Riot Index

Censorship

• David Cameron’s net-censorship proposal earns kudos from Chinese state media

  UK prime minister David Cameron (who is reported to have rioted himself and then fled police while at university) has proposed a regime of state censorship for social media to prevent people from passing on messages that incite violence. This proposal has been warmly received by Chinese state media and bureaucrats, who are glad to see that Western governments are finally coming around to their style of management.

• Riots lead to rethink of Internet freedom [from China]

  One of the anti-riot measures recently suggested by British PM David Cameron is to prevent rioters from using Twitter and other social networking websites. Such a tactic, which was slammed as a trick resorted to only by authoritarian governments in the past, has had a great impact on world media.

Privacy

• Inquisitive UIDAI wants all details about you and I

  The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Karnataka, which is all set to begin its ambitious “Aadhar” enrolment in Bangalore from August 17, has kicked up a row even before its formal launch by “surreptitiously” widening the scope of the ID card beyond the officially stated position.

  On the second day of the special enrolment for mediapersons and their families in the City — as a precursor to the launch for general public —there were heated arguments between applicants and officials, as the enrolment forms distributed by the officials did not match the forms put out by the UIDAI on its website and seemed to be far wider in its scope, seeking personal details.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Where In Trademark Law Does It Say It’s Okay To Trademark A Town Name ‘For The Good Of The Community’?

    We had recently written about how a group called the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Inc (SMRi) had received trademarks on the name of the city of Sturgis, where the famed motorcycle rally is held each August. SMRi was then using the trademark to block the sale of souvenirs from any “unauthorized provider.” This seemed absolutely ridiculous. You should not be able to trademark the name of a town under trademark law. We had thought that SMRi ran the event, but after our last story ran, we found out that it was a separate operation set up solely to “manage the intellectual property” of the event.

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • Notes on ACTA and Public Health

      The European Parliament Committee on International Trade (INTA) commissioned a study on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). The INTA study highlights problematic aspects of ACTA and makes recommendations. According to the study, “unconditional consent would be an inappropriate response”, and “There does not therefore appear to be any immediate benefit from ACTA for EU citizens”. The study confirms ACTA goes beyond current EU legislation.

      With regards to access to medicines, the INTA study concludes that adding some annotations will solve the problems. There is a huge gap between the paper reality of the INTA study and the reality in the streets: people are dying because they do not have access to medicines. The INTA study aims too low, just meeting our international obligations on public health is by far not enough. We leave in place, and reinforce with ACTA, low-volume high-profit strategies. We also note some other health issues (development and availability of medical and diagnostic methods and instruments).

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

How Linux handles hardware problems

A few points to this post. First, diagnosing problems in Linux is not as hard as it is rumored to be. /var/log/messages is usually where the kernel logs its information. And it logs very thoroughly. The kernel’s entries show up as “kernel”, just like the example above. And, the logs are in plain text so they can be opened with any program that can read text. Unlike Windows which stores logs in a proprietary format that need Microsoft tools to view.

Ubuntu 11.04 vs Windows 7 vs OS X 10.7 (Lion)

The Image Editing test uses ImageMagick’s command-line Convert tool to change 24-bit TIFF files to PNG format. It runs with the auto-level, auto-gamma, antialias and contrast options, simulating common operations performed on image files. OS X Lion is slightly ahead of Windows here, but Ubuntu is a huge 17 per cent ahead of its rivals.

Kernel Space

• Update On Open-Source AMD Fusion Llano Support

  Last month when testing the AMD Radeon HD 6550D graphics as found on the AMD Fusion A8-3850 APU I mentioned the latest Git code (Linux kernel / Mesa / DDX) was broken for this Llano-generation APU while the proprietary Catalyst driver had “just worked” under Linux. Here’s an update where the open-source driver support is now at today.

Applications

• Manage Your Twitter & Identi.ca Accounts With Choqok [Linux]

  For people who are really tweet-o-holics, constant access to Twitter (or Identi.ca, an open source clone of Twitter) is as much a necessity as food and water. At varying levels, this may also be true for those who are fans of Twitter but not necessarily tweet-o-holics.

  One possible choice is to have Twitter up and running in the browser most of the time. While this is a feasible solution, you’ll start missing out when the browser is minimized. Also, a browser isn’t exactly lightweight on system resources. Therefore, your best bet would be to use a well-built Twitter desktop client.

• 6 ways to map your mind with Linux

  From Wikipedia: “A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid to studying and organizing information, solving problems, making decisions, and writing.

• Proprietary

  • No one cares about license agreements

    In today’s reality, license agreements are mostly vendor protection mechanisms. They give you little choice and even less help. Lots of stuff in these agreements would probably not hold water in the court. There’s a sort of a status quo between users and companies, as in you don’t mind that we abuse your products and we won’t sue you back for the flaws in your software.

    Most people don’t read and don’t care about EULAs. We could say it’s their fault when things go wrong, but it’s not that simple. If just about everyone ignores the terms listed in agreements, then they can hardly be called agreements, more sort of disagreement. At best, people adhere to EULD. But sometimes, you do find decent things out there. If you go for open-source and free software – not necessarily at the same time – you have a better of chance landing on the fairness turf. And that would be all, I guess.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Installing Aptosid on the Asus A53E-XN1

  • HOWTO: Easily Share Files between Linux Machines using sFTP

  • Custom Lookit panel icon to match Faenza icon set

  • Installing sSMTP MTA (Mail Transfer Agent)

  • Fedora graphical front end for su with beesu

  • Weekend Project: Turn Thunderbird into a Groupware Client with SOGo Connector

  • Manage & Compare Fonts Easily With Font Manager [Linux]

    Browse and manage your Linux fonts using a simple GUI. Font Manager is a program that allows you to browse, compare, manage and even add fonts on your Linux system; a must-have tool for designers on any platform.

• Games

  • Hacker Evolution Duality – Free playable beta for linux, now available

    Exosyphen studios would like to announce the availability of a free playable beta for linux of the upcoming game, Hacker Evolution Duality.

  • Windys 1.5.0 Released

Desktop Environments

• Rick Perry blames God for Gulf oil spill

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 7th August 2011

• GNOME Desktop

  • String freeze for GNOME 3.2 in 3 weeks

Distributions

• Mate review on Arch Linux

  The resulting desktop looked exactly like Gnome2, and it felt good to be back :). I made the panels transparent, added a few applets and some panel shortcuts.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • PCLinuxOS Zen Mini 2011 Review

    Remain blissfully ignorant, or experience nirvana today with this powerful, lightweight, and highly customizable release from PCLinuxOS. Zen Mini provides a useful LiveCD and a minimal list of applications making this an ideal distribution for people looking to manufacture their own environment. As a user with much previous Zen Mini experience I found this slim distribution to be an excellent choice for older hardware or a small hard drive. Unfortunately rumors suggest that one of the primary contributors for this release, Siamer, may be ending his time with PCLinuxOS due to shortage of time. He will be missed, but I have high hopes that Zen Mini will carry on in the future.

    [...]

    Zen Mini also delivers exciting 3D effects using Drak3D and Compiz Fusion. This allows you to experience the rotating 3D desktop cube, enhanced window transparencies, wobbly windows, and much more. And to make all of your settings easier to find, you can find an icon that says configure your compute in the Gnome panel. This will open the PCLinuxOS Control Center where many of your options and settings can be configured from one location. All said, the stability and integrity of this distribution deserves far more recognition than I can offer. Be sure to try Zen Mini today!

• Gentoo Family

  • Apt-gentoo? Gentoo-apt! Hah!

    I was marginally amused when I saw that some funny person had written an apt-gentoo wrapper that, err, scrolls build logs around slowly.

• Red Hat Family

  • Redhat 5.1 Redneck Internationalization

    Installing RedHat Linux was fun in 1998 with this special language option. Thanks to the free Virtual PC 2007 for bringing back the laughs! See footnote #2 on this page to see why this was even a language option.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Unity. Simplify Your Life.

        The Ubuntu Vancouver Local Community believes that one barrier to the widespread adoption of Ubuntu’s ethos and its collection of outstanding software is a shortage of well-written and accessible user guides. Guides that make people say “Wow! I didn’t know Ubuntu is that easy. I didn’t know Ubuntu could do that!”.

        Unity is most new users’ entry point into Ubuntu, and first impressions count. Unity is the ethos of Ubuntu. Unity is our “secret sauce”.

      • Ubo Iconset : Ballpoint pen made, Handmade Iconset for Ubuntu

        In this post I am going to talk about very interesting icon set, though, this icon set is still under alpha version, and I usually dislike alpha version of icon-set as they miss many critical icons for the frequently used programs which makes the desktop look inconsistent and often are not completed, I would mention Ubo Iconset here because of the factor of novelty associated with the iconset.

      • Ubuntu Gnome Wallpapers

      • Linux Q&A ; Why I Play for Both Teams

        Recently a number of you in the OMG! Ubuntu community have been wondering about my “Ubuntu is Easy” videos, and why I have chosen to create a series of what seem like extremely simple tutorials.

      • Jenkins for Ubuntu Oneiric: Call for Testing

        Jenkins 1.409.1 has landed in Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot so now is the time to try it out and help with testing this new distribution model for Jenkins!

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Sumptuous Free Android Internet Radio Apps

      Internet radio is an audio service delivered over the internet. This type of service can offer personalized streams of music and is often seen as a promising medium for promoting recorded music. Internet radio should not be confused with podcasting. The difference between the two technologies is that the former involves streaming media, the latter focusing on downloaded media. Of course, some applications offer both internet radio and podcasting functionality.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • The Vinci: A 7-Inch Tablet Computer Designed for Babies

Google App Inventor Discontinued, Will Become Open Source Instead

Many of you may not know much about App Inventor. This was a tool that was very exciting when it was first announced by Google Labs and it was made available to the public last December in a beta test. Basically Google created a program that would help users with zero coding skills or knowledge of any sort to build Android applications using the App Inventor tool. This was one of many great things that came from Google Labs.

[...]

Things wont stop there, Google has agreed to open source the Google Labs App Inventor code so hopefully the amazing developer community we all know and love here in the Android world can make something that was great, even better.

It’s time to switch to free and open source software

A dip-stick survey among colleagues and friends revealed that FOSS is quite popular among the masses. Consider this: Over 60 per cent of the people surveyed said their choice of media player was VLC – an open source software. When asked what their favourite browser was, over 80 per cent said they used Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome – both part of the FOSS repository.

Free Software and homeschooling: reports from the trenches

Andrew: I am a homeschooler, and I wish there was more FOSS out there for homeschoolers. Most of the FOSS I’ve experienced are small things like using TinyMCE rich text editor for the www boards at PA Homeschoolers’ online AP classes. However, there’s also a lot of informal stuff. My brothers have been playing around with programs like Tux Math, Tux Typing, GIMP, and Tux Paint.

Marco: Why are you homeschooling? Did your parents homeschool you?

Andrew: Well, it’s funny you ask that. My father and mother were staunchly against homeschooling, at first. My dad actually engaged in several arguments, taking the “homeschooling is wrong” side. Then one day, Dad met some homeschooled teens. He was amazed. They actually looked him in the eye, shook his hand firmly, and had a conversation with him. He was astonished. He then read a book on homeschooling while on vacation. He read all about the academics, the values passed down, and family quality time. When he came back, he told my mother, at the time a businesswoman on Wall Street, that “we are going to homeschool”. And that’s what happened. Every year, they asked us if we wanted to stop. We never said yes. However, I did take several classes outside the home, including several APs at pahomeschoolers.com.

Westinghouse Sanctioned in Case Over Open Source

Open-source software developers convinced a federal judge to impose sanctions on Westinghouse Digital LLC, which was found to have violated an injunction against using free programming code for commercial gain.

In 1999, programmer Erik Andersen developed software and contributed it to an open-source computer program known as BusyBox. Open-source software can be freely distributed, as long as it is not sold commercially.

About a decade later, he and the Software Freedom Conservancy filed an action for copyright infringement against 14 companies, including Westinghouse Digital Electronics, Best Buy and Samsung, for allegedly distributing BusyBox code in products such as cameras, high-definition televisions and wireless routers.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Chrome Is Being Ported To Wayland

    Besides the exciting news last week that KDE has drawn up plans for Wayland in 2012, there’s more good news in the land of this next-generation display server: the Google Chrome/Chromium web-browser is being ported to run on Wayland.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 7 Might Use 50 to 75 Percent More Memory

    Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla Corporation, said in a press conference that Mozilla sensed that developers were getting very tired of the endless whining about memory usage of the popular browser and its many plugins.

  • Firefox 6 breaks out ahead of schedule, gets official August 16th

    is ready to make its worldwide debut a few days early. In typical Mozilla fashion, a complete build of Firefox 6 is now unofficially available for your downloading pleasure, three days ahead of schedule. If you’re looking for a major facelift to the desktop edition, you won’t find one here — most of the new features aren’t cosmetic. Perhaps most visibly, you’ll find the domain name of the page you’re parked on highlighted in the address bar. On the Android side, version 6 makes much bigger promises, like a “fresh visual style in Chrome Gingerbread,” enhanced image scaling, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s “faster and uses less memory.” We’ve downloaded the desktop version of the browser ourselves, and we’ve found the release quite snappy. If you’re not afraid of a little pre-release downloading, you can catch the (desktop) fox at the source links below. And as per usual, please let us know how it’s treating you.

BSD

• PC-BSD/FreeBSD 9.0 For Intel Sandy Bridge

  In the half-year since the launch of Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors, these very fast processors with rather good integrated graphics (using an open-source driver) have been benchmarked every which way under Linux on Phoronix. Phoronix benchmarks have shown broken kernels, AVX compiler performance, and even comparison results to Windows and Mac OS X, among other original Intel SNB articles. What hasn’t been tested up to this point though is the BSD operating system support for Intel Sandy Bridge hardware.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• We have C++11

  Hopefully soon GCC will also have the -std=c++11 option, replacing the current one.

U.K. riots raise questions about U.S. unrest

As Americans look across the Atlantic, a natural question arises: Could the flames and violence that erupted in Britain scar this country, too?

Health/Nutrition

• Nanny of the Month: the vegetable garden forbidder

  Here’s Reason TV’s take on the Nanny of the Month. The winning loser this time is Oak Park, Michigan City Planner Kevin Rulkowski who wanted to jail a woman for growing vegetables in her front yard.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• 2011-08-13 Protests around the world

  China: Thousands of people in Qianxi County, Guizhou province smashed ten vehicles and torched another five, said Xinhua, China’s state news agency. According to Reuters, “China saw almost 90,000 such “mass incidents” of riots, protests, mass petitions and other acts of unrest in 2009, according to a 2011 study by two scholars from Nankai University in north China. Some estimates go even higher.” “In fact, China has riots more serious than England’s every week,” said one Weibo comment.

• Starkey raving bonkers! Historian accused of racism on riots

  The historian David Starkey was fighting to save his lucrative TV career last night after he claimed that the riots were the result of “black culture” and that whites involved in the disturbances “have become black”.

Cablegate

• 2011-08-13 WikiLeaks: U.S. and Brazil Vie for Power in Peru

  In their correspondence with the State Department, U.S. diplomats in South America have been exceptionally paranoid about the activities of Hugo Chávez and the possibility of a leftist regional alignment centered upon Venezuela. That, at least, is the unmistakable impression that one is left with by reading U.S. cables recently disclosed by whistle-blowing outfit WikiLeaks, and it’s a topic about which I have written widely in recent months. Yet, with President Hugo Chávez’s health now fading fast and Venezuela looking like a rather spent force politically, it would seem natural that Washington will eventually turn its sights upon other rising powers — countries like Brazil, for instance.

• 2011-08-13 Murder as foreign policy: assassination of Syrian General could have been an inside job

  On the 1st of August 2008 Syrian General Muhammad Suleiman, who also bore the title of Special Presidential Advisor for Arms Procurement and Strategic Weapons for President Bashar al-Assad, was murdered in highly mysterious circumstances. General Suleiman was shot three times in the head, neck and stomach at his home in the exclusive Rimal al-Zahabieh resort in the Mediterranean city of Tartous. It was speculated then that the shots came from a sniper located on a boat, which explained how the top level security forces surrounding Suleiman were avoided. At this time relations between Syria and Israel were at their worst and the talk of war was in the air, particularly due to Syria’s intent on upgrading its nuclear and chemical weapons facilities, a strategy headed by Suleiman. Therefore, most of the international press, most notably The Sunday Times, stated as a fact that it was Israeli intelligence agency Mossad who was to blame.

Finance

• China urges action on EU and U.S. debt, to keep yuan policy

  China is worried about challenges that the European Union faces in the next two months and urged the bloc as well as the United States to hold down government debt, its trade minister said on Friday.

• Analysis: China costs start to worry U.S. multinationals

  For years, low prices on China-sourced goods helped dampen inflation in the United States. Now China’s efforts to boost domestic consumer spending, reducing reliance on exports, are leading to higher costs for multinationals that manufacture goods there.

• Greed, not Osama, took down the economy

  It was a phantom prosperity, as was painfully learned. In his 2007 biography, Greenspan too politely acknowledged the role that the “loosening” of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers played in heightening financial risk. “Vaporization,” would have been a more apt term. Within the year, Lehman Brothers would declare bankruptcy, the era of bailouts arrived (again), and we all became comfortable with the lexicon. (The Troubled Asset Relief Program would forevermore be known as TARP, and even the innocent were initiated in the ways of collateralized debt obligations.)

• WEB EXCLUSIVE: These rioters are Tony Blair’s children

  On the third day of the London riots I received a telephone call from Mash, a member of a Brixton gang who I befriended three years ago. He was standing outside an electronics shop in Clapham, watching the looting. I could hear shouts, glass breaking but never a police siren. I urged him to go home. ‘Harri man,’ he remonstrated, his voice hoarse with emotion, “You don’t get to do this every day. You do your thing, and you don’t get arrested. It’s wild and exciting. These few days, it’s our time.”

• Somebody made huge money on S&P downgrade of US

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Look At Murdoch’s Lawyers

Censorship

• Heard Somewhere Inside the Beltway: BART vs. Free Speech

  BART officials in the San Francisco Bay Area cut off cell phone service in what they described as an attempt to prevent a public protest.

• BART Defends Decision To Cut Off Cell Service After Civil Rights, FCC Concerns Raised

  After rumors of a possible protest intended to disrupt service reached BART officials yesterday, they pursued a number of strategies to ensure that didn’t happen. One of those strategies, cutting off cell phone service to passengers, has left riders outraged, and at least one expert calling for an FCC investigation. BART police, however, say the move was necessary to ensure the safety of all.

• BART Pulls a Mubarak in San Francisco

  This week, EFF has seen censorship stories move closer and closer to home — first Iran, then the UK, and now San Francisco, an early locus of the modern free speech movement. Operators of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) shut down cell phone service to four stations in downtown San Francisco yesterday in response to a planned protest. Last month, protesters disrupted BART service in response to the fatal shooting of Charles Blair Hill by BART police on July 3rd. Thursday’s protest failed to materialize, possibly because the disruption of cell phone service made organization and coordination difficult.

• Save Our Social Media! Stop Cutoffs And Closedowns

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • “The University of British Columbia is transitioning to a new copyright environment…”

    I am hopeful that there will be some positive cultural shifts here at the University as a result of this development. There will be a higher profile for open educational resources and other Creative Commons licensed materials. And I dare to hope that some of the initial confusion and hassle around usage and “fair dealing” will inform and activate our energy when the impending revisions to Canadian copyright law again become an issue in the coming months.

• Distributions

Applications

• Proprietary

  • SingleOS Launches Fuscan Linux Cloud 2.0

    Software company SingleOS (www.fuscan.com) announced on Friday that it had officially released version 2.0 of Fuscan Linux Cloud, an update to the company’s cloud software automation solution.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Software RAID in Linux – a small tutorial

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Has a New Login Manager

        The brand-new display manager, LightDM, has been introduced by Canonical in the current development release of the Ubuntu 11.10 operating system.

        With last night’s updates, the current development release of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system got a brand new and slick login manager, called LightDM.

      • [Screenshots and Video] New Improved Unity Interface Lands in Ubuntu 11.10

        Unity Interface has just received a massive overhaul and the dash looks better than ever. Applications and Files Lenses on the launcher have been removed and are now integrated into the dash only. A new Music Lens has also been introduced for quickly searching and browsing your favorite artists.

        The Ubuntu Button on top left corner has been removed and a new big Ubuntu orb on the launcher now activates the main dash menu. Active blur option for the dash is turned on by default now giving it a really sleek and polished look. Application title, window controls and app menu on top panel now show all the way to the left.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Friday Time-Waster: Play DOS Games In Your Chrome Browser

    NaClBox (get it?) is a port of DOSBox that allows DOS games to be played right in your browser. Right now you can play titles like Star Wars Tie Fighter complete with multi-voice MIDI sound and hot hot VGA graphics. It works on Macs, PCs, and Linux machines and runs under Chrome 13.

Openness/Sharing

• Khan Academy: Spreading Education In the Open Source Way

U.K.’s broken social contract blamed for riots

The spark that lit riots in Britain last week is rooted in the government’s radical alteration of the social contract with its citizens, says a Toronto psychiatrist who was born and raised in the U.K.
People at the lower margins of society feel abandoned and powerless to the point where they lash out in fear, says Dr. Kwame McKenzie.

British society is undergoing a psychological realignment along American lines rather than traditional European values, where there is a straightforward social contract between the individual and the state, he says.

On the rap sheet: ‘looter’ who pocketed £1, and a suspect caught with an empty box

Steven Keith, 43, of Longsight, Manchester was remanded to jail accused of stealing items worth £1 after allegedly burgling M1 News.

He was said to be among rioters who tore through central Manchester on Tuesday night. He was charged with burglary and a judge at Manchester magistrates’ court remanded him in custody until next week.

Health/Nutrition

• What Kind Of Gm Plants Are On The Market Internationally?

  The expansion of genetic engineering into the food industry has resulted in the growing of GM plants over the past decade or so. Genetically modified food is not only limited to a specific country because several countries worldwide have already adapted this agricultural technology. In fact, there are now a variety of plants that are grown using genetic engineering techniques.

• Welcome to the Age of GMO Industry Self-Regulation

  As I reported last week, the USDA’s recent surprise decision not to regulate genetically modified bluegrass poked yet more holes in an already-porous regime for overseeing GM crops—essentially to the point of regulatory collapse.

  There were a few important strands I wasn’t able to wrestle into the story. The main one is an odd letter that USDA secretary Tom Vilksack sent Scotts Miracle-Gro as an addendum to the agency’s response to Scott’s GM bluegrass petition. Vilsack’s letter, dated July 1, acknowledges concerns that GM bluegrass will contaminate non-GM bluegrass—that is, that the Roundup Ready gene will move through wind-blown pollen and work its way into non-modified varieties. This is the process known as “gene flow,” and it has already been well-established for GM corn and other modified crops.

• 93 percent of unborn babies contaminated with GMO toxins, study finds

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Torture in the US Prison System: The Endless Punishment of Leonard Peltier

  In June 2006, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons released “Confronting Confinement,” a 126-page report summarizing its 12-month inquiry into the prison systems. The commission follows up the analysis based on its findings with a list of recommendations. Topping the list of needed improvements is better enforcement of inmates’ right to proper health care and limitations on solitary confinement. Five years after the report’s release and despite its detailed and well-researched studies, inmate abuse continues. More recently, news reports from California’s Pelican Bay Prison amplified the need for change, but after the three-week inmate hunger strike ended, the torture of solitary confinement continues nationwide.

• ‘I feel like I’ve saved a life’: the women clearing Lebanon of cluster bombs

  Only up close does it become clear that some of the bulky figures in armoured vests scouring the fields of southern Lebanon for unexploded cluster bombs are wearing hijabs under their protective helmets.

  Once local teachers, nurses and housewives, this group of women are now fully trained to search for mines and make up the only all-female clearance team in Lebanon, combing the undergrowth inch by inch for the remnants of one of the most indiscriminate weapons of modern warfare.

• NY judge won’t order Gitmo psychology probe

  New York judge has declined to force an investigation into whether an Army psychologist developed abusive interrogation techniques for Guantánamo Bay detainees and should be stripped of his license.
  The move halted what advocates have called the first court case amid a push to shed light on psychologists’ role in terror suspects’ interrogations.

• Camila Batmanghelidjh: Caring costs – but so do riots

  My own view is that the police in this country do an impressive job and unjustly carry the consequences of a much wider social dysfunction. Before you take a breath of sarcasm thinking “here she goes, excusing the criminals with some sob story”, I want to begin by stating two things. First, violence and looting can never be justified. Second, for those of us working at street level, we’re not surprised by these events.

  Twitter and Facebook have kept the perverse momentum going, transmitting invitations such as: “Bare shops are gonna get smashed up. So come, get some (free stuff!!!!) F… the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! Dead the ends and colour war for now. So If you see a brother… SALUTE! If you see a fed… SHOOT!”

• These riots reflect a society run on greed and looting

• US official: 85% of USAID to Egypt since 25 January went to US organizations

  About 85 percent of USAID’s funds to Egypt since 25 January has gone to US organizations, including the National Democratic Institute and the International Republic Institute, a US official told the Christian Science Monitor.

  The official, whose name the newspaper did not mention, said the money was directed to training programs on practicing politics, and to bolster political parties’ ability to participate effectively in the forthcoming parliamentary elections.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Shell battles to stem North Sea oil leak

  The company confirmed last night that it had managed to stem the leak from a pipe leading to the Gannet Alpha platform, located 112 miles east of Aberdeen.