• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

GNU/Linux Inside stickers are back and better than ever!

We are proud to reintroduce our popular GNU/Linux Inside stickers. The new sticker features the same artwork as the classic GNU/Linux Inside sticker but is now on a much more durable sticker backing, perfect for putting on your phone or laptop. The stickers are 1-inch in diameter, and made of heavy duty aluminum.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Install Mplayer and Multimedia Codecs (libdvdcss2,w32codecs,w64codecs) on ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric)

  • Use httperf for Server Benchmarking

  • Detecting Malicious Traffic in HTTP Headers

  • Unattended SSH with Smartcard

    I have several backup servers that run the excellent rsnapshot software, which uses Secure Shell (SSH) for remote access. The SSH private key of the backup server can be a weak link in the overall security. To see how it can be a problem, consider if someone breaks into your backup server and manages to copy your SSH private key, they will now have the ability to login to all machines that you take backups off (and that should be all of your machines, right?).

  • Building a powerful & affordable firewall with Linux

    It’s no doubt that one of the leaders for network equipment is Cisco Systems. Newer Cisco devices are starting to use what Cisco calls its “IOS-XE” operating system, which is a customized flavor of GNU/Linux. Yes, GNU/Linux, which should not come as any surprise as GNU/Linux is used on countless high level appliances and security devices. In fact, there are hardly any appliances or security devices that run Windows for the operating system. Why? Because GNU/Linux is highly scalable, powerful, reliable, and a better overall solution than Windows.

    I have always been a huge fan of using GNU/Linux for building my own firewall boxes. First, old machines like Pentium II or Pentium III boxes are perfect for this. These boxes will easily run even the latest version of GNU/Linux. The Linux kernel itself has many functions built in for network routing, traffic shaping, bridging, virtual IP addresses, and just about anything else that a firewall needs to support. And the fact that Cisco now leverages the Linux kernel for its appliances tells me that even Cisco agrees.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • blackPanther OS v11.1 Darkness is Out

  • Press Release: Sabayon Linux 7 Core Releases

• Gentoo Family

  • Sabayon 7 GNOME 3 review

    Sabayon is a Linux distribution described by its developers as “… a bleeding edge operating system that is both stable and reliable.” It is based on Gentoo, a source-based (Linux) distribution. The latest edition, Sabayon 7, was released just last week (October 10 2011 to be exact). Sabayon has support for all the known free desktop environments, but this release, as is customary, includes 32- and 64-bit installation images for GNOME 3, the K Desktop Environment, and Xfce only.

  • Sabayon 7 Core, SpinBase, ServerBase and OpenVZ Released

    Fabio Erculiani proudly announced last evening, October 18th, the immediate availability for download of the Sabayon Linux 7 CoreCDX, SpinBase, ServerBase and OpenVZ editions.

    Sabayon Linux 7 CoreCDX, ServerBase and SpinBase editions are designed for Linux experts and advanced users that want to set up a home server or create their very own operating system, based on Sabayon.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Kororaa 15.1 (Squirt) released

      The second release of Kororaa 15 (codename “Squirt”) has been released. Version 15.1 is available for download, in 32 and 64 bit with KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Turns 7 Years Old, First Ubuntu Was Released Today

        Ubuntu has made some major wins this year as Indian Judiciary system switches to Ubuntu from RHEL. One of the reasons could be Ubuntu’s ease of use and focus on desktop users as compared to RHEL. Ubuntu also made a major win by being selected by Amazon and HP for their servers. 2011 may bring the much needed profitability to Canonical, the company which has been funding Ubuntu for all these years.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 – Precise Pangolin planning prepared

        The Ubuntu Developer Summit 2011 is approaching and, as is customary, Mark Shuttleworth has laid out his objectives and themes for the fourth Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) release, Ubuntu 12.04, recently named Precise Pangolin. The two foremost issues on Shuttleworth’s mind are the fact that 12.04 is an LTS release and Ubuntu’s presence in the cloud; he is also aware of what Ubuntu owes to the work of other developers.

      • Gnome 3 Can Be Hacked By Home Users On Ubuntu 11.10

        Let’s get one thing clear, Gnome 3 is here to stay no matter what Linus Torvalds thinks. Yes, it will continue to improve and add more features as the time passes by. Same will happen to Canonical’s Unity. It is the future. You can either hold onto the past and refuse to embrace newer technologies, or take the road to innovation. I never had issues with Unity or Gnome 3 shell, I had issues with bugs in Ubuntu 11.10, which stopped me from doing important work. I do trust the developers of Canonical (and they have some of the best developers in the world) to fix those bugs.

        When I look at Windows 8 or Apple Mac, I feel lucky. While Windows users will be stuck with Windows 8′ Metro UI, we have couple of options. If you don’t like Gnome 3 Shell, you can go to Unity or XFCE or LXDE or KDE.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 and the Oddly Oneiric ‘Countdown’

        “I just got to look at the countdown and….wow is that REALLY dumb!” said slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “Did they learn anything from those moronic house parties MSFT had? If you want to generate buzz that sure isn’t the way to do it. Is there ANY non Ubuntu user that would be impressed?”

      • Flavours and Variants

        • The Perfect Desktop – Kubuntu 11.10

          This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 11.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Kubuntu 11.10 is derived from Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) and uses the KDE desktop instead of the GNOME desktop.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • 3 Free Apps to get the most out of your NFC-enabled Android

    • Android 4.0 upgrades will soon be available

      According to Google’s Andy Rubin, you will now be able to upgrade your current Android OS to the latest Ice Cream Sandwich, Android 4.0 by November.

    • Andy Rubin: Android 4.0 to be open sourced by year end

      Speaking at this week’s AsiaD conference in Hong Kong, Andy Rubin, Google Senior VP of Mobile and the man in charge of Android development, confirmed that the source code for the next major update to Android, version 4.0, will be available as open source “a couple of weeks” after the recently announced Galaxy Nexus smartphone ships next month.

      Code-named “Ice Cream Sandwich” (ICS), Android 4.0 was first revealed yesterday (19 October) alongside the new Nexus device, at a joint Google and Samsung event. The new version of the mobile operating system includes features from both the current phone version, 2.3.x “Gingerbread”, and the tablet version, 3.x “Honeycomb”. While it will reportedly work on both large- and small-screen devices, it was only demonstrated on the Galaxy Nexus smartphone.

    • Android 4.0 Source Code To Be Released Soon

      Google was criticized for holding back the source code of Honeycomb. There was a valid reason behind that move. Google wanted to bring an end to the fragmentation in the Android market. Releasing the Honeycomb code meant giving it to OEMs to put it on their devices, which would further increase the fragmentation.

      Google clearly stated that Honeycomb was a quick-fix for tablets and it was working on the next version of Android which will run on all Android devices – it was dubbed IceCream Sandwich. Google made it clear that it will release the source code of IceCream as soon as it is available.

    • The Android source is back online

      The Android source repository has been offline since the kernel.org compromise; it has now returned on a new site. Services like Gerritt will take a little longer still. “To reiterate, these servers contain only the ‘gingerbread’ and ‘master’ branches from the old AOSP servers. We plan to release the source for the recently-announced Ice Cream Sandwich soon, once it’s available on devices.”

    • Google Serves Up Ice Cream Sandwich With a Nexus on the Side

      Ice Cream Sandwich is a redesign of the Android OS. It has a highly visual interface, a facial-recognition feature and home-screen folders.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Asus’ new Android Transformer tablet going quad-core

    Asus Chairman Jonney Shih unveiled his company’s next-generation Android tablet today, a 10-inch model in the Transformer family that will come with Nvidia’s quad-core Kal-El processor.

Events

• Coverage Of LinuxCon Prague, Czech Republic

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Unattended SSH with Smartcard

    I am in Toronto right now, spending a week with Mobile folks. It has been about 6 weeks since I started working on a mobile extension, and the list of dirty tricks we employing to get things done is growing. Some of these hacks are there because there is no alternative, and some are there because I just didn’t figure out the right way to do it.

SaaS

• SGI to sell Cloudera software and services

  Linux server specialist SGI is moving further into the big-data market: it has signed a partnership agreement with Cloudera Inc., the provider of Apache Hadoop-based data management. Under the terms of the agreement, SGI will distribute Cloudera software pre-installed on SGI Hadoop Clusters.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Interview: Jesper Schmidt Hansen, author of GNU Octave Beginner’s Guide

  This week’s FLOSS4Science interview is with Jesper Schmidt Hansen, nanofluidics scientist and author of the GNU Octave Beginner’s Guide, one of the few books on GNU Octave besides the official GNU Octave manuals. Remember that you can leave comments or questions at the end of the post. Enjoy the interview!

  F4S: Hello Jesper. Please, give us a brief introduction about yourself.

  Jesper: I currently hold a position at Roskilde University, Denmark, where I investigate fundamental phenomena in nanofluidics. I have been a postdoctoral fellow at Swinburne University, Australia, and at Pierre et Marie Curie, France. Before my academic career I did a Ph.D. in soft condensed matter.

• GNU/Linux Inside stickers are back and better than ever!

• gnutls 3.0.4

Project Releases

• Rapid7 announces Community Edition of Metasploit

  US security company Rapid7 has announced the launch of a Community Edition of the popular Metasploit exploit framework. According to Rapid7 Chief Security Officer and Metasploit Creator HD Moore, “The best way to tackle the increasing information security challenge is to share knowledge between practitioners, open source projects and commercial vendors.”

You Must Be Dumb To Use Windows Phones: Steve Ballmer

HUMOR: Steve Ballmer, the chair-throwing CEO of Microsoft, yesterday said that you need to be a computer scientist to use Android. He said that Windows Mobile is the best selling mobile platform in the world and even the dumbest person on the planet can use the Windows Phone. “You don’t have to be smart to use Windows phones,” said Mr Ballmer.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Major Loophole Remains in Net Neutrality Resolution

  Negotiations on a weak Net neutrality resolution are coming to an end at the EU Parliament, with the vote taking place tomorrow. After much reluctance, the conservative (EPP) group has finally agreed to endorse a call for a timely assessment of further regulation on Net neutrality. However, the text still includes a major loophole allowing operators to implement Internet access restrictions on the pretext of managing congestion.

• Net Neutrality Resolution Adopted in EU Parliament

  The “Industry” Committee of the EU Parliament unanimously adopted a resolution on Net neutrality. Through this vote asking the European Commission to promptly assess the need for further legislative action, the Parliament is taking a strong stance in favour of Net neutrality. Pressure now increases on EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who may soon be forced to break away with her failed “wait and see” approach and take action.

ACTA

• Negotiator’s notes on ACTA

• ACTA discussion heats up

  Meanwhile there is still some struggle about the delivery of the Europarl legal opinions, and it seems unclear to observers what DEVE would do. This week there was a dinner meeting of the Kangeroo Group. Velasco-Martins of the Commission claimed they could properly respond to any criticism and asked member states to be more specific. Given the track record of the Commission in the case, the legal loopholes and a missing criminal acquis their chuzpe is astonishing. The Commission largly builds its confidence that the Treaty is legally permissable on the TRIPS agreement which was concluded by Member States prior to all the relevant EU Treaties reforms, and with a competence reservation by the Union.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Management of UEFI secure booting

The FSF have released a statement on UEFI secure boot. It explains the fundamental issue here, which isn’t something as simple as “will OEMs let me install Linux”. It’s “Does the end user have the ability to manage their own keys”.

Secure boot is a valuable feature. It does neatly deal with the growing threat of pre-OS malware. There is an incentive for it to be supported under Linux. I discussed the technical aspects of implementing support for it here – it’s not a huge deal of work, and it is being worked on. So let’s not worry about that side of things. The problem is with the keys.

Secure boot is implemented in a straightforward way. Each section of a PE-COFF file is added together and a hash taken[1]. This hash is signed with the private half of a signing key and embedded into the binary. When you attempt to execute a file under UEFI, the firmware attempts to decrypt the embedded hash. This requires that the firmware have a either a copy of the public half of the signing key in its key database, or for there to be a chain of trust from the signing key to a key in its key database. Once it has the decrypted hash, it generates its own hash of the binary and compares them. If they match, the binary is executed.

What happens if it doesn’t match? Per the UEFI specification, the firmware can then prompt the user and ask if they want to execute it anyway. If the user accepts then the hash of the binary is remembered[4] and can continue to be executed in future. This is similar to what you get when you visit a self-signed https site, or when you connect to an ssh server for the first time – the user must explicitly state that they trust the software that is being booted.

Operating system Linux deters computer viruses

In our Facebook Story of the Day viewers wanted to know about a computer operating system called Linux. Linux is an alternative operating system such as the popular Windows system or the iOS for Macs.

Desktop

• Vodafone brings ARM and Ubuntu together for South African Webbook

  If you don’t know what Ubuntu is by now, we’re not sure what tech blog you’re reading — ’cause it sure isn’t this one. Ok, so finding a computer with the world’s most popular Linux distro preloaded on it isn’t exactly easy (there aren’t any lurking in your local Best Buy, that’s for sure). But, tracking down a machine running the Ocelot in South Africa will be getting a bit simpler. The country’s Vodafone affiliate, Vodacom, launched the Webbook — a 10-inch laptop running Ubuntu 11.10 on a Cortex A8-based Freescale i.MX51 processor (likely 800MHz). Inside is also 512MB of RAM and 4GB of flash storage, enough for basic browsing.

• Canonical, Vodafone bring ARM-based Ubuntu netbook to South Africa

• Wyse Introduces Industry’s Fastest Desktop and Mobile Thin Clients

  The Z50 is Wyse’s premier Linux-based alternative to a high-end desktop PC that provides unparalleled flexibility, performance and user experience but with the security, maintenance and management benefits of a thin client. The Wyse Z50 delivers a richer HD multimedia user experience and greater support of all popular VDI protocols, including Citrix HDX, Microsoft RDP7 and VMware PCoIP. The Wyse Z50 has multiple connectivity and peripheral options, and is Energy Star 5.0 Compliant, consuming a fraction of the energy needed by a PC, at only 15 watts.

Server/Storage

• IBM announces preconfigured analytics servers

  IBM on Wednesday introduced mainframe and Power-based systems for analytics in an effort to compete with Oracle’s Exadata.

• Bacula Systems Releases Linux Bare Metal Restore Feature

Audiocasts/Shows

• Tech Talk: the tablet wars and the grandfather of Linux

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.1-rc10

• Shaping the Future of Linux: Clarissa Womack

  At the tender age of ten, she decided that she wanted to become a computer programmer and, indeed, she has never wavered from that path. While other kids were just playing computer games, Clarissa was reading computer magazines in an effort to learn everything she could about how computers work. In the computer magazines that she read, there weren’t many pages devoted to Linux, but everything that was written was positive—and this is what sparked her interest and kept it burning throughout her formative years. By the time she graduated from high school, Clarissa had already helped assemble home computers, had dabbled in multimedia and HTML, had programmed in Pascal/Delphi and was a member of the local LUG: the Home Unix Machine Brisbane User Group, otherwise known as HUMBUG.

• Kernel comment: Untapped power saving potential

  Recent Linux kernels, and distributions based on them, don’t make use of some of the power-saving features offered by modern computers because they can cause problems on some systems. The distributions tend to just ignore such difficulties – but it is they who are best placed to remedy them.

• Kernel Debugging At OSI Days November 2011

Applications

• PhotoRec Heroically Rescues Deleted Files

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Vim Text Objects: The Definitive Guide

  • Article – How to tame Ubuntu 11.10 !

  • 36 Free 3D Model Sites Compatible with Free Blender Animation Projects

  • Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.10 (LAMP)

  • KDE4 Tip: Turning Off Annoying Dynamic Systray Notifications

  • What is the exact difference between a ‘terminal’, a ‘shell’, a ‘tty’ and a ‘console’?

  • Creating packages for Pardus Linux with pisido

  • Exporting to PDF in Scribus

  • Install Faenza 1.1, The Right Way!

  • Show Desktop Indicator For Ubuntu [Quick Tip]

  • Capturing screenshots in Linux

  • Managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux network settings using NetworkManager

  • How to Find Nearly Anything in Linux – Tweeting Linux by Don Crawley

• Games

  • Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle – Review

    Using Steam and/or Desura, it’s quite simple. Just add the code, and download the games. If you are using Desura for Linux, you’ll have to join the Desura group on Desura (yep, its strange, i know), and you need to be accepted that takes about 1 1/2 days, after that you can add the games, but for Frozen Synapse, you’ll have to pick the HIB version, or it will charge you for the game.

  • Trine 2 DLC Campaign, Linux Version Being Planned For Spring 2012

    Addressing questions regarding the game on their forums, Frozenbyte say that Trine 2 will hover between 6-10 hours in length for the average player, but that the focus is on making the game replayable.

Desktop Environments

• The Little Desktop That Could

  LXDE has been an option for some time now on most distros, but for new-to-intermediate users like me it is easiest to use if it is presented as the master desktop of an entire integral system. I got started in Linux with Ubuntu (9.04) and apart from general distro-hopping I’ve mostly stayed with it. I don’t claim it’s the best, it’s just what I’m most familiar with. My ticket to escape from the Unity desktop came when a reasonably stable release of Lubuntu tackled the 11.04 version of its parent Ubuntu. Here was a distro that even I could shape the way I liked it.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Happy 15th to the folk at the KDE project

    I first encountered KDE when it was in version 1.1 when a friend in India told me of a distribution which was the same as Red Hat – I was playing around with 5.2 at the time which was using the FVWM window manager – but had KDE instead. This distro was then known as Mandrake; today we know it as Mandriva.

    Instead of using Mandrake, I downloaded KDE 1.1 and installed it on Red Hat; it was very nice and light years ahead of all the other DEs with which I had been playing around. Applications like KMail were nicely designed; kppp was really useful because at that time everyone was on a 56k internet connection. Additionally, for a GNU/Linux beginner, kppp was much more user-friendly than tools like minicom.

    Over the years, KDE has added a huge number of applications; the one that stands out for me is k3b, the CD/DVD burning application that is quite simply the best of its kind even when one compares other platforms. I have never been able to find an application for this task as good as k3b, no matter whether it be on Windows, the Mac or GNU/Linux.

  • Easy Favorites in KDE!

    Having recently switched to KDE, I found one major annoyance. That is not to say that KDE is perfect save for this one thing, but it was pretty glaring to me none the less. Favorites.

    I started “pinning” applications to my “favorites” section in the KDE launcher and it didn’t take long to fill it up. In Windows 7, this is not a big deal because the launcher will just get longer to accommodate the content. Not the case with KDE. I set out to find a way to make the KDE launcher longer, to fit my most commonly used applications, but came up short and instead devised this clever way to launch apps without the aid of any 3rd party widgets.

• GNOME Desktop

  • It’s Easy To Guess What Angers GNOME Users

    The 2011 GNOME User Survey, an end-user survey that was assembled by independent GNOME users and hosted on Phoronix, began less than 24 hours ago and we’re already approaching 2,000 submissions. There’s still one month to go, and from these submission so far when simply dumping the comments it amounts to about 148 pages. However, it’s not hard to guess what most of these comments are about when it comes to the GNOME desktop.

  • Gnome Pie 0.2 Released

Distributions

• At Home With AV Linux

  My studio computer collection includes two custom-built desktop machines and a Hewlett-Packard G60 laptop. As described in my previous article, the primary desktop box has been running an old but rock-steady 64 Studio 2.1 that has recently been replaced by a shiny new 64-bit Arch system. The secondary desktop machine and the laptop are both running the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 10.04. However, while I like and enjoy using Ubuntu I hardly require two identical installations of the same Linux distribution, so I decided to replace one of them with AV Linux.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2011.0 – Supreme start, unhappy ending

    Mandriva 2011.0 test was one hell of a first date. But as we got to know each other, as brief as the affair was, issues rose, many and great. Even in a single day of fiddling with the distribution, I countered some 29 problems, including some pretty big showstoppers. Now, no matter how great the system is, no matter how beautiful, with problems like a broken package management and a crippled 3D experience, the end result is disappointing.

    It’s as if Mandriva 2011.0 has two personalities – one slick, modern, smooth, polished, and beautiful, the other ugly, buggy, uncoordinated. Really weird. Now, it’s exactly this type of small issues that separates champions from the rest. Personally, I found the lot of smaller bugs more annoying and troubling the lack of proper 3D acceleration, for example. If I were to power up this distro on a new machine with an Nvidia card, I have no doubt things would have worked out fine. But the rest of the issues would remain.

    I must admit that this year’s release is a big, big drop in quality from the previous edition, especially considering my extremely high expectations. From utterly good to just average is a huge drop. In the same breath, the Mandriva team exercised the most unique and intriguing visual transformation of the KDE desktop yet, so perhaps there’s hope, if they can sort out all the little things. We’ll see what gives next year. At the moment, Mandriva 2011.0, if you get the package manager to work, deserves something like six out of ten points. Dedoimedo out.

• Gentoo Family

  • openSUSE Delayed, Ubuntu Birthday, Sabayon Releases

    Sabayon Core is the minimal foundation for the Sabayon desktop systems. Core is appropriate for servers, home theaters, customized desktops, and more. There are several “spins” to choose from depending upon your specific needs. For example, CoreCDX comes with Fluxbox while the Spin and Server -Bases do not have an X server included. But they all come with Linux 3.0, btrfs support, encrypted filesystem support, and, of course, Entropy.

    Customized Sabayon spin “Forensics” has ditched KDE and GNOME for Xfce. Sabayon Forensics “is geared for Law Enforcement to gain access to a suspects computer to scan and retrieve any and all information.” This is the first release with Xfce, but weekly updates will be released. See the announcement for more information on that.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Expands Cloud Ecosystem through Partnership with Virtustream

    Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Virtustream Inc., a leading provider of cloud software solutions and services, today announced that Virtustream has joined Red Hat’s cloud ecosystem as a Premier Certified Cloud Provider. With this, Virtustream has added support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to its xStream cloud platform and now offers Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-demand to customers. Virtustream can now offer its customers a more scalable and flexible cloud infrastructure through enhanced support within a unified private and multi-tenanted enterprise cloud, and Red Hat customers can also now easily deploy on xStream.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Users Play Waiting Game, Gnome 3 Cometh

    If you are a Debian (stable) user, then you are undoubtedly used to one of the most rock-solid experiences available in the FOSS community. That of course comes at the expense of having the latest and greatest at your fingertips. Debian users can now rejoice between ice ages as Gnome 3 is finally coming to the unstable branch! That means you only have 400 years to go until it is available in stable. Let the waiting game commence.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Enough Ubuntu, YET?

      • Social Networking in Ubuntu 11.10

        Today I hosted an Ubuntu Open Week session on social networking in Ubuntu 11.10. I decided to convert my notes from the session into a blog post, enjoy!

        Ubuntu includes a social networking desktop service, Gwibber. Gwibber isn’t new to Ubuntu, it has been included for quite a while now. The intent isn’t just to provide a twitter or facebook client, but it is to provide a means for you to interact with your favorite social networks.

      • A Quick Peek Inside Ubuntu And The Ubuntu Unity Shell

      • What about creating The Ubuntu Administrator’s Handbook?

      • What is new in Ubuntu 11.10 compared to Ubuntu 11.04?

        Have you tried out Ubuntu 11.10 yet? Install it using our downloadable guide on How to install Ubuntu 11.10. Let us now compare the most prominent changes in appearance of the dash, launcher and various applications in Ubuntu 11.04 and Ubuntu 11.10.

      • Happy Birthday, Ubuntu!

      • Ubuntu 11.10 on ARM

        I have been using Ubuntu 11.10 on ARM now for a couple of days and I have to say: It Rocks! Ubuntu has had a long history of supporting ARM Systems on a Chip (SoC) since 2008, but Ubuntu 11.10 is a significant milestone.

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 237

      • Adventures in Ubuntu 11.10 Live

        The newest release of Ubuntu Operating System, Ubuntu 11.10, was released 5 days ago.
        Stir is settled down, and it is a time for me to try new flavour of African Humanity.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 review

        It’s October, and that can only mean one thing: the twice-yearly Ubuntu update is out! We’re now up to 11.10 (year and month, geddit?), which seems worlds away from 4.10 with it’s GNOME 2 desktop. Whilst I don’t use it as my primary OS any more, I have a soft spot for Ubuntu, as it got me (and, no doubt, countless others) into Linux. And even though it’s based on Debian, it provides the base for numerous other distros. So, like it or not, it’s a pretty big deal in the Linux world at the moment.

      • A Unity workaround

        Before I continue, allow me an aside. My philosophy about this whole desktop environment thing is simple. The desktop on my computer should resemble my desktop in real life. On my desk are a lot of things, some important and some not, and none of it is in any particular order. My desk is not limited to a certain number of items neatly tucked on one side; it has things all over it that are immediately accessible when I need them.

      • Introducing Ubuntu 11.10 on ARM

      • Ideas for Ubuntu Unity

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Which Ubuntu Variant is Right For You?

          With the release of Ubuntu 11.10, the Unity desktop is starting to mature. But what if Unity’s just not for you, but you still want the convenience of Ubuntu’s large community and Debian-based technology?

          You might start by exploring one of Ubuntu’s official variants.

          According to Distrowatch, Ubuntu is the basis for seventy-seven distributions. However, Ubuntu’s official variants are in a category of their own.

        • Linux Mint Will Soon Get a GNOME 3 Edition

          Now that Ubuntu Linux has chosen Unity as its default desktop environment, Linux Mint stands out as perhaps the most user-friendly distribution offering a non-Unity default alternative, as I’ve noted before.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Linux-Based Tizen Mobile OS Could Appeal Overseas

    Tizen project developers will need to build “an appealing user experience that seduces consumers to buy Tizen handsets instead of the popular iPhone or Android-enabled devices,” said analyst Francisco Jeronimo. Widespread industry support also would be required for Tizen to grab market share at the expense of the current mobile OS leaders.

  • Android

    • Android 4.0′s Five Best New Features for Users

      Silly name aside, Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), is perhaps the most important Android release to date. With this release, Google has brought its tablet Android fork, 3.x, back into sync with its smartphone trunk, 2.x. In addition, all of ICS will soon, as I understand it, be made open source.

      What that means for you is that independent software vendors (ISV)s can stop wasting time in developing two different versions of programs and focus their energies on making the best possible Android applications. Since, at the end of the day, the success of any operating system is all about its applications, this bodes well for Android.

    • Android 4.0 unveiled with new unified UI, face recognition

      Google announced Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”), a version of the mobile operating system that for the first time is optimized for both smartphones and tablets. Unveiled with a preliminary software development kit — and due to appear first on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus — it sports a revamped user interface, a faster browser, an improved camera interface, plus facial recognition and text-to-speech features.

    • Galaxy Nexus boasts Android 4.0, 1280 x 720 resolution

    • Google: Motorola buy won’t put us into hardware business

      When Google announced plans in August to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, some assumed the company would start actively involving itself in handset development.

    • New Google Nexus Promo, Better Than Live Event

    • Samsung’s Galaxy S/S II Android Juggernaut Rolls With 30 Million Sold

    • If Android “Feels Wrong” then I don’t want to be right

      Case in point, I brought my last device, the original 2009 Motorola Droid, from its final 2.2 “Froyo” update to the latest 2.3.5 Gingerbread courtesy of the CyanogenMOD community.

      This is an activity fully endorsed and encouraged by Google due to the OS’s Open Source nature — not once have I seen a rooted, custom-ROMed device denied access to the Android Market.

      Conversely, while a large “Jailbreaking” community exists for iOS for customizing and adding functionality in an underground manner, custom iOS builds just do not exist openly — they would be considered to be pirated software, like Hackintoshes.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Players cut 7-inch tablet PC prices to compete for market share

    Tablet PC players have recently started to drop their tablet PC prices to attract consumers, especially 7-inch models as the machines can easily attract first-time buyers with their smaller size and US$100-150 cheaper prices compared to 10-inch models, according to sources from tablet PC vendors.

Cassandra Reaches 1.0: What’s Next?

This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware deliver unprecedented reliability in the face of RAM errors.

“Open Source Is Good For Both Experts And Beginners”

Aseem Jakhar, open security researcher and OSI Days speaker, talks about his passion for open source solutions and his upcoming project Jugaad that would be a one-shop-stop to learn about *nix malwares function, in an interview with LFY.

Events

• VISTA Expo and Symposium Nov 17-20

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 8 Beta: Visual Tour

SaaS

• ownCloud 2: Your Personal Cloud Server

  ownCloud is a free software alternative to some proprietary web services and it currently includes file management (with built-in file sharing), music streaming, calendar, contacts and more – all running on your computer or server..

• Exclusive Interview With The Creator Of ownCloud

  Cloud Computing seems to be starting to become a necessary evil. Even if leaders like Richard M. Stallman warns about the dangers of cloud computing, users are lured by offerings like iClouds. How can an Open Source user who wants complete control over her computing, which includes data as well, take advantage of the cloud yet not lose anything in the process? The answer is ownCloud — a private cloud computing solution. We interviewed Frank Karlitschek, project founder of ownCloud.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice expands users and reach

  LibreOffice, the project forked from OpenOffice.org, is moving into the modern era with developers working on versions that run in Web browsers and on iOS and Android devices.

  The Document Foundation announced the moves today at the LibreOffice Conference, but the work isn’t available yet for ordinary folks to try.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Creativity trumps money in open source politics

  Creativity trumps financial power. The best ads do play on our fears. What good does it do to have an enormous financial advantage if the best TV ad of the cycle cost nothing? When the work of some anonymous schmoe trumps the work of highly-paid campaign consultants, why depend on them?

• Free Software Foundation urges OEMs to say no to mandatory Windows 8 UEFI cage

  If you buy Microsoft’s explanation for the company requiring a version of UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) on PCs that can run Windows 8, it’s there to protect users from next-generation malware. If you think that’s the only reason for the UEFI to be in there, I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The UEFI requirement is also there to block Linux and other alternative operating systems from booting on Windows 8 PCs. In response to this open-source operating system threat, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has started a petition to urge original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s to give people a way to easily opt out of Microsoft’s Windows 8 UEFI cage.

Project Releases

• Blender 2.60 is out

Public Services/Government

• Cape Verde’s Big Win

  Two years after that, I heard first-hand the reports of that and other projects based on open source software. The job is not easy, and there are definitely challenges, but Cape Verde has fully embraced the concept of democratic participation, and they have built a architecture of open government and open systems based on open source software. It is an exciting validation of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus hypothesis, which is that when technology can lower the barriers to participation, more people become more positively engaged and more productive. Cape Verde has done this, not alone by any means, but with partners like Brazil, who are themselves true leaders in open source and open government.

Programming

• Zend Debuts PHPcloud

  PHP was the core language of the 1.0 era of the web, bringing scripting to the emerging Internet. PHP vendor Zend now wants PHP to be the language for the cloud and today announced a new service to do just that.

• The importance of Google Dart

ICANN takes control of Internet Time Keeping

What happened was David Olson, the volunteer who had run the public domain Time Zone and Daylight Saving Time Database was sued by–I’m not making this up–an astrology software company called AstroLab for, they claimed, using data from their ACS Atlas program.

Microsoft uses Google maps, Bing doesn’t cut it

Security

• How Hackers Can Benefit IT Security

• IcedTea 2.0 and security fixes

• Free Metasploit Community Edition released

  Metasploit Community combines the open source Metasploit Framework with a basic version of the robust commercial user interface available in Metasploit Pro to provide an entry-level response to the evolving threat landscape.

• Nice Try, Bozo

  I just got another one of those telephone calls. This time I was prepared for it. What follows in not an exact transcript, but a shortened version.

  “Hello sir, I’m calling to inform you that your computer has a virus. We can fix your computer.”
  “You’ve seen a virus? On my computer?”
  “Yes sir.”
  “Is that a Windows virus?”
  “Yes sir.”
  “And you’re seeing it right now on my computer?”
  “Yes sir. We’re from the Windows company.”
  “You’re from Microsoft?”
  “We provide Windows support sir.”

• W32.Duqu: The Precursor to the Next Stuxnet

  On October 14, 2011, a research lab with strong international connections alerted us to a sample that appeared to be very similar to Stuxnet. They named the threat “Duqu” [dyü-kyü] because it creates files with the file name prefix “~DQ”. The research lab provided us with samples recovered from computer systems located in Europe, as well as a detailed report with their initial findings, including analysis comparing the threat to Stuxnet, which we were able to confirm. Parts of Duqu are nearly identical to Stuxnet, but with a completely different purpose.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Bill to abolish long-gun registry could come this week

  The Harper government is poised to introduce contentious legislation as early as Thursday to abolish the long-gun registry.

  The legislation is bound to once again spark sharp political debate over whether the registry is a much-needed tool for police to keep Canadian communities safe, or whether it has become a costly intrusion into the lives of law-abiding gun-owners.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Failure to Grow: Global Oil Supply

  Using the latest data through June, from EIA Washington, global production of crude oil is currently averaging 73.856 mbpd in 2011. The loss of Libyan production has been offset this year by increased production from Saudi Arabia. (It remains unclear how sustainable Saudi production can be, currently at 9.840 mbpd. Saudi production has been highly variable this year, with month to month swings as much as 1 mbpd). Meanwhile, declining production from Mexico, the North Sea, continues to weigh.

Finance

• William K. Black: “Enforce the Laws for the 99″

• Goldman Sachs’s exceptionalism takes another knock

  The exceptionalism of Goldman Sachs took another knock this week. For a brief period on Wednesday, shares of the Wall Street firm traded at a bigger discount to book value — or assets minus liabilities — than those of megabank rival JPMorgan. This rarely happens and suggests that investors fear the bank’s franchise, both as a trader of securities and financial adviser to corporations and governments, is somehow damaged.

Privacy

• Good To Know – A Consumer privacy guide from Google

Copyrights

• Can’t look now: finding film online

  Last week YouTube announced the opening of its movie rental service. This could be great news for film lovers, offering easy access to the films they want to watch. Exactly how useful this is to consumers depends somewhat on how many films are available through the service.

  The availability of legal content online has featured heavily in discussions about the digital economy, most recently in the ongoing roundtables, hosted by the Minister Ed Vaizey MP, about new website blocking powers over sites involved in copyright infringement. The question is whether consumers’ demand for films, music and other goods is being satisfied.

  ORG, and others such as Consumer Focus, believe that more attention needs to be paid to how well the markets for films and music are serving consumers before we assume that certain kinds of enforcement measures are necessary and proportionate. We want to see thriving and innovative cultural markets that help creators and consumers get the best out of new technology.

  In this context, and against the backdrop of the recent injunction won by the film industry that requires BT to block the website Newzbin2, we decided to have a look at the availability of films online. We looked at how many of the recent best-sellers and catalogues of critically acclaimed films, including the top 50 British films, consumers can legally buy or rent online. We searched five content providers, and looked at rental and purchasing prices, and compared them with DVD availability and prices.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

MY DESKTOP IS CHANGING

Now we come to 2011 and the Linux desktop horizon is changing with the rise of smartphones and tablets. As our data becomes more mobile, developers are working to synchronize everything we use and need across all platforms, from your phones and tablets to your laptop and desktop computers. It is believed that by having a unified interface, it will help users avoid confusion and create a productive synergy. As handheld platforms are quickly becoming the dominant tools for accessing data, computer operating systems are following suit.

18.5-inch panel PC offers capacitive multitouch

Desktop

• Take your Linux PC back to the future!

  Take your PC back to 1985 with a cool selection of tools and tricks that build a fully functioning desktop computer on the console!

  There are many reasons to use the console. Sometimes you need to run on older hardware. Or you may be stuck running remotely over a slow connection, where using an X11 desktop is just painfully slow. There are lots of articles that describe the tools and utilities available for the console.

  But how do you use them all together? This tutorial will look at one way that you can combine all of these programs together to give you a fully functional desktop. You’ll essentially end up with a console desktop where you can check email, surf the web, chat with people, catch up on the news, and more. We’ll use tmux to organise your desktop and make the most of your screen real estate.

• Why I Switched to Linux

  Since then I have used later versions of UBUNTU on both my home desktop system and my laptops. My newest laptop, an IBM ThinkPad T-42 is running Ubuntu 10.04 and – I’m writing this on that laptop. Linux has improved – 99% of the hardware on my T-42 “just worked” with the minor exception of the accelerometer chip (parks the harddrive when laptop is bumped)

Accumulations

• TLWIR 22: Red Hat, India’s Supreme Court, and More

• Goodbye, Dennis Ritchie

Kernel Space

• Pushing Reiser4 Is “Not Of High Priority”

  Edward Shishkin, the lone developer that took over development of the Reiser4 file-system following the conviction of Hans Reiser, has shared a new update with Phoronix regarding the efforts towards pushing Reiser4 into the mainline Linux kernel.

• Linux 3.0.7

  Note, I’ve had some boot problems with this kernel, and I can’t seem to narrow the issue down, but I think it’s due to something not related to the kernel itself, but am not positive. Please test to verify that I didn’t mess something up.

• Graphics Stack

  • The Linux 3.1 Kernel For Older Intel Graphics

    While there’s many ongoing improvements for Intel’s Sandy Bridge graphics and the next-generation Ivy Bridge graphics within the Linux kernel, Mesa, and xf86-video-intel (namely the SNA acceleration for the DDX), here’s some benchmarks from two older Intel systems using the latest Linux 3.1 kernel to see if there are any improvements there.

Applications

• Nautilus Terminal 1.0 Released With Support For Nautilus 3.x (Terminal Embedded Into Nautilus)

• The Farstream A/V Conferencing Framework

• Instructionals/Technical

  • C development on Linux – Introduction – I.

  • The Perfect Desktop – Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

  • Restricting remote commands over ssh

  • Using MySQL to manage your music collection on Amarok

  • Windows entry disappeared in Grub2 menu

  • Learn Linux, 302 (Mixed environments): Managing user accounts and groups

  • Create Slick Slideshows with digiKam

• Games

  • Tomes of Mephistopheles

  • 5 Open Source Games Come Together to Form ‘Free Game Alliance’

    Free Game Alliance is a collection five free and open source games spread across a variety of genres. All these games are cross platform and works on Linux, Mac and Windows. The initiative was started by Atomic Blue, makers of MMORPG PlaneShift. However, FGA is made by all the projects participating in it.

  • Postal 3, not yet, but maybe in the future

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Shell 3.2.1 Released

    Owen Taylor announced earlier today, October 18th the immediate availability for download and upgrade of the GNOME Shell 3.2.1 user interface for the GNOME 3 desktop environment.

    The GNOME Shell package provides basic UI (User Interface) functions for the GNOME 3 desktop environment, such as launching applications and switching to windows.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Puppy Linux 5.2 released

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Green-lights a Behavior Modeling Platform for JBoss

    In a large organization, no single IT staffer will be able to observe all the millions of system events and glean from them a pattern worth paying attention to. It’s a problem with the level of knowledge decreasing in proportion to the rising amount of data.

    Back in 2007, Red Hat joined an effort to craft a system for automating the process of detecting actionable patterns from huge amounts of system data. Maybe one human being can’t detect the patterns in a trillion data points, but a rules engine could. This rules engine is called Complex Event Processing (CEP). Last week, the company announced it’s ready to integrate the results of its work into its business rules engine, JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.2.

  • KVM 2011 Forum Presentations Now Online

    KVM Forum 2011 took place in Vancouver from the 15th to 16th of August, but the videos are finally up. KVM Forum was co-located with LinuxCon North America 2011. Videos are now uploaded to YouTube (all the videos are at that link). Other details on this virtualization conference and the presentation slides are available from Linux-KVM.org.

• Debian Family

  • Back to OpenShot for video editing in Debian GNU/Linux

    Not entirely satisfied with my last effort in OpenShot, I wanted to try something else, and that something turned out to be Blender’s Video Sequence Editor feature. That was a resounding failure. I had no idea how to do just about anything, and I find the Blender UI extremely uninviting.

  • Debian GNU/Linux Live Images Updated

    I mentioned last week that there was a new Debian GNU/Linux release available (6.0.3). At that time the Live images had not been updated. As of today (or late yesterday), they have. So if you want to get an easy look at the latest Debian running on your hardware, or you prefer to (or must) install from a Live image rather than the normal netinst image, you’re good to go now.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Review: First Real Step in Its March Towards Mass Adoption

        Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot final release happened sometime ago. I have been using Ubuntu 11.10 as my default netbook OS ever since Oneiric Alpha 2 was released. So it’s not like I am installing Ubuntu 11.10 just for the sake of reviewing it. Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot has been the OS of choice in my netbook for sometime now.

      • Ubuntu Hardware Summit 2011 Announced

        Now that Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) has been released, Canonical proudly announced a few minutes ago the official place and date for the upcoming Ubuntu Hardware Summit 2011 event which takes place once a year.

      • Ubuntu 11.10

        So apparently Canonical decided to name this release after a cat that dreams and pees a lot. Were they trying to send some sort of message? Interesting, I wonder if this decision was made by a particular individual or some sort of committee? Some have said that Canonical is copying Apple too much (Lion anybody?) and perhaps they have a point or two in that regard. Aaah well, it is what it is.

      • Introducing Ubuntu 11.10 Without Unity

        Now that Ubuntu 11.10 was released, we are proud to announced today, Octomber 18th, the immediate availability for download of a new Linux operating system based on the newly released Ubuntu 11.10 distribution.

      • Canonical, Vodafone bring ARM-based Ubuntu netbook to South Africa

        Canonical and Vodacom, the South African subsidiary of Vodafone, have announced the launch of the Vodafone WebBook in South Africa. The ARM-based netbook runs the Ubuntu Linux operating system and is designed to “bring simplified, value-added internet access to thousands of South Africans, many of whom have until now had no access”.

Devices/Embedded

• Debian-based NAS OpenMediaVault released

  Following two years of development, OpenMediaVault (OMV) project founder and lead developer Volker Theile has announced the arrival of the first release of his open source NAS (network-attached storage) operating system, code-named “Ix”. Created by Theile – who is also a FreeNAS and Debian developer – OpenMediaVault is a Debian-based rewrite of the FreeBSD-based FreeNAS distribution.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Samsung, Google whip out Android 4.0 Nexus

    • What’s New In Android 4.0?

    • iPhone 4S vs Galaxy Nexus: The Better Hardware!

      Google and Samsung have announced the launch of the next superphone dubbed Galaxy Nexus. The phone arrives only a few days after the launch of ‘disappointing’ iPhone 4S. While the iPhone 4S has nothing new to offer (from hardware POV), Galaxy Nexus comes with the best of the breed hardware. We talked about soft aspect of Galaxy Nexus here, in this article we are talking about the hardware comparison of the ‘trying-to-catch-up’ iPhone 4S vs ‘rules-writing’ Galaxy Nexus.

    • Dual-display phone to star in texting championship

      T-Mobile and LG announced an oddball Android 2.3 phone that features both a 3.5-inch display and a secondary two-inch screen embedded in the middle of a split-QWERTY keypad. Designed for texting and social networking, the 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon-equipped LG DoublePlay will be featured in the fifth annual LG U.S. National Texting Championship on Oct. 26.

    • HTC Amaze 4G on T-Mobile: Great camera, but a battery vampire

      T-Mobile’s HTC Amaze 4G is worth considering by serious shutterbugs who want a phone that can replace their everyday point-and-shoot, according to this eWEEK review. But, reviewer Nicholas Kolawkowski adds, don’t expect its battery to hold out all day.

    • Motorola’s latter-day Razr is ‘thinnest 4G LTE smartphone’

      Motorola Mobility announced the Droid Razr, a high-end Android phone whose Kevlar-reinforced case is just 0.28 inches thick. Aimed at Verizon’s 4G LTE network, it features a dual-core, 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage, a 4.3-inch screen packing 960 x 540 pixels, dual cameras, and accessories including a new 14-inch Lapdock 500 Pro.

    • Top Free Android Audio Players

      We often see Android devices being used as a music player. Android has a fairly capable stock audio player. However, that player has a number of deficiencies. For example the lack of gapless playback is a showstopper for anyone who likes to listen to classical music.

    • No Need To Wait, The Motorola Droid RAZR Teaser Photo Was Hidden In Plain Sight

      Earlier today, the Droid RAZR teaser site went live, revealing bits and pieces of the upcoming device as specific bloggers input the codes sent to them directly from Motorola. There’s only one problem with that: we’re still waiting for most of the bloggers to enter said codes. Luckily, one of our readers starting digging through the teaser page’s source code and uncovered the full image.

    • Ice Cream Sandwich Official Video

    • Texas Instruments: “It’s Not the Number of Cores, It’s Sophistication”

      Texas Instruments is pretty darn proud to be powering the new Galaxy Nexus handset. While Samsung might have told us we were getting a dual-core 1.2GHz processor in the new hot phone, they didn’t elaborate on which particular brand or model. That’s probably why TI is sending out emails tonight, sharing the good news.

    • Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich SDK now Available for Download

      Are you a ROM developer? Tinkerer? Just a solid geek with a passion for Android? After tonight’s awesome Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and Samsung Galaxy Nexus announcements, the SDK is now available for download,

    • How Linuxy Is Android?

      The world of Android is growing increasingly complicated. Soon Amazon will begin shipping its Fire, which includes a highly modified version of an old Android release. How free is the heart of Android? How much does its share with its free-spirited cousin Linux? Is it heading into a future where proprietary versions exist?

    • Motorola’s New Razr: Cutting-Edge or Just Another Droid?

      Motorola is taking yet another shot at reviving the Razr brand’s glory with the Droid Razr, a new Android smartphone headed to the Verizon network. However, will its thinness be enough to differentiate it from other top-model Android phones out there? “They’ve all got dual-core processors, WiFi hotspot functionality and a wide display,” said ABI’s Michael Morgan.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Speedy Jetstream tablet carries some unwanted baggage, says review

    The HTC Jetstream lives up to its name with a fast, dual-core 1.5GHz processor, 4G LTE/HSPA service, a responsive, eight-megapixel camera, and a Scribe pen accessory. Yet with its $700 price, thick 0.51-inch profile, 25-ounce weight, and relative lack of ports, this tablet’s a tough purchase to justify compared to several other 10.1-inch Honeycomb devices, says this eWEEK review.

  • We saw Ice Cream Sandwich on a Phone, but What About a Tablet?

    You watched the announcement, read all the blogs, and drooled over the multitude of Android 4.0 sexiness. Screenshot after screenshot, we saw what the next generation of Android phones would look like — but what about tablets? We all known Ice Cream Sandwich is the new one-size-fits-all Android and is meant for both phones and tablets, so where’s the screenshots of ICS running on a tablet? Google and Samsung were understandably focused on the new Galaxy Nexus, but since Google was so kind to release the Android 4.0 SDK, others took it upon themselves to show us what we can expect ICS to look like running on a tablet.

Events

• ABLEconf 2012 Call for Participation

• SCALE 10X to host SCALE Kids Conference

  For the first time ever, the Southern California Linux Expo will host the SCALE Kids Conference, a free and open source event where the community leaders of tomorrow will be able to spotlight their talents and ideas.

  The goal of the conference is to be as “kid driven” as possible. The event offers a unique opportunity for kids 10 to 16 to see and experience the inner workings of planning, determine the content, and help to steer the direction that the conference will take.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Walking with Dinosaurs – Mozilla’s Pascal Finette on WebFWD

    Rory MacDonald sits down with Mozilla’s Pascal Finette, former head of Mozilla Labs and now the man behind Mozilla’s new WebFWD initiative, an accelerator programme for exciting open source projects…

    “My path to Mozilla is probably a little bit leftfield,” says Pascal Finette, the man behind Mozilla’s new WebFWD programme. “When you look at my CV, my background is that I studied economics and psychology, then I founded a start-up straight out of college, I worked for eBay, I did mergers and acquisitions for a US software company, I did consulting for start-ups and then, the last thing I did before I joined Mozilla, I actually co-founded and ran a venture capital fund: an early stage seed-fund in Germany and UK.”

  • Firefox for Android Looks Promising

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Will Be Ported to iOS and Android

• The Future of OpenOffice.org: How Not to Write a Press Release

• LibreOffice’s Mobile and Cloud Horizons Appear Strong

  Ever since LibreOffice, the productivity suite forked from OpenOffice, started to take shape, questions have arisen about how its trajectory might differ from OpenOffice’s. This week, the LibreOffice Conference is going on, and The Document Foundation is generating some buzz through the announcement that versions of the suite will arrive for iOS and Android devices, giving LibreOffice a strong mobile footprint. Susan covered the news here. It’s also very good news that the suite will arrive in a cloud-based version that could compete closely with Google Apps and other cloud-centric productivity tools.

• Incubation, podling, IP Clearance, oh my!

  The Apache OpenOffice.org project is currently in the incubation phase. We’re a ‘podling’. It’s where all new Apache projects begin, regardless of how mature your source code base is. In this post I’ll attempt to explain a bit about incubation, and a bit about the ‘Apache Way’, and our current effort to meet the requirements for 3rd party code review and clearance. In future posts, I’ll attempt to tackle other aspects of the project. If we all have a better understanding of how the work is becoming organized, those of you interested to volunteer will have a better idea of where to start, and those who are interested to follow our progress will have an easier way to check up on things.

• Apache Disavows Team OpenOffice.org e.V.

  Thursday’s story about the future of OpenOffice.org garnered an interesting response from the Apache Software Foundation that, coupled with a broader statement on the ASF blog, disavows any notion of trouble within the OpenOffice.org project.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• FSF takes Win 8 Secure Boot fight to OEMs

  PC makers are being lobbied to install Windows 8 on machines in a way that will afford users the freedom to boot Linux or any other operating system.

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is urging PC users to sign a statement demanding that OEMs which implement Windows 8′s UEFI Secure Boot do so in a way that allows individuals to disable it, or that the PC makers provide a “sure-fire way” to install and run an operating system of the user’s choice.

• Free Software Foundation: Windows 8 secure boot requirement could lock out Linux

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched a campaign claiming that Windows 8-certified PCs might prevent users from booting into Linux. The mandatory “secure boot” facility in the systems’ Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) might better be called “restricted boot,” the organization claims.

• Stallman on Steve Jobs: Tasteless or Incisive?

Openness/Sharing

• Alcock shed light on federal government’s ‘culture of secrecy’

  Former Liberal cabinet minister Reg Alcock is remembered as a champion of open government and a tireless advocate for using technology to reform how Canadians are governed and departments are managed.

Programming

• Google Dumps Code Search – Should We Be Worried?

  Google does a lot of good for developers. At one time or another, I’d bet that many developers have played with a Google API at some point.

  Developers have also come to rely on Google’s Code Search over the years. It’s a service that I first wrote about when it launched five years ago. At the time, then Google product manager Tom Stocky was enthusiastic about the effort as a way to easily search for publicly accessible source code.

• Deploying web applications from Orion to Heroku

Cablegate

• This Week in the Press: 6 October – 12 October, 2011

  Corporate conduct

  The Deadly Microsoft Embrace: The government of India’s Tamil Nadu region is planning to purchase some 9 million computers, which will run Windows instead of free software. Cables shed light on how Microsoft has reached similar deals in other countries. In Vietnam, the U.S. government intervened to secure a large-scale contract for Microsoft. In Tunisia, Microsoft won a significant state contract only after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had agreed to donate to a charity run by then president Ben Ali’s wife.

  US diplomat said ex-BP boss’s Turkish partner unethical: Cables say Turkish businessman Mehmet Karamehmet is known to have employed tactics including death threats to force favorable deals. Mr Karamehmet is the largest shareholder of Genel Energy, which was recently acquired by Vallares Plc.

  Richard Branson was ready to fund plan to persuade Mugabe to quit: Cables state that British businessman Richard Branson was to provide the funds for a large group of well-known African politicians, formed with the aim of persuading Mugabe to leave office. Zimbabwean politician Jonathan Moyo, who is alleged to have invited Branson to join the group, denies the allegations, saying that his own involvement was due to Branson, rather than the other way around.

Finance

• A Letter from Goldman Sachs Concerning Occupy Wall Street

  Please contact your Goldman representative for a full prospectus. As the world descends into a Darwinian free-for-all, the Goldman Sachs Rage Fund is a great way to tell the protesters, “Occupy this.” We haven’t felt so good about something we’ve sold since our souls.

• Canada Trade Deal With European Union: CETA May Benefit EU Over Canada, Officials Say

  As Canadian and European Union negotiators sit down Monday for the ninth round of talks on a sweeping and controversial trade agreement with the EU, The Huffington Post has learned European officials expect Canada will get the short end of the stick.

• The Work of the 1 Percent and the 0.1 Percent

  The Occupy Wall Street movement chants “We are the 99 percent, you are the 1 percent.” It’s a catchy refrain, and there are many excellent reasons to put the focus on Wall Street in the struggle for economic and political justice in the US. But even singling out one percent of the US means we are still talking about over 3 million people–are they Wall Street types? Where do they actually work?

Privacy

• Supreme Court to hear Facebook bullying case

  A Nova Scotia girl’s fight to have disparaging Facebook postings about her kept secret is going to the Supreme Court of Canada.

  The case could ultimately weigh the privacy of someone who has been tormented against the public’s right to transparency in the legal system.

Copyrights

• U.S. Copyright Czar Cozied Up to Content Industry, E-Mails Show

  op-ranking Obama administration officials, including the U.S. copyright czar, played an active role in secret negotiations between Hollywood, the recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law, according to internal White House e-mails.

  The e-mails, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, (.pdf) show the administration’s cozy relationship with Hollywood and the music industry’s lobbying arms and its early support for the copyright-violation crackdown system publicly announced in July.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Is Brazil The Most Linux-Friendly Country On Earth?

  Their best-selling desktop runs GNU/Linux.

  That other OS seems to dominate notebooks, however. All of the netbooks they sell run that other OS. Android/Linux dominates the tablets.

Server

• Point-and-Click your local Servers to the Cloud: Racemi

  As people are getting their heads around the economic benefits of cloud computing–pay just for what you use servers and services–I’ve been hearing a lot of people say they’d use the cloud if only they could move their existing servers to the cloud without a lot of blood, sweat, and toil. This is where Racemi, a cloud-services company, comes in with its easy server migration program.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Disable Screen Lock In Ubuntu 11.10

  • Guest session and user management in Ubuntu 11.10

Desktop Environments

• BP’s Gulf of Mexico PR, One Year Later

  Finger-pointing over the Deepwater Horizon disaster resumed recently after the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Coast Guard issued a joint report (pdf) which concluded all three corporate participants in the calamity — BP, Transocean Ltd. and Halliburton — were at fault. The report concluded all three companies violated federal laws and safety regulations by “failing to take necessary precautions to keep the Macondo well under control at all times.” The report also found all three companies were “jointly and severally liable for the failure to comply with all applicable regulations.” That means all three companies are mutually responsible for the accident, and each can be held singly responsible for the entire debacle. The report parsed blame among the companies for sloppy materials and workmanship, inadequate training, failure to properly assess risk and conduct proper testing, failure to abide by stop-work work policies after multiple anomalies were discovered, and so on.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE rekonq 0.8 released

    The rekonq development team has released version 0.8 of rekonq, the KDE web browser. The browser is based on Qt’s QtWebKit, and, according the project’s home page, aims to be “light, fast & clean”, avoiding competing with KDE’s more feature-rich web browser, Konqueror. Rekonq is the default web browser in Kubuntu, and has been included with KDE’s Extragear collection since May 2010.

Distributions

• Take a Walk on the Zen Side

  Frequent readers of DistroWatch may recall the last time I tried Zenwalk I was quite happy with it. The medium-sized distro provided a polished and responsive desktop platform which ran like a cat with its tail on fire. Though armed with fewer resources than the big-name projects Zenwalk was a strong contender last year, making my Top Five list in 2010. With this in mind it should be no surprise I was eager to try Zenwalk 7 when it arrived in early 2011. So it would appear this review is coming out quite late, and there is a reason for that.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Unity or Gnome Shell?

        Unity, which drew a lot of flak in its earlier reincarnation, seems to have matured with the latest Ubuntu release. Performance is snappier, and the Dash has received a major face lift that makes it look sleek and professional.

        On my old Acer Aspire One, I ran into occasional hiccups, probably because the built-in graphics on the netbook isn’t all that hot. Still, Unity was much more responsive than it was when I first tried it out some months ago.

      • Does the New Ubuntu 11.10 Prevent You From Changing Default Apps?

        A big definitive NO should be the answer. But I found this strange new bug with two brand new Ubuntu 11.10 installations of mine. When I tried to change the default application for AVI files from Totem to SMPlayer, an error came up with the warning that says, “Could not set as default. Error while setting “SMPlayer” as default application: Can’t create user application configuration folder /home/manu/.local/share/applications: Not a directory”.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 is a complete operating system available at no cost

      • Welcome to Ubuntu 11.10: Oneiric Ocelot

        Welcome to Ubuntu. Yes, that’s the new and improved Unity interface. If you want an old style GNOME interface, , look to Mint Linux. Want to try the new GNOME shell, see Fedora. Ubuntu’s default desktop is going to stay Unity.

      • Broken Windows? Ubuntu Linux Saves the Day

        Canonical has just released Ubuntu 11.10, it’s latest version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. It calls itself ‘Linux for Human Beings’ and it aims to be one of the most newbie friendly Linuxes. It’s innovative ‘Unity’ GUI (graphical user interface) is designed for simplicity and functionality.

      • Ubuntu 11.10, Back To Old Days Of Broken Linux

        I was extremely excited about Ubuntu 11.10. I was under impression that it will fix the issues with 11.04 and will further polish Unity. I have been using Ubuntu since 2007 and I have been an advocate of Ubuntu. This is one distro which had all the punches to lure any user to ditch Windows and move to Linux.

      • Which Ubuntu Should I Use?

        When we asked Cameron how he found Ubuntu in comparison with Windows, he said
        1: I found it’s layout much easier to understand
        2: The Quick access side docks are awesome
        3: I like the idea of multiple workspaces, keeps your screen tidier
        4: Easy to access power options on screen
        5: I found it much faster than windows at, a) starting up and b) opening programmes.

      • Is Ubuntu Becoming a Poor Man’s OS X?

        Canonical actually hired the people behind the original concept of CNR to help them develop a similar marketplace. It’s great to see that everything worked out and that this software marketplace legacy was able to find a new home.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint developers make GNOME 3 edition plans

          Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint Founder and lead developer, has announced that his project has started work on a GNOME 3 edition of its next major release, version 12. The new edition will initially be developed alongside the GNOME 2.32-based release which will remain as the default desktop environment of Mint. The developers had decided to stick with GNOME 2.32 because there had been “radical changes” in GNOME 3.x’s desktop which had split the communities of GNOME and Mint users.

        • Puppy Linux 5.2 (Wary) optimized for older PCs

          The Puppy Linux project announced version 5.2 of the legacy-PC friendly “Wary” version of its small-footprint Linux distribution. Puppy Linux 5.2 (“Wary”) features an SMP-optimized version of the Linux 2.6.32.45 kernel, an upgrade path to Xorg 7.6, an updated PuppyPhone 1.1 VoIP app, and a new PupCamera app for automatically detecting digital cameras, says the project.

        • Linux Mint Will Adopt Gnome 3, To Be Released In November

          One of the reasons for the increasing popularity of Linux Mint is the ease of use. But as Ubuntu moved to Unity, instead of enhancing Gnome 3 Shell, it created a divide. Unity/Gnome 3 Shell offers a new interface, which was heavily criticized by Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux. This new interface not only demand relearning everything but also takes away a lot of functionality and customization.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • 12 Reasons Why Apple iPhone 4S Will Lose to Motorola Droid Bionic

      Other changes for the Droid Bionic includes higher RAM capacity, change in chipset from the Tegra 2 AP20H to the Texas Instruments’ OMAP4430 and surprisingly the inclusion of lesser battery capacity compared to the one introduced in the beginning.

      Droid Bionic, which runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS, comes with a 4.3-inch HD screen featuring the Corning Gorilla scratch-free glass, a front-facing camera for video chat, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, Adobe Flash preloaded, 32 GB of memory and a slim frame. It has a dual-core 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM.

    • Motorola Unveils The DROID RAZR for Verizon – Faster. Thinner. Smarter. Stronger.

      Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha took the stage just moments ago to announce their new pride and joy, the DROID RAZR. The device boasts the world’s thinnest profile measuring in at just 7.1mm thin and weighing only 127 grams. It’s not only thin and light but it’s also built to take a beating thanks to its stainless steel core, laser-cut kevlar fiber outer body, tough Gorilla Glass display, water resistance with Splash-guard technology and carbon fiber accents.

    • Samsung and Google Android Event Moved to October 19

      Ice Cream Sandwich, or Android 4.0 for those of you not familiar with the code name, will unify the disparate smartphone (Android 2.x) and tablet (Android 3.x) versions of its mobile OS with a consistent UI and app framework. This will hopefully enable developers to more easily port their apps to all of the many screen sizes and resolutions that Android devices sport. As is normal with new Android launches, Samsung is expected to reveal a new phone that will show off the new operating system’s capabilities and serve as a baseline for other Android partners’ devices.

    • Galaxy Nexus rumours: what you need to know

    • Motorola’s RAZR Makes iPhone 4S Look Like A Toy!

    • Live Blog: Ice Cream Sandwich Party with Google/Samsung

Going From “Ow” To “Wow” In Open Source

Venkat Mangudi, an open source evangelist and OSI Days speaker, recalls how his 10-year-old kid made him realise that Linux should be made compulsory in schools. He also explains how FOSS came to the rescue of small businesses, the new open technologies revolutionalising the world and how to overcome the ‘Ow’ of discomfort in open source to get a ‘Wow’ of admiration!

Google’s open source search to end

Open Source Platforms Lead the Machine Translation Charge

At a surprisingly rapid pace, machine language translation is now moving into high gear on devices that we already use, and open source platforms are leading the charge. Ten years ago, futurists such as Ray Kurzweil predicted that the devices we carry with us would become fast and efficient at translating languages, and it’s happening now. If you haven’t tried the translation tools in platforms such as Google Chrome and on Android, you’re missing out.

Open source jobs: What’s hot, where to look, what to learn

What does the future hold for eager, talented software developers, and people with related essential skill sets? The overriding trend, as in all industries, is you’re on your own, chum. But free/open source software (FOSS) offers considerably more richness of opportunity than anything else. Let’s peer into the crystal ball and see what the future holds.

What Are Open Source Ideals? Just “Giving Away”? Or Are Things More Complex?

An open source ideal is not to be branded mechanical. It’s not to be deemed irrelevant to the world. Instead it’s to be understood as any philosophy that employs collaborative thinking, evolving mantras and a refusal of traditional notions. It’s a methodology of progress – and even religion can’t escape it.

Events

• OpenGeo’s Eddie Pickle Joins Open Source Panel at 2011 GEOINT Symposium

  Eddie Pickle, Senior Vice President of OpenGeo, the open source geospatial software company behind the OpenGeo Suite will participate on a panel discussing open source technologies at the GEOINT 2011 Symposium. The panel, Demonstration of Military Relevant Open Source Geospatial Software, will be hosted by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OpenGEO), Military Open Source Software Working Group (MIL-OSS), and the USGIF Tradecraft Subcommittee.

• Open Source Search takes Centre Stage at Apache Lucene EMEA Conference

  Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Apache Lucene and Apache Solr search technology today announced record registration numbers for its second Apache Lucene EuroCon EMEA Conference. More than 300 developers, IT professionals and decision makers will convene in Barcelona this week; double the number of delegates from last year’s event and a testament to the industry’s focus on open source search. This interest in an open source path to search applications follows a turbulent 12 months in the proprietary search market and the emergence of Big Data as one of the biggest challenges and opportunities for today’s businesses.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Native Android GUI developing for Firefox

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• ASF says OpenOffice.org is in good health

  Four months after the transition from Oracle to the ASF, the Apache Software Foundation has made it clear that it considers OpenOffice.org (OOo) to be heading in the right direction. It believes that the presence of more than 70 active committers – ten times the number involved in other projects in the Apache Incubator – illustrates the level of interest in the project. Although it has been six months since the last new OpenOffice release, this is, says Apache, a matter for each individual project. Intensive work on adapting OpenOffice.org to the Apache Way is apparently under way.

• Office Suites: LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org?

  The office suite has occupied a very strange position in the world of open source. As a key software tool used by practically everyone on a daily basis, it was vital for free software to be able to offer one. And yet what came to be the leading office suite – OpenOffice.org – was widely recognised as deeply unsatisfactory. Its early versions were barely usable, and even in its later incarnations it was hard to get enthusiastic about it.

  That was largely a function of the way that it had come into being, starting as the closed-source application StarOffice, and then being open-sourced by Sun, which had bought the product, largely in an attempt to irritate Microsoft. Licensing issues meant that OpenOffice.org never really became a true community project. As a result, there was no real passion behind its development, and it showed.

• Redefining Community Relationships

  Following yesterday’s post that asked specific questions about the goals and objectives of Team OpenOffice.org e.V., members of the broader OpenOffice.org community pointed out that as far back as August 13, Apache OpenOffice.org leaders were calling for the cessation of outside fundraising activities specifically aimed at OpenOffice.org.

Education

• Free software testing on USB for students to web developers

  A bit of semi-random open source software searching is generally beneficial for the soul and spirit at least once a month. My most recent expedition in this vein led me to find Mantra, an open source browser-based security framework for penetration testing and security assessments.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Worried About Win 8 Secure Boot? So Is the Free Software Foundation

  The secure boot mechanism planned for Microsoft’s Windows 8 has already provoked considerable outcry from Linux users worried that the technology will make it impossible to install their favorite free and open source operating system on Windows 8 certified PCs.

Project Releases

• Apache Cassandra reaches foretold version 1.0

  The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced the release of version 1.0 of the open source, highly scalable, column-oriented, distributed “NoSQL” database, Cassandra. The release comes just under five months after the release of the previous version, 0.8.0, and since then the developers have added support for data compression to reduce the volume of data on disk on Cassandra nodes and have improved the memory and disk space management with off-heap storage of the row cache and self tuning memory tables.

Public Services/Government

• Levers of Government

  I believe we are at a stage where governments around the world are going to put aside FUD and look at the facts in choosing/purchasing IT. Any OS can function. GNU/Linux costs less to do the job. The FUD that no applications are available for certain specific tasks is nonsense. Governments are larger than the corporations producing non-free software so they can produce their own software at much lower cost especially if it is shared amongst governments.

Programming

• Classy Methods, a Sense of Self (Classes Part 2)

• It’s Not Too Late to Learn How to Code

Standards/Consortia

• What you can do with HTML 5 and Canvas

  HTML 5 is becoming more and more popular. This stems from the controversy over the late Steve Jobs objecting to using Flash technology, explaining that it is outdated, and HTML 5 is the future. While this is still debatable, HTML 5 has some huge backing by some major companies. Companies like Google, Apple, and Mozilla. HTML 5 brings new tags along such as header, footer, article, video, and audio.

Finance

• Wall Street sees no exit from financial woes

  Wall Street executives, facing demonstrators camped for a fourth week in New York’s financial district, said they were anxious and angry for other reasons.

  An era of decline and disappointment for bankers may not end for years, according to interviews with more than two dozen executives and investors. Blaming government interference and persecution, they said there was not enough global stability, leverage or risk appetite to triumph in the current slump.

• Citigroup earnings rise 74 percent, to $3.8 bln

  Citigroup Inc.’s earnings rose 74 percent in the third quarter as more of its customers paid their bills on time, leading to lower losses from loans. An accounting gain also boosted income.

  It was the seventh straight quarter of income growth for Citi, the nation’s third-largest bank by assets. Citigroup was one of the biggest recipients of taxpayer support during the financial crisis. It received $45 billion in bailouts funds and was partly owned by the government until December 2010.

  The New York bank’s net income rose 74 percent, to $3.8 billion, due to lower losses from loans and an accounting gain related to the valuation of the bank’s own debt. Citi’s stock fell 1.7 percent to close at $27.93, less than other banks stocks.

• Credit card late payments edge higher in September

  In what may be an early sign that credit card users are again having trouble paying their bills, five of the nation’s top six credit card issuers said Monday that late payments rose in September.

  That’s the first month since February 2009 that so many major companies reported upticks in payments late by 30 days or more.

• Poll: Dim outlook on Obama’s policies

  A majority of Americans want President Barack Obama’s agenda to succeed, but ultimately believe it won’t, according to a new poll out Monday.

  Asked whether it seemed more likely that Obama’s policies will succeed or fail, 59 percent of those surveyed in a CNN/ORC International poll said they believed they will fail, while 36 percent said they believed Obama’s policies will succeed.

• Occupy Wall Street and the Diversity of Objections to Inequality

  Right now Occupy Wall Street has favorable polling. So did the Tea Party at its beginning. As Seth Ackerman pointed out to me, once people saw that the Tea Party wasn’t a new thing but this old, arch-conservative thing, one that wants to take our global historical moment and wage total war against public sector workers and uteri, they turned against it. One symptom that it was an old thing was the books that it circulated: from Hayek’s underwhelming Road to Serfdom to Bircher Cold War tracts from the types who thought Eisenhower was a member of the communist conspiracy.

• The Most Important Facts about the Global Debt Crisis

• Germany Lowers Expectations for E.U. Summit

  At the start of a crucial week for the euro, Germany sought Monday to play down expectations of a decisive breakthrough at a summit meeting of European Union leaders this weekend, indicating that an emerging five-point plan designed to end the euro zone’s sovereign debt crisis could take months to implement.

• Obama: Occupy Wall Street ‘Not That Different’ From Tea Party Protests

• Rep. Cantor – Bought and Paid for by Wall Street Investors

  So while Rep. Cantor may believe the Occupy Wall Street movement is “the pitting of Americans against Americans,” the reality is the movement is pitting Americans against his campaign contributors.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Gaming American Democracy: A Perfect Storm in Which Republicans Disenfranchise Voters While Giving Corporations Unchecked Powers

  The American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC — like countless other such 501(c)(3) and (4) non-profit conservative charitable organizations — has an intentionally dull-sounding name, for conservatives prefer to operate behind closed doors, secretly, without attracting attention. I first noticed ALEC during the Bush II years when I read a Mother Jones article about what was described as “one of the nation’s most powerful — and least known — corporate lobbies.” Even then, ALEC had already been “ghost writing” state laws for nearly a decade. Yet I’d not heard of ALEC before. It had no website, and I could find little reported information about its work.

• Recall On: Scott Walker’s Campaign Coffers “Open for Business”

• ALEC Ties Bring Down British Defense Secretary, Threaten Prime Minister David Cameron

  British Defense Secretary Liam Fox has stepped down in the midst of an escalating scandal tied to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The ALEC connections have led opposition party leaders and the British press to question whether British Prime Minister David Cameron has been “allowing a secret rightwing agenda to flourish at the heart of the Conservative party.”

Privacy

• CMD Demands Investigation of Facebook’s Impact on Privacy

  CMD has signed onto a letter with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and seven other pro-privacy groups requesting that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigate changes Facebook has made to user accounts that undermine the privacy rights of millions of users.

  The letter focuses on two recent policies implemented by Facebook called “frictionless sharing” and “post-log out tracking.” According to the letter,“frictionless sharing and post-log-out tracking harms consumers throughout the United States by invading their privacy and allowing for disclosure and use of information in ways and for purposes other than those to which users have consent and relied upon.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Spy vs. Spy, Spilt Blackberries & Redmond’s Lies

Audiocasts/Shows

• CAOS Theory Podcast 2011.10.14

• Episode 169: Garamond

Kernel Space

• TI Prepares Its Open DRM/KMS OMAP Driver

  Texas Instruments has put out a new version of its DRM/KMS Linux driver for OMAP platforms as it prepares to hopefully see this open-source graphics driver merged into the mainline Linux kernel.

  Rob Clark of Texas Instruments released the third version of its “omapdrm” driver that provides basic DRM/KMS support for OMAP hardware from TI. This comes just days after talking about the Linux 3.2 kernel DRM and how Samsung’s Exynos DRM driver was merged into the drm-core-next tree as the first ARM DRM driver that will be introduced in this next major kernel release after Linux 3.1.

• Graphics Stack

  • R500 Texture Semaphores Merged To Master

    The R500 texture semaphores work, the feature I wrote about and tested earlier this month, has been merged to master. This feature in the R300 Gallium3D open-source driver can provide some impressive performance improvements.

Applications

• Meacher the Mouse Teacher – Meet the DevTeam

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Remove Appmenu (Global Menu) In Ubuntu Oneiric

  • How to enable Java in Chrome and Firefox on Ubuntu

  • Code Academy- The Free JavaScript guide for absolute beginners

  • pwd Command Options

  • [Conky]: Martins Conky Configuration | Clean And Simple Conkyrc

  • Secure deletion of a file via the KDE GUI

  • Command Line Basics: Finding Files

  • Logcheck: why I love you

  • Set up Qemu&Spice&Libvirt 0.9.6 USB Redirection on Ubuntu 11.10

  • The Perfect Server – Ubuntu 11.10 [ISPConfig 3]

  • Install Google Reader Indicator On Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

  • Linux process scheduling made easier: lance

  • JavaFX 2.0 arrives and heads for open source

  • How To Customize Gnome 3 in Ubuntu 11.10

  • How To Replace Unity With Gnome 3 As Default In Ubuntu 11.10

• Games

  • Oil Rush Beta Arrives is Ubuntu Software Center

    Oil Rush is a real time naval strategy game with stunning graphics and gameplay. This is one game that kept all of us waiting. We had listed Oil Rush right at the top of 12 best paid games for Linux. Now, Oil Rush is available for installation via Ubuntu Software Center. Note that you can only pre-order the game right now, but you also get access to beta version of Oil Rush.

Desktop Environments

• Paved With Good Intentions

  It sounds to me like GNOME is joining KDE on the road to computing hell…with the very best of intentions. Both teams are trying to add the glitz and polish that Windows and Mac users have come to expect. (I get the impression that GNOME is trying to imitate OS X.) The problem is, both teams are making their once-loved desktop environments bloated, slow, clumsy, and counter-productive.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Plasma Active

    At the desktop summit, many contributors got a ExoPC from Inten, but the software on it was quite a disappointment. Meanwhile, there is an official release of Plasma Active that fills the gap. So I sat down and installed it on the ExoPC. It really works quite nice and smooth. Applications like Amarok and a browser make it usable to hear music and do some quick internet surfing. I documented the steps in order to get everything up and running.

  • Plasma Active

• GNOME Desktop

  • Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark

    I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons. 11.04 dropped me into the new “Unity” GNOME interface. There may be people in the world for whom Unity is a good idea, but none of them are me. The look is garish and ugly, and it takes twice as many clicks as it did before to get to an application through their supposedly “friendly” interface as it did in GNOME Classic. No, dammit, I do not want to text-search my applications to call one up!

  • Tronny ‘Tron Legacy’ Gnome Shell Theme

  • Running Gnome 3 In Ubuntu 11.10

    Ubuntu branched out of Gnome 3 by using its own Unity shell instead of Gnome shell on top of Gnome 3, there are reason well understood and I personally believe it has made GNU/Linux richer as we now have two Shells and users can pick the one they want.

Distributions

• Arch Linux with KDE 4.7

• New Releases

  • GParted 0.9.1-5

  • Kwort 3.2 release candidate 1

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia, three months (or so) on

    If I ever had any regular readers, I’m sure I’ve lost them all by now! We had a bit of weather in Connecticut, as you might have heard; putting up hurricane shutters, and later taking them down, brought me into an uneasy truce with some long-forgotten muscles. I decided to take a night course or two. I’m processing my long-departed Uncle Jim’s thesis into publishable form (it’s about John Milton; or, more precisely, it argues that Milton’s poem Paradise Regained has been consistently underappreciated and misunderstood), which (and this is the point) is handing me a good excuse to learn LaTeX. And I’m doing some Linux-oriented volunteer work, too; I’ll blog about that when I understand it a bit better.

• Gentoo Family

  • Review: Sabayon 7 KDE + GNOME + Xfce

    But usually, I only review the KDE edition, so why am I reviewing the GNOME and Xfce editions too this time? Well, GNOME is now at version 3.2, and the Xfce edition is now considered to be stable enough to not be “experimental” anymore, so I think both of those things warrant reviews. Of course, I’m going to be reviewing the KDE edition as well, and KDE is now at version 4.7, which I haven’t had much experience with as most recent KDE distributions I’ve tried have included KDE only at version 4.6.

    I tested all 3 editions using live USBs made with UnetBootin. I did not test the installation procedures, because I didn’t see anything in the release notes about improvements to the installer, so I don’t really anticipate any changes from last time. Follow the jump to see what each edition is like.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • UBUNTU 11.10 FINAL REVIEW! & CRITICISMS

      • Ubuntu Friendly – What It Is and How You Can Help

        Ubuntu 11.10 users are being encouraged to take part in ‘Ubuntu Friendly’ – a community-drive database of desktops, laptops and netbooks that work well with Ubuntu.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Is Out Now With New Default Programs [Linux]

      • Oneiric gone wrong, but rescued.

      • Don’t Upgrade to Oneiric Ocelot!

      • Unity much improved in Ubuntu 11.10

        This one — 11.10, dubbed Oneiric Ocelot — is a regular, incremental update of 11.04 (Natty Narwhal, which came out in April). The changes are minor for the most part, but the Unity desktop is much improved.While Unity has been around for some time, Canonical made it quite clear with 11.04 that it was going to be phased in while the older, tried and true Gnome 2 shell that had anchored Ubuntu for years was going to be put out to pasture.

        Such a bold decision, of course, brought on some negative reactions (yes, I was one of the complainers and wrote a nice, long rant about how much I hated Unity here). Here’s the thing — the Gnome 2 desktop is very familiar with its Windows XP-like layout and behavior. Does it look dated? Sure it does, but people don’t want to replace “familiar and effective” with something new and shiny that doesn’t work that well.

      • Upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10, and a pleasant user interface greets you. Does the good news end there?

        I’ve been running Ubuntu 11.04 for several months and have been satisfied with the experience. Less than a week ago, the newest stable Ubuntu 11.10 version (Oneiric Ocelot) was announced.

        To my surprise, I didn’t have to go to fetch Ubuntu 11.10 or run a command to get it, it came straight to me!

      • Code names and other coelacanths

        I’m probably going to be answered as though I were a hybrid of Ebenezer Scrooge and Darth Vader, but can we quit with the code names for Linux distributions, already? People are taking them way too seriously.

        Code names make sense if you want to keep what you’re doing a secret. If you’re planning a military operation, you probably don’t want anyone to know until you actually hit the beaches of France. Or maybe in the case of the revised Doctor Who, when you’re a producer who doesn’t want the excitement to peak too soon (in which case, you pass around sheets of paper watermarked with “Not to be copied” and call what you’re doing “Torchwood,” then decide the name would make a great spinoff series).

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Puppy Linux 5.2 “Wary” released

          The Puppy Linux development team has announced the arrival of version 5.2 of the “Wary” edition of its independent Linux distribution. Puppy Linux is a popular small release that can run entirely from RAM and its primary focus is ease-of-use.

          Based on the 2.6.32.45 Linux kernel, and with all of its base packages recompiled in the T2 System Development Environment, the new release is a “massive upgrade” to the 5.1.x series. Users can now easily upgrade from Xorg 7.3, which is still included by default to support older hardware, to version 7.6 for newer video devices by installing a single PET (Puppy’s Extra Treats) package. Because of several problems, the gtkam GTK2 GUI for libgphoto2 has been replaced with PupCamera for automatically detecting digital cameras.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich: everything you need to know

      Google dropped some interesting information about Ice Cream Sandwich, the next version of Android – Android 4.0 at its Google I/O conference back n May.

      We now know that Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will be announced at a Google event on 19 October.

There is Free Software and then there is Free Software

I think one thing that often confused people when they first get involved with free software is the difference between FOSS and freeware (or shareware). When speaking about open source software in my writings I try to always use the term “FOSS” which is an acronym for “free open source software”. The source of this sometimes confusion can be sorted with the Latin statement:

Gratis versus Libre

Which roughly translates to:

“for zero price” versuses “with little or no restriction”

Or to simplify it even further to a common analogy first used by Richard Stallman:

“Think free as in free speech, not free beer.”

Should Joe Average the end user care if their software is Gratis or Libre? Whether or not a program is truly free doesn’t affect the user user right?

Wrong.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle v. Google – Motion Practice

• Report from LibreOffice conference

  First there is a great number of presentations and discussions. We started with an impressing overview, by Italo, Michael and Florian, of the first years’ achievements of TDF. Impressive numbers, some polished to an very shiny state. But hey, marketing is marketing after all, and also without the footnotes that would make some of them look more realistic: we may be very proud with the people that are involved and all product improvements and the tooling and community that are set up!

• An odd vulnerability report for LibreOffice

  An October 5 press release from The Document Foundation provides a bit of information about a vulnerability that was fixed in recent versions of LibreOffice (LO). The vulnerability sounds fairly serious: “This flaw could have been used for nefarious purposes, such as installing viruses, through a specially-crafted [.doc] file.” It was evidently fixed, silently, in versions 3.4.3 and 3.3.4 of LO, which were released in August. The details (such as they are) were withheld “until users have been given time to migrate to the new version”, but it isn’t at all clear that Linux distributions have put out fixes yet. Worse still, OpenOffice.org (OOo) is vulnerable as well, but there has been no release from that project since January.

• Enabling By Removing Obstructions

  Last week I was in Paris as a guest of The Document Foundation to speak at their first annual LibreOffice Conference. It was my honour to make the opening remarks at the opening reception, hosted by the government of the Paris region. Here’s what I said.

• LibreOffice Online

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Sad State Of FSF’s High Priority Projects

  With the Free Software Foundation having removed GNU PDF from their list of high priority projects after declaring the open-source work to implement proper Adobe PDF support a success, what’s left to the FSF high priority project list and how are those remaining projects coming along?

Public Services/Government

• Isle of Open Source 2011 at Villa Bighi

  The IOOS2011 conference is based on global interest generated by MARSSA, the Marine Systems Software Architecture, a revolutionary Maltese high technology for the marine and yachting industry. Originating from Malta and launched in February, MARSSA has grown into the first Community Driven project in the marine industry with a global outreach.

• Cabinet Office allays council’s open source fears

  The council said its interpretation was based on advice from implementation partners and a reading of security guidance documents from CESG and Cabinet Office. The Cabinet Office called for the meeting to clarify the situation. The meeting yesterday was also attended by GCHQ and suppliers LinuxIT, DeLIB and Nameless.

  Bristol City council leader Barbara Janke said the meeting was very productive and the council now has the green light to push ahead with its open source strategy. “The Cabinet Office were able to reassure us that there are no security or accreditation issues that should hold us back from pushing ahead with our open source agenda.

Openness/Sharing

• Creative Commons 4.0 on the horizon

  Creative Commons held its Global Summit a few weeks ago in Warsaw, with amazing international participation. Without question, the most-discussed topic was the upcoming 4.0 release of the licenses, including related issues and a lively debate regarding whether the licenses should be ported to specific countries – or whether we should instead try to create a new international license.

Programming

• Enrichment class.

  I ultimately decided on Python, not just because I’m comfortable with it and it meets the criteria, but also because it’s widely in use running things the kids have heard of (Google, Facebook, NASA), widely recognized as a good first language for learning, and is eminently readable for any of the kids who decide to pursue it further after class is over.

Standards/Consortia

• Why Banks Must Support All Mobile Platforms and Why HTML5 Matters

  The challenge of developing and maintaining mobile banking applications that will run on an iPhone, an Android phone, a BlackBerry or a Windows phone, as well as browser-based or wireless application protocol apps that will run on anything, is daunting even for large banks with massive IT budgets, never mind the rest of the banking world. But Jeff Dennes, who led the development of some of the first mobile banking apps at USAA and was recruited to Huntington Bancshares, Columbus, Ohio, a little over a year ago, says a multi-platform strategy is necessary. And HTML5, the latest version of the hypertext language for structuring and presenting content on the internet, is the next development frontier for banks to ignore at their peril.

• Open web surging ahead

  On-line open/free content originates from a variety of sources. This edition of NetSpeak explores yet another avenue for tapping free content.

UNIX

• OpenIndiana 151a Desktop review

  OpenIndiana (OI) is a distribution of illumos, which is a community fork of OpenSolaris. And OpenSolaris itself was the open source version of Solaris, before it (OpenSolaris) was discontinued by Oracle, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, Inc., in January 2010. Before OI’s base was switched to Illumos, it was based on OpenSolaris. I know this all sounds convoluted, but that, in summary, is the history of OI.

  Compared to popular Linux distributions, OI is a relatively young distribution, with a very small development community whose members are mostly based in Europe. OI Build 151a is the latest development release, and the third so far. A stable edition is slated for release before the end of this year.

• Dennis Ritchie

  For those with only a sketchy knowledge of computer-speak, the job of an operating system is to organise the various parts of the computer – the processor, the memory, the disk drives, keyboards, video monitors and so on – to perform useful tasks. A programming language, meanwhile, is usually an artificial shorthand of words, numbers and punctuation used to construct computer programs – including operating systems themselves.

• Computer programming pioneer dies

Security

• Script of the Week: ModSecurity 403s

Finance

• Carney Said to Be Lead Candidate for FSB Role as Decision Looms

  Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. manager who has clashed with banks on the need for tougher regulations, is the leading candidate to run the body charged with rewriting the rules of global finance, two officials from Group of 20 nations said.

Censorship

• Political and Judicial Censorship of French Copwatch

  The Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris has ordered the blocking of Copwatch Nord-Paris IDF, a website charged by the French government with defaming and putting at risk the safety of police officers.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Finalization of EU Parliament’s Weak Net Neutrality Resolution

  The European Parliament is finalizing the negotiation of “compromise amendments” to its resolution on Net neutrality. At this point, the weak text binds the Parliament to the failed “wait-and-see” approach of EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes, which amounts to letting operators restrict Internet access to pursue short terms economic goals. The resolution could however bring a proper definition of Net neutrality and increase the pressure on the Commission to investigate telecoms operators’ behaviour and take action.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • The Times proposes copyright sanity

    The New York Times has picked up on the recent proposal by the Administration to modify copyright law by invoking a new international agreement (ACTA) which would give US copyright protection previously given copyright protection under foreign law link here. These were in the U S public domain in the past but now they would be recognized as copyrighted. The Times opposes this.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• The Most Successful Open Source Software in the History

  Reason of the first one: Linux + GNU = GNU/Linux. From Linus Torvalds declared in 1991 that he created new OS based on Minix kernel has now been close to 20 years. At that time, most of the web server is Linux system.

• Answers to some common kernel.org account questions

Applications

• The Best Video Chat App for Linux

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Protect your Mac & Linux Computers from Hacks by Creating an iptables Firewall

• Games

  • Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle Breaks a Million

    A few other statistics of note: 231, 799 copies of the HFSB were purchased, roughly two-thirds of them by Windows gamers and the remainder split fairly evenly between the Mac and Linux crowds. Linux gamers paid the highest average price at $9.61, followed by Mac owners, who ponied up an average of $6.95, and finally the Windows cheapskates, who as usual brought up the rear with a sub-average $4.13.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE celebrates 15th birthday

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • The Best Video Chat App for Linux

  • Red Hat Takes Its Hat Off to Dennis Ritchie

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 released today, try it in your browser

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot is now available

      • Ubuntu unveils Oneiric Ocelot update

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Released

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Overview

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot – download live, any problems?

      • Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) released

      • +
        Ubuntu 11.10: A Linux Option for Cloud Services Providers?

        Canonical’s Ubuntu 11.10 debuted today. Best-known as a desktop Linux distribution, Ubuntu 11.10 also has server and cloud aspirations. Indeed, the Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure effort now leverages OpenStack, LXC, Juju and multiple virtualization technologies. But will cloud services providers (CSPs) and channel partners embrace Ubuntu 11.10 for their public and private cloud efforts? Before you answer that question don’t forget that rival Linux distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE and CloudLinux are working overtime on their own cloud initiatives.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Released

      • Ubuntu 11.10, the Linux you’ve been waiting for

      • Linux Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” Available For Download

      • Canonical Lays Ubuntu Cloud Claim

      • Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Server tames cloud with Juju, Openstack, says review

        Ubuntu Server 11.10 is more compelling than as ever as a Linux distribution for cloud deployments, says this eWEEK Labs review. A lack of updated documentation and some other rough edges give pause, but the new Juju cloud deployment framework and tighter OpenStack integration should make “Oneiric Ocelot” a winner when it arrives in its LTS version in April.

      • Ubuntu Linux 11.10 is the “Oneiric Ocelot”

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Puppy Linux 5.2 Wary proves big operating systems come in small packages

          Ubuntu Linux may have grabbed a lot of headlines when version 11.10 was released earlier this week, but it’s not the only Linux-based operating system to get an overhaul this week. Today Puppy Linux 5.2 Wary was released.

Devices/Embedded

• Delta selects Sysgo’s ELinOS Linux product

  The R&D site in Bern develops power supplies for telecom applications. One of the modules developed in Bern is the control and supervision unit PSC 3. For several years, a commercial real time operating system is used. To prepare the upcoming extensions within the next generation of Telecom Power Supplies, Delta has decided to replace the operating system by Sysgo’s ELinOS.

• Linux-based network camera design supports up to 1080p@60fps

  Nexvision announced a Linux-based network video camera reference design with remote accessa dn analytics based on the Texas Instruments 1GHz, DSP-enabled DM8148 DaVinci processor. The CAMSMOOV also integrates an FPGA, as well as a camera with up to four camera processing boards supporting up to 1080p@60fps H.264 video at up to 12 megapixels, plus sensors and a variety of wired and wireless I/O.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google and Samsung reschedule Android “Ice Cream Sandwich” event

      Google and Samsung have announced a new date and time for their joint Android event; the original event, which was scheduled to take place on 11 October, was postponed by the companies last week. According to AllThingsD, the joint event will now take place on 19 October at 10:00 am HKT (3:00 am BST) in Hong Kong, at its AsiaD conference.

    • Is Android’s bane a boon for Free Software?

      As Android began its remarkably rapid ascent to become the world’s leading smartphone operating system (depending on how and where you measure it), its “almost open” code was widely accepted as good enough, given that what we had before so was so much worse. The idea that a Linux-based offering could not only be taken seriously by ordinary users, but might actually beat everything else – even the near-mythic iPhone – seemed so extraordinary that we were willing to overlook those proprietary blobs floating around in the sea of otherwise free code.

      But as Android woes have mounted, and the spectre of a Microsoft tax being applied more and more widely has loomed ever larger, there is an interesting possibility: that people will start to think more seriously about creating truly free mobile phone stacks. There are already a number of attempts out there, in various stages of completion.

    • Motorola Droid RAZR Specs Said to be Faster Than the iPhone 4S

      A source of BGR has confirmed a few specs of a certain Droid device that Motorola and Verizon are rumored to be launching next Tuesday and they’re quite awesome. We’re still uncertain about the name but we do know that it will be one of the following names:

      * Droid HD
      * Droid RAZR
      * Droid Spyder

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Latest ‘Cruz’ Honeycomb tablets start at $200

    Velocity Cruz has begun shipping two Android 3.2 tablets, dropping the price of the eight-inch, 800 x 600 Cruz T408 by $40 to $200 and selling the 10.1-inch, 1024 x 600 Cruz T410 for $300. Both the T408 and T410 are equipped with a 1GHz, Cortex-A8 processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage, capacitive touchscreens, and front-facing cameras, says the company.

  • Motorola and Best Buy Announce the XOOM Media Edition

    We can’t say we didn’t see this coming after being leaked a while ago, but the exact specifications and details remained a mystery until todays announcement.

“Open Source Gives Me High-Quality Solutions”

Robert Lemke, lead developer of TYPO3 Phoenix, speaks on how open source has gradually come at par with commercial solutions, won over both government and private organisations and what problems it simultaneously needs to address. He also tells Linux For You, about introducing new techniques ‘Aspect-Oriented Programming’ and FLOW3 at the OSI Days in November.

SaaS

• Cloud, open source, and new network models: Part 1

  What is the network’s role in cloud computing? What are the best practices for defining and delivering network architectures to meet the needs of a variety of cloud workloads? Is there a standard model for networking in the cloud?

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Post-PC LibreOffice heads for Web, iOS, Android

• LibreOffice To Go Online, Will Run On Android

• OpenOffice.org “can’t be allowed to die”

  A major fundraising campaign is starting on 13 October to save the open source productivity suite OpenOffice.org. After splitting with Oracle, its the main sponsor, on 1 June the lead developers behind the software have issued a statement committing themselves to continuing as an association and financing itself through user donations.

CMS

• Agencies see advantages to open source content management systems

  Many people were terrified when the Commerce Department first considered moving to an open source content management system for its main website, the agency’s new media director said Thursday.

Business

• Diaspora Prepares to Launch Open Source Social Network

  Diaspora is most famous — that is, in the geeky contingents where it is known — for the promise it holds as a distributed, open source social network that allows users to control their own data. But 18 months after it began as a project on Kickstarter that attracted donors like Mark Zuckerberg, it has also won a reputation for more promise than delivery.

  After Diaspora emailed its users to ask them to donate this week, having published an expense report that showed its $200,000 in Kickstarter money had all been spent, some assumed the end was near.

• eWEEK Readers Trust Open Source

  Two out of three readers use open source, but some of you don’t trust it. Next: choose a tablet for business!

• Semi-Open Source

  • Q&A: NGINX’s Andrey Alexeev Discusses The Open Source Web Server

Public Services/Government

• Government of Paraguay Going to FLOSS in 2012

• Paraguay aims to switch to open source software

Programming

• “Open Source Gives Me High-Quality Solutions”

  The Apache Subversion (SVN) open source version control system is out with its 1.7 release today. The new SVN 1.7 release adds new features such as HTTPv2 and WC-NG that improve performance and make version control more efficient for developers.

• Key Milestones Over 10 Years of Eclipse

  As we get ready to celebrate 10 years of Eclipse, I thought it would be interesting to look back on the major milestones in the Eclipse community, ie. what were the major events that have helped shape and drive the Eclipse community. Here is my list but please feel free to add your own in the comments. We have also created a slide show of these milestones available at the end of the post.

Standards/Consortia

• Gate One brings open source SSH to HTML5 browsers

  Version 0.9 of Gate One, an open source terminal emulator for HTML5 web browsers, has been released. This is a beta level build – the first public release as the developer works towards a stable 1.0 version. The software makes use of WebSockets to connect a server backend written in Python and a frontend written for modern browsers in JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS. The frontend doesn’t require any browser plug-ins to be installed.

• New ODF 1.2 format

  The latest Open Document Format, ODF 1.2, was finally approved by the OASIS committee. It is a major milestone, as the previous version (1.1) dates back to 2006. ODF is also a standard under the ISO committee, but in its even older 1.0 instantiation.

Google Kills Open Source Code Search, Plus Kills Buzz

Health/Nutrition

• Children Gardening in Sewage Sludge: Los Angeles Schools Alerted

  This week, CMD’s new Food Rights Network sent letters to thirteen schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that have “organic” school gardens adopted by Hollywood’s Environmental Media Association (EMA). As we reported in May, EMA teamed up with sludge-marketing corporation Kellogg Garden Products, which sells products made from Los Angeles area industrial and human sewage sludge with the label “quality organics” and which used the gardens for photo ops with sludge products.

Security

• WineHQ database breached; Fedora Project forces password change

• Linux System Hardening

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Progressive Group Pressures Major League Baseball To Drop Glenn Beck

Finance

• Protesters plan to ‘Occupy’ London, Rome, Auckland

  That’s the word going out on the Web to rally street protests on Saturday around the globe from New Zealand to London, Frankfurt and, of course, New York.

  Protesters got started early in Italy, where students managed to break into the hall of the Goldman Sachs building in the heart of Milan’s financial district, a few steps away from La Scala opera house, police said. The protesters were quickly dispersed.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• ALEC Politicians Spin Special “Interest” Bill to Protect Corporate Wrongdoers as “Job Creation”

  For years, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), has been itching to protect big corporations from high interest rates charged in cases where corporations have killed or injured Americans. Now, Wisconsin politicians serving on key ALEC task forces are pushing a bill embracing this idea as part of ALEC alumnus Scott Walker’s latest effort to force the ALEC agenda into law based on claims that doing so will help “job creators.”

• Progressive Group Pressures Major League Baseball To Drop Glenn Beck

  The progressive group Americans United for Change is launching a campaign against Major League Baseball (MLB), pressuring the group to cut its ties to right-wing pundit Glenn Beck due to his history of controversial statements.

  Beck recently left his high-profile spot as a host on Fox News to launch his own online network, GBTV. This spring, MLB Advanced Media, the interactive arm of the MLB, teamed up with Beck and agreed to provide him with a streaming video platform. Along with Beck’s show, MLB Advanced Media streams more traditional sports fare, such as baseball games and March Madness.

Civil Rights

• The conference on Technological Surveillance and Free Software

  Yesterday I attended a conference titled “Technological Surveillance and Free Software”, which was organized by the School of Information Technologies of the university where I work. This activity was part of the actions to start the migration to FLOSS in the university.

  The speaker showed a clip from one newspaper displaying the headline “State institutions using more free software everyday”. This piece of news was published yesterday, too. That was something I did not expect!

ACTA

• The European Parliament services denied the existence of ACTA documents four times

  The European Parliament services denied the existence of INTA coordinators’ minutes (regarding ACTA) four times. Under EU law, Institutions can refuse access to documents in some cases. But EU law does not provide a possibility to deny or obfuscate the existence of documents. See our 5 October letter to the INTA secretariat.

• FFII requests European Parliament’s Legal Services’ opinion on ACTA

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• “75 Per Cent Of Stock Exchanges Worldwide Run On Linux”

  Want to know why open source technology could be a hit proposition for your business venture? Kapil Gupta, CEO of OMLogic Consulting and an OSI Days speaker, in an interview with Linux For You, shares interesting facts to highlight why open source technology makes business sense. He also gives a brief synopsis of his upcoming talk at the OSI event that would surely appeal to the open source based businessman!

Audiocasts/Shows

• CAOS Theory Podcast 2011.10.14

Kernel Space

• First Linux Benchmarks Of AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer

  Here’s the first Linux benchmarks of AMD’s FX-Series Bulldozer desktop CPUs that launched on Tuesday. Specifically, it’s Gentoo Linux performance results for an AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer.

  The AMD FX-8150 Linux benchmark results can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org. It’s an eight-core AMD FX-8150 on an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX motherboard with 4GB of RAM. Gentoo Linux was used with the Linux 3.0.6 kernel and GCC 4.5.3. Unfortunately, this system is not under my control and there’s no direct comparisons available for this hardware system to any other AMD processors.

• Utilities for Making and Checking MS-DOS FAT Filesystems

Applications

• Easily Rename Files And Directories With GPrename

• Transmageddon Video Converter

• Proprietary

  • Desktop virtualization: Parallels vs. VMware vs. VirtualBox

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Upgrade Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) To 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) (Desktop & Server)

  • Using GeoIP With Nginx On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04

  • How To Upgrade Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) To 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) (Desktop & Server)

  • First Linux Benchmarks Of AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer

  • Starting Ubuntu in console mode

  • How to Fix Lag Issues with ATI Proprietary Graphic Drivers (fglrx) in Ubuntu 11.10

  • Get the name of the newest file in a directory on the linux shell

  • Ubuntu Tip: Enable synchronizing installed apps with other computers

  • Customizing a package for openSUSE!

  • Ubuntu 11.10 GNOME Shell Guide

  • A Simple User Guide For Ubuntu Oneiric

  • Root-kits: The Enemy Within

  • Linux System Hardening

  • Drawing circles

  • How to show the full URL in Firefox

• Games

  • Much Awaited Game ‘Dungeons of Dredmor’ Released for Linux

    Much awaited game Dungeons of Dredmor from Gaslamp Games is now available for Linux and can be purchased from Desura (Linux client is currently in beta).

  • Alien Arena 7.52 Released with New Levels and Game Mode

    Multiplayer First Person Shooter Alien Arena has just been updated to version 7.52 bringing in lots of new features and fixes.

  • Dungeons Of Dredmor now available!

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 9th October 2011

  • Plasma Active Perspective: The User Story

    Plasma Active brings a flexible, elegant, activity-driven user experience to a spectrum of devices. This article is part of a series of articles about different perspectives on Plasma Active. This installment looks at the user story, and aims at answering the questions “what does Plasma Active bring me as a user?”, what are the underlying concepts and how do we plan to achieve these goals.

  • Fifteen years of KDE

    Fifteen years ago Matthias Ettrich started the KDE community. On 14th October 1996 he wrote his famous email to the de.comp.os.linux.misc group on Usenet. He called for other programmers to join him to create a free desktop environment for Linux targeted at end users. Many, many people joined. Thousands of developers wrote millions lines of code. We did 90 stable releases of our core set of applications alone, not counting all additional stuff and the thousands of 3rd party applications.

  • 15 years of KDE

  • Looking for a Polished Linux Desktop? Consider KDE

    In the world of Linux desktops, Ubuntu’s Unity and GNOME have tended to dominate the headlines in recent months, but there’s another contender that many consider an even better choice.

  • KWin on Pandaboard

  • KDE Rekonq Browser Picks Up Many Features

Distributions

• CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) – Digital Forensics LiveCD

  CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is an Italian GNU/Linux live distribution created as a project of Digital Forensics. CAINE offers a complete forensic environment that is organized to integrate existing software tools as software modules and to provide a friendly graphical interface.

• New Releases

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 169

    · Announced Distro: Parsix GNU/Linux 3.7r1
    · Announced Distro: Superb Mini Server 1.6.2
    · Announced Distro: Sabayon 7
    · Announced Distro: Ubuntu 11.10

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • The ‘restricted’ repository for Mandriva/ROSA 2011 is available for public testing!

• Gentoo Family

  • Sabayon 7 vs. Ubuntu 11.10 Performance

    The release of Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” this week captured most of the Linux spotlight, but also arriving this week was Sabayon 7, the Gentoo-based Linux distribution that’s meant to be easy-to-use and desktop-oriented. In this article Sabayon 7 has been pitted against Ubuntu 11.10 with its stock Linux 3.0 kernel and its new experimental Fusion kernel.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Testers Wanted to Kick Tires on Fedora 16 Beta Release

      The Fedora project rolled out the beta version of Fedora 16 today and invites testers to take it for a spin. Current known bugs are listed in the Fedora wiki, and beta testers are encouraged to provide feedback to help fine tune the operating system before Fedora 16 rolls out in November.

• Debian Family

  • Debian GNU/Linux Point Release

    I know, I know. Everyone who has any interest in this kind of thing is waiting anxiously for the new Ubuntu release. So I will shamelessly exploit that anticipation by mentioning that an updated distribution for Debian GNU/Linux “squeeze”, 6.0.3, was announced over the weekend. Well, announced, but not quite entirely available yet. Most of the ISO images have been updated, but the Live images have not yet.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Review: For Ubuntu, The Road To 200 Million Desktops Starts With 11.10

      • The Most Beautiful Ubuntu 11.10 Manual Published

      • Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” released

      • Spotify Gets Better Ubuntu Integration In Latest Update

      • How to install Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot – An Ubuntu Installation Guide

      • Ubuntu’s Oneiric Ocelot: Nice, but necessary?

        Oneiric Ocelot, or Ubuntu 11.10 as it is known, has been delivered and refines the core of the Unity environment Canonical built at the expense of GNOME.

      • Ocelots Are Go

      • Ubuntu 11.10 review. Oneiric Ocelot – beautiful, but deadly

      • Now there’s a list of Ubuntu-certified computers

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Review: Incremental Refinement

        As Mac and iPhone users play with their new iOS5 and iCloud, Linux users get to play with a brand new release of the most popular Linux OS. Ubuntu 11.10, also known as Oneiric Ocelot, has arrived.

        Unlike the last release, which featured a switch to an entirely new Unity user interface, this one is a fairly incremental upgrade. What most of us expected were further refinements to this new user interface, and Ubuntu more or less delivered on that, but let’s get into the nitty gritty.

      • Ubuntu 11.10: Word on the Street

      • Ubuntu Spotted at Best Buy, But Not as Something for Sale Though

        And to think, they kicked me out of Bestbuy for wanting Ubuntu on a netbook. This was around…2008? I went in to one of the Bestbuy’s at Tigard, Oregon. Asked for my Windows Refund, or just to get a laptop with Ubuntu installed…got the “lemme ask my manager” response, 30 minutes later the manager “banned” me from the store.

      • Upgrading to Drupal 7, not always easy

      • Ubuntu 11.10 – Oneiric Ocelot Has Been Released

      • Ubuntu 11.10 screenshots

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Post Installation Guide

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Lucid Puppy 5.2.8 released

        • Ubuntu Rescue Remix: Version 11.10

          Version 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) of the very best Free-Libre Open-Source data recovery software toolkit based on Ubuntu is out.

          Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix provides a robust yet lean system for data recovery and forensics. No graphical interface is used; the live system can boot and function normally on machines with very little memory or processor power. Following Ubuntu’s six-month release schedule, all the software is up-to-date, stable and supported.

          Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix features a full command-line environment with the newest versions of the most powerful free/libre open-source data recovery software including GNU ddrescue, Photorec, The Sleuth Kit, Gnu-fdisk and Clamav.

        • An Ubuntu Alternative -or- An Alternative Ubuntu

          For all those who object so strongly to the Ubuntu Unity desktop, I have been thinking this afternoon that I have some time (it’s Friday), and I have a free disk partition (Natty is out, Oneiric is in, and the Ubuntu test partition is free), and I haven’t looked at Kubuntu in quite a long time (it’s been so long that I don’t even remember the last time). So I have downloaded and installed it on my Lenovo S10-3s. Here are the results:

        • Disappointments of Kubuntu 11.10

          There are 2 times a year when all Linux users, and especially Ubuntu users, are excited. They are April and October. These are months when new versions of Ubuntu Linux are released.
          This October is not an exception. 13th of October (sorry, not Friday this time) saw release of version 11.10, nicknamed Oneiric Ocelot. As usual, Canonical, company beyond Ubuntu, releases whole family of systems based on the same core: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Lubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux-based network camera design supports up to 1080p@60fps

  Nexvision announced a Linux-based network video camera reference design with remote accessa dn analytics based on the Texas Instruments 1GHz, DSP-enabled DM8148 DaVinci processor. The CAMSMOOV also integrates an FPGA, as well as a camera with up to four camera processing boards supporting up to 1080p@60fps H.264 video at up to 12 megapixels, plus sensors and a variety of wired and wireless I/O.

• Phones

  • Android

    • One Smart Phone, Two Personalities

      AT&T, the second largest wireless carrier in the U.S., and Qualcomm, which dominates the market for smart-phone processors, want to give your phone a split identity. The companies are separately adopting technology that can make a smart phone secure enough to keep IT bosses happy, but open enough to allow its owner to install apps or surf the Web.

      AT&T will release its version of the technology, called Toggle, for Android phones this year. Someone using a device with Toggle installed taps the home button twice to flip between personal and work modes. The personal mode behaves like a regular phone and is fully under the user’s control. The work mode looks like a separate phone with its own desktop and suite of apps and is secured by a password. Its functionality is constrained by a company’s IT policy; all data stored or created under the work mode, whether e-mail, contacts, or Web downloads, is encrypted and can be remotely wiped if a phone is lost or stolen.

Events

• SCALE Kids Conference announced

SaaS

• X.commerce Joins OpenStack Community

• Cloudera and MicroStrategy Announce Integration Between Business Intelligence and Apache Hadoop

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle v. Google – Google Gets Significant Win on Mitchell Report

• Oracle v. Google – You Can’t Make This Stuff Up (or maybe you can)

  If it weren’t for the potentially serious economic and technological ramifications of this case, some of the filings would be worth their weight in gold with respect to their entertainment value. Such is the case when reading Google’s response (519 [PDF; text below]) to Oracle’s precis letter seeking leave to file a Daubert motion regarding the Google damage expert reports of Drs. Leonard and Cox (See document 511). As I said yesterday, we only read Oracle’s side of the story, and I expected Google’s to be quite different. It is.

  Oracle complained that Drs. Cox and Leonard have no technical background and, instead, relied upon Google employees for technical interpretations. As Google points out, this is the same thing Oracle has done. Pot, meet kettle.1 Google further points out that it intends to make all of those Google employees upon which Drs. Leonard and Cox relied available for questioning at trial before putting either of the doctors on the stand. So Oracle will have ample opportunity to question the merits of the technical observations.

• Oracle v. Google – Google Continuing To Press Hard On Its Positions

  Google is continuing to press Oracle with further motion filings. This time Google attacks Oracle’s claim for past patent damages as outside the scope of the law. (521 [PDF; text below]) Oracle has asserted a claim for patent damages from the year 2007. Oracle, however, did not give notice of infringement to Google until much later, perhaps as late as July 2010. If Google is successful in obtaining leave to file its motion and is successful on the motion, it could preclude virtually all damage claims for past patent infringement. Damages would then only be due from the date of notice going forward, if at all.

• LibreOffice Conference Announcements

• The Apache Software Foundation Statement on Apache OpenOffice.org

  On 1 June 2011, Oracle Corporation submitted the OpenOffice.org code base to The Apache Software Foundation. That submission was accepted, and the project is now being developed as a podling in the Apache Incubator under the ASF’s meritocratic process informally dubbed “The Apache Way”.

  OpenOffice.org is now officially part of the Apache family.

  The project is known as Apache OpenOffice.org (incubating).

  Over its 12-year history, the ASF has welcomed contributions from individuals and organizations alike, but, as a policy, does not solicit code donations. The OpenOffice.org code base was not pursued by the ASF prior to its acceptance into the Apache Incubator.

• Apache Asserts OpenOffice Stewardship

  Despite the growing momentum of the LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is urging the community of volunteer developers to rally around the OpenOffice code base as the canonical version of the open source software suite.

• The Document Foundation Thinking Beyond Desktop

  During the LibreOffice Conference in Paris yesterday, The Document Foundation made several interesting announcements. Among them, a new online version of LibreOffice and a port for smartphones are planned for next year or 2013.

  LibreOffice Online appears to be an online application of LibreOffice in the ilk of Microsoft 365 or Google Docs. The new browser-based app, developed by openSUSE’s Michael Meeks, “is based on GTK+ framework and HTML5′s canvas.” There isn’t a lot more detail available right now, but a demo video is available here (requires WebM support).

• Apache vows to develop, protect OpenOffice

  Citing its success with other donated projects, the Apache Software Foundation vowed to protect OpenOffice.org and prevent fragmentation.

  In a lengthy statement issued to naysayers and concerned parties today, the ASF rejected claims that OpenOffice would be neglected and pointed to its success with other adopted open source projects such as SpamAssassin as proof that the “Apache Way” will grow and develop OpenOffice.

  The ASF also noted that the project would be known under the name Apache OpenOffice.org and is officially in incubation status.

• LibreOffice gaining momentum, heading to Android, iOS, and the Web

CMS

• Drupal and WordPress at SchipulCon: One Stage, One Open Source Love

• Upgrading to Drupal 7, not always easy

• Open Source Drupal Marks the Spot for eBay’s X.com

  eBay is the latest tech giant to embrace Drupal, the open source content management system that now runs an estimated 2 percent of all websites on the planet.

  As eBay formally launched its new X.commerce business unit — a sweeping effort to bridge the worlds of online and offline payments — the company revealed it had moved the unit’s X.com website to Drupal, dropping the proprietary Jive Software platform the site previously used.

Business

• Openwave and Open-Xchange Partner to Provide Service Providers with Advanced Email Solutions

• Univa Partners With StackIQ

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Why Stallman is right about Steve Jobs

  An indication of the extent to which people in today’s world are prone to hypocrisy is evidenced by the way they react after someone dies.

Project Releases

• Blender 2.60

Public Services/Government

• PY: Government project targets exclusive use of OSS for all government agency websites in 2012

  The government of Paraguay has embarked on an ambitious project with the aim to implement on an exclusive basis open source software (OSS) in all government agencies in 2012.

• FR: Council of State clarifies right of local government to opt for open source

  In a ruling of 30 September 2011, the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, clarified the right of contracting authorities to require suppliers to use specific open source software in the context of public procurement.

• PY: Government project targets exclusive use of OSS for all government agency websites in 2012

  The government of Paraguay has embarked on an ambitious project with the aim to implement on an exclusive basis open source software (OSS) in all government agencies in 2012.

  Nicolás Caballero, IT Coordinator for the Office of the President of the Republic of Paraguay was quoted by a local newspaper as saying: “The first and most evident aim is to save resources.” He noted that the saved resources can be allocated to other areas and that assessments performed by the Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare foresee savings of about $ 4 million (approx. € 2.9 million) for the ministry alone.

X11

Time zone database back online

The time zone reference database used by all versions of Unix and Linux is back online in an updated version, reports Java developer Stephen Colebourne in his blog. Last week, the tz database was taken offline because of a copyright problem. Now, the data is available for downloadDirect download from a new server. Robert Elz will be maintaining the time zone information. The tz database will eventually be posted at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), where the mailing list for the presentation and discussion of relevant information is already kept.

The computer is dead, long live the computer

After six years of loyal service, I have retired my oldest desktop. Save for an occasional vacation and an unlucky power outage once a year or so, the machine worked 24/7, without any big problems or hiccups. But six years of age for a computer is like three million for a person, so all good things must end and better things come in their stead.

Finance

• Delaware judge dismisses Goldman Sachs pay claims

  The New York investment bank Goldman Sachs is known for, among other things, paying its executives pretty well. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, for example, was awarded a $67.9 million bonus in 2007, the same year the firm set a Wall Street pay record.

• Goldman Sachs Investor Lawsuit Over Pay Plan Dismissed

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc. persuaded a judge to throw out shareholders’ claims that the investment bank’s compensation system improperly rewarded employees for taking risks that hurt the firm’s stock price.

  Delaware Chancery Court Judge Sam Glasscock concluded yesterday that Goldman Sachs’s board acted properly in setting up a pay plan for the fifth-biggest U.S. bank. The judge dismissed a consolidated investor lawsuit claiming the plan wrongly awarded billions of dollars in bonuses to executives and employees, including Chairman Lloyd Blankfein, even as the firm’s market value declined by $50 billion since 1999.

ACTA

• ACTA Signed by 8 of 11 Countries – Now What?

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The demise of the Windows platform

The free Linux desktop is mature. It’s not only on par with proprietary desktops on other operating systems, it actually is innovating and moving beyond what other systems do. It covers all the needs of the vast majority of use cases. It has a variety of office suites, it runs several fine web browsers (another area where Windows has lost relevance up to the point of being made fun of), it has excellent tools and applications in almost any area you can think of, it’s a primary choice for software developers, it even moves beyond classical desktops to netbooks, tablets, and more.

Desktop

• GNU/Linux on the Desktop Rolls in India

  So, not only is GNU/Linux on the desktop doing well, people who actually use it for their living have become confident enough to switch distros without much fuss. Compare that with the German Foreign Office which found GNU/Linux brought complaints from users and was too expensive. What’s wrong with this picture? Instead of whining that users should go to M$, users are choosing the distro of their choice. No complaining about “compatibility” or “complexity”. Just getting on with it.

Server

• IBM Evolves from On Demand to SmartCloud

Kernel Space

• AMD Catalyst vs. Radeon Gallium3D On Linux 3.1

  If you are not taken by today’s release of Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”, here are some new Radeon graphics benchmarks comparing the Catalyst driver on Ubuntu 11.10 to the latest R600g driver from Mesa 7.12-devel on the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.1 kernel.

• Shaping the Future of Linux: Ken O’Brien

  Can computer science change the world? Ask Ken O’Brien, a first-year Ph.D. student at University College Dublin’s Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory, and he’ll answer with a resounding “yes.” With his focus on green scientific computing at CASL, Ken works with physicists, mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists to develop new energy optimization solutions for scientific applications.

• Graphics Stack

  • The Linux GPU Driver Limitations For Opera 12

    For those interested in the GPU hardware acceleration support for Opera 12 that was made available with this morning’s release of Opera 12 Alpha, here’s the stipulations regarding the “out of the box” Linux GPU driver support.

Applications

• Amanda: A One-Stop Solution for All Your Back-up Problems

  Looking for an enterprise back-up solution for your servers? Is your network too complex to be handled by simple back-up utilities? Does the thought of making backups feel like a headache? Do not worry, there’s Amanda to the rescue!
  Amanda is probably one of the best open source network back-up solutions available in the market today. The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (AMANDA), as the name suggests, was developed at the University of Maryland. It allows the administrator to set up a single master back-up server to back up multiple hosts over the network, to tape drives, to disks or to optical media, and even the cloud (with the help of Amazon S3 Web services). It provides an array of options for the type of media that can be backed up to, and a multitude of client environments.

• Demystifying Back-ups

  Back-ups are a crucial part of our digital lives, yet they don’t always get the love they deserve. Keeping back-ups is sometimes confusing, thanks partly to the jargon—should I have ‘differential’ back-ups or is a ‘full system image’ a better way? To address questions like these, this article sheds light on all aspects of back-ups, from its basic definition, to information that can help you perform the kind of back-ups you need.
  Backing up data is the process of making a copy (or more) of our data files—documents, spreadsheets, presentations, e-books, movies, music, browser bookmarks, settings, installed programs—almost everything. Fundamentally, the questions are:
  1. What to back up?
  2. When to back up?
  3. Where to back up?
  4. What type of back-ups to perform?
  5. Do you need more than one back-up?

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Recover Deleted Files in Linux

  • Changing Desktop Appearance On Linux Mint 11 (Advanced)

  • How to Add a Random Quote to Terminal

  • Book Review: Node Web Development

  • Tech Tip: Create an Automatically Scrolling Reader

  • FLOSS Manuals Offers New Documentation for Cool Tools

  • Not Enough Ubuntu Yet?

• Wine

  • Getting Started with Wine

• Games

  • How to play Windows games in Linux

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3.2: big steps forward

    I was busy with other things when 3.2 was released, hence my only writing about it now. Having just started using the new release full time, I have to say that I’m really impressed with how it turned out. The rate of progress since the 3.0 has been extremely high.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Updates JBoss SOA and Business Rules for Decision Making

    Red Hat Wednesday announced the new JBoss Enterprise SOA 5.2, JBoss Enterprise Data Services Boss Enterprise Business Rules Management System (BRMS) platform releases.

    Pierre Fricke, director of SOA product line management at Red Hat told, InternetNews.com that the overall goal of the new product releases is to help build intelligent, integrated enterprises.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Web of Trust Project

      I was hoping to wait a bit before announcing my project but I’m having problems getting my ducks in a row. Because of this I’m reaching out to the community for help.

    • Linux Just Got Better With The Fedora 16 Beta Distribution

      Linux distributions have been improving by leaps and bounds, and those improvements are becoming visible in the latest beta releases. Fedora, one of the flagship distributions carrying GNOME 3, is no different and should have plenty of new features to make your mouth water.

    • Linux Just Got Better With The Fedora 16 Beta Distribution

      Some people have a beef with this release name and have been going out of their way to grill its proponents on what a huge faux pas and injustice this is. Beefy Miracle — how could you name something like that? Don’t you see it will make you a laughingstock? What were you people thinking?

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) released!!

      • Dreamy Ubuntu 11.10, the Oneiric Ocelot, slinks into view

        Ubuntu received a major update today. The developers behind the popular Linux distribution released version 11.10, codenamed Oneiric Ocelot. The update brings a wide range of improvements, including some much-needed enhancements to Ubuntu’s Unity shell.

      • A tour of Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Released [Screenshots & Video]

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Released – See What’s New

      • Ubuntu 11.10 is out: A quick look at what’s new

        Ubuntu 11.10 a.k.a Oneiric Ocelot has just been released. This highly anticipated release brings the latest open source applications along with some great improvements to the Unity interface. In case you’ve been dying to find out what’s so great about the Ocelot, read on as we give you a quick overview of everything that’s new in 11.10.

      • What’s new in Ubuntu 11.10

        For the new version of Ubuntu, code-named Oneiric Ocelot, the developers have put particular effort into revising the applications area, improving the usability of the Software Centre and enhancing Ubuntu’s Unity interface.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot’ Released, Full Review, Video and Screenshots Tour

      • Things To Tweak After Installing Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

      • Things You Should Do After Installing New Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

      • 10 Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 11.10

      • 7 Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot’

      • Ubuntu Online Demo- Try Ubuntu Online Before Download

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Officially Released

      • Caveats In The Ubuntu 11.10 Graphics Stack

      • Is Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Another Headache?

      • Final Ubuntu 11.10 spiffs up Unity, adds ARM server support

        Ubuntu 11.10 (“Oneiric Ocelot”) was released, featuring makeovers for its Unity desktop and Ubuntu Software Center, plus a switch to the Thunderbird email client and a new backup tool called Deja Dup. On the server side, Ubuntu 11.10 adds ARM support, as well as a new “Juju” cloud management framework, and the integration of OpenStack within Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure.

      • Screenshot Tour of The Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

        Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot was released couple of hours ago and quite a few people would have already downloaded and installed or upgraded it. If you’re one of those wondering – “How does it look?” – here’s a brief screenshot tour.

      • Ubuntu Linux 11.10: Unity comes of age (Review)

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Introduces DVD and Netboot Images

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Has Been Released

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Ocelot Heads to the Cloud

      • Ubuntu 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot’ Bounds onto Stage

      • Installing the latest Ubuntu Linux: Ubuntu 11.10

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Top Free Android E-book Readers

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Has IBM kicked OpenOffice.org to the curb?

  Hey, here’s one for you: would somebody explain to me why we’re at the point where statements like “OpenOffice.org can’t be allowed to die!” are being made?

  Those are the words of Stefan Taxhet, CEO of Team OpenOffice.org e.V., the German non-profit responsible for managing the fundraising for the Apache OpenOffice.org project. Taxhet made this statement in a press release Tuesday that announced new fundraising efforts for the project, which is apparently in need of a cash infusion.

Dennis Ritchie

• Paying tribute to technology icon Dennis Ritchie

  Most of you who follow the tech industry have likely heard of the passing of computer programming icon Dennis M. Ritchie (also known as dmr) on October 8 at the age of 70. While it could be argued that Linus Torvalds is more famous in today’s world than Dennis Ritchie, it’s quite safe to say that there wouldn’t be a Linux without Dennis Ritchie.

• The email I received from Dennis Ritchie (by way of maddog)
  I l

• The Genius Who Made it Simple

  Today marks the passing of the pioneer of C and Unix, Dennis Ritchie, the R in K&R. I personally compare his innovation to language. Because both of them gave us the ability to communicate with another creature: humans, and computers. Without him and his partner, programming would be as hard as Electrical Engineering. He is a prophet among computers.

• Computing pioneer Dennis Ritchie dead at 70

• Dennis Ritchie – A roundup of tributes to an unsung hero

• A Few Brief Thoughts on the Death of Computer Science Titan Dennis Ritchie

• Remembering Dennis Ritchie, Creator of the C Programming Language and UNIX Co-Creator

  Dennis M. Ritchie, co-creator of UNIX and father of the C programming language, died this past weekend after a long illness. It’s no exaggeration to say that without Ritchie, modern computing would not be what it is today.

  Often known as “dmr,” Ritchie was born in Bronxville, NY in 1941. He studied at Harvard University, initially focusing on physics. Ritchie said that he entered computing because “my undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat.”

• Dennis Ritchie: the giant whose shoulders we stand on

• RIP Dennis

• Dennis Ritchie, Creator of C and Unix Passes Away

• Dennis Had A Bigger Effect Than Jobs: Pike

  “When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn’t even know who he is.”

• The Bizarre Cathedral – 100

Internet/Net Neutrality

• No Privacy Without Net Neutrality

  In a ground-breaking opinion on Net neutrality, the European Data Protection Supervisor stresses that restrictions to Internet access inevitably harm privacy. As the European Parliament enters in the final stage of the negotiations on its resolution on Net neutrality, this opinion underlines that the EU Commission’s “wait and see” approach is bound to fail and is unjustifiable. Members of the EU Parliament – who will soon hold a crucial vote on the matter – must preserve citizens’ privacy by requiring strong regulatory measures to ban discrimination of online communications.

Copyrights

• Evidence please

  The Government now has a chance to set out clear strategies for assessing the impact of infringement and the effectiveness of different enforcement strategies. Doing so is stage one in finding a way to bring the voices in this debate – be it rights holders, artists, or civil society – closer together to discuss practical, effective and proportionate policy.

• Minute Meme “Credit is Due” Distinguishes Plagiarism from Copyright Infringement

  One of the most irritating myths promulgated by the entertainment industry is the idea that copyright is an ethical imperative because it’s bad to “steal other people’s ideas”. This is frequently combined with an illustrative story of plagiarism — in other words, a situation in which someone fraudulently claims credit for someone else’s work. Of course, this is nonsense. Plagiarism and copyright infringement are two completely different things. Although they sometimes occur together, there are many examples of either without the other. And if your eyes just glazed over — no problem: Nina Paley has made it easy with her new Minute Meme for QuestionCopyright.org, called “Credit is Due”.

• ACTA

  • FFII urges EP Civil Liberties Committee to formulate opinion on ACTA

    ACTA is a multilateral agreement which proposes international standards for enforcement of intellectual property rights. According to the FFII, research has shown serious fundamental rights issues.

    A group of prominent European academics published an opinion on ACTA. They conclude that certain ACTA provisions are not entirely compatible with EU law and will directly or indirectly require additional action on the EU level. They invite “the European institutions, in particular the European Parliament, and the national legislators and governments, to carefully consider the above mentioned points and, as long as significant deviations from the EU acquis or serious concerns on fundamental rights, data protection, and a fair balance of interests are not properly addressed, to withhold consent.”