Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Of Operating Systems and Oil Companies

    The bill often comes due with the same inflated price tag. Computer repair shops more and more choose scorched earth methods to fix an infected or broken system. Being a person who partially makes their living from the same pain, it is much, much cheaper to recover data and reinstall than it is to untangle the tentacles of a rootkit or sophisticated virus from the registry.

    Even when things are running smoothly, the Windows user pays for the “convenience” by updating virus software, tolerating Windows updates and suffering sluggish behavior from a system that is six months or longer installed.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 3.0-rc6

    And quite frankly, Christoph Hellwig has now _twice_ said good things about that driver, which is pretty unusual. It might mean that the driver is great. Of course, it’s way more likely that space aliens are secretly testing their happy drugs on Christoph. Or maybe he’s just naturally mellowing.

  • Could you do Linus “Linux” Torvalds job?

    At $500 US through July 8th and $600 thereafter, that’s a nice discount. Student Registration is $100. Student attendees will be required to show a valid student id at registration. LinuxCon will be held in Vancouver, B.C. on August 17-19, 2011 It will celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Linux. Besides a host of far more important Linux and open-source movers and shakers, I’ll be speaking at the conference as well.

  • PCIe, power management, and problematic BIOSes

  • Graphics Stack

    • Nouveau Driver Power Management Against The NVIDIA Blob

      Following last week’s completion of the Radeon driver power management tests against the AMD Catalyst driver, now it is time to turn the tables on NVIDIA. In this article are some power consumption and thermal tests when comparing the latest open-source “Nouveau” driver code against NVIDIA’s closed-source proprietary driver.

      Testing went nearly the same as last week’s Radeon driver power management test. The Watts Up Pro USB power meter was monitoring the system’s power consumption, which was being automatically logged by the Phoronix Test Suite. Also monitored at the same time by the Phoronix Test Suite was the CPU usage and GPU temperature.

• Applications

  • Geeqie Image Viewer Geeks Out on Features

    You wouldn’t use a word processing program to carry on an IM chat, and you shouldn’t rely on an image viewer to handle graphic-intense image editing, collection management and photo album maintenance. That is why you need a quick and handy image viewing app like Geeqie to supplement the image manipulation toolboxes found in full-fledged image editor programs.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to create a simple invoice using Libre Office in Ubuntu.

    • Safer Access without Passwords

    • How To Set Up And Integrate An Ubuntu 10.04 LTSPv5 Server Into A Windows 2008 Active Directory Domain

  • Games

    • Suite of educational games for children – Childsplay

      Childsplay is a collection of educational activities for young children and runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux.
      Childsplay can be used at home, kindergartens and pre-schools. Childsplay is a fun and save way to let young children use the computer and at the same time teach them a little math, letters of the alphabets, spelling, eye-hand coordination etc.

    • Interview with Keith Poole from Desura Part 3

    • 10 Popular Real Time Strategy(RTS) Games for Linux

      Except for some really casual games for Linux and the best of paid games for Linux collection, games for Linux and Ubuntu is a category we haven’t yet really covered here at all. That is going to change from now on. Here is a quick list of 10 real time strategy(RTS) games for Linux(mostly open-source) in no particular order. Please keep in mind that, I haven’t tried them all by myself and many of the games are in the list because of the good reviews they received from users elsewhere. So here they are, read on.

    • A Linux Port is in Works for Action Game ‘Garshasp’

    • ‘No Time To Explain’, New Indie Game Coming Soon to Linux

      New Indie platformer No Time To Explain will come soon to Linux. Developed by Tiny Build Games, No Time To explain has received great response on their their Kickstarter funding initiative with more than 2,000 backers for the game. As much as $26K has been raised for the game though the initial target was 7K only.

    • 18 Extra Hot Linux Commercial Games (Part 1 of 3)

      One of the things we really want to witness is Linux making a significant penetration in the desktop market share. Whilst most supercomputers use the Linux platform, it is lamentable that the vast majority of desktops continue to run Microsoft Windows. Current surveys put Linux’s desktop share at a miniscule 1-2%. Yet modern Linux distributions offer so much for the typical computer user with an unparalleled range of open source software, combined with shining desktop environments that make the operating system extremely user friendly.

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME 3 May not Be Designed for You.

      Since Fedora released GNOME 3, there has been lots of bickering, like when everybody released KDE 4. (Ubuntu gave up on GNOME and went for “Unity,” which is, in short, built on GNOME 3 but with a different user interface).

    • New GNOME haz no friends

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Fusion 14.1

    • GParted 0.8.1-5

    • Linux Deepin 11.06 正式版发布

    • Clonezilla 1.2.9-12

    • ArtistX 1.1

    • Parted Magic 6.3

      This release fixes a few obscure typos and bugs in some of our scripts. Pburn and Pfilesearch have been added for testing. There are no menu entires yet, so run “pburn” from the command line. If there are any Puppy fans out there that can help us getting these to work as well as they do on Puppy, that would be awesome. If they work okay, then we can add them to the menu in 6.4.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Eugeni Dodonov Sails Away, Quits Mandriva

      There is a community. Hackers hack and take flak. Artists create beauty. Managers manage. Bloggers write and commenters comment. Names become familiar. Personalities began to emerge. Friendships form, rivalries rear, and animosities appear.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Centos 6.0 will be released in the next few hours

      According to Centos’ QAweb Blog, since July 2nd the ISO images of Centos 6.0 Final had been composed and built to be pushed to the staging machine which would then start syncing out to the internal centos.org mirror.

      Yesterday the os/ and isos/ tree had been finally synced out to the internal mirror servers. The updates/ tree were also signed. Since a few things have been fixed, the update should be on the way to the QA machines and synced out to the internal mirrors. So it is ready to be opened to public mirrors in a few hours.

    • Red Hat Previews JBoss Application Server 7

      Red Hat’s JBoss middleware division is now previewing the next generation of its Java middleware. JBoss AS 7 (Application Server) is currently in beta, providing developers and enterprise with an opportunity to see the future of Red Hat’s middleware server technology.

  • Debian Family

    • Get to Know Debian Goodies

      If you work with Debian-based systems, you probably know the basics of working with dpkg and APT’s tools. But there’s much more available. To find out which packages have release-critical bugs, hog the most disk space or still use older versions of files that have been upgraded, you want Debian Goodies.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Xubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal review – Struggling

            A great fan of Xfce-flavored desktops, I am not. Xubuntu, specifically? Well, it has never really struck me as good as its brethren, the Gnome- and KDE-based desktops. However, once in a while, a refresh of bias and opinion is necessary. My last encounter with Xubuntu was back in 2009, almost two years back, a century-worth of time in the Linux frame of reference. So let’s perform another Dedoimedo transformation.

          • Seven Months of Bodhi Linux in Pictures

            Bodhi Linux is still a fairly young project. We gained a good bit of recognition for providing a usable Enlightenment desktop while many others still do not (if they offer one at all). We started back in just November of last year, but the project has matured a good deal in just this short bit of time. The following are screen shots (and some history) from the nine developmental and two stable releases we have had during the last seven months.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Cars: The Next Big Platform Opportunity for Linux?

    If you cycled the clock back a few years, you would find that most people who were enthusiastic about Linux tended to debate its prospects as a desktop operating system. Fast-forward to today, and it’s clear that Linux is finding many of its biggest opportunities at the server level, in embedded Linux deployments, and in other scenarios that lie outside the desktop computing arena. There are more and more signs that the next frontier for Linux may be in cars, as evidenced by Toyota’s decision to join the Linux Foundation as a Gold member.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • GNU/Linux is out Java/Linux is in.

        Why has Java/Linux become so popular? Quite simply because it is being marketed under a single common name. Android. It is not seen as a hobbyist operating system. It is not seen as something done by rebels without a cause. It is recognised as a commercially viable operating system to add value to manufacturers products. In short it has the respect and recognition which GNU/Linux has never been able to achieve. It has become a household name. You ask anyone what Android is and they will be able to tell you. It is being mentioned specifically in television adverts. It is being describe as a feature in manufactured products. That has never been done for GNU/Linux to the extent is being done for Android.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Google, Virgin America partner to push ChromeBooks, free WiFi in the clouds (the real ones)

      As part of the deal, business travelers can try out a ChromeBook on select flights from San Francisco, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Boston and Chicago at no cost. Interested flyers can access a ChromeBook at departing gates at those airport’s Chrome Kiosks and test it out — as well as Virgin’s free WiFi — on their flights free of charge.

Free Software/Open Source

• Web Browsers

  • The future of PDF is JavaScript?

    Is there anything that JavaScript can’t do?

    The new Mozilla sponsored pdf.js effort is all about using JavaScript as a the mechanism by which a PDF file is rendered and displayed in the browser.

  • Mozilla

    • Ubuntu 11.10 Uses Thunderbird 5 as Default Mail Client

    • Debian Mozilla team creates a Release archive for Iceweasel

• SaaS

  • Cloudera Unveils Industry’s First Full Lifecycle Management and Automated Security Solution for Apache Hadoop Deployments

  • Karmasphere Announces the First “Hadoop Developer Virtual Appliance”

  • Introducing Platfora – Putting a New Face on Hadoop

  • Platform Computing Announces Commercial Support for Apache Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)

  • MapR Technologies Announces Availability of the Industry’s Easiest, Fastest and Most Dependable Distribution for Apache Hadoop

• Databases

  • MongoDB is the New MySQL

    Not because MongoDB is a replacement, as Joseph Ritchey argues in his piece “MongoDB is the New MySQL.”

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • OpenOffice – splits and pirouettes

    The splits and controversies around LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org have highlighted a number of issues concerning the licensing and corporate governance of open source projects and communities.

  • Getting the new MS fonts in LibreOffice – or rather, forget about it

• CMS

  • WordPress 3.2 gets a dose of Zen

    From the ‘Freshly Pressed Open Source Goodness’ Files:

    WordPress 3.2 is now out (officially announced on July 4th), a little it more than four months after 3.1 came out.

    The big deal this time around is the new zen approach to a minimalist user interface when writing content. It’s a great idea.

• Semi-Open Source

  • The rise, fall and reality of commercial open source

    In both cases, there are reasons and incentives for ‘going closed,’ so to speak, but it is the true open source efforts that elicit true community benefits: collaboration, transparency, speed, flexibility, security and more. So while open source as a term or identifier may not be what matters most to vendors or customers, there is no question open source is key to the business and future of many, if not most vendors in cloud and mobile computing. Ask Puppet Labs or Chef sponsor Opscode whether open source matters to their customers and their business.

  • Talend MDM Stretches Beyond 100 Million Master Record Milestone on Commodity Server

  • The Sin in Open Source

    I’ve written before about the genuine renaissance open source software represents and the vast implications that openness provides. I admitted that computer science, based on its relative unwillingness to share great ideas, has lagged behind other hard sciences in its understanding of how and where value is created.

    I’ve also written about the principles of open source software and how the mere gifting of source code, while important, does not actually generate the majority of value for the community. Instead, the real value comes from adhering to the principles of open source — transparency, participation and collaboration — and I’ve tried to evangelize this is the real method upon which open source companies help create success.

• Public Services/Government

  • CeBIT Gov 2.0 Conf: Open Source Wrongness

    I was contacted earlier today by “Stephen from CeBIT”. Stephen ultimately was asking whether I would like to pay CeBIT for the privilege of presenting on open source related issues at an upcoming Gov 2.0 conference. Stephen’s line was that there would be many potential customers at the conference so it would be a good investment. In effect, Stephen was asking to be paid for marketing to Government.

    Selling to Government, at least in Australia, is universally acknowledged to be difficult for SMEs. Ultimately the reasons for this are that the Executive is particularly averse to failure and are subject to fairness tests in the award of contracts. As a result, the Executive establishes a bureaucracy to ensure that each potential supplier is treated the same, and any engagement is subject to particularly extensive terms and conditions. All of this carries with it a cost of engaging with Government. In other words, marketing to Government is particularly expensive.

• Programming

  • Migrate from SVN to Git easily with git-svn

Leftovers

• Security

  • Stop Software Attacks From Destroying Your Servers

  • Defending against malicious CDs and USB flash drives

• Finance

  • Goldman Sachs, The Federal Reserve – The Big Bad Wolfs

    Goldman Took Biggest Loan in Fed Program was reported today in Bloomberg both on Bloomberg TV and here on the internet…click here…to read story. While this was a secret loan program at the time – dating back to 2008 and other banks participated – Bloomberg TV reported that Goldman received the lowest interest rates of any of the participants, from near zero to 2.6% as well as the single biggest loan.

    Goldman Sachs & Co., a unit of the most profitable bank in Wall Street history, took $15 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve on Dec. 9, 2008, the biggest single loan from a lending program whose details have been secret until today.

  • President Obama Calls Jon Corzine “Our Wall Street Guy”

    President Obama recruited the former Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine to help him fundraise for his re-election campaign, according to the NYPost.

    The main news is that Corzine has been working on Obama’s 2012 campaign for months. IE: He hosted a fund-raiser at his Fifth Avenue home for Obama. He’s attended secret meetings with Obama, and he organized a meet-and-greet at the Four Seasons for key finance-industry execs and Obama’s new chief of staff, former banker Bill Daley.

• Civil Rights

  • MI5 admits to wrongful surveillance of innocent people, new report says

    The UK’s Security Service wrongly gathered information about innocent telephone users during criminal surveillance, a report into the interception of communications has said.

• Internet/Net Neutrality/Telecom

  • Roseman: A competition watchdog with some bite

    Melanie Aitken has taken on the Canadian Real Estate Association over its multiple listing service. She’s blasted Rogers/Chatr Wireless ads for misleading ads (“fewer dropped calls”). And she’s tried to stop Visa and MasterCard from handcuffing merchants.

  • Free Speech and the Internet

    As the United Nations has said, access to the Internet is a human right. A report by the U.N.’s special rapporteur presented last month to the Human Rights Council in Geneva warns that this right is being threatened by governments around the world — democracies included.

  • Mobile phone firms to be forced to reduce overseas roaming charges

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • It’s official: Spotify is coming to the U.S.

    • Spain’s performing rights organisation SGAE raided by anticorruption police

      he Civil Guard today raided the headquarters of the General Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE) in Madrid as part of an investigation into embezzlement and misappropriation in an operation ordered by the anti-corruption prosecutor, who has announced that it has spent the last two years investigating a series of alleged crimes at the powerful artists recording rights organisation.

Reader’s Picks

• DCGS-A, a Microsoft based intelligence system used by the US armed forces has never worked, and cost $2.7 billion and many lives.

  This shortfall translates into operational opportunities missed and lives lost. … several Representatives on July 19 2010, who then asked the US Army to consider switching to another, proven system that the FBI and CIA use: Palantir. The Army refused, and instead rolled out a software update that was meant to fix any issues. Unfortunately, according to the former intelligence officers, the system is still unusable. “You couldn’t share the data,” says one of the former officers, and they both agree that the system is “prone to crashes and frequently going off-line.”

  DCGS-A made the fatal move from java to .NET back in 2008.

  With DCGS-A version 3.0 fielded throughout this year, V-3.1 should be fielded toward the end of 2008. A major addition to V-3.1 is the MFWS framework format. The newest DCGS-A iteration will change from a Java-based MFWS to a Microsoft net-based one, code named “Viper.” “This change will provide the ability to rapidly add analyst tools because there are so many Microsoft developers and applications already available that are potentially useful to the analyst,”

  The alternative, Plantir, seems to be run on gnu/linux and other Unix. A recent job advertisement describes the people they are looking for,

  You tend to pry off useless windows-centric keys on your keyboard and find GUI-based pointing devices superfluous.

• Hardware

  • Toyota joins the Linux Foundation

    I suspected but could not prove that Microsoft had it’s hooks into Toyota and this was why their breaks were failing. The shift to gnu/linux is evidence the company is moving on to better things.

• Health/Nutrition

  • What private insurance really does to your neighbors.

    starting today, I will be sharing on an occasional basis some of the horror stories like the ones I used to work so hard to keep out of the press. … Universal coverage, in my view, is the ultimate goal we all should share. Remember this if nothing else: Until we achieve it, you and your loved ones could easily be facing your own horror stories.

  • Big Pharma’s Latest Shady Ploy to Sell Depression Drugs.

    $4.5 billion in direct drug advertising brings us back to the days of patent medicine claims.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Why do US police have tanks?

    Local police departments are being supplied with military uniforms, weaponry, vehicles, and training. … the most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home. … 40,000 of these raids take place every year, and are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • As fires around Los Alamos threaten waste sites the DoE plans another bomb making plant.

  • Soil samples 40 miles from the still uncontrolled Fukushima reactors have Cs-137 levels between 10,000 and 50,000 Becquerel per kilogram.

    The highest reading in the city of 290,000 people far exceeded the level that triggered compulsory resettlement ordered by Soviet authorities following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, they said.

  • Sulfur pollution masked global warming for a while in the West. and the same thing is happening in China today

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • The US now gets more energy from renewable sources than nuclear power

• Finance

  • UN used as tool for water privatization grab.

    Billions of dollars are being given out to the most ardent promoters of water privatization. … We’re also seeing the IMF forcing indebted nations to sell off public assets, including water systems, as a condition of receiving financial support. The whole system is rigged for these corporations, and they still are losing contracts, not meeting their obligations

• Anti-Trust

  • Microsoft pays University of Nebraska $250,000 to use Office 365

    Microsoft did this in hopes that the University would not make the transition over to Google Apps

    Office 360 is so bad that the company has to pay people for lock in and violate their privacy. The unreliable service won’t work with gnu/linux or OSX

  • Microsoft wants $15 per Samsung Android

    I’m told these are poor quality smart phones, though they look great. Microsoft probably limited features beyond the scope of Microsoft’s patents like they tried to do to the Barnes and Noble Nook.

  • How predictable. Apparently Facebook’s video calling doesn’t work for Linux users (but Google+ hangouts do!)

    Though it was not free software and should not be trusted, Skype worked well for gnu/linux users until Microsoft bought it.

  • Microsoft still won’t say what patents Android violates but they have mentioned a number of crazy things in their ongoing lawsuits of Motorola and Barnes and Noble. Shades of SCO, they accuse Droid users of violating patents too.

    Microsoft shills cheer and hope for the worst

• Censorship

  • A deceptively named bill is called out by people who know better

    An ideologically diverse group of 90 law professors has signed a letter opposing the PROTECT IP Act, the Hollywood-backed copyright enforcement/Internet blacklist legislation now working its way through Congress. The letter argues that its domain-blocking provisions amount to Internet censorship that is barred by the First Amendment

    The term IP is intended to confuse.

• Privacy

  • Cisco to build out China’s big brother camera system. Their partner, Microsoft is offering their “decision engine” to help.

  • Creepy game camera knows what you are doing.

    Are you writing in your secret diary again, Winston?

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Running Ubuntu 11.04[Video]

  This is one of the advantages of having an open device running an open OS. ASUS Eee Transformer Pad is already among the fastest selling Android tablets out there and it is powered by latest Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS. YouTube user lilstevie89 have managed to install and run Ubuntu 11.04′s classic GNOME desktop in his ASUS transformer TF101.

• Kernel Space

  • DRM Changes Coming Up For Linux 3.1 Kernel

    There’s still a few more weeks left until the Linux 3.0 kernel will be officially released, but there are already some changes worth looking forward to with the Linux 3.1 kernel as it pertains to the Direct Rendering Manager drivers.

    In going over the drm-next Git tree of David Airlie’s, for what will ultimately go in as the pull request when the Linux 3.1 kernel merge window is opened, there’s a few items to mention at this time:

• Applications

  • Lightspark Flash Player Sees Some Improvements

    The open-source Lightspark Flash Player is now at version 0.5 release candidate one. This new release is set to bring a number of significant improvements to this free software alternative to using Adobe’s proprietary Flash Player on Linux operating systems.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Fireworks And Gimp

    • Taking screen captures with Shutter

    • Install BBC iPlayer Desktop get Live Radio/Live TV in Ubuntu

    • How to Setup Rsync Backups on Linux the Easy Way

    • The Beginner’s Guide to Shell Scripting: The Basics

  • Games

    • A Linux Port is in Works for Action Game ‘Garshasp’

      Developers of action game Garshasp : The Monster Slayer are working on a Linux port. The game is inspired by Prince of Persia series and is based on Ogre3D engine.

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Lunch With A Side Of GNOME

      Sometimes your plans for the day are altered greatly because of external circumstances. Nomachine released the latest NX 4 preview last night. We have been very anxious for this technology in order to deploy iPad/tablets, so this was my primary project for today. Prior releases inched closer to our goals, but were *far* too slow to do any beta testing. VNC testing over EVDO was painful as well. At this time no native client is offered for the iPad, instead it works by just using the Safari browser and then connecting to a web server. X is started inside the browser and your desktop appears. Performance on Firefox/Linux/Wired is very snappy and fast. Safari/iPad/WiFi works fairly well as does Safari/iPad/EVDO. So for the first time ever, I was able to take an iPad to lunch with me and log into our new GNOME server. I present, lunch with a side of GNOME:

• Distributions

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Unity Mail Gets GNOME Keyring Support, Graphical Configuration Dialog

          Unity Mail is a Unity-specific application to display the email unread count on the Unity launcher.

        • Overlay Scrollbars – Update

          When we introduced the new overlay scrollbars we knew it was a bold decision and we were expecting some critics because of the use cases we didn’t support.

          As hoped, we had a lot of very useful feedback. Most of the people very liked this innovation and understood our need to be consistent to our design principles. But because we were hoping for the minimal impact, it was important for us to understand when this wasn’t the case.

        • Ubuntu Linux ‘Natty Narwhal’ debuts in PHL

          Linux and open-source software fans can now keep up with Windows and Mac users with the release of the latest flavor of popular Linux distribution Ubuntu.

          Aside from being free, the open-source Ubuntu release 11.04 —codenamed “Natty Narwhal”— touts the improved graphical user interface (GUI) dubbed “Unity.”

          “Over other Linux desktop [distributions], Ubuntu has the advantage of being easy-to-use, as well as having a solid infrastructure underneath. Ubuntu also has a broader coverage of language support, with the widely used Unicode as the default character encoding,” Zak Elep, head of Ubuntu Philippine Team Local Community (LoCoTeam) said in a statement.

        • Free Official Ubuntu Book For Approved LoCo Teams

        • A new snapshot of Unity 2D

        • Weekend Project: Create Virtual Hosts with Apache

• Devices/Embedded

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • HP Debuts TouchPad as Thunderbird Accelerates

      No, the HP TouchPad is not a pure-breed Linux up-front tablet. The HP TouchPad, which was released this past week, runs on HP’s webOS, formerly the operating system used by Palm, which HP acquired in 2010 for $1.2 billion.

Free Software/Open Source

• FOSS misfits: Rusty Russell’s take

  It is even less often that a person who has the integrity of Rusty Russell does so. His comments about social misfits in the community – whom he refers to as arseholes (he used the American spelling, assholes) – has not received much attention, understandably, given the insular nature of most commentary about FOSS.

  Russell is a senior kernel programmer, a good guy, very funny and a genuinely impulsive person. He is well-known as a prankster; one of the pranks he pulled in 2010 resulted in the well-known Debian developer Bdale Garbee having to sacrifice his beard at the hands of Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

  [...]

  And senior FOSS people need to speak out more often about the problems within. Drawing a ring around things will not make problems disappear – when they do see the light of day, they will be akin to Murray Cummings’ blast in 2007.

• Interview with Libre Graphics Magazine at Libre Graphics Meeting 2011

  I was recently able to attend the 2011 Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal, and there i had a blast meeting lots of people and founding out about so many great projects. One of these, is Libre Graphics Magazine and the fantastic people behind it: ginger “all lowercase” coons along with Ana Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente of Manufactura Independente.

• Openness/Sharing

  • FabFi: An open source wireless network built with trash

  • The Uzebox: An open source hardware games console

    Anybody who has even a passing familiarity with IT — and even most who don’t — encounters open source software on a daily basis. Whether it’s Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, the Apache HTTP Server, which powers most of the world’s Web sites, or Google’s Android mobile platform, open source software has gone from being solely the domain of geeks to part of many people’s everyday life — and it’s become big business.

• Programming

  • General-Purpose C Libraries: Limited Options

Leftovers

• Security

  • phpMyAdmin updates patch critical holes

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• L’Independence day with a bit of a twist

  Every year, near this day (July 4), I do a blog post on the independence Linux has brought me and the community at large. But this time around, I want to take a bit of a different approach. This approach was inspired by an outpouring, of late, by other media types, about how Ubuntu is slipping in the ranks at Distrowatch. Their assumptions are all centered around Unity and how Canonical has doomed the perennial user-friendly distribution in one fell swoop. Although not really related to this column today, I have also been watching the rank and file at Distrowatch, and Ubuntu still remains at the top. Possible premature speculation? Maybe — but, on a side note, I will say that the over all opinion about Unity is still very strongly against this desktop remaining as the default Ubuntu desktop. We’ll see if Ubuntu can’t gain some independence from that awkward, buggy desktop.

  What I want to bring up today is how the Linux operating system, and the community around it, is now enjoying an independence from its past. Thinking about the outpouring of speculation about Ubuntu’s ranking on Distrowatch, I wondered about the true relevancy of sites like it. Does a site that ranks the popularity (in downloads only) of a distribution really have any bearing on how much Linux is used today? To that I would answer, “Not in the slightest”.

• TLWIR 7: Patent Trolls, Superheroes and More

• Desktop

  • Google Analytics data shows Microsoft Windows losing market-share due to phones & tablets

    Microsoft Windows lost a big chunk of the global browsing market, according to the first report from Google on web trends.

    The survey, based on data from “hundreds of thousands” of websites that use Google’s free Analytics (web tracking) service, shows Windows dropping by a whopping 5.1 percentage points in its share of browsing computers.

• Kernel Space

  • Toyota Joins Linux Foundation

    The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Toyota is its newest member.

    A major shift is underway in the automotive industry. Carmakers are using new technologies to deliver on consumer expectations for the same connectivity in their cars as they’ve come to expect in their homes and offices. From dashboard computing to In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI), automobiles are becoming the latest wireless devices – on wheels.

  • Are Android and Linux the same thing?

    I’ve knocked the sand out of my keyboard, applied aloe to my sunburned skin, and am trying to apply my refreshed and relaxed brain to the following conundrum:

    Is Android Linux?

    [...]

    Like most classifications of this nature, the decision on where to define the differences between Linux and Android really makes argument go one way or the other. If you point to the kernel, then yes, Linux and Android are very much related to each other. If you look at the application layer, then things get much harder to pin down.

  • 20 years of Linux

    Torvalds thus chose to release Linux under the Gnu General Public License or GPL created by Richard Stallman, the visionary behind free software movement. The license gave end-users and developers four important freedoms:

    •The freedom to use the software for any purpose;

    •The freedom to change the software to suit their needs;

    •The freedom to share the software with friends and neighbors; and

    • The freedom to share the changes they make.

    The decision to go with GPL was crucial because it fueled Linux’s development and use worldwide, eventually transforming it from a hacker’s experiment to the foundation of a large, thriving, commercial eco-system.

  • AMD’s New Open-Source Employees

    Joining John Bridgman and Alex Deucher in working on the open-source driver stack at AMD are two new, but familiar, names: Michel Dänzer and Christian König. These two Linux graphics driver developers are now officially AMD employees.

  • Graphics Stack

    • WebCL: OpenCL For The Browser

      First there was WebGL to bring OpenGL to the web-browser, and now there’s WebCL to do the same for bringing OpenCL to the web. The Khronos Group is getting ready WebCL, to bring OpenCL to modern web browsers with JavaScript support. Early WebCL support is already available for the WebKit rendering engine.

      WebCL is expected to work in a similar way to WebGL, but to instead harness the compute power of modern graphics processors. There are currently a few basic WebCL demos for those running Mac OS X with a modern NVIDIA GPU that supports the OpenCL 1.0+ specification. Samsung is largely behind the work on bringing WebCL to WebKit while Nokia has been working on a WebCL extension for Mozilla Firefox. Those interested in learning more about WebCL can visit the Khronos Group Wiki page.

• Applications

  • Burn CD, DVD and Blu-Ray in Ubuntu Linux using Silicon Empire

    Burn CD, DVD and Blu-Ray in Ubuntu Linux using Silicon EmpireSilicon Empire is an application for GNU / Linux that lets you record and manage optical discs such as CD, DVD and Blu-Ray. It is written in Qt, a widely used multi-platform library for developing applications with graphical user interface as well as for developing non-GUI programs as tools for the command line and console server.

  • Top 5 Screenwriting Applications for Linux

    When it comes to screenwriting applications, there aren’t that many choices for Linuxiens as there are for Windows and Mac users. However, that doesn’t mean that you’ll have to ditch your beloved penguin to write your next big screenplay. There are a few Linux-based as well as web-based screenwriting tools you can try out that are almost as good as industry-standard softwares like Final Draft and Magic Screenwriter. So, without much ado, here are the best screenwriting tools available for this awesome platform.

  • 20 Linux Alternatives for Common Windows Applications

    1- LibreOffice: Some might point out that Oracle’s own Open Office is still very much an option, but the fact is that Linux distributions are or have already migrated to LibreOffice in its stead. Unlike the proprietary-friendly Microsoft Office, LibreOffice offers the end-user much of the same functionality without the added cost of proprietary licensing. However, the biggest downside to LibreOffice has to be the lack of proper formatting support when opening a Microsoft docx document. While the document may be supported, chances are fantastic that the previous formatting won’t hold.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Enabling Compiz Fusion On An Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop (With The Unity Desktop)

    • Running Funtoo,SUSE and Slackware through OpenVZ on Fedora 15

    • Ram Disk on Linux

    • How to prepare patches for Debian packages

    • Install Terminator With Built-In “Quake” Mode

    • How to restrict or allow SSH access to certain users only in Linux

    • Save laptop battery with Linux and bumblebee (Nvidia Cards)

    • How To Change GNOME 3 Login Screen (GDM3) Background / Theme [Quick Tip]

    • systemd for Developers II

    • Agilia Linux Commands You Must know .

    • Quiz: What the Bash Shell Does

    • Install Mixxx DJ Software On Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”

    • Top Five Terminal Commands Everyone Should Know (as suggested by you)

    • One-Stop Shopping for Open Source Manuals

    • The ordeal

    • Changing resolutions in Android x86

    • Installing And Using OpenVZ On Fedora 15

    • Understanding Functions

    • Webian Shell: Prototype Web-Based Shell

    • Easily Install Extra Applications In Fedora Using Autoplus Or Fedora Utils

    • How to download RSS feeds with a simple script

    • Implementation spice on Ubuntu 11.10 KVM Server

    • Writing Good Documentation for Linux, Part 2

  • Games

    • A quick look at Indie Games on Linux

      There are many games for Windows that aren’t produced by the big well-known game companies. These smaller games, often called “indie games”, can be every bit as fun and exciting as a box game you spend $50 or $60 on in the store. Some are free, while others range in price from $5 to $40. In this post, I’ll look at some of the best of the free games for Windows. This won’t be a comprehensive discussion, just a quick peek into the possibilities of which well-known free indie games from the last 4 years will run well on Linux. All games mentioned below are definitely recommended!

      (I am using vanilla Wine in this discussion – while some games will also run with Crossover Games, or Play On Linux, I wanted to ensure that you could run any game using only the Wine version from the winehq repository).

    • Game Drift Linux – Distribution For Gamers

      Jimmy Thomsen from Linos a company which specializes on customizing Ubuntu to suite costumers needs has released a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu for gamers called Game Drift Linux !

    • First Public Alpha Released for Linux Game ‘The Platform Shooter’

      First public Alpha of Linux game The Platform Shooter has been released. The game is based on Ogre3D engine and is developed by FRACTiLE Games.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • The Mistake that is Upgrading to KDEPIM 4.6.0

      I’d like to see if I could downgrade, but Sabayon has removed the older PIM from repositories. So, I guess I’m moving to a new distro tomorrow and risk losing everything else trying to use an older version. Yeah, I have a back-up from right before the upgrade, but that’s a week or two’s worth of mail – some of it important.

• Distributions

  • There Should Be Only One Distribution!

    What the person is really saying is, they don’t like the distribution, or maybe just Ubuntu and its popularity, and want to be vocal about it. Know what I do when I don’t like something? I don’t use it. There’s a whole pile of stuff in our community that I don’t like, and I rarely, if ever, talk about it. I don’t believe in using Adobe’s Flash, I could go on and on about it when people bring it up, I don’t. I do my thing and move on. Not so with the type of person I mentioned, they’ll bring it up about each and every new derivative of almost every distribution.

    Here’s the funny part too, if they like some derivative of a specific distribution that they already like then it’s perfectly fine.

    Let’s speak about the other group, the smaller group that feels we really do have too many distributions and actually makes an attempt at explaining why they believe having fewer would be better. They will tell you a number of reasons, all fairly sound from the onset, until you start to discuss them.

  • Gentoo Family

    • Sabayon Linux 6 Comes Now in Four New Flavours

      After the release of Sabayon Linux 6, Fabio Erculiani is proud to announced the immediate availability for download of four Core editions of the Sabayon Linux operating system.

      Sabayon Linux 6 Core 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.

      The four newly updated editions of Sabayon Linux 6 are: SpinBase, CoreCDX, ServerBase and OpenVZ. While the SpinBase and ServerBase editions allow users to make Sabayon spins or set up a home server, the CoreCDX edition allows users to easily obtain a minimal graphical environment of Sabayon.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat appoints new General Manager for the Middle East and Africa Region

      Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that George DeBono has been appointed as general manager for Red Hat in the Middle East and Africa region. DeBono, who previously held a senior global operations role within Red Hat, will now lead the company’s business in the region.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Modal Dialogs Land in Ubuntu 11.10

          Modal dialogs in Ubuntu 11.10 made their first appearance last week for Unity 2D users. Today they make their appearance in Unity proper.

          The effect is provided by the ‘unity dialog handler’ plugin.

        • ClassicMenu Indicator – Notification area applet for the top panel of Unity desktop

        • Tired of paying for Windows? Try Linux instead

          Surprising revelation: for the last month or so, I’ve been using a Linux-powered laptop as my primary work machine.

          Linux, of course, is the free, open-source alternative to Windows and Mac operating systems. I’ve fiddled with it from time to time, but never considered it a viable replacement for either one.

          Mind you, I can’t abandon Windows altogether. Not only do I write about it for a living, I also rely heavily on certain features and programs not currently available in Linux.

          But this much I’ve learned: If you want to breathe new life into an old and/or slow PC, or you’re just tired of paying for operating systems, Linux rocks.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • AriOS 3.0 Released [Ubuntu 11.04 Remaster]

            AriOS is a really interesting Ubuntu remaster that comes with a clean design and a large default application selection, especially useful for those with poor or no Internet connectivity.

          • Introducing Update Packs in Linux Mint Debian

            One of the strong points of Linux Mint Debian is the fact that it’s a rolling distribution. Users enjoy a continuous flow of updates coming from the repositories, which keeps their system up to date without the need to upgrade to newer releases or to go through the hassle of reinstalling the operating system. When the updates are significant and affect large or sensitive parts of the system, some experience is needed from the user. The new updates might ask you something you’re not familiar with, some post-configuration might be required for things to work as they did, and if you make a mistake and you don’t have the knowledge to fix things up, you might very well end up with a partly or completely broken system.

          • A quick look at Linux Mint LXDE 11

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux gaming handheld targets $10-$20 price — but is it for real?

    Eccentric indie game developer Robert Pelloni (“Bob’s Game”) announced he is developing a gaming handheld prototype based on Linux that will sell for $10-20 by year’s end. The 400MHz ARM-based “nD” device will offer a 2.4-inch, 320 x 240 display, and Wi-Fi, and will be supported soon with a Linux SDK, claims Pelloni, although many are skeptical the device will see the light of day.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • HTC faces challenge for 2011 shipment goal

        With demand for HTC’s Android-based smartphones still growing steadily and HTC set to begin selling its naked-eye 3D model, the HTC EVO 3D, in Europe in July, the company is expected to garner revenues of NT$135-140 billion (US$4.7-4.88 billion) in the third quarter with its smartphone shipments reaching 12.5-13 million units, estimated the sources.

      • OMAP 4 earns first Netflix HD certification on Android

      • Android up, as BlackBerry and Windows phones decline, says comScore

        Google’s share of the U.S. smartphone market just keeps going up — while Microsoft’s continues to decline, according to comScore. In May, Android had a 38.1 percent slice of the pie, while Windows Mobile and Windows Phone eked out just 5.8 percent, the research firm says.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Netbooks: RIP or Live Long and Prosper?

      “The netbook has been murdered,” read the article on ITworld that got tongues wagging. “The concept of an inexpensive computing device with high value for the third world has been sufficiently co-opted so as to make the category meaningless.

      “Some called netbooks a sub-category of ‘ultra-light’ or ‘sub-notebooks,’ but netbooks became legitimized by the announcement of the (US)$100 OLPC laptop,” the article went on.

      It wasn’t long before the news spread to Slashdot, where bloggers — as per their wont — expressed a healthy amount of skepticism.

Free Software/Open Source

• Intel Releases New Open Source Packages

  Intel’s research division Intel Labs recently released a pair of open source software packages, including a distributed scene graph package to increase the maximum number of participants in 3D Web applications, like virtual worlds, by more than 20 times, and an advanced offline ray tracing package to help speed up rendering of photorealistic images on Intel-based systems by 100 percent.

• Tech Pundits Surrender: The Retreat from Free Software and Open Standards

  All the same, such views seem deeply misguided. They present false dichotomies, often based on an unrealistic definition of quality. All they really do is support the existing state of affairs between manufacturers and end-users, and delay the innovations that free software and open source are in the process of delivering.

• Picking the Right Web Server for the Right Job

  Both have good reasons for their popularity. Apache is at the core of the LAMP technology stack upon which a lot of server architecture is based: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl. That’s not just the web server itself but other application servers that use LAMP as a foundation. Among them are popular content management systems (CMSs) as Drupal and blogging platforms such as WordPress. If you need more, many Apache modules enable you to easily incorporate additional functionality into the Web server.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Fixes to memory footprint land in Firefox 7

      Firefox 5 was all about bug stomping and the stillborn channel switcher, Firefox 6 will see the addition of lots of HTML5 and CSS3 features and more privacy controls, and Firefox 7 — at long last — will focus on memory management and performance increases.

      Firefox 6, which moves to the Beta release channel today, introduced a significantly improved about:memory page with buttons that can manually trigger garbage collection (GC) and cycle collection (CC). Garbage collection frees up memory by clearing old and unused JavaScript objects; cycle collection does the same for DOM objects, including web pages. By hitting these buttons repeatedly — or by hitting “Minimize memory usage”, which triggers both processes three times in a row — you can reduce Firefox 6′s memory footprint significantly.

• SaaS

  • OpenStack is getting more and more attention…

    RackSpace and Eucalyptus are definitely taking two very different paths: RackSpace is spending time and effort to set a new standard, yet involving as many actors as they can (read standardization efforts, community building, creating alliances, etc).

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • New OpenOffice.Org One Month On

• Project Releases

  • Blender 2.58a update log

  • New Linux-64-bit-Option in LibO-ExtensionCenter

• Public Services/Government

  • All new e-governance projects must work on open source operating systems: Draft

    Computer hardware and peripherals used by all new e-governance projects must work with Linux and other open source operating systems, says a draft policy. The rules for device drivers – software that make devices such as printers and servers talk to computers – have been put in the public domain by the department of information technology, which will take into account views of hardware makers and other stakeholders before finalising the policy. The proposed policy is expected to save government money as open source systems come cheap.

    Many states are keen to adopt cheaper systems but shy away due to their non-compatibility with latest hardware. The draft effectively rules out use of closed systems such as Apple Macs and iPads. It is also silent on smartphones that run on proprietary software.

    For instance, India’s showcase project, Nandan Nilekani-led Adhaar, makes extensive use of Blackberrys. In general, India has always supported use of open source operating systems but it is the first time a policy is being framed on the use of operating systems and device drivers in government projects. The policy is expected to open a Pandora’s box, as most companies, including makers of PCs, servers, chips, and operating systems, have arrangements to make their products talk to each other.

  • EU Lock-in

    Yeah, they’re locked-in seriously and now they want to swallow the sinker.

• Openness/Sharing

  • The Open-Source Car

    Besides a V6 as your engine, your car is very likely to soon be running Linux under the hood. The Linux Foundation will be announcing today that Toyota is joining the Foundation.

    Some of you may be wondering, “What the heck is a car company doing joining the Linux Foundation?” The answer is easy. As the Foundation puts it, “A major shift is underway in the automotive industry. Car-makers are using new technologies to deliver on consumer expectations for the same connectivity in their cars as they’ve come to expect in their homes and offices. From dashboard computing to In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI), automobiles are becoming the latest wireless devices – on wheels.”

• Programming

  • Shed Skin: Another Way To Compile Python Code

    Last week on Phoronix I wrote about Gccpy, which is an effort as part of Google’s Summer of Code to develop a Python front-end to GCC that would allow compiling Python into native system binaries using the GNU Compiler Collection. This was of interest to many readers and the developer behind Gccpy, had commented in more detail in the forums. Following that news article I received an email regarding another Python compiler effort.

Leftovers

• Finance

  • David Stockman: Ben Bernanke Is Finished!

  • Revealed: Tim Geithner’s Cover Letter to Goldman Sachs

    Among my many other accomplishments: Helping a large number of financial institutions avoid the consequences of their actions. As many of the very large number of our mutual friends (hint, hint) will tell you, the quid pro quo on this — cutting executive salaries and perks while limiting dividends and corporate acquisitions — was strictly window dressing. Remember the bonuses AIG paid to executives in its Financial Services division after receiving $170 billion in bailout?

    Prior to my current position I served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It was in that job, when I got Bear Stearns a $30 billion bailout, that I discovered my true vocation: Giving large amounts of other people’s money to down-on-their-luck wealthy institutions. This was very important to help the economy, no matter what Paul Krugman says. I mean really, what’s he ever done?

    In closing I would just like to say how much I respect and admire your CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, whom everyone agrees is very spry for a man of his age.

  • UPDATE: Goldman, BlackRock Complete E-Traded, Cleared Credit Swap

    Goldman Sachs Group (GS) and $3.65 trillion asset manager BlackRock Inc. (BK) announced Thursday they have completed an index credit derivative trade along the lines of what was envisaged in the 2010 Dodd- Frank financial overhaul law.

    It is Goldman’s first swap trade with a client to be electronically executed and centrally cleared in the spirit of that law. The firm has conducted several trades in a manner largely consistent with the aims of the act with other dealer banks for some time.

    The trade, referencing the CDX North America Investment-Grade Index administered by Markit, was executed on a trading platform run by Tradeweb, and was cleared through Chicago’sCME Group. Other firms in the derivatives market, including Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan and Barclays Capital, have made similar announcements in recent months.

    Goldman served as the clearing agent, routing the trade through to the CME clearinghouse for processing on its client’s behalf. It also served as the executing dealer on the trade.

    Clearing is when a central counterparty stands between trading parties, guaranteeing their contractual obligations in case a member of the clearinghouse defaults.

  • Goldman Sachs flexes its lobbying muscle

    Facing the wrath of the public and the government after the global financial crisis that hit three years ago, Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has opened a new front for its aggressive business tactics — the nation’s capital.

    Increased federal oversight and the threat to its lucrative investment bank business from investigations and pending regulations have led Goldman to bolster its Washington presence significantly, turning a low-key lobbying operation into a sophisticated, high-powered enterprise.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • US claims all .com and .net websites are in its jurisdiction

      THE US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) wants to take down web sites that use the .com and .net top level domains (TLD) regardless of whether their servers are based in the US.

      Erik Barnett, assistant deputy director of ICE said told the Guardian that the agency will actively target web sites that are breaking US copyright laws even if their servers are not based in the US. According to Barnett, all web sites that use the .com and .net TLDs are fair game and that, since the Domain Name Service (DNS) indexes for those web sites are routed through the US-based registry Versign, ICE believes it has enough to “seek a US prosecution”.

      According to the Guardian, ICE is not focusing its efforts just on web sites that stream dodgy content but those that link to them, something the newspaper claims has “considerable doubt as to whether this is even illegal in Britain”. It points out that the only such case to have been heard by a judge in the UK was dismissed.

Reader’s Picks

• Health/Nutrition

  • Some drug trials are marketing campaigns in disguise..

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Could a missing SNAP generator leak plutonium and pollute drinking water for millions of Indian citizens?

  • Global warming caused droughts result in fireworks bans across the US.

    More than the eight states mentioned are under drought fire watch. Alabama and Mississippi, for example, have extreme drought conditions and fires but had fireworks displays anyway. Adding to the injury oil companies use billions of gallons of water for fracing in drought struck Texaso.

  • Oil production carries a radioactive materials risk.

    Radium and other heavy metals discharged in waste end up in sea food. BP’s drilling disaster spiked concentrations.

    The appeals court agreed that there was a preponderance of evidence that the oil-production wastewater is dangerous and that LDEQ failed to protect the public interest. It ordered the agency to take immediate action.

  • US citizens: support the Nuclear Power Plant Safety Act.

    This bill mandates the ability to withstand longer power outages, more use of dry cask storage for spent fuel and other reasonable steps for existing plants.

  • Stupid Urban Vehicles [SUV] and other big cars make the world more dangerous

    when you control for own-vehicle weight, “being hit by a vehicle that is 1,000 pounds heavier results in a 47 percent increase” in the probability of dying and that it gets even worse with SUVs and pickups. … at a lower car size equilibrium, drivers would be both safer on average and less of a deadly threat to cyclists and pedestrians. It would also be easier for innovators to put tolerably safe electric cars (or autonomous robot cars) together if they didn’t need to share the road with as many giant vehicles.

  • Polar ice will faster than previously expected.

  • Yes, Wind and Wave Power are Renewable.

    New Scientist, Nathan Myrhvold, Bill Gates and SuperFreakanomics are named and shamed for pushing global heating propaganda.

• Finance

  • EU bullies Greece into more “austerity”, that is sending all of their money to corrupt foreign investors instead of offering essential public services.

  • Goldman Sachs takes the money and runs.

    Less than three years after receiving $10 billion in bailout money from American taxpayers, Goldman Sachs informed its employees recently that it will fire 1,000 workers in the United States and elsewhere, shifting their jobs to the cheaper Singaporean labor market [in an attempt to inoculate itself from the impending blowback]. … Goldman joins the ranks of top U.S. corporations like GE, Chevron, Intel, and others who have collectively outsourced over 2.4 million American jobs in the past decade.

    RMS calls the firm, “a stateless marauding brigand“

• Anti-Trust

  • Amazon’s anti-tax crusade.

    Amazon claims that its opposition to collecting sales tax is not driven by a desire to gain a price advantage over its competitors. Instead, the company insists that collecting sales tax in every state would be excessively burdensome. … Amazon has put ownership of its physical facilities in the hands of subsidiaries and then claimed there was no basis for the parent company to collect taxes. When that has not worked, the company has sought special exemptions by what amounts to bribing the state with promises of job creation.

    State laws taxing all business on the web, with or without physical presence is a cure worse than the disease.

  • A good case for US single payer health insurance.

    The current, poorly regulated insurers put their profits above efficiency and patient care and are unaffordable. Here’s an example of abuse by private insurance companies.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • The US State of Mississippi makes it a crime to credibly impersonate people for malicious purposes.

• Censorship

  • Residents of France: tell Sarkozy to withdraw the Internet censorship decree.

  • Italians: oppose Italy’s new Internet censorship law.

  • US States continue to pass laws against indecency and federal courts contiue to block them

    [Alaska] plaintiffs pointed out that Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia have all enacted similar online indecency laws—and every one of them has been struck down as unconstitutional by the courts. Indecency legislation in Utah is currently on hold while the courts decides whether to strike it down, too.

  • Microsoft again proves itself a willing partner in Chinese censorship.

• Civil Rights

  • Federal courts block some provisions of recent anti-imagrant laws in four US states but the organization pushing the issue hopes for different results in Alabama.

    Michael Hethmon of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which has been helping state lawmakers draft Arizona-like laws around the country, said Alabama legislators were hoping for a legal challenge when they passed their law, … “[they] looked at Judge Bolton’s reasoning and said, ‘We’re not on the left coast here, we’re in the 11th Circuit, and we think we’re going to get a different interpretation by a different judge,’” Hethmon said.

    Both citizens and employers are still burdened with an “E-verify” system that gets things right about half of the time.

  • Back on the chain gang in Georgia

    After signing the state’s repressive, Arizona-style anti-immigration law and quickly finding himself confronted by disgruntled farmers bemoaning the loss of labor in their fields, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, vowed to send thousands of convicted criminals into the fields to pick beans, berries, and peaches.

    Walmart already gets produce from prison labor.

  • Tort reform, binding arbitration and how corporations can violate you with impunity.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • In this article, an Apple booster tells us reporting on Imaginary Property is hard.

    The term “IP” is a sure sign of confusion or an attempt to confuse.

  • The Rich are Destroying the Economy

    High unemployment creates a downward pressure on wages, allowing employers to work the remaining employees harder and thus to increase profits. This dynamic, combined with the above commodity speculation, has been the entire basis for the corporate recovery, while working people have literally seen nothing beneficial. … Since consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the U.S. economy, policies like these ensure that another crisis is inevitable.

    The rich have enough to ride out each crisis, so they only become richer and more powerful unless people enact reasonable regulations.

  • Copyrights

    • Spanish anti-sharing organization, SGAE, is raided and faces criminal prostitution for diversion of funds ostensibly collected on behalf of artists.

      We can only expect more of this if people listen to the recommendations of the copyright maximalists at eG8 who engineered Spain’s laws.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Apple Unlikely to dethrone HP as leading portable PC vendor

    I have great respect for Digitimes. They have their finger on the pulse of IT, particularly in China, but they are out to lunch with the story that Apple will overtake HP in personal computing even if tablets are considered in the mix. Digitimes’ story assumes that Apple will continue with a huge share of tablets. That will fall apart because Android/Linux is being pushed by more than a dozen players large and small, each with some variation on the basic OS developed by Google. What this will mean is that consumers will be faced with many choices. While Apple has a large and growing following, the world is much bigger than Apple and consumers, particularly in the hot emerging markets will love small cheap Android/Linux tablets and smart phones.

  • Thoughts On Linux

    All in all I am very impressed and I would recommend Linux Mint to anyone who want to save money and not buy the Windows alternative. It is fairly lightweight, responsive and easy to run and configure. 9 out of 10 in my eyes.

  • On Linux on desktops..

    Here in Brazil, Linux usage is gaining more and more adoption for the past decade, and it is quite common to find Linux-based computers in supermarkets, computer shops, and so on. Of course, they are not that widely available as their Windows counterparts, but still, it is hard to find any computer store which wouldn’t have at least some computers running a Linux-based OS, and it is usually enough to do a web search on any Internet shop to find several compatible models which come with Linux pre-installed. Be it Mandriva, Ubuntu, or any other distribution – they all have the common open-source foundation and all the benefits of free software. And yes, they are ready for desktop and casual users to use!

    It is great to know that the Open-Source movement is gaining more and more spread world-wide. I truly believe that it has the power to change the world, and I am really happy to know that it does it.

  • Mac OS X Power Consumption vs. Ubuntu 11.04, Windows 7

  • Nothing But Chromebook For A Week

    Then I grabbed the mini-VGA to VGA adapter, a 24 inch HP monitor, and got it plugged in. Now I have a Chromebook workstation that makes me sing.

  • Hope and Change Inside My Computer – Part III

    I mentioned that my computer does not freeze. It darn well shouldn’t. It has a 64 bit dual core quad processor with 4 gigs of RAM. Windows 7 infuriated me just as much as Windows XP did with it’s intermittent stalls for no obvious reason. To be fair, a few Linux distros had momentary freezes with a slight darkening of the screen but after a bit of research, I turned Compiz off and it stopped doing it. Personally, I don’t see the point as I didn’t find it useful, just wobbly and shiny.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • # Going Linux Jul 05

  • Linux Outlaws 216 – Jaffa Cakes

  • WebOS 3.0 In-Depth | LAS | s17e06

  • “The Spiffify Your Open Source Edition” of Dr. Bill.TV Netcast #195

• Kernel Space

  • The Kernel Graphics Interface (KGI) Is Effectively Dead

    While the FreeBSD Foundation is now paying for Linux kernel mode-setting and GEM/TTM memory management to be ported to BSD — and they are making some progress — this isn’t the first attempt at moving major parts of the graphics stack into the kernel. Pre-dating Linux KMS/DRM is the KGI Project, which still is technically around, but it’s pretty much dead in terms of new development and any hope of the Kernel Graphics Interface reaching its goals.

  • Graphics Stack

    • NVIDIA Introduces 280 Linux Driver Series

      Now that NVIDIA has officially released the 275.xx Linux driver, they’re onto the 280.xx driver series. Just in time for the US holiday weekend they have released the NVIDIA 280.04 binary Linux driver beta.

      While the 280.04 beta driver marks the introduction of a new series, the official change-log is shockingly small. All that’s officially mentioned for being fixed-up in the 280.04 beta is incremental bug-fixes and preliminary support for the X.Org X Server ABI 11. This is the video ABI that’s being used by X.Org Server 1.11 RC1. It’s good to see NVIDIA still at the top of their game in supporting new kernel and X.Org releases, while AMD continues to lag behind with their Catalyst driver. It will still be several months before AMD Catalyst is expected to support X.Org Server 1.11.

    • Cedar Trail Coming Soon To Open GMA500 Driver

      While Intel’s OSTC (Portland) team is busy at work on Intel Ivy Bridge Linux graphics support for this next-generation hardware due out by year’s end, the same team doesn’t play with Intel’s Poulsbo or other graphics IP that isn’t an in-house Intel creation and part of their open-source driver. It seems, however, that Alan Cox is personally working on early “Cedar Trail” support for the open-source GMA500 driver.

• Applications

  • Yet Another Open-Source Video Editor: Novacut

    There’s a number of open-source non-linear video editor programs that have been going for a few years, including Cinelerra, OpenShot, and PiTiVi, among others. None of these projects have been particularly promising and yet comparable to the proprietary competition in the video editing world. Lightworks is an option since it’s a professional software product that was then open-sourced, but it’s Linux client isn’t expected until late 2011. There is though another new option coming in the Linux video world and that’s Novacut. Novacut is an open-source video editor, but at least it’s taking a slightly different approach than the other projects.

  • Reading news the way I like it

  • Proprietary

    • 5 Free and Open Source Skype Replacements for Linux

      Skype is without doubt one of the best proprietary software available to Linux users. However, ever since Microsoft acquired it, some people have started looking for free and open-source alternatives to the popular communication (Voice over Internet Protocol, instant messaging, videoconferencing) software.

      Let’s take a close look at some of the best choices you have if you were to quit using Skype today. So without further delay, here are some of the best free and open-source Skype replacements (in no particular order) especially for those of you who are using Linux…

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Install Python 2.5 on CentOS/4

    • Two monitors. Different resolutions. One desktop.

    • Install Ubuntu without burning LiveCD from Windows 7 dual-boot(not wubi)

    • 7 Useful Commands For Ubuntu Linux Newbies

    • Linux Shell Introduction

    • How not to upgrade a Mint installation

    • # Install Arch Linux On Your Computer [Part 2]

    • Quiz: Input/Output Redirection

    • Put your site under Siege

    • Automounting NTFS flash drives in Gentoo

    • Hidden Linux : Hardware reports

    • builtins

    • HOWTO : Yet Another Back|Track 5 on Dell Streak 5

    • Why run your own DNS server? (Spamassassin)

    • The Bootable Maintenance Flash Drive

    • How to change the default application for a type of file in Linux Mint/Ubuntu

    • Remotely manage your KDE system from your Android Phone

    • Wireless Network Security: How to Use Kismet

    • Enabling Compiz Fusion On An Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop (With The Unity Desktop)

    • Getting secure with Mantra: An open source penetration testing kit

    • Install LMMS 0.4.12 In Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal | PPA

    • How To Set Up An Openfire Instant Messaging Server On CentOS 5.6

  • Games

    • Valve Makes The Source SDK Free Of Charge

      Valve Software has announced they’ll be making the Source Engine’s Software Development Kit (SDK) available free of charge to the community and their gaming customers.

      Details can be found on the Valve Software web-site. They also have information on their Wiki as making free access to the Source SDK should allow their “modding” community to further flourish.

    • First teaser trailer for Dirk Dashing 2 and July Newsletter

    • Interview with Keith Poole from Desura part 2!

    • Game Drift Linux – Distribution For Gamers

      Jimmy Thomsen from Linos a company which specializes on customizing Ubuntu to suite costumers needs has released a GNU/Linux distribution based on Ubuntu for gamers called Game Drift Linux !

    • Strategy Game ‘Unknown Horizons’ Gets Random Maps and New Graphics in Latest Update

• Desktop Environments/Login Managers

  • Light Desktop Environment for Fedora 15 (LXDE or XFCE)

    If you believe that you are not yet ready for Gnome 3 or if your hardware can’t handle the heavy desktop environments then you can always enjoy Fedora 15 Lovelock with your old hardware using light desktop shells like LXDE or XFCE.

  • 5 of the best lightweight window managers for Linux

    If you do a lot of work on a Linux computer, continuously switching between many windows, the right window manager can make you much faster and more productive than an extra 2GB of RAM.

  • LXDM: the wannabe Login Manager

    I love the idea behind LXDM: provide a lightweight, NOT freakingly bloated (in terms of dependencies, == doesn’t pull in half GNOME) Login Manager.
    If it only worked properly. Until yesterday night at least.

    Besides we all know that LXDM (the LXDE Login Manager) is in its early stage of development (kudos to its devs), it doesn’t mean that XDG specifications don’t deserve proper attention, and implementation.

    Until yesterday, in Sabayon land, LXDM wasn’t able to load Desktop Environments correctly, for this reason (lxdm.c): the lxdm_do_login() is in charge of reading user configuration ($HOME/.dmrc or whatever) and fork() the DE loader away.

  • Stability Adventures Part 1 – Adding unit tests to compiz

    As part of the Quality Assurance commitment I am making for compiz, one of the biggest parts of this is unit and regression testing. Previously, compiz has had no such infrastructure for doing so and this has allowed for subtle regressions to be introduced into earlier revisions and then not become noticable until much later ones, making the regression very difficult to track down. One of the more annoying ones is one I have just finished debugging at 3:45AM, bug 804683, where due to the way that clock_gettime () works, it can return time values which are less than what it previously would have returned a few nanoseconds ago. Luckily, I have a fix for this. However, it was difficult to find and a lot of time was wasted debugging one of the problems that came out of it (wallpaper plugin auto-cycling not being called accurately).

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Blog: Dutch KDE BBQ

    • Plasma Active Summer Tour

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 26th June 2011

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Newlooks – a classic touch for GNOME 3

      The design of the default GNOME 3 theme Adwaita has been optimized for the GNOME Shell where it really shines but it’s not really meant to be used in the Fallback Mode.

    • Top 10 Dazzling GTK Themes

      Gnome shell may have started its bull run but the good old Gtk themes still don’t fail to pack a punch. Have a look at our choice of Gtk 3 themes sourced from the Mecca of all Gnome themes – gnome-look.org

    • Why Gnome 3′s Fallback mode sucks

      Ask every Gnome user. Every Gnome release, developers take away features, while giving us a proverbial carrot, but Gnome 3? They decided to just give us a stick.

      For starters, the GDM, The screen where you log in? There used to be a way to select your keyboard language and other settings. That’s gone in 3.0. (Psst, some people use áccénts on their passwords but I guess Gnome isn’t designed for people)

    • gnome-shell one week in

      Well its almost a week since I upgraded to Fedora 15 and started using gnome-shell. The good news is I’m still using it and generally really like it, although admittedly there’s quite a few bugs, and quite a few regressions that I really dislike. Fortunately a lot of those are fixed in the short tern with a few extensions and gnome-tweak-tools. I’ve also filed quite a few bugs, updated others where I felt I could add useful information, or just added myself onto the bug for easier tracking. There’s a lot of fixes that are being worked on for gnome 3.2 and I appreciate that the gnome team is working hard to balance their vision and design with a workable desktop.

• Distributions

  • Lightweight Portable Security 1.2.1

    After playing with Lightweight Portable Security for a few days, I have to say I’m a bit disappointed.

  • Porteus 1.0: On the Trail of SLAX

    ISO image of Porteus 1.0 is quite small, well below 300Mb. Of course, it can be burned to CD and ran from there. And also you can put Porteus onto USB drive and run from there. I wanted to use second option. Documentation says that I need to copy files from iso-image when it is mounted as loop device or via archive manager. Then script has to change Master Boot Record on the drive.

  • New Releases

    • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 154

      · Announced Distro: PCLinuxOS KDE 2011.6
      · Announced Distro: Vinux 3.2
      · Announced Distro: Linux Mint 11 LXDE RC
      · Announced Distro: Mandriva 2011 RC1

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • PcLinuxOs 2011.6 Review / Thoughts

    • PCLinuxOS 2011 Review – Linux Distro Reviews

    • Mandriva Desktop 2011

      I think users are going to like Mandriva Desktop 2011 plenty. Check the main website for a full review when the stable version is released.

  • Gentoo Family

    • Sabayon 6

      The Sabayon developers have done a good job at making Gentoo accessible for less technical users. However, this distro is in need of some software management improvements as I noted in the problems section. The Entropy Store needs to be a bit more aesthetically pleasing and it could also use a name change.

      Overall though my experience with Sabayon was pretty positive and there’s not a whole lot to dislike about it. It’s a solid desktop distro that should get the job done for most people.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Executive offers peek under the Red Hat

      I was the first Massachusetts employee – early 2001. At the time we were a completely retail, boxed product. We decided that there was a need to bring Linux to the [business] enterprise, to make Linux enterprise-class. I did a job fair up here. I had 1,500 people show up, 400 of which had some kind of kernel expertise. I did job fairs in other parts of the country, and I would get one or two.

    • Fedora

      • Installed Fedora 15

        Despite all the efforts to make Fedora 15 easier and more user friendly, making power users kind of unhappy by removing functionality and features, it doesn’t look ready yet (please, remove more features! :D).

      • Fedora and laptops – only a brief look …

        When installing Fedora , we can send hardware profile to Fedora Team.

      • Fedora in Public Libraries

        Our local Linux Users Group in my home town of Osijek has started workshops called knowledge exchange in partnership with our public library. So first step was to install Fusion Linux Fedora Remix on their PCs.

        Are there other examples with Fedora being rolled out in public libraries or in some other public institutions? I would be really interested with their experiences.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Now Powered by Simply MEPIS 11

        Firstly, sorry about the lack of posts recently. I kind of function on a post-when-I’m-not-doing-anything-else schedule. Recently, doing anything else has involved, at least computer wise, breaking yet another Ubuntu based installation. This time it was Netrunner, which is a shame as it looked quite nice from what I saw. It was probably my fault. Anyway, I have never actually given KDE a fair shot. I like GTK a bit more, particularly because it is used in more than one environment. Netrunner’s implementation showed me that KDE 4 could actually be quite simple to use and of course, nice to look at.

        So I wanted to keep trying out KDE, but also to escape an Ubuntu base and the instability it brings (at least in my experience, yours may very well be different). This left me with many options. Fedora, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, OpenSuse, Sabayon, Calculate and Salix all offer KDE desktops, among others. MEPIS, Chakra and Pardus are also great devoted KDE distributions. Still, I wanted stability without losing the package variety I am accustomed to from Ubuntu so I opted for the only Debian stable based distro out of those, MEPIS 11.

        [...]

        Having used MEPIS for a few days now I can officially say that it is as stable, nice looking, and easy to use as it is said to be.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • 10.000 Ubuntu-PCs: “Segen und Fluch”

        • Unified Messaging Menu / MeMenu On The Way [Mockup]

          According to a recent update to the Ubuntu Wiki Messaging Menu page, the MeMenu will be integrated into the Messaging Menu. Further more, the MeMenu Ubuntu wiki page now says it’s obsolete and will be replaced “by an IM status section in the messaging menu”, which makes it pretty clear that the MeMenu and Messaging Menu unification is about to happen.

        • Inner City Boston Ubuntu Hour 2

        • Ubuntu: how to deal with (or not) Unity

        • Why Unity Will Become The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened To Ubuntu

          It has been two full months since Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” was released with the new Unity user interface. With Unity, Canonical has taken a very drastic step and cut down on a lot of customizability that many power users would want. Understandably, many proclaimed that Unity is the best thing that Canonical has ever done. There was even an article claiming that Ubuntu is on a decline due to Unity.

        • Ubuntu 11.10 Release Schedule Changed, Alpha 2 Delayed

          The release schedule for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system has been modified last week by Canonical. The second Alpha version was supposed to arrive for testing last Thursday, June 30th, but it was rescheduled for July 7th.

        • Ubuntu wants to become its own brand

          Recently I’ve found that I have a problem with Ubuntu, but it’s not a simple one to explain.

          You don’t expect a distribution at the top of the popularity charts to risk its user base and its wider community standing by making big changes in a single release, yet this is exactly what Canonical has done with Ubuntu 11.04.

        • Inside Natty Narwahl: the all-new Ubuntu

          The latest version of Ubuntu, codenamed Natty Narwhal, isn’t just another release of the iconic distribution. We take a comprehensive look at the new interface.

          [...]

          Natty is nice. It boots fast, is slick to use, and Unity is the visual upgrade Ubuntu badly needs to compete in this age of Mac OS X and Windows 7. It’s also bold enough to go out on its own limb and not emulate either competing OSs (though it does clearly borrow from Mac OS X). And this is a good thing, because we need fresh ideas every now and then to see if there’s a better way of doing things.

        • Ubuntu Slaps Its Users In The Face

          Second, everyone talks about this bad relationship Ubuntu has with Gnome. This I personally find amusing. If Ubuntu has upset Gnome, and the Gnome foundation so much, why do they accept financial support for them? Canonical sits on the Gnome Advisory Board because they support (donate money to) Gnome. This position allows them to help ‘guide’ the Directors of the Gnome Foundation in the overall direction of Gnome and the Gnome Foundation. Doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of bad feelings there, or neither of the two would be together is my guess.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Bodhi Linux for ARM Alpha 1

            If you have used Bodhi before then you may be aware that one of the profiles we offer by default is one that is optimized for touch screen devices.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • HP in Discussions to License WebOS Software, CEO Apotheker Says

      Hewlett-Packard, which makes and sells its own phones and tablets that run the WebOS operating system, rose 1.3 percent to a three-week high of $35.55 in New York trading yesterday.

    • Android

      • Samsung, Google, Canonical: Please Make Honeycomb Work With Ubuntu

        Android and Ubuntu are cousins, they share the same blood stream and DNA code. However, there seems to be some problem between the two brothers (or sisters). Honeycomb uses MTP as the file transfer protocol instead of Mass Storage Device (non-Android OS such as iOS for iPad are even worse as you can’t do anything without risky iTunes.)

        While we can mount and see folders on Honeycomb tablets, we can’t see content inside those folders or take back-up of images or files that we downloaded.

      • China v USA: Who Loves Freedom More?

        Well, it turns out they both love that other OS more than freedom but at least in China, Android and Linux get equal time.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Really Small Cheap Computers

      At 7 inches I found tablets as cheap as $86 CDN. So it’s not the latest and greatest – 4 hours battery life, 800MHz ARM11, Android 2.1, 256MB RAM and resistive touch screen.

    • Tablet operating systems compared

      Each comes with a set of pros and cons and will almost certainly influence your tablet buying decision, so here’s our guide to every major system.

Free Software/Open Source

• An Update on the IFOSS Law Review and Announcing the IFOSS Law Book

  We have written before about the International Free and Open Source Law Review, but it’s worth getting an update as to what was in the last issue. I also want to make you aware of the latest publication coming out of the community of lawyers interested in free and open source software, the IFOSS Law Book.

• Getting secure with Mantra: An open source penetration testing kit

  Mantra is an open source, browser-based framework for penetration testing and security assessments. It’s based on Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, so it’s cross-platform, and it’s part of the Open Web Application Security Project — OWASP. Techworld Australia recently caught up with project leader Abhi M. Balakrishnan to talk about Mantra and its goals

• Events

  • Proposition of Cross-Distro Mini-Conf for Linux.conf.au 2012

    Time has come again to think to our friends down under ! Since I was there in 2007 for a MondoRescue conference I think this is really a place to be in the FLOSS ecosystem when possible; Too bad it’s so far away from France Travel costs are not light either.

  • Debian at several conferences

    The Debian Project is pleased to announce that it will be present at several events in the coming weeks, ranging from developer-oriented conferences to workshops for users and wannabe developers. As usual, upcoming events are also listed on our website.

    From June 27 to July 3, during Campus Party 2011 in Bogotá, Colombia, Debian Colombia invites all to join the special event “Lleva un paquetico en tu corazón (Keep a Little Package in Your Heart)” during which attendees will work on bugs and will create Debian packages. It will also be possible to participate via IRC by joining the channel debian-co on irc.debian.org. Further information (in Spanish) is available on the wiki page.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Automake and cmake revisited

    One reason I had for awhile considered cmake so strongly in GNU Telephony is that I choose to experiment with using Qt to build applications, and at the time I thought it rather difficult to build QT applications under autconf/automake. A week ago I revisited this question on my own, and found I was actually wrong about this.

• Project Releases

  • Gawk 4.0 Is A Major New Release

    Besides releasing libgcrypt 1.5 this week, another GNU project has been updated. Gawk 4.0.0 has been officially released as a major update to this popular free software utility. Gawk 4.0.0 presents several new end-user features along with revamped internals.

  • A New Version Of Libvirt Brings Many Changes

  • Minitunes 1.0 has been released

    Minitunes 1.0 has been released, The new release added a new search box that allow you to search music in your collection , added drag’n’drop, which let us to add songs or entire albums simply by dragging them within the application, adding new translations. Fixed some bugs found in previous versions to improve stability. and more.

• Public Services/Government

  • AGIMO finalises new open source guide

    Includes procurement guidelines and open source software policy.

    The Federal Government has issued version 2.0 of its Guide to Open Source Software, after seeking public comments on a draft guide in March.

    The new, 67-page document (pdf) replaced a guide that was issued by former special minister of state Eric Abetz in April 2005.

    Australian Government CIO Ann Steward said on Friday that she was “very pleased with the response” to the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO)’s call for comments on the draft.

• Programming

  • Quick Update

    Hey all i am sorry for the last post i have many posts drafted to be posted within the next 2-3 weeks where i am going to discuss my project GccPy as there has been alot happening with it recently, i am working on a paper which shows everything about it so far but i want to have some posts demonstrating the basic principles of compilers and in deed creating an Ahead of Time version of Python on top of GCC and how this actually works. I personally find it a pretty cool topic but first i will am just in a bit of rant mood and its about whats happened since my last blog post:

    Well anyway i’m currently in an awkward position i feel i may leave university but i will see because its simply causing me so much problems in my day to day life, I’ve got onto Google summer of code 2011 yet again to work on Gccpy with Ian lance Taylor but i may focus a little more on working on the Gcc middle-end to make some of my work a little easier. But the problem i am having at the moment with university is i actually failed all my modules last semester which may sound awful. Esp the one in compiler development i am writing a complaint about this at the moment due to the fact i actually took my own time to create a compiler specificity for this language they developed which works i cant emphasize this enough it actually works and demonstrates an IR properly designed and works well and doesn’t segv if you put in a syntax/grammar error i didnt even have to do this for the module.

  • No need to worry as open source contributions decline

    As open source usage has entered the mainstream, are users contributing less time and money to open source projects, thereby putting the future of the project at risk? One CEO of a leading open-source-based company thinks so.

  • GNU Awk gets major tune up in version 4.0.0

    The GNU Awk developers have announced version 4.0.0 of Gawk, aka GNU Awk, the GNU Project’s free software implementation of AWK, the data-driven scripting language for extracting data and creating reports. Gawk 4.0.0 is the result of two years’ work in which the developers made a number of major changes.

    For example, they have added BEGINFILE/ENDFILE allowing Gawk programs to execute rules when they begin or end processing a file and support for indirect function calls and “arrays of arrays” (including an isarray function). There is a new –sandbox option which disables the system() call and redirects input/output and extensions, allowing for “scripts from questionable sources” to be run with minimal access to the system.

  • Introducing Multithreading to Mature Desktop Applications

Leftovers

• L’Affaire DSK: Presumption of Innocence Lost

  When Dominique Strauss-Kahn first mulled over the idea of running for president of France, he professed concern that his vulnerabilities in the coming election would be the trifecta of “money, women, his being Jewish.” In the week since a housekeeper at New York’s Sofitel Hotel alleged that he assaulted and attempted to rape her, all three of those elements have converged to render any thought of a political future for Strauss-Kahn entirely beside the point.

• Finance

  • Here’s The Legal Complaint WikiLeaks Is Threatening To File Against Visa, MasterCard

    More than six months have passed since Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and others cut WikiLeaks’ purse strings. And if that blockade lasts six more days, the secret-spilling group plans to take its financial fight to the courtroom.

  • LEGAL ACTION BY WIKILEAKS AND DATACELL AGAINST VISA AND MASTERCARD

    WikiLeaks and Datacell (a service provider assisting WikiLeaks) are to sue Visa & MasterCard for engaging in an unlawful, U.S. influenced, financial blockade.

    On June 9th a the law firms Bender von Haller Dragested in Denmark and Reykjavik Law Firm in Iceland acting on behalf of DataCell and WikiLeaks told the companies that if the blockade is not removed they will be litigated in Denmark and a request for prosecution will be filed with the EU Commission. Visa Europe, MasterCard Europe, and Teller (a Danish company licensed to process transactions on behalf of the card companies) are the subjects of the complaint.

    It was pointed out to these companies that their coordinated action on December 7th last year to block all credit card transactions to WikiLeaks and DataCell constituted a serious violation of the Competition Rules of the EU (Article 101(1) and 102). Furthermore, that the actions of these companies have violated Danish merchant laws when they terminated the payment services and by refused to reinstate them.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Copyright group Creative Commons targets web users

      Creative Commons’ chief of staff, Lisa Green said that the campaign was partly aimed at combating the myth that it supported “giving everything away for free”.

Reader’s Picks

• Anti-Trust

  • Now that Microsoft owns Skype, Facebook will offer some kind of in browser Skype.

    Sky P2P, aka Skype, is a peer to peer network service. Putting it in a browser so that it can pretend to be a client is silly. Facebook is now one of the most hated companies in the US, along with other Microsoft partners such as cable monopolies, airlines and big banks.

• Censorship

  • Telstra now blocks websites.

  • US ISPs will throttle customers at the request of big publishers [2]

    This is basically the worst of ACTA done privately.

• Privacy

  • US Wiretaps were up 34% in 2010 over 2009

    Thanks to the PAT RIOT act, law enforcement does not have to ask a court for permission, so the rise in asking is just a drop in the bucket. People who want privacy should only free software and encrypted communications.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Patent aggressors acquire Nortel patents

More Reader’s Picks

• Happy 10th Birthday to Bittorrent

• Steve Ballmer defends himself by yelling

  Microsoft regularly inserts laugh tracks and applause into embarrassing media, so I would not trust this clip for crowd response.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Google Health is Dead, HealthVault Indivo Win

    Indivo X has almost all of the same benefits as HealthVault (they are little behind on the Direct implementation and beta deployment), but if you actually want to avoid a repeat of the Google Health fiasco, this is the way to go.

    People should only use this kind of storage if they can use their own crypto and the site acts as a public key broker for doctors and patients. No one should use any Microsoft software for medical records because Microsoft’s executives are convicted anti-trust felons.

  • The Decline of Employer-Based Health Insurance

    in 1989, the vast majority of Americans — well over two-thirds of the population — got their coverage through employers. … the share of Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance declined from 64.2 percent in 2000 to 58.5 percent in 2008. Most of that decline occurred during the Bush Administration, and before the most recent recession began. … The reason more and more small employers are no longer offering coverage is because many of them have been “purged” by their insurance carriers. … All it takes is one employee of a small business — or the spouse or child of one employee — to get critically ill for the company’s insurer to jack up rates so high that the business owner has no choice but to drop coverage for everyone.

  • How ignoring your neighbor’s problems hurts you. [2]

    The cost of healthcare is escalated because of the claims of these unfortunate employees. Their claims raise your rates. That shouldn’t be the only reason to support the smoke free workplace – but it’s at least one major one.

    Bans on public smoking usually half the number of hospital admissions for heart attacks.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Walmart Fruits and Veggies Brought to you by Prison Labor

  • FBI abuse round up

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Email shows that UK government officials got together with industry people to cook up lies about nuclear risk in the wake of Fukushima.

    We need to ensure the anti-nuclear chaps and chapesses do not gain ground on this. We need to occupy the territory and hold it. We really need to show the safety of nuclear.

    The same people plan to build eight new reactors in the UK.

  • Despite damming new revalations about the size and impact of Fukushima, the story has fallen out of US corporate media

  • The World Health Organization suppresses research about the effects of radiation and radioactive fallout, following an agreement made with the IAEA.

    the 2005 report of the IAEA-dominated Chernobyl Forum, which estimates a total death toll from the accident of only several thousand, is widely regarded as a whitewash as it ignores a host of peer-reviewed epidemiological studies indicating far higher mortality and widespread genomic damage. … [radiation biologist Keith Baverstock was fired by the WHO for] new epidemiological evidence from nuclear test veterans and from soldiers exposed to depleted uranium indicated that current risk models for nuclear radiation were understating the real hazards.

  • BP has bought control over scientific assessment of the effects of the Big Spill, and is using this to prematurely declare areas as clean.

    the party responsible for the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history now has the power to dictate the course of restoration efforts.

    Promises to privately compensate businesses in the region were not honored and the “clean up” effort is mostly a cover up.

  • Global heating is triggering leakage of a tremendous store of methane under the Arctic Ocean, which is so big it would cause catastrophic warming all by itself if a substantial fraction escaped.

• Finance

  • Google’s bids for Nortel patents were all famous physical constants, ending in Pi billion dollars.

  • Wikileaks will sue Visa and Mastercard for the $15,000,000 in donations their denial of service cost.

  • Stock buybacks are a spending black hole designed to make executives and stock brokers richer.

    “Buybacks don’t improve operations, make the health system run more efficiently or reduce premiums. Their sole purpose is to boost stock prices” for the benefit of investors and executives. … The buybacks slowed after that year [2007] as a result of the economic downturn but are back in favor. … between 2003 and 2010, the five largest for-profit insurance firms spent $64.1 billion on share buybacks.

  • Republican Rep. Issa was buying Goldman Sachs bonds while he defended the bank’s interests in Congress.

• Anti-Trust

  • KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures put their hooks into GoDaddy

    The Scottsdale, Arizona based company which has built its marketing around scantly-clad women, manages more than 48 million domain names.

  • Internet Explorer now at 44% according to StatCount.

  • the winning consortium in the Nortel NRTLQ case represented the bulk of Android’s competition in the smartphone OS market.

• Civil Rights

  • Palestinians accuse Israel of deliberately acting to divert and degrade Gaza’s water.

  • Greece interfered with a Gaza relieve flotilla, but that can be expected from a cruel government that is selling out its own people.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Eric Schmitd predicts web censorship

    “as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television,” Schmidt reasoned. “If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket,”

    This is true everywhere and most people are unaware of it. The rich and powerful people who govern broadcast will censor the web if we let them.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Another story about the Mayo Clinic’s fight against a business method patent on blood tests.

    Mayo and its backers, including the American Medical Association and the American College of Medical Genetics, claim Prometheus is staking exclusive rights over the body’s natural response to illness and medical treatment. They say that such sweeping patents could make it harder to practice medicine, limit access to care and increase treatment costs. The patent, Mayo argues, even covers a physician’s thought processes.

  • New Zealand sotftware companies happy without software patents

    While the majority of these submissions were critical of the proposed exclusion of software what was notable by it’s absence was a single submission by a New Zealand owned commercial software development company.

    The objections were filled by multinational companies and lawyers. The same result would happen anywhere because no one really wants sostware patents.

  • Copyrights

    • Hypocritical whisper campaign against free software, leads to denial of non-profit status for organizations in the US.

      Some hypothesise this is because of complaints to the IRS from large corporations accusing open source non-profits of actually being tax avoidance devices for their competitors. … there are many non-profits in this predicament … the IRS position is “we’re still reviewing”

      The organizations have been silent because they don’t want to be punished. This left them divided and helpless but that’s at an end now and contacts for complaints are given in the article.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Hope and Change Inside My Computer – Part II

  In retrospect, I have recently read a large amount of comments and articles on how Linux is not ready for prime time. Honestly, if I had read even a fraction of these articles, I doubt I would have installed it, even with Mark’s endorsement. In the past two months or so, I can honestly say I can not understand how these writers came to such a conclusion. Linux works extremely well for me.

• Linux IT to underwrite open-source adoption

  Linux IT is aiming to kick-start community-based open-source software adoption among UK enterprises with the launch of an indemnification scheme.

  In what it claims is a world first, the integrator is offering to underwrite any community-based open-source software that meets the requirements of its
  verification process.

  The soon-to-be-launched programme, which is backed by an unnamed insurance firm, enables Linux IT to fix or replace the software if it does not work as expected. Cover to the value of £5m is provided.

• Desktop

  • Virgin America Offers Free Wi-fi To Test Google Chromebook

    Virgin America is offering its flyers an opportunity to ‘test-fly’ Google Chromebook with fee Wi-Fi. Virgin America flyers will get a chance to check out a Chromebook at their departure airport gate and take the new notebook computer out for a spin onboard select Virgin America flights. The offer will run from July 1 to September 30, 2011.

  • Samsung Galaxy Tab, Chromebook Beat Apple On Amazon

• Server

  • MCSE or RHCE – Which certifications should you be the most proud of?

    The issue with the MCSE is that the tests are glorified word association exams. To pass, all you need to do is learn all the technology names and keywords created by Microsoft, the contexts in which these words are used, and the contexts in which they aren’t used. Obviously an understanding of the technologies behind the buzzwords is helpful, but not essential.

• Applications

  • 7 of the Best Free Linux Bioinformatics Tools

    Bioinformatics has been defined in many different ways, but it is common ground to regard this discipline as the application of mathematics, computing and statistics to the analysis of biological information. The objective of bioinformatics is to enable the finding of new biological insights, and to create a broader, more critical view from which unifying principles in biology can be perceived.

    Bioinformatics is very important in the field of human genome research. It has become crucial for large-scale measurement technologies such as DNA sequencing, microarrays, and metabolomics. The field of bioinformatics has been aided significantly by Linux-based hardware and software. There are a number of Linux distributions which offer an integrated bioinformatics workstation. The popular distribution Bio-Linux packages hundreds of bioinformatics programs spanning a number of different fields.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to remove duplicate files without wasting time

    • Do more with less

  • Games

    • Dead Cyborg, New Episodic Science Fiction Adventure Game Coming to Linux

      Dead Cyborg, a new donation based episodic science fiction adventure is coming soon to Linux. The game is based on Blender game engine and is made by one person Endre Barath, who has done all the coding, designing and written the story as well.

• Distributions

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • They make Mageia: Jérôme Quelin

      Now that things are well on their way and that Mageia 1 is there, it’s time to discover some more about the persons that are making this a reality.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux-based networked DVR can record from 64 cameras

    IndigoVision announced a doubling of capacity to 2TB disks on its NVR-AS 3000 of Linux-based, surveillance-oriented network video recorders (NVRs). The NVR-AS 3000 systems are now available with up to 6TB of usable RAID 5 storage, as well as RAID 0/1 options, and can record full framerate video and audio from 64 cameras, and play back 20 streams simultaneously, says the company.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Canonical releases Ubuntu One for Android devices

        LINUX VENDOR Canonical has brought its cloud storage that it calls Ubuntu One to Android devices, saying that in order to stream files, it stores them as plain text.

        Canonical’s Ubuntu One cloud storage service had previously been available from the outfit’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, however with the arrival of Ubuntu One Files on Android, users can access the service on both PCs running Ubuntu and Android devices. The free service offers 2GB of storage space and does not need a PC to operate.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • TouchPad ships to hurrahs for WebOS, but hoots at the hardware

      The Wi-Fi version of the 9.7-inch HP TouchPad tablet went on sale today for $499 (16GB) and $599 (32GB). Early reviews follow the same general pattern as those of the original Palm Pre two years ago: praise for the promise of WebOS, but disappointment over bugs, performance, lack of apps, and limited battery life.

    • Why HP Is Negotiating WebOS License Deals?

      Because WebOS won’t survive if its runs only on HP devices, its as simple as it goes. HP doesn’t command the smartphone market as much as Samsung or Motorola do. In addition HP also needs what matters the most ‘apps’ for WebOS to be successful. Not many developers will be interested in porting their apps for a platform which has a non-existent market.

      Most HP smartphone users are corporate users and they may not want Angry Birds on their devices. If there are no takers, Rovio won’t port Angry Birds to WebOS and if there is no Angry Birds there, many regular users won’t buy WebOS phones. Simple.

      So, HP needs vendors which can take WebOS to consumer segment.

    • Media-oriented Android tablet sports IR remote

      Vizio announced the VTAB1008, an eight-inch tablet that includes infrared “universal remote” capabilities and runs Android 2.3. The company added that it will employ Android and its own Vizio Internet Apps Plus (V.I.A. Plus) additions in forthcoming TVs, Blu-ray players, smartphones, “and more.”

    • Cisco Cius Tablet Set For Release

      In June of 2010, Cisco CEO John Chambers announced the Cius, an Android based tablet that was supposed to be the first enterprise grade tablet. Fast forward to 2011 and the Cius still is not yet generally available, but that’s about to change.

      Cisco today announced that the Cius will become generally available in July and will include a new enterprise AppHQ component for the delivery of mobile applications. Cisco is trying to differentiate the Cius from consumer tablets like the Apple iPad as well as other Android tablets by providing enterprise grade collaboration, security and applications. The device isn’t just a tablet, it can also be docked with a phone and a keyboard as well.

Free Software/Open Source

• DHS, Georgia Tech seek to improve security with open-source tools

  The Georgia Tech Research Institute has been designated the lead organization in a government project to develop open-source cybersecurity capabilities.

• Events

  • Calls for papers issued for ELC Europe, Linux.conf.au

    Calls for papers were announced for CELF’s Embedded Linux Conference Europe, co-located with LinuxCon Europe in Prague on October 26-28, as well as the Australian Linux.conf.au, planned for Jan 16-20, 2012 in Ballarat, Australia. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation announced Kim Blanche’s “Flying Penguins” as the winner of the 20th Anniversary of Linux T-shirt contest, earning her a trip to next month’s LinuxCon Gala in Vancouver.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • You’ve Got Firefox in my Pidgin: Instantbird 1.0 Launches

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice 3.4.1 Is Now Available for Download

    A few minutes ago, July 1st, The Document Foundation company announced the first maintenance release of the LibreOfficeb 3.4 open source office suite software for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms, bringing several bugfixes.

    LibreOffice 3.4.1 is available now (see download links at the end of the article), for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. The new release fixes some important bugs and updates several translations. Overall it is much stable than the previous release and everyone is encourage to update.

  • Major gaps of Open Office Impress versus Microsoft Power Point: what do you think?

    Yesterday Sergio, a user of OpenOffice Impress, sent to the OpenOffice.org discussion list his list of the “Major Gaps of OpenOffice Impress 3.3 vs. Microsoft Office PowerPoint”.

    Sergio compiled the list because, as much as he likes OpenOffice, “after struggling for over 1 year, sadly he had to stop using Open Office Impress and go back to Microsoft Power Point”.

  • PPAs and LibreOffice

    First I would like to thank everyone for their interest in LibreOffice! Second, I think it’s very important to understand that there’s a difference between PPAs and the default version shipped by Ubuntu. Just like any other distribution, Ubuntu releases a full GNU/Linux system that comes with a set of fully defined and qualified packages. Unless Ubuntu chooses to upgrade these packages themselves, they won’t move or change until the next version of the distribution is released. PPAs are a community based and convenient way to use more up-to-date version of software packages, but do not expect the same quality or to have a fault-proof software running; it’s an upgrade for the users who wish to enjoy their system with more spice and n

  • Ready for Paris? See you there in October!

    It seems I’m continuing my pattern of posting less here, which I find to be a disappointing yet apparently an unescapable trend. If you haven’t seen my “dents” and “tweets” on the side of this page, feel free to follow me on identi.ca (charlesschulz) and on Twitter (ch_s). Note that I’m much more often on identi.ca than on Twitter. Today, I would like to send everyone reading this blog a very special invitation. The first LibreOffice Conference will take place in Paris, from the 12th to the 15th of October. These will be great days to meet face to face and to exchange though conferences and informal, quick talks about several topics related to LibreOffice development, distribution and design. Also, and this is important: our call for papers is open but it will close by the end of July, so feel free to submit your proposal now. I would like to unveil somewhat what we have in store for this event.

• Education

  • How to teach the next generation of open source with Scratch

    Do you ever wish your kids would do something besides play video games on the computer? What if you could get a head start teaching them to be the next generation of open source developers?

    Computers are increasingly easy to use, but programming is far more complex–and less accessible. For many of us who now have small children, programming began with BASIC programs on computers that forced you to make them do something by offering nothing but a command line.

• Business

  Semi-Open Source

  • EnterpriseDB Extends PostgreSQL for Itanium

    Enterprise giant Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) has been warning its users this year that it plans to abandon the Intel Itanium architecture that powers HP’s (NYSE: HPQ) Unix operating system. While Oracle isn’t interested in supporting Itanium, others are.

    EnterpriseDB today announced Postgres Plus Advanced Server 9.0, which provides Oracle compatibility and now supportS HP-UX on Itanium.

Leftovers

• Facebook, Google+, and Centralized Proprietary Monocultures

  This week, Google released Google+, which is basically a social network that’s a lot like Facebook, but run by Google instead of Facebook. The big deal here is that it’s a lot easier to modify privacy settings and configure what information to post to which group(s) (“Circle(s)” in Google+-speak) of contacts. This shows that Google, at least on the surface, takes privacy a lot more seriously than Facebook. I say this because whenever a controversial privacy settings change occurs on Facebook, it’s usually in the direction of less privacy, and only when the users get outraged does Facebook do anything at all (and it’s usually insignificant), because the truth is that Facebook’s business is built upon selling users’ data to companies for marketing, advertising, etc. I’ve also gotten annoyed with Facebook’s chat and constant UI changes that occur for no good reason, so I’m a little more drawn in that sense to Google+ because it integrates Google Chat (which I know works), and all of Google’s applications have kept pretty much constant, simple UIs over the years. Please note that I haven’t actually used Google+, though I have an invitation (it seems like Google can’t process that invitation right now); any statements that make it seem like I’ve used it are actually just my hopes and expectations.

• Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s National Day of Divisiveness

  Texas Governor Rick Perry plans to host a “National Day of Prayer and Fasting” on Saturday, August 6 at Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas, in an event is billed as a “non-denominational, apolitical Christian prayer meeting.” Despite the “apolitical” label, the event has some political undertones, particularly since Perry has been flirting with a run for the Republican presidential nomination and currently serves as chair of the Republican Governors Association. Perry has invited the other 49 U.S. state governors to the event. The portrayal of the event as a “nondenominational” ceremony is a misnomer, too, since the event will be exclusively Christian, and no other belief systems will be represented.

• Walker Plans to Celebrate Budget Bill with Felon Until Union Broadcasts Rendezvous

  Governor Scott Walker will sign the controversial state budget bill into law June 26. He was originally scheduled to sign his budget at Badger Sheet Metal Works, a private business operated by a man with six felony tax convictions, in Green Bay, at 2 p.m. on Sunday. However, now that Gregory A. DeCaster’s tax troubles have been publicized, the governor’s office has announced a new location for the ceremony: Fox Valley Metal Tech, also in Green Bay.

  “While Mr. DeCaster has served his time in jail and paid his debt to society, it is fitting that the governor would choose to sign this budget at a business owned by someone who was once convicted of the felony of tax evasion,” said Marc Norberg, a Wisconsin native and assistant to the general president of the Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association.

  Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch said something quite similar earlier in the day when he told WisPolitics, “Green Bay, and certainly the company that we’re going to, reflects really what this budget and what Gov. Walker’s first term here is all about.”

• Supreme Court spat got physical

• Health

  • Insurers’ Bait and Switch

    More and more Americans are falling victim to one of the most insidious bait-and-switch schemes in U.S. history. As they do, health insurance executives and company shareholders are getting richer and richer. This industry-wide plot explains how health insurers have been able to reap record profits during the recent recession as the ranks of the uninsured and underinsured continue to swell.

    It also explains why the insurance industry and its allies are pulling out all the stops to kill a measure in the California legislature that could protect state residents from losing their homes and being forced into bankruptcy if they get seriously sick or injured.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Largely Symbolic: New Jersey Senate Bans Fracking

    While the ban is cause for celebration for those truly in favor of a “clean energy future,” it is largely symbolic because only a tiny sliver of the Marcellus Shale actually touches the state. There is actually some truth to the statement made by Energy in Depth’s Chris Tucker, who stated that the ban, by-and-large, is “irrelevant.”

  • What Happened to Media Coverage of Fukushima?

    Fukushima has been a wake up call about the dangers of nuclear power, and some countries are heeding the information. But it seems the U.S. is still sleeping when it comes to this issue. Light-to-absent coverage of TEPCO’s struggles to bring Fukushima under control, legislators who insist on acting favorably towards the nuclear power industry despite the deteriorated state of our current reactor fleet and an ineffective Nuclear Regulatory Commission have all contributed to a bad combination of a dangerous situation and a complacent American public on this issue.

• Finance

  • Insurers Spend Big Fighting Regulations, Paying CEOs Huge Salaries

    Nowhere are health insurers working harder to thwart reforms that could save consumers billions of dollars than in California. One measure they are especially determined to kill is a bill that would give state regulators the authority to reject rate increases that are excessive or discriminatory.

    The California Assembly passed a bill to do just that earlier this month over the intense opposition of insurers, including the state’s biggest supposedly nonprofit health plans: Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente.

  • Darrell Issa’s fishy dealings should (but won’t) be investigated by his own House committee

    Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), one of the richest members of Congress and the chairman of the House Oversight Committee who promised a hearing a day after the November 2010 elections, has always been slimy little creature who refuses to accept responsibility for his own misbehavior, everything from car theft to lying about his military history.

  • Goldman Sachs’s Connections With Central Banks Reach Deeper After Hiring

    The fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets said yesterday it hired Bank of England economist Andrew Benito after recruiting Huw Pill from the European Central Bank in May and Naohiko Baba from the Bank of Japan in January. Moving in the other direction, Ben Broadbent, Goldman Sachs’s ex-chief U.K. economist, started at the Bank of England last month. Former vice chairman Mario Draghi will take up the presidency of the ECB in November.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • RIAA: LulzSec & Anonymous Show Why We Need PROTECT IP

      Ah, the RIAA will apparently stoop to pretty much any old ridiculous argument to get PROTECT IP passed, I guess. The RIAA’s Mitch Glazier has written a typically ridiculous blog post defending PROTECT IP. Most of it tries (and fails) to counter the very credible claims of folks like Paul Vixie (who knows this stuff) that PROTECT IP (1) won’t work and (2) will break the internet and cause tremendous collateral damage. The arguments against Vixie pretty much amount to quoting people, who have known associations with those backing PROTECT IP, saying that “eh, things won’t be that bad, and we can minimize unintended consequences.”

Reader’s Picks

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Global warming thwarts a UK nuclear power plant

    it was stuffed with jellyfish. Another plant in the US state of Nebraska was flooded as an earth dam around it collapsed. Power to the spent fuel recirc was cut.

  • Global Warming has opened up the Northwest Passage, allowing species from the Pacific to migrate to the Atlantic.

    This article mentions gray whales and algae. Killer whales have also made the journey and were sited in the Gulf of Mexico before the drilling disaster.

• Finance

  • Money Services Roundtable, a loby group for Western Union, American Express, Travelex, MoneyGram and others, constructed a law to destroy an online banking rival.

    Even though Think Computer Corporation, the company that runs FaceCash, is capable of meeting both of these requirements, the unfortunate reality is that the California Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) requires licensees to have far more than the dollar figures specified by the statute. The DFI has been unwilling to provide a single number to us explaining how much money is actually required to obtain a license.

• Anti-Trust

  • PJ smells something rotten in the Nortel bidding and points to this article that quotes Maureen O’Gara

  • Now that Microsoft owns Skype, it is considered secure enough for the US Congress.

    They should check the patent on spying that Microsoft just applied for. If they read about the Bing sting, they might also drop Windows use.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • OECD advocates endless war on sharing and all the injustices required to make that practical. CSISAC calls them out

    [the OECD's Paris statement] could undermine “online freedom of expression, freedom of information, the right to privacy, and innovation across the world

• Censorship

  • Publishers can now order ISPs to disconnect people from the internet.

    under Section 60c of Finland’s Copyright Act, a court has granted CIAPC injunctions in three of the cases.
    What this means is without the sending of a so-called “first strike” letter, the respective ISPs of the subscribers in question are now required to completely disconnect their infringing customers from the Internet. … in all cases the file-sharer was either an actual Internet subscriber or a family member of a subscriber.

    Let’s see, there’s presumption of guilt, group punishment and large fees all to support the unjust war against sharing.

  • Italy grants government sweeping censorship powers.

• Privacy

  • Danish police would outlaw anonymous internet use.

  • Microsoft wants a patent on listening to your phone conversations.

    It’s not enough for them to violate your privacy, they want to be the official government spy.

• Copyrights

  • A black market exists for journals.

    This article is propaganda by the publisher who cries that ““pirates” are reading journals “for pennies on the dollar.” Communist China is invoked for inflammatory effect. How dare people share journals with each other?

  • The US Supreme Court strikes down prescritpion privacy laws in Vermont, New Hampsire and Maine.

    Pharmacies are said to have a “free speech” right to sell doctor prescribing information. EPIC argued that “de-identification” techniques were insuficient to protect patient privacy. The dissenting opinion was:

    the Vermont law affects expression “in one, and only one way” — by depriving data-mining companies of data that “could help pharmaceutical companies create better sales messages.” That is more linked to legal government effort to regulate a commercial enterprise, and not speech protected under the First Amendment,

    Ludicrous decisions like this are predictable from a court that says corporations have free speech rights.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• What WebOS Means To HP, Linux, And You

  In John’s review of the new HP TouchPad, he claimed that “WebOS is the real star of this show. The OS offers true multi-tasking and uses a system of “cards” and “stacks” to display active applications.” I think it’s worthwhile to remind everyone that WebOS is built atop the Linux kernel, and that has several interesting ramifications. HP has continued Palm’s dedication to user experience, and WebOS should make it abundantly clear that “Linux” need not be synonymous with “complex and arcane”. But there’s a lot more than just superficial window dressing to consider.

  HP could have chosen to use Android for their tablet. It would not have been a bad decision, really, but by buying and continuing to develop WebOS, HP is using Linux to better control their own destiny. Jim Zemlin, director of the Linux Foundation, says he sees this “as an anti-Microsoft decision so that they no longer need to rely on a third-party and be beholden when making important business decisions.” This tactic has been tried many times in the past: old-timers will remember various OEMs shipping DR-DOS rather than MS-DOS, and OS/2 rather than Windows 3.1, to fight the Redmond hegemony. But WebOS, and the proliferation of small mobile computing platforms (tablets, phones, printers, etc), allows HP to really own their whole stack, which allows them provide the best experience to their customers according to their own corporate vision.

• A nice surprise

  Today, I visited the same shop after a particularly hard day of a rather stormy week. I went in looking for an external HD and another clerk brought it to me. I instinctively started turning the box trying to find a Tux signal somewhere and the clerk noticed, so he politely asked me: “Excuse me…What are you looking for?”

  Mentally, I sighed and said to myself “here we go again” before I told him: “I want to know if these devices support Linux”.

• Server

  • 7 Reasons Why Linux Will Rule The Server Market

    e’ve ranted a lot about Linux not being able to catch up on Windows and Mac in the desktop arena. However, we can never complain about the position Linux enjoys in the server market. Of course 20-22 % is too small a figure to put the penguin in a dominant position, but the growth Linux has seen over the years has been astounding. From big companies like Google to small technology blogs that are read by a handful, Linux — as IBM prophesied in an advert long ago — is everywhere.

    Here are some of the reasons why we think Linux is the future ruler of the server market:

• Applications

  • Battery Drain Problem? : Bumblebee to the rescue

    Any laptop would definitely lose its charm if it requires frequent visits to the charging points and this is a fact that most Laptop owners hate in their laptops. Today this scenario is getting more complicated. As laptops are getting faster and as their graphics support increases the charge consumption also increases.

  • Rollback, a barrel of fun

    One morning, not long ago, I ran the sudo conary updateall command in the terminal emulator. Conary did what it was told, as Conary always does unless the connection times out or something. But this time, one of its gifts was a beta of Opera 11.50.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Fedora 15 x86_64)

    • Learn How to Install Oracle Linux 5

    • Do We Need An Android Patent Pool?

    • How to install openssh in Archinux

    • Install Flashplayer in Sabayon or Gentoo

    • Setup cpufreq and keep your laptop/netbook cooler on PCLinuxOS

    • A 5 minute guide to Fluxbox

    • Run custom command instead of my shell

    • How to remove duplicate files without wasting time

    • Sabayon Nostalgia

    • How To Install Arch Linux On Your Computer [Part 1]

    • [ PHP] – Get user’s country using ip

    • Using QEMU for Embedded Systems Development Part 1

    • Compile and Run Syncany on Ubuntu 11.04

    • BlueBubble: What I learned

    • Share Files Easily with ProFTPD

    • What To Do If Still Seeing Poor Linux Battery Life

      For those Linux users still reporting a large difference in power consumption when using Ubuntu 11.04 or any other modern Linux distribution compared to past Linux releases or Microsoft Windows, more information would be helpful. A list of notebooks/configurations where the battery life is still frustrating would be helpful for my purposes and I’m sure the community at large would like this data too.

  • Games

    • Gameolith The Linux® Game Download Store

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • New Plasma Active Window Switcher

      Last week, Marco and I have integrated a new window switcher into Plasma Active. We had designed and started to implement this rather central component of the shell during the Tokamak sprint a couple of weeks ago, now it finally made its way into Active, so you can update your system to the latest packages and enjoy it. (In order for it to work correctly, you’ll have to delete your plasma-tablet-appletsrc file, as we do not update these automatically at this stage of development). The new window switcher works very well, and is quite snazzy on top of that. It also contains an application launcher! I’ve recorded a small demo video showing these new features.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Nautilus Elementary Ambiance Theme Adds PPA, Looks Better Than Ever!

      Nautilus Elementary Ambiance GTK theme by simplygreat is perhaps the most beautiful mod of default Ubuntu Ambiance theme. We have featured it already in our top themes for Ubuntu 11.04 post. Few things have changed lately and the latest Nautilus Elementary Ambiance theme now comes with a PPA. Installation has now become a breeze.

    • Running GNOME apps in Kubuntu

      These days there is a lot of discussion going on surrounding the future of Ubuntu and GNOME with respect to desktop user interface or “desktop experience”. For me personally I find a lot of good in both Canonical’s Unity and GNOME’s gnome-shell. There is, however, enough issues, both technical and political, that I have been more of a mind to try other desktop environments.

• Distributions

  • Untangle your network

    Untangle it’s a software appliance (based on Debian) that can help you in managing your network from content security to web caching, remote access to policy enforcement, all from one simple, drag & drop command center.

  • New Releases

    • Calculate Linux 11.6 released

      The new version of the distribution Calculate Linux 11.3 has been released. All editions of distribution are available for download: Calculate Linux Desktop with desktop KDE (CLD), GNOME (CLDG) and XFCE (CLDX), Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS), Calculate Directory Server (CDS) and Calculate Scratch Server (CSS).

    • The last Zentyal beta installer (2.1-2) available!

      Zentyal Development Team is glad to announce the availability of a new beta installer, Zentyal 2.1-2! This is the last beta version: from July to September a series of release candidates will be published, and in September the next stable release (Zentyal 2.2) will see daylight.

      This installer contains all the improvements and bugfixes done since the release of the previous beta installer (2.1-1 ). Moreover, it also comes with the first previews of three fully new modules: PPTP, Captive Portal and VM Management. It is important to notice that these modules are still under development and they may be in alpha status – They are not intended for production environments.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Mandriva 2011 RC1 Looks Impressive, Screenshot Tour

      Mandriva, through Eugeni Dodonov, announced a few minutes ago, June 29th, the immediate availability for testing of the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming Mandriva 2011 Linux operating system.

      Mandriva 2011 RC1 contains a huge number of changes, compared to the previous development release, Mandriva 2011 Beta 3. It has updated applications, such as Mozilla Firefox 5.0, Opera 11.50, Pidgin 2.9.0, as well as a new revamped interface with new artwork.

    • A quick note about Mandriva 2011 UI

      Folks, just to drop you a quick note about Mandriva 2011 UI – if you enable Desktop effects, you’ll have a completely different UI experience when compared to the one with them disabled.

    • Reviewed: Mageia 1.0

      Our verdict: A worthy successor to Mandriva that promises to deliver even more in the future. 8/10

  • Gentoo Family

    • Larry the Cow Embraces Freedom

      We encourage our developers and users to create Gentoo artwork based on our newly released Larry.

    • Gentoo Screenshot Contest 2011

      Gentoo Users, Developers, and Staffers are encouraged to submit their sweetest screenshots. This year likewhoa went all out and put together a custom cms for us to use for the contest. Please head over to the 2011 Contest Page for all of the details.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Who Says You Can’t Make Money with Open Source?

      Red Hat’s CEO, Jim Whitehurst, expects the company’s revenue to TRIPLE to three billion dollars in five years. This is a company whose only business is providing service and support for open source software.

      IBM, on its 100th year in business, has been richly rewarded for its billion dollar investment in Linux with a market cap today that eclipsed Microsoft’s back in May. I would argue that IBM has created so much shareholder wealth largely because they got open source and they got it early. They built services and products around open source instead of competing with open source.

    • Red Hat Exec’s $1 Million Sale

    • Fedora

      • Fedora Logical Volume Manager Benchmarks

  • Debian Family

    • Packages I’ve added to LibreOffice in Debian Squeeze

    • How to start contributing to Debian?

      I often get requests of persons who would like to contribute to Debian but who don’t know where to start. Let’s try to answer this question properly so that I can give out this URL the next time that I am asked.

      The Debian website has a page explaining how to help Debian. While it provides no less than 10 suggestions in a daunting text-only list, it’s difficult to know what to do next once you picked up something that you could do.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • 5 Quick Tips to Improve Ubuntu 11.04 Unity Performance

          In my opinion, one area where successive Ubuntu releases continuously under-performed is on the overall system performance front. Every new Ubuntu release feels more and more bloated, especially so with latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. I was quite taken aback by fact that, even the so called Ubuntu “derivatives” like Pinguy OS and Elementary OS were a lot slicker than the original Ubuntu. Having said that, Unity is still very young and I believe it will become vastly improved by the time of next Ubuntu LTS release. But what all can we do to significantly improve overall performance of Ubuntu Unity right now? Lets explore.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • How Linux Mint took over all my computers

            Regular readers will recall that I was pretty darn impressed with Linux Mint 10 on my laptop. I’ve been slowly moving other machines to Mint since then, one at a time. First it was my test-bed machine, with various different versions – Mint 10, Mint 11, Mint Debian. I settled it on Mint 11 64-bit. Then my main desktop, which also got Mint 11 64-bit and is running nicely. The ancient Dell D610 laptop was next to go: that got Mint 10 32-bit.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Rugged AMC module taps dual-core 1.2GHz QorIQ

    Kontron announced its first AdvancedMC (AMC) processor module equipped with Freescale Semiconductor’s QorIQ processors. The single-width, Linux-ready AM4120 module incorporates: a dual-core, 1.2GHz QorIQ P2020 processor with extended longevity support; up to 4GB soldered DDR3 SDRAM; four SERDES lines; three gigabit Ethernet channels; flexible boot options; and under 17-Watt power consumption, says the company.

  • Nokia Will Ditch Users For Microsoft?

    It seems Mr Elop, the ex-Microsoft executive now driving the once master turned mistress Nokia towards Microsoft’s bed, is more determined to turn Nokia into a hardware truck which delivers Microsoft’s mobile OS.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Do We Need An Android Patent Pool?

      Once upon a time a company called iRiver made a name for itself with a line of MP3 players and portable media players. In fact I still have an old iRiver MP3 player lying around which I still use from time to time as a voice recorder thanks to its support for line and mic input. But while iRiver never exactly went away, the company has largely faded into the background after the launch of the iPod touch and iPhone.

    • Motorola XOOM Available In India

      Motorola has announced the availability of Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi and 3G variant tablets in India. Motorola XOOM features a 1GHz dual-core processor and 1 GB of RAM, front-facing and rear-facing cameras, true multi-tasking functionality, and the latest Google Mobile services on a 25.6 cm (10.1-inch) widescreen HD display.

    • E-Books readers sales rise, but are tablets really lagging?

      You see I’m also on record as saying that the Android Linux-powered e-readers were quickly evolving into tablets. Like what tablets you ask? Try the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color: they’re both powered by Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Further thoughts on the decline of ‘open source’ as a competitive differentiator

• Open Source is not a Sin, It’s a blessing

  The term open source to me means – no vendor lock-in, it means i can try out (at least a community version) without getting some kind of license key. It means there is likely a mailing list and a bug tracker — you know the stuff that provides transparency.

  What has happened in my view is that some of the commercial open core vendors have so watered down the term open source in their own marketing as to make it meaningless. After all if a so called open core vendor (software based on open source but with added ‘stuff’ around it) has the bulk of the added ‘stuff’ non-open source (often the case), then being open source in that context doesn’t really matter, does it?

• Do you FOSS or do you FLOSS?

  Recently a person was writing a paper and they used the term “FLOSS” (meaning Free and Li[bv]re Open Source Software) instead of “FOSS” (meaning Free and Open Source Software). The author happens to have been from Latin America and writing for a United Nations sponsored paper. In these types of papers the term “FLOSS” is used quite regularly.

• Scientist: How to attribute free software contributions in journal article, proceeding and monograph

  Scientists, academicians and researchers are a group of users that benefits greatly from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS / FLOSS). Most them would use free software not only to help in preparing graph and documentation, but also as the main tool in their investigation.

  Although it is not explicitly required by the software license or by software authors, the role of free software should be appropriately attributed by academicians and scientists who used them in their investigations as it would not only acknowledge the contribution of free software authors (some of them are hardworking academicians or scientists themselves), but this will also done to fulfill the academic accountability on the researchers part.

• Bear Turns Open Source Shark in Deep Water

  On this day he’s wearing his CEO hat. He’s come to talk about SharkCloud, his latest project, which could be a FOSS game changer if he gets it to fly.

• FUD Barriers For Open Source Non-Profits?

  Are US open source organisations having their applications for non-profit status blocked?

  In a post to a private mailing list I follow, Software Conservancy chief Bradley Kuhn has confirmed that an unexpected problem highlighted recently by CASH Music is indeed a real issue for open source groups in the USA seeking to formalise non-profit status. I asked Bradley if he’d be happy to share some of the information from that posting and he agreed.

  The problem is that, for unexplained reasons, the US tax authorities (IRS) are not approving applications from open source organisations for tax-exempt status very quickly – if at all. As Jesse von Doom notes in the blog posting that drew attention to the matter, “no one wants to draw the ire of the IRS”, but Bradley observes that this is a problem he has been hearing about for over a year.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Thunderbird Made Default In Ubuntu 11.10, Final Default Email Client Decision Not Yet Taken

      According to a recent change, Thunderbird is now the default email client in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, replacing Evolution. The update should be available for Oneiric users in a few hours.

      But this doesn’t mean Thunderbird will be default in the final Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot release because according to the default email client blueprint, the final decision has not been taken yet. We should find out if Thunderbird will stay as default sometime around Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Alpha 3, after both Thunderbird and Evolution will be evaluated…

    • Mozilla Thunderbird 5.0, a look at new features!| PPA Ubuntu

      The new Thunderbird comes with a handful of new features such as drag and drop enabled interface, improved add-on manager and account creating wizard and several fixes. The most apparent change you shall notice is definitely the better, minimal and more modern interface. The Add-on manager, Trouble shooting page and many bug fixes!

    • Thunderbird joins Firefox with rapid release

    • Firefox 5 A Success For Mozilla

      Firefox may not have been overwhelming in the features department, but it has accomplished a major goal for Mozilla: The transition of users was accelerated by a factor of 2.

      I cannot quite remember a Mozilla browser that was as controversial as version 5, a version that is loved and hated at the same time. For users, Firefox 5 is an almost insignificant update that does not deliver any tangible benefits with the exception of security updates that are phased for Firefox 4 (there was anyway just one big update.) However, as the days go by, we more and more feel that this is not really a browser that was made with Mozilla’s users in mind. This is a browser that was created as a launch platform for future Mozilla browsers. In some way, Firefox 5 is a browser that Mozilla made for itself.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Oracle v. Google – Oracle’s Response to the Daubert Motion

    Oracle has now filed its brief [PDF] in opposition to Google’s Daubert motion in which Google seeks to exclude Prof. Iain Cockburn, Oracle’s damages expert, as an expert in the patent infringement suit. Google’s arguments largely fell into the category of asserting Prof. Cockburn was ignoring or distorting facts and ignoring well established principles for determining damages.

    In its response Oracle makes a compelling argument that Prof. Cockburn’s determinations are within the bounds of reason, that Prof. Cockburn is an established expert on patent infringement damages, and that, to the extent Google disagrees with Prof. Cockburn’s approach and findings, Google should put forward its own expert or save its criticism of Prof. Cockburn for cross-examination at trial. It is hard to argue that point.

  • Do We Need An Android Patent Pool?

    Patents are dangerous for the innovation and progress in the IT field. Monopolies like Microsoft, Apple and Oracle have stared using the so-called software patents as bane to block innovation and competition in the market.

    America’s controversial software patent law is causing more damage to the IT industry than it is doing good. It’s time US congress must take steps to abolish the IT evil called software patents.

    Smaller players, also known as start-up are living under threat of being bullied by mega-corporates like Microsoft and Apple with some unnamed patent seeking ransom or face legal action.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • A Python Front-End To GCC Is Brewing This Summer

    It turns out there’s another fairly interesting Google Summer of Code project being worked on this summer beyond the exciting projects and the Mesa/X/Wayland projects that have piqued our interest this year. This project was somehow skipped past when looking at the GSoC information before, but it’s a continued effort (by the same student last year) to write a Python front-end to GCC.

• Public Services/Government

  • Czech environmental agency relying on open source and open standards

    Cenia, the Czech Republic’s Environmental Information Agency, is relying on a broad variety of open source solutions, says its director Jiří Hradec. “To provision services that vendor independence, we use open source wherever possible.”

• Openness/Sharing

  • Can Creative Commons solve the digital rights problem?

    The internet has made the sharing and remixing of content into a common pastime but copyright laws, first designed more than 400 years ago, have not kept up. Creative Commons attempts to change that and this week the organisation published a guide, The Power of Open, that shows exactly how the system works.

    Joi Ito, the chair of Creative Commons, told the Telegraph: “If you think about the success of the internet, it allows people to innovate without asking permission.” He said that existing copyright was an obstacle to that and so Creative Commons provided a way to let creators control their rights without stifling innovation.

  • CoLab: An Experiment Into Open Source Science

    Scientific research is exhaustive, time consuming, and often frustrating, especially when the results don’t turn out. What’s more, when publishing research articles, fellow scientists, colleagues, and the general public tend to be unaware of the amount of work put into the research, as the paper published only contains the best of the best in terms of results and findings. All the other data collected, the procedures used, the false starts, unpredictable mistakes and surprises that happen along the way go unnoticed, stored away in boxes to collect dust.

    But why? Why do scientists hide 90% of what they do? Are they afraid of their research being stolen? Are they worried that others in the scientific community may criticize or challenge their findings? Or is it just that they have gotten so used to doing their research behind closed doors that they stopped looking for a new way to do things? Whatever the reason, it seems that scientists should be collaborating and brainstorming together, utilizing the community resources available in order to better their research.

  • Chinese City Allegedly Pursues Open Internet Plan

    At OStatic, we’ve frequently covered one of the most anti-open technology trends in existence: censorship in regions of the world that don’t support open Internet principles. There are many free tools available, including open source tools, that allow for anonymous browsing in these regions, and China remains one of the most restrictive regions of the world in terms of Internet censorship. Now, though, one Chinese city is proposing to break the mold, creating a haven in the center of China for a free Internet.

• Programming

  • New Identi.ca Share Button

  • Scripting, Part Two: Looping for Fun and Profit

• Standards/Consortia

  • EU Commission presents legal package for revised European Standardisation System

    On Wednesday this week the European Commission adopted the legal package on standardisation. It consists of a Communication outlining the strategic thinking and directions for European standardisation and of a Regulation that will lay down the legal principles and constitute the future European standardisation framework. Both texts plus some accompanying material like the Impact Assessment are available from the DG Enterprise website.

    To begin with, the legal package is excellent – highest congratulations to the Commission. It addresses the urgent needs for European standardisation that had been identified in the studies and reports over the last years. Above all, it addresses the needs of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector which has developed different structures globally with well-established fora and consortia being in the lead of ICT standards development. The legal package, following the Digital Agenda, takes this up and provides well-thought-out and sophisticated solutions. They build on the current European standardisation system which proved to be effective and efficient, but complement it with important means taking into account the global realities in ICT.

Leftovers

• Finance

  • Strauss-Kahn case is ‘close to collapse’, say reports

    The prosecution case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund and French presidential hopeful accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, is close to collapse, a report in the New York Times has claimed.

    The newspaper reports allegations that significant problems have emerged with the case against the former IMF boss that could see the conditions of his house arrest in New York being relaxed with immediate effect.

    Based on interviews with two unnamed law enforcement officers, it says that “major holes” in the case will be admitted to a federal criminal court in Manhattan as early as Friday. New York Police Department had no comment last night.

• Civil Rights

  • US authorities have access to European cloud data

    Cloud providers like Microsoft have to provide US criminal prosecutors with access to customer data, as ZDNet reports. This access applies even if the data is stored by firms based in the EU and in European data centres. This was explained by Microsoft’s British managing director Gordon Frazer in London during the launch of Microsoft’s Office 365, when he was asked whether Microsoft could ensure that the data stored at its data centres in the EU would never leave Europe.

  • Do We Need An Android Patent Pool?

    The US Congress has made a decision to start using the proprietary and insecure Skype at a time when there are growing concerns over the security and stability of Skype. In the last month alone, Skype has suffered major outages and exposed security holes.

    A recent report revealed a dangerous exploit in Skype for Mac which can be exploited to create a worm that can take control of Mac PCs. I very much doubt that US congressmen use secure Linux machines, however they may be burning the tax-payer’s hard-earned money on expensive and shiny new Apple Macs.

    On top of the outage problems and security issues, Skype is going through the transition of being acquired by an abusive monopoly, Microsoft, which creates quite a lot of uncertainty about its future.

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Hope and Change Inside My Computer

  I was intrigued. My first question to him was “How do I buy a computer with that already on it”, that of course being Linux. Mark explained that it not only acted as a recovery CD but that it could be installed as a permanent operating system and showed me the icon on the desktop.

  I asked him if I could play around with the disk for the evening and he of course said yes.

  After faxing in my story, I logged out of work via computer and began exploring my new digital visitor. I would have occasional fits of “This can’t be working.” and “Can this be legal?” Of course now I know it is but from my narrow perspective, I’ll ask you to understand my doubts.

  I can’t tell you exactly when I made the decision but somewhere between playing with LibreOffice and the webcam software, I found myself dropping and dragging important files from my Windows world onto a portable hard drive.

• Server

  • Top 10 supercomputers in numbers

    * 548,352 – the number of CPU cores in the K Computer in Japan, the world’s currently fastest supercomputer. It’s the result of having 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs with eight cores each.
    * 1,820,352 – the combined number of CPU cores in the top 10 supercomputers
    * 672 – The number of computer racks that make up the K Computer (one is seen on the image for this post).
    * 8.2 petaflops – The computing performance of the K Computer. It’s more powerful than the five next systems (i.e. position 2-6) combined.
    * 8,200,000,000,000,000 – 8.2 petaflops written out as floating point operations per second (8.2 quadrillion instructions per second).
    * 2.6 petaflops – The computing performance of the second-fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A in China.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Linux Outlaws 215 – Bitcoin Discussion

  • FLOSS Weekly 172: MediaFront

    We chat with Travis Tidwell about MediaFront, the open source media solution for streaming and playing video over the web.

    Guest: Travis Tidwell

• Kernel Space

  • User Space Filesystems

• Applications

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Extended File Attributes Rock!

    • Son O’ Tip O’ The Day: X rotation

    • Get Started With Pygame

    • How to install Lamp in ArchLinux

    • Saving session terminal states with screen command

    • history Command

    • Command-line Photographic Workflow on Linux

    • AWK Vs NAWK Vs GAWK

  • Games

    • Award Winning Game ‘Bridge Construction Set’ is Now Available in Ubuntu Software Center

      Bridge construction set (also referred as Pontifex II) is now available in available in Ubuntu Software Center under the purchase section. The game which tests your bridge constructions skills has received great reviews from critics and users and has won many awards.

• Desktop Environments

  • If Brazil Has to Guard Its Rainforest, Why Does Canada/U.S. Get to Burn Its Tar Sands?

    It was big news in Canada when, in 2008, the country slipped from the top-ten list of the world’s most peaceful countries (all the way to eleventh). By this year, it was back in eighth, 74 places above the U.S. and, when liberals in the U.S. feel despairing, what dominates their fantasy life but “moving to Canada?”

    And yet, today, you could make an argument that Canada has actually become one of the earth’s more irresponsible nations — namely, when it comes to the environment. Indeed, you could argue that the world would be better off if the government in Ottawa was replaced by, say, the one in Brasilia, which has made a far better show of attending to the planet’s welfare. It’s a tale of physics, chemistry, and most of all economics, and it all starts in the western province of Alberta.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • From Platform to Frameworks — KDE hackers meet in Switzerland

      One of the primary results of Platform 11 was gaining consensus on making KDE’s development platform more modular, with each library (or technology within it) clearly defined in its purpose and how it can be deployed for use in a Qt or KDE application.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME 3 vs Unity: Which is right for you?

      With so much controversy surrounding the recent release of GNOME 3 and Canonical’s Unity, there’s only one way to resolve things: a head-to-head battle royale. Gareth Halfacree investigates which next-generation desktop environment might suit you better to set the record straight once and for all…

      GNOME 3 and the GNOME Shell have their fans, who castigate Canonical’s Unity – and vice-versa. There are also those who decry both, claiming that a move to icon-based launchers represents a dumbing-down of the classic GNOME user interface. Worries over compatibility and extensibility cause further concerns, until nobody is quite sure what’s going on any more.

• Distributions

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Mandriva 2011 RC 1 Available – Quick Look

      Almost as if Eugeni Dodonov read my post last night, he answered earlier this evening that the ISOs are now on the mirrors. I had found a copy a couple of hours before his post, so I was already burning. I had been looking forward to seeing the newer Mandriva, but in the end I’m afraid I was slightly disappointed.

      [...]

      All that looks stuff aside, I was really looking forward to seeing the new Mandriva Control Center that was alluded to in Dodonov’s post last night. But it just looked like the same ole same ole to me. They could have and probably did do some work under the hood, but there was no changes to the appearance. And the issue of setting up graphical drivers mentioned in an earlier post still exists. I looked in the software manager and NVIDIA proprietary drivers were included, but the configuration just seemed broken. Everything else seemed to function correctly as far as I tested. The installer hasn’t changed to the naked eye either except for the main image.

    • PCLinuxOS LXDE 2011.6 – Excellent Lightweight

      Here are my first impressions.

    • Mageia-cal Win Over Humanity

      Am I happier now than I was before Mageia installation? Most likely yes. Mageia proved itself very stable and nicely composed system not only in Live run, but also in full install mode.
      Yes, I still have something to work on before I can make final decision to dump Kubuntu. But that hour is very close I believe.
      And even now I have system which works smoother and quicker then Kubuntu, does not have issues with desktop effects and shutdown. These two facts are more than enough.

  • Gentoo Family

    • Sabayon 6 KDE review

      Final Thoughts: The K Desktop Environment has all the features required to make an excellent desktop operating system, but one half of the problem lies in the default configuration shipped from the “factory.” The other half (of the problem) lies with distro developers who do not bother to tie the loose ends together. As much as I appreciate the time and effort involved in packaging a distribution, the community would be better off if more is done to ensure a more robust out of the box user-friendliness. Every feature that could work out of the box, should. The pieces are in place, they just need to be tweaked a little bit.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0 Now Available with Expanded Performance, Scalability and Cloud Readiness

    • Red Hat: Bringing profitability to open source

      The 43-year-old executive, who in December 2007 took over the reins of what is now the biggest open source vendor in the industry, said what defines a 21st Century company is one with a significant number of workers who are “socially connected” through sites such Facebook and Twitter, and is governed by “meritocracy, not hierarchy”.

      By virtue of being in the open source space, Red Hat has many young employees who are generally early adopters of technology and this is a demographic that he has helped lead by influence and example.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Bridge Construction Set lands on the Software Center

          Chronic Logic’s award winning game, Bridge Construction Set, is officially for sale in the Ubuntu Software Center. In Bridge Construction Set you build a bridge that hopefully does not break, however having a train plunge into the depths below may be fun for some!

        • Ubuntu Community Week Collector Card #1

          Paolo is one of the amazing people out in local Ubuntu communities spreading the word, organizing events, and helping to nurture stronger teams. When you tune into Paolo’s presentation at Ubuntu Community Week, please be sure to ask him to sign your card. (And don’t worry, the bullets he’s referring to are those that appear in nearly every presentation you’ve ever yawned through.)

        • Ubuntu 11.10 Development Update

          We are one week away from Alpha 2, so right now you can see lots of developers trying to get as many things into Ubuntu Oneiric as possible: AirPrint, theme changes and loads of other stuff. After this milestone we will have only 4 weeks left until Feature Freeze at which stage most of the features should have have landed. As always: the status overview should give you a very detailed look on how each feature is progressing.

        • Are Ubuntu’s Glory Days Over?

          “The Ubuntu apologists are making all sorts of noise about how Canonical is targeting a new market (tablets and similar screen resolution devices), but we’ve seen this show too many times before,” explained Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “Red Hat didn’t get to be profitable (something that still eludes Canonical) by dumping their target customers every year to chase new opportunities.”

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Peppermint OS: Cloud Oriented Desktop Distro

            Released in July, Peppermint Two is based on Lubuntu 11.04, an Ubuntu-derived distribution using the LXDE desktop environment (see our overview). Its main distinguishing feature is that it mixes traditional applications with cloud applications that are closely integrated into the desktop.

            Previous versions of this distro made use of Mozilla Prism for running web applications directly on the desktop, but Peppermint has now switched over to Chromium. This means that Chromium is the web browser and also powers the rendering of web applications thanks to the ICE SSB (single site browser), a framework developed by members of the Peppermint OS team.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Will an HP WebOS license deal matter?

      Licensing WebOS could be a double-edged sword for HP though. When you look at the tablet and phone market, as of this moment, Apple and Google are clearly dominating. When it comes to the tablet, the iPad continues to blow away the field. HP gets it turn at bat on Friday when the HP Touchpad hits stores.

Free Software/Open Source

• The economic value of Open Source software

  What is the real value that Open Source has brought to the economy? This is not a peregrine question. Since most of the current evaluation methods are based on assessing “sales”, that is direct monetization of OSS, we are currently missing from this view the large, mostly under-reported and underestimated aspect of open source use that is not “sold”, but for example is directly introduced through an internal work force, or in services, or embedded inside an infrastructure. Summary: OSS provide cost reduction and increases in efficiency of at least 116B€, 31% of the software and services market.

• GoldenOrb offers open source variant of Google’s Pregel

  Analytics company Ravel has announced it is releasing GoldenOrb, its massive-scale graph analysis software, as open source. GoldenOrb is based on the ideas behind Google’s Pregel architecture which is in turn inspired by the Bulk Synchronous Parallel Model developed in the 1980s.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Thunderbird jumps from 3.1 to 5.0 (just like Firefox’s leap from 3.6 to 4.0 to 5.0)

      After dealing with Firefox 3.6.17′s abrupt end of life in favor of 4.0, and then 4.0′s deprecation in favor of 5.0 (and yes, I had to change repositories every time because Linux in general and Debian in particular doesn’t force new software on users), now I learn that Thunderbird is jumping from 3.1 to 5.0.

      I use the Debian Mozilla Team APT archive for all my Mozilla software needs (Firefox/Iceweasel and Thunderbird/Icedove). Now I’ll be dipping into my sources.list files to up the Icedove repo from 3.1 to 5.0 once the Debian Mozilla Team offers the new version (they generally need a little time to package it up).

    • Not much in new Thunderbird 5, but roadmap looks promising

      Mozilla has released version 5 of Thunderbird, the popular open source e-mail client. The update includes some new features, updated components under the hood, and a number of performance and stability improvements.

      Mozilla spun off Thunderbird in 2007, creating a separate organization called Mozilla Messaging. The split was reversed several months ago when Mozilla announced that it would reabsorb the messaging group and integrate it into Mozilla Labs.

      The Thunderbird development model underwent some significant changes alongside the organizational restructuring. Its versioning and development cycle have seemingly been harmonized with that of Firefox. The Thunderbird version number was bumped up directly from 3.x to 5—skipping version 4 entirely. This change allows Thunderbird’s version number to match Firefox and reflect the version number of the underlying Gecko rendering engine that is shared between both applications.

• SaaS

  • Cloudera Delivers Apache Hadoop Connector for Netezza

  • VoltDB Announces Enterprise-grade Hadoop Integration

    VoltDB, a leading provider of high-velocity data management systems, today announced the release of VoltDB Integration for Hadoop. The new product functionality, available in VoltDB Enterprise Edition, allows organizations to selectively stream high velocity data from a VoltDB cluster into Hadoop’s native HDFS file system by leveraging Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), which has SQL-to-Hadoop integration technology, Apache Sqoop, built in.

  • Actuate Announces Support for Hadoop

    Application developers can now use BIRT 3.7 from the Eclipse Foundation to access Hadoop using Hive Query Language (HQL). Not only can BIRT provide native access to Hadoop as a data source for analysis, dashboards, reporting and custom BI and information applications, it can be used to build data sets or data visualizations that seamlessly combine Hadoop data with other data sources including SQL databases, XML data, document archives and flat files.

  • Exclusive: Yahoo launching Hadoop spinoff this week

    As the originator of the Hadoop technology, Yahoo’s official entry into this space should play a big role in shaping how the market of Hadoop-based products evolves.

    Yahoo’s Hortonworks (as in the Dr. Suess book “Horton Hears a Who,” a reference to the elephant logo that Apache Hadoop bears) will be comprised of a small team of Yahoo’s Hadoop engineers and will focus on developing a production-ready product based on the Apache Hadoop project, the set of open source tools designed for processing huge amounts of unstructured data in parallel. It’s a natural step for Yahoo, which uses Hadoop heavily within its own web operations, and which has contributed approximately 70 percent of the code to Apache Hadoop since the project’s inception.

• Business

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Pentaho BI 4 Delivers Power to the User

    • Alfresco Announces Alfresco Team for Powerful Content Collaboration

    • Zenoss Releases Zenoss Service Dynamics with Impact Management for Hybrid Cloud Operations

      Zenoss, Inc., a leading provider of management software for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT infrastructures, today announced the availability of Zenoss Service Dynamics. The new offering includes the market’s first service impact management solution that both unifies and automates impact and root cause analysis for IT services that span private and public IT infrastructures.

    • Zenoss Update, Service Dynamics, Next Steps…

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open for Business in Every Way

    What I was keen to do there was not so much the usual “look at all the fun things you can do to money from giving stuff away”, since that by now is well-explored territory (one, moreover, that is visited briefly in the earlier slides of the set below). Instead, I’ll focus on the other ways in which openness of a general kind can provide benefits to businesses that embrace it.

• Programming

  • Eclipse Indigo Release Train Is Now Available

    The Eclipse Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of Indigo, the 2011 annual release train. This is the eighth successive year in which the Eclipse community has shipped a coordinated release on schedule. Indigo is available for immediate download from www.eclipse.org/downloads.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Rob Weir says…

    Microsoft Office patch today. “Office File Validation Add-in” http://bit.ly/kFXlEA Interesting, uses a “binary schema”

Leftovers

• Security

  • Hacker group Anonymous declares war on Orlando, Florida

    The hacker group Anonymous has taken down a US tourism website in Orlando, Florida as a protest against the arrests of people handing out food to the city’s homeless.

• Cablegate

  • From Nader and Gravel to Assange: There Are Some Parodies Money Can’t Buy

    If you haven’t seen the new fundraising video from WikiLeaks, which plays off an old Mastercard commercial, don’t miss it. It’s smartly done, and doubly effective given that Mastercard is one of the companies that are refusing to process donations to the whistleblowing site. With more than 100,000 views on Vimeo since being posted a few days ago, you have to give Julian Assange credit for knowing how to make a viral video.

• Civil Rights

  • The Solution to Bad Speech is More Speech

    Speech is never a punishment, and it strikes me as especially dangerous for supporters of free speech to suggest otherwise. If libertarians call it a “punishment” when the government subsidizes your opponent’s political campaign, it’s hard to object when more censorious types call it a “punishment” when a third party runs a nasty campaign ad against a politician. The solution to speech is more speech. I don’t love the Arizona campaign finance system, but I think it’s hard to argue that it runs afoul of the First Amendment.

  • Why Google+ Is Better Than Facebook: Who Owns Your Data?

    Google launched its social networking platform last night. The initial response and reviews are positive. Google+ has exceeded all expectations by bringing all needed features under one roof. The integration with different Google properties and services is amazing.

    Having spent one day with Google+, I can say that finally we have a strong Facebook competitor. It also puts both the companies and products under a direct comparison when it comes to data ownership.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Three companies fined $2.5-million for knock-off Louis Vuitton and Burberry bags

    Three Canadian companies have been ordered to pay roughly $2.5- million for selling knock-off Louis Vuitton and Burberry handbags in what a Federal Court judge described as an “egregious” case of trademark infringement.

  • Copyrights

    • BT flood warning to High Court

      BT has warned the High Court that if an injunction to block access to the Newzbin2 website were to be granted, it would be the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ opening the floodgates to content owners desperate to prevent sites pointing to pirated content. BT told the court that it could face up to 400 applications for injunctions in the next year if the Motion Picture Association (MPA) prevail in an action against the UK telecoms giant.

    • ACTA

      • Council to sign ACTA the cynical way

        Essentially the Council Decision would endorse it permissable that the Commission and the member states together circumvent parliament prerogatives under the Treaties (and Treaty conditions) via an Agreement with third nations using the trade funnel. Outrageous and inacceptable.

      • ACTA Ratification in Europe To Require Approval from All 27 Member States

        David Hammerstein reports that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has been determined to be a “mixed agreement.” This means that the agreement must be approved by both the EU and by the 27 member states. That suggests a long process to obtain individual parliamentary approval throughout the EU (the EU Council is moving quickly on the issue, however).

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• GoDaddy.com adopts Linux Professional Institute Certification

  The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com) , the world’s largest domain name registrar, has initiated a program of LPI training and certification for their technical support staff. The program began this past March and an initial group of IT professionals at GoDaddy.com have successfully obtained their LPIC-1 certification.

• Ubuntu demonstrated running on Galaxy Tab 10.1, summarily dubbed ‘Tabuntu’ (video)

  Sure, you can run Linux on robots and on desktops and, apparently, on small cats, and we’ve also seen it on plenty of tablets before, but this one is a little different. Max Lee over at Galaxy Tab Hacks created the video below to demonstrate a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 running Ubunbu, but doing it on top of Android such that the tablet’s native OS is running Linux in the background and then using a VM client to launch the UI. In other words: it’s running both operating systems at once, and despite that we think the results are quite usable, even loading up this very website with aplomb. It’s demonstrated after the break and if after watching you just gotta get a piece of that the full instructions are on the other end of the source link below.

• No Surprise Here: You Can Use Ubuntu on a Galaxy Tab 10.1 [Video]

• Surprising Power Consumption Of Ubuntu 11.04 vs. Windows 7

  With similar workloads, for the most part the power consumption is comparable between Ubuntu 11.04 and Windows 7 Pro SP1. The only major differences came during Flash-based HD video playback being more efficient under Windows, power consumption while OpenGL gaming, and in select other areas. Ubuntu / Linux actually has the potential to become more power efficient than Microsoft Windows 7 based upon the close findings from today. Once Active-State Power Management (ASPM) is properly fixed up for Linux, there is still a Linux 2.6.35 kernel power regression, a scheduler power regression, and more. Just yesterday on my Twitter feed, the Phoronix Test Suite and I made a discovery of a possible 8% power savings from an entirely different vector. More to come.

• Linux 2.6.38 power problems confirmed, but workaround appears

  Phoronix has identified the Linux power regression problems it previously noted in Linux 2.6.38 as being related to Active-State Power Management (ASPM) code for PCI Express — and has published a workaround. The problem, which can result in low battery life with Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora 15, have been confirmed by Tom’s Hardware Guide.

• Desktop

  • 10 ways the Linux community can fix the mess on the desktop

    That, of course, doesn’t mean all is lost. Quite the opposite. As has been proved over the years, the Linux community is incredibly agile, so this issue can easily be resolved. Here are some possible solutions.

  • Tidying Up The Desktop

    Jack Wallen at Tech Republic has a good article on this subject. see 10 ways the Linux community can fix the mess on the desktop. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as he writes. For instance, I would not agree that Unity should be killed. It is great to have yet another desktop environment. I do think Unity should not be exclusive. Many millions of loyal users of Ubuntu may not want to change desktop environments from GNOME. I think, eventually, Unity may achieve a level of functionality that makes it widely desirable but forcing users to change is undesirable. Users may have to reverse-engineer Ubuntu to put GNOME back or change distros. That is probably a waste of their time, not what IT should be about.

• Server

  • Oracle Solaris 11 to abandon elderly servers

• Kernel Space

  • Linus Torvalds Doesn’t Understand User Space Storage

    I was directed to a recent mailing list post by Linus Torvalds on linux-fsdevel in which he derided the concept of user-space filesystems. Not a particular implementation, mind you, but the very concept of it.

    Jeff Darcy, of Red Hat and CloudFS fame, wrote a wonderful response, which you should read first before continuing further.

  • The Linux 3.0 Kernel With EXT4 & Btrfs

  • Sweden-based Designer Wins 20th Anniversary of Linux T-shirt Contest with Flying Penguin Design

    Today we are very excited reveal that Kim Blanche is the winner of the 20th Anniversary of Linux T-shirt design contest with her simple, thoughtful “Flying Penguin” design.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Mesa 7.12 Is Now Where The Fun Is At

• Applications

  • Pidgin-privacy-please – A privacy plugin for the pidgin instant messenger

  • Best of the lot: My top 5 media players for Ubuntu

    Ubuntu is now one of the most popular Operating Systems used in the world. The main reason behind is the open source nature of Ubuntu and the backing provided by the vast online user community. Today Ubuntu ranks in 3rd in the list of top OS’s. The Open Source wizard supports a wide variety of software including media players. Today we review some of the best media software available for Ubuntu’s latest versions.

  • Typemock Launches Easy Unit Testing Framework for Linux

    Isolator++ for Linux enables unit testing – the foundation of agile development – of any C/ C++ code (including complex code such as statics, globals and non virtual method) by allowing the test to intercept and fake behaviours. The API is specifically designed to make tests more concise, more resistant to production code changes and easier to understand for new users which ensures that time is not wasted re-writing unit tests. It also protects the code from regression bugs and allows organizations to feel confident that their final product meets industry standards.

  • Arista Transcoder: Media Conversions Without the Technical Inquisition

  • Proprietary

    • VMware whitewashes self in open source

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Tip o’ the day: console rotation

    • Do more with less

    • Checksumming Files to Find Bit-Rot

    • Removing slotted libpng in Gentoo

    • How to Customize Extra Mouse Buttons in Linux

    • Use Klipper Clipboard Actions for Better Productivity

    • How to limit MySQL port access to specific network

    • Getting Around in GIMP – Expired Polaroid 600 Film Effect

    • [Quick Tip] Quickly refer to any Gdocs shortcut without switching the current tab

    • Speed up your downloads with Axel

    • Grab Android Screenshots from Linux: No Rooting Required

    • Writing a C library, part 2

    • Configuring a SAMBA Print Server

    • LD magic in Linux

      The linker is a magical beast which does all sort of crazy stuff with your binaries, without you even knowing it. Every Linux install has a linker living in the shadows, though seeing it in action is a rare supernatural event. There is an ancient tradition to communicate with the spirit of your linker. Not many know about this secret dark path and it’s powers to annoy even the most experienced (L)user.

    • Load Testing and Benchmarking With Siege

      Getting ready to roll out a site, but not sure how it will perform in real-world use? Take a look at Siege, a load-testing and benchmarking utility that will help stress test your setup before exposing it to the world.

      Siege is a fantastic utility for helping with Linux server management by exposing problems before they go into production. It’s open source software (GPLv2 or later) and easy to get started with.

  • Games

    • Ten Linux apps that need to raise their game

      Generally, applications that are too awkward to use or lack key features eventually disappear. The apps that prevail are solid, reliable, up to date and offer plenty of user-friendly features. Unfortunately with Linux, no matter how user friendly the desktop becomes, some applications and systems remain tricky to configure and use.

      I thought it might be interesting to list some of the applications that fall into the awkward category to see what experiences you’ve had with them. I also thought this exercise might help developers identify those tools that could do with a nudge towards user friendliness.

    • Desktop Linux Gamer’s Guide

      So you’ve installed one of the popular Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, and you’ve activated your graphics drivers; now what? While mainstream gaming has not quite found it’s way onto Ubuntu there are a number of worthy titles to keep you from booting up that old Windows partition. This article was written with Ubuntu users in mind, but it may be possible to get these games running under other Linux distros. All prices displayed below are approximate conversions from other currencies. All the games (and crossover) can be bought online and downloaded.

• Desktop Environments

  • Keynote Interview: Dirk Hohndel

    Continuing in a series of interviews with the Desktop Summit 2011′s keynote speakers, this past week William Carlson traded emails with Dirk Hohndel of Intel, who will give the Summit’s August 6 opening keynote address.

    As a hacker-turned-businessman, Hohndel brings a business perspective of free software to the Desktop Summit. Currently Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel, Hohndel will talk about the role that large companies play in open source, and how the open source community can work effectively with them.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • BlueBubble + Applets

      On the screen, you can see the lock-keys-appket, as well as gnote, gnome-music-applet and the cpu-frequency-monitor applet. Also visible are the trashcan and the show desktop applets, the ‘fast user switch’ applet (Called gdm-classic-user-switch-applet in the repo) and the gnome-volume-control applet which was sadly missing from the initial BlueBubble launch. I’d like to throw a huge ‘thank you’ to Thomas Scheunemann for helping me out with the gnome-volume-control applet. To prevent some conflicts between old-gnome-media and new-gnome-media packages…

    • Facebook blocked KDE photo applications

      Facebook had blocked applications that use the KDE Image Plugins Interface (KIPI) from uploading photographs to the social network and hid existing photos that were previously uploaded via KIPI. KIPI is used by a number of applications such as digiKam, KPhotoAlbum and Gwenview.

      The problem appears to be that what was meant to be a secret key and application ID for a now deprecated interface into Facebook was included in the KIPI source code. It is suspected that at some point spammers took the key and id and used it for their own malicious applications on Facebook. This hasn’t been a problem for KDE users, but now Facebook has instituted a new scheme to block spam. This new anti-spam scheme correlates negative feedback on applications with their keys and ids and blocks them. The KDE keys, having been apparently poisoned by abusive use by spammers, were then blocked.

    • What price Community?

      KDE prides itself as being a community. Is that justified? I have seen good, hard-working people driven away from projects because they were receiving behaviour from other members of our community that they would not accept from general users. The Code of Conduct, it seems, is for others, not for ourselves.

• Distributions

  • Red Flag Linux – Going critical

    Red Flag Linux is a curious blend of modern and ancient. It has what you don’t expect it to have and lacks in what seems obvious. To name a few of the flaws, there’s the user setup, graphics card drivers, an outdated application stack, and the package manager problems. But the single biggest problem is the relevance.

    I don’t presume to be able to understand the needs of the Chinese market, so my conclusion might be completely wrong or irrelevant itself. Perhaps the average Chinese users cares nothing about security or the age of his programs. For that matter, Windows XP is not a young or modern system either, but it’s popular and it works well. The way I see it, Red Flag Linux could be a very useful and practical system.

    What it needs is to bring up some of its core elements to a more modern standard. Not necessarily become the next Ubuntu, because there’s already one and there’s no need for another, more sort of tailor its unique nature to become more accessible. Now, it’s entire possible that the distro developers do NOT want or care about foreign market segments, in which case all my arguments are pointless. But with some attention to details, Red Flag Linux could work well for the international user.

    I hope this Linux continues to flourish. It’s not the best in any category, in fact, it’s fairly average overall, but it could achieve what no other Linux distro has done yet – reach a critical userbase. Even if as little as 1% of Chinese people embrace this platform, we’re talking some fifteen million users. Do you understand the implications of this? I do.

    To sum it up: Red Flag Linux, average, needs lots of polish, decent performance, programs need updating, has the potential to make Linux become what no other distro has achieved yet. Final grade: 6/10.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • PCLinuxOS KDE 2011.6 now available

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat’s 1 Billion Reasons to Love Linux

      On the Linux Planet, free and open source software makes the world go around, while in the wider world, it’s often money. There is one Linux vendor that stands head and shoulders above all others when it comes to money. This past week, Red Hat reiterated its commitment and path to be the first Linux vendor to make $1 billion in revenue in one year.

    • Fedora

      • Linpus Lite… a bit too lite…

        Let me translate that into normal people language: Linpus is a Taiwanese company that, from what I understood, wants to bring users simple and intuitive interfaces, through Linux of course. So you can imagine I was at least curios to try an Linux OS more interface-based and see what has been done to it.

        Linpus Linux Lite is a Fedora-based distro that wants to be very easy and intuitive for its users. The first thing i noticed when i slamed the ISO into my VirtualBox is that you can’t boot straight from the CD, you can only install it to the hard drive, which is a pity since i wanted to try it out first.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Knoppix 2011 6.4 Review

        Knoppix is a top choice for developers, administrators, or anyone on the move. Unlike many other popular Linux distributions Knoppix stays focused on providing one of the best Linux live CD’s available. Now you can have a huge selection of excellent applications and system tools all without any changes to your current system setup. Knoppix is also a great choice for carrying on a flash drive. Not to mention the fact that Knoppix has very advanced hardware detection. So download this great release today and find out why Knoppix is known by many as one of the best Linux Live CD’s available. Many users have reported that Knoppix was so useful that it is now used as their default installation. And yes Knoppix can be installed to your hard drive without to much trouble but it is not recommended for Linux newcomers.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Puzzle Moppet hits the Ubuntu Software Center

          The newest addition to the Ubuntu Software Center is Puzzle Moppet from Garnet Games. The poor little Moppet is lost and all alone in the wilderness. How are you going to help it get out? This interesting game requires you to solve puzzles to help Moppet find it’s way. Puzzle Moppet is a challenging 3D puzzle game featuring a diminutive and apparently mute creature who is lost in a mysterious floating landscape.

        • Ubuntu Slogan

        • Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) or Linux Mint 11 (Katya)?

          Comparatively, Linux Mint automatically includes out-of-the-box support for Flash, MP3′s, and the playback of most other media files. At the time, this more complete out-of-the-box experience was one of the reasons I ended up going back to Linux Mint 10 (from Ubuntu 10.04). So, now that Ubuntu includes this, (and in fact, installs even more software automatically such as NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers), it has, at very least, removed one of the reasons I had for sticking with Linux Mint.

        • Ubuntu One Files for Android lets you access more than your Music

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint 11 LXDE RC released!

            The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 11 LXDE RC.

          • Another Linux distro that I love: Zorin OS 5

            There are so many groovy little details that differentiate Zorin OS from Ubuntu here I can’t go over every one. But for instance, when you minimize a running application to the panel, it gives a lovely thumbnail preview of the app on mouse-over. And the default Start Menu (upper left corner in my screenshot below) is also highly configurable. I think there are about ten different menu styles you can use besides the Windows-like default. (Again, see screenshot below). I totally love the Linux Mint Menu, but after getting used to the different variations in Zorin OS I’ve come to like theirs almost as much. There are many similarities between Zorin OS and Linux Mint; the attention to detail and ease of use make either of them excellent choices for Windows or Mac users to cross over to the Linux side!

          • Netrunner 3.2 Released

            Updated from 3.1->3.2:

            KDE (Desktop) 4.6.2
            Firefox (Browser) 5.0
            Flash/Plugin 10.3.181.26
            Thunderbird (Email Client incl. Lightning Calendar) 3.1.10
            VLC (Media Player) 1.1.10
            Wine (Windows Environment Layer) 1.3.22
            Pidgin (Messenger Client) 2.7.11
            Gimp (Graphic Program) 2.6.11

• Devices/Embedded

  • Unfazed Intel to press ahead with MeeGo

    Nokia may have launched its first and last Meego-powered smartphone, but Intel remains determined to press ahead with the development of its versatile Linux-based operating system.

    According to DigiTimes, Santa Clara is preparing to launch MeeGo v1.3, which will offer improved support for a variety of devices and platforms, including netbooks, tablets, smartphones, smart TVs and car infotainment systems.



  • Phones

    • Android

      • Fox Thinks Apple Is Religion, Bashes Samsung Galaxy Tab

        Clayton Morris of Fox did nothing but proved himself to be a joker the way he compared the iPad with the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The way he blindfolded himself on the camera and did an entire 30 second stint ‘touching’ and ‘feeling’ the Galaxy Tab made me think,”is this how we cover technology?” While he admitted that the Samsung Galaxy looks good, feels better, is lighter and thinner, he doesn’t recommend buying it.

        He said that advancement in hardware and design do not matter. How the product feels in your hand doesn’t matter. He is contradicting himself, and may upset the master Apple. Look at any of the iPad ads and you will find Apple trying to sell using the same points which Morris is trying to tell us do not matter when it comes to Android!

      • Tag Heuer readies €4700 Froyo phone

        Posh watchmaker Tag Heuer hopes you will – it’s working on just such a beast. There’s a teaser on Tag Heuer’s own website, but watch blog A Blog To Read has been mailed some snaps of the gadget and the specs.

      • Top 5 Must-have Android Applications

      • MyTouch 4G Slide focuses on the camera

        T-Mobile unveiled an Android 2.3-based 4G slider phone with an advanced camera. HTC’s MyTouch 4G Slide is equipped with a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 3.7-inch, WVGA touchscreen, and an eight-megapixel camera with dual LED flash, “zero” shutter lag, a backside illuminated sensor, and a wide aperture f/2.2 lens, says the carrier.

      • Half million Android activations a day pave way for Google Nexus Prime

        Google’s Andy Rubin says Android is now being activated on 500,000 smartphones and tablets each day, with 4.4 percent week-to-week growth. Meanwhile, new rumors claim Google’s next Samsung-built Nexus device will run “Ice Cream Sandwich” on a TI OMAP4 processor and be called Google Nexus Prime.

      • Cisco spins enterprise-oriented app stores for Android tablet

        Cisco Systems has announced an app ecosystem for its Android-based Cius tablet. Marking the company’s entry into a crowded landscape, “AppHQ” will focus on IT managers and professionals, according to the company.

      • Android App Downloads Now Total 4.5 Billion

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Tablet launch includes, Ubuntu, Windows, and Android models

      Italian vendor Ekoore announced three tablets with capacitive multitouch displays — two Atom-based tablets that run Ubuntu 11.04 or Windows 7, and an ARM-based tablet running Android 2.3. The 11.6-inch “Perl” offers a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450; the 10.2-inch “Python” moves to the DDR3-ready Atom N455; and the seven-inch Android 2.3-based “Pascal” uses a new 1.2GHz Telechips TCC8803 processor, according to the company.

    • Acer Chromebook goes on sale for $350

      Acer began accepting pre-orders for its Wi-Fi only AC700 Chromebook for $350 on Amazon.com. Following Samsung’s $430 Series 5 Chromebook — and again based on Google’s Chrome OS — the AC700 notebook offers the same dual-core Intel Atom N570 processor, a slightly smaller 11.6-inch display, 2GB of DDR3 memory, a 16GB solid-state disk, a multi-card reader, and a webcam.

    • iRiver preps Android tablet, HD e-reader

      iRiver has reportedly unveiled a seven-inch MX100 Android tablet in China, sporting a 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird processor, and is expected to soon ship its six-inch, Cortex-A8-based, 1024 x 768 resolution “Story HD” e-reader. Meanwhile, the Android-based Entourage PocketEdge e-reader has been heavily discounted to $120 as the unique, dual-screen device glimpses the white light of oblivion.

Free Software/Open Source

• Tux Paint Kids Summer Drawing Contest

  The 2011 Tux Paint Summer Drawing Contest is sponsored by Worldlabel.com and is open to all children aged 3 to 12 who live anywhere in the World!

  Here’s a chance to show off your talent using a great drawing program made especially for kids. Tux Paint is an award-winning drawing program you can download to your computer. Tux Paint was recently awarded SourceForge.net Project of the Month. It will run on all versions of Windows (including Tablet PC), Mac OS X 10.4 and up, Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. And it’s FREE!

• Microsoft Office 365 Launch: Zimbra Scores Surprise PR Win

  Either way, Zimbra scored a major victory with the mention in The Wall Street Journal. Before the article, The VAR Guy suspects, most WSJ readers had never heard of Zimbra.

• Open source based company wins industry award

  Voice over IP services provider Gradwell has won the Federation of Communications Services (FCS) “Communication Provider of the Year” award. Managing Director Peter Gradwell accepted the award, presented at FCS’s 30th birthday celebrations, saying it was a “great reflection of all our hard work… being recognised by the FCS is especially important as they represent the whole industry.”

  As well as hard work, Gradwell’s secret weapon for competitiveness is open source; at the core of the operation is Asterisk VoIP software running on Debian GNU/Linux based systems and nearly all the company’s communications stack is based on open source software. Thanks to this combination, Gradwell says it can sell a complete telephony solution at a price that is closer to a single licence of its competition. It isn’t all about pricing though.

• Ravel open-sources tool for analyzing graph data like Google

  Austin, Texas-based startup Ravel has released GoldenOrb, an open-source graph database that looks to bring the benefit’s of Google’s Pregel project to the masses. Graph databases don’t get the attention of other big-data technologies such as Hadoop or NoSQL, but every Twitter user is familiar with the result of what graph databases can do.

• ESA Summer of Code in Space 2011

  The 2011 ESA Summer of Code In Space (SOCIS) starts! Mentoring organization (i.e. open source space-related projects) can apply before 15/07/2011. Modelled after the Google Summer of Code, SOCIS is an European Space Agency pilot project offering students the opportunity to be paid to develop, during the summer, open source code for space related open source projects.

• Events

  • Python conference to be held in August

    Enthusiasts and users of the open-source Python programming language will gather in Sydney in August for the two-day PyCon AU, the second such conference to be held Down Under.

  • ApacheCon NA 2011: conference programme announced

    The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has published the programme for this year’s ApacheCon North America. ApacheCon NA 2011, the official user conference of the Apache Software Foundation, will take place from 7 to 11 November in Vancouver, Canada.

  • linux.conf.au issues Call for Papers

    The organisers of linux.conf.au (LCA) have announced a Call for Papers (CFP) for the conference, which will take place at the beginning of 2012 in Ballarat, Australia. Interested parties have until 29 July to submit proposals for papers or presentations.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • What does the future hold for Firefox?

      Firefox was always the coolest browser but it is rapidly losing that crown to Google’s Chrome

      I’ve been a fan of Firefox for the longest time. Over the years I have faithfully installed just about every version of the open source browser and, while I chopped and changed between e-mail clients, web-editors and word processors, I always remained faithful to Firefox.

      That was until about three months ago. That was when I first installed Google’s Chrome browser as more than just a test version. Until then I had always had a copy of Chrome to hand, but only for testing purposes, and never as my day-to-day browser. However, Firefox (I forget which version) was playing up and constantly crashing, so I decided to give Chrome a real chance.

    • More Firefox feature assassination coming up

      So in keeping with the direction the devs at Mozilla have been steering the Firefox browser, plans include more feature assassination (of course), this time in the form of obfuscating useful information — arguably the most important information for users of a web browser — in the address bar.

    • Cross Platform Messaging Client Instantbird 1.0 Released

      Open source and cross platform messaging client Instantbird version 1.0 has been released today. Instantbird is based on Pidgin’s libpurple protocol library and Mozilla’s Firefox technology. It supports all major messaging services and have an extension system for adding extra functionality, themes etc.

    • Mozilla drafts Firefox vision statement

      With a new Mozilla chief executive, a new six-week rapid-release cycle, and new Firefox management, apparently the organization has concluded there’s no time like the present to pin down an answer.

      “Now that we have a solid base to work from, and greatly improved agility, it’s a good time to look at the quickly-evolving landscape and chart our path forward,” Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s vice president of product, said in a mailing list message on Friday. “To that end, I’ve tried to synthesize and distill countless discussions and ideas I’ve heard from throughout the Mozilla community over the last few years about where we should go with our products to further the Mozilla mission.”

• SaaS

  • Hadoop: Making Money From FLOSS

    Yes, the world can make its own software and share it. Hadoop is already in use by many players on the web, cloud and just data-processing. From a few (Able Grape search engine for wines) to thousands (Yahoo!) of nodes working together can process a lot of data and keep it safe. The software is sufficiently complex and flexible that training/support should be a lucrative business sufficient in itself to justify the investment in Hadoop. At the same time the whole world benefits from the result.

  • Yahoo! seeds Hadoop startup on open source dream

    Yahoo! is creating a new company with its core Hadoop engineering team, seeking to rapidly expand the scope of the open source distributed number-crunching platform and ultimately bring it to a much wider audience. In growing the Hadoop “ecosystem” through increased work on the core Apache-based open source project, the company hopes to eventually make its money by providing training and support for the platform.

  • ‘Hadoop Alternative’ to Be Open Sourced

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Oracle Vs Google-what next?

    The last week saw as set back of sorts for Oracle, as the US patent analysts rejected 17 claims of the 21 infringements claimed by Oracle on one of the seven infringement claims it had filed against Google. However, there are further 122 claims to wade through.

  • OpenOffice.org site goes offline, Oracle declines to comment

    Two URLs including the OpenOffice.org domain owned by software giant Oracle are currently displaying error messages, but the Larry Ellison-run company is declining to explain why the sites are down.

    The openjdk.java.net is also currently failing to load.

    Both sites carry the same “Error 503 – service unavailable” message, and the URLs are owned by Oracle.

    The OpenOffice.org domain is expected to expire on 12 June 2012 and its IP location in California still carries the Sun Microsystem stamp.

  • Reexaminations – Detailed Tables – UPDATED

  • After OpenOffice and Hudson, will Oracle stick with open source?

    In recent weeks, Oracle has taken two premier open source technologies gained through the company’s 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems — the OpenOffice.org productivity suite and the Project Hudson continuous integration server — and donated them to the Apache Software Foundation and Eclipse Foundation, respectively.

• CMS

  • How open source CMS Joomla grew to 23 million users

    When I began speaking to Ryan Ozimek on the phone, the first thing I asked him was how – in a world where a social networking site gets major coverage for surpassing 10 million users – an open source product like his can quietly reach over 20 million without much fanfare.

    Ozimek, president of the nonprofit that oversees Joomla, the product in question, told me that nonprofits often have less incentive to publicize such milestones. “Joomla isn’t a corporate enterprise,” he explained. “Joomla is made by developers around the world freely giving their time to something they’re passionate about and is managed and run by a leadership team and a nonprofit organization that doesn’t really have any financial stake in the game.

• Business

  • Actuate Adds Hadoop to Open Source Business Intelligence

    Application developers can now use BIRT 3.7 from the Eclipse Foundation to access Hadoop using Hive Query Language (HQL).

    Actuate (NASDAQ: BIRT) has announced support and services for Hadoop and MapReduce in the new release of BIRT 3.7, the company’s open-source enterprise business intelligence toolset.

    Hadoop is an open source framework for managing vast amounts of distributed data (big data) that works in conjunction with MapReduce, a framework to support distributed computing for large data sets on hardware clusters.

• Funding

  • Understanding Changes In The Software And Venture Capital Industries

    Open source became a movement – a mentality. Suddenly infrastructure software was nearly free. We paid 10% of the normal costs for the software and that money was for software support. A 90% disruption in cost spawns innovation – believe me.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Darwin does Free Software

    The evolution of software carries a different pace depending upon the management structure and goals of the project. Here we explore the history of, and potential for evolutionary theories of software development.

• Public Services/Government

  • NL: Half of all public administrations have open source strategy

    Half of all public administrations in the Netherlands (51 percent) has a strategy for open source or is preparing such a plan, and half (53 percent) has specific plans to use more of this type of software. These are two of the conclusions of a survey by NOiV, the Dutch government’s resource centre on open source and open standards.

    The survey also shows that 66 percent of all public administrations in the country supports the vendor independent electronic document format ODF, and has made it an option for their staff (69 percent). Next, the vendor independent document format PDF is being used to publish non-revisable documents on the web site of 62 percent of the public administrations.

  • Government Names Open Source Guru As Tech Advisor

    Open source enthusiast Liam Maxell has been appointed as technology adviser to the Cabinet Office

    In a move that could hint at the Government’s future direction over open source technology, Liam Maxwell has been appointed as technology adviser to the Cabinet Office.

    Maxwell has worked as an advisor for the Conservative Party regarding technology and is widely considered to be the man behind the Government’s open source strategy drive, which is now being executed by the Cabinet Office. Maxwell was also the IT manager at public school Eton, as well as previously being a Tory councillor for Windsor and Maidenhead, which pioneered the use of virtualisation to cut costs.

  • Government’s new technology adviser is an open source enthusiast

    Conservative local councillor and head of computing at public school Eton, Liam Maxell, has been appointed as technology adviser to the Cabinet Office, in a move that could herald wider use of open source technology in government.

    Maxwell will advise the Efficiency and Reform Group within the Cabinet Office on how technology can deliver better quality, lower cost public services. His appointment, starting from September, is expected to last for 11 months.

  • The obstacles to Open Source in the public sector

    This is what some respondents had to say about systems integrators and Open Source software:

    “Systems integrators are not holding back the take up of Open Source in the public sector it is just paranoid rubbish.”

    “I am sure some systems integrators are holding Open Source in the public sector back, however I know that the more progressive systems integrators aren’t.”

    “I think systems integrators are holding back Open Source. I have no examples but industry sees public sector as a cash cow.”

    “The government IT capability is rarely willing to challenge the views of system integrators.”

    “Money is the reason system integrators hold back Open Source. With open source their profits go down.”

    “System integrators are holding Open Source back. Particularly the reseller SIs who have a significant conflict of interest to deal with and will erode sales margins by doing so. Equally the government employs consultants who aren’t oriented towards open source solutions but aligned and accredited to vendor programmes.”

  • Despite the U.S. CIO’s Exit, Open Source Is Entrenched in the Federal Government

• Licensing

  • What’s This “…And the Rest” Crap!?!

    The example of this problem that was recently brought to my attention was on Fedora Project’s website. At the bottom of all of the pages of Fedora’s website, there’s “© 2011 Red Hat, Inc. and others”. I’ve dubbed this a “Gilligan’s Island copyright notice” because, while Red Hat is probably a copyright holder some of Fedora, Red Hat employees are also fond of pointing out how many contributors they have from outside Red Hat. Yet, with regard to the website, those contributors aren’t considered important enough to appear in the copyright notice. They’re secondary characters that Red Hat is indicating don’t matter that much: like The Professor and Mary Ann in Gilligan’s Island’s first season.

• Programming

  • GitHub’s Linguist open sourced

    GitHub has released its Linguist library, designed to identify the programming language in a file, as open source. GitHub, a commercial project hosting service which handles files of numerous types, uses the library to detect which syntax highlighter to use for a file, to work out when to ignore binary files and generated files, and to generate graph data for projects by language.

Leftovers

• Cablegate

  • The WikiLeaks Palace Revolt

    Julian took WikiLeaks offline early in 2010 to boost donations. And it worked. The organisation made over $200,000 in the first big push. This represented cash like never before. And Daniel’s eyes popped.

    So Daniel argued with Julian argued about the money. Daniel always found something he didn’t like, found a reason to challenge Julian’s wisdom and way of running WikiLeaks, but most of all he argued about the money – he wanted it.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • The Dark Side of the OECD Oil Inventory Release

    IEA in Paris announced this morning a release of 60 million barrels from OECD inventories. The implications of this extraordinary action are not positive. Let’s first take a look at the most recent global production data, which shows the large downward move of supply coming into March 2011, from the loss of Libyan oil. IEA is pointing to this loss of supply as the prima causa for its decision. | see: Global Crude Oil Production in mbpd (million barrels per day) 2004-2011.

  • China’s Diesel Smile

    Unfortunately, it does not appear OECD nations have been successful in getting the price of oil down below $100. There remains a justifiable suspicion that Saudi Arabia cannot supply the market either with extra light sweet oil, or with extra oil of any grade, for longer than a month or two. If China and Western countries have indeed made an arrangement to swap these oil price knock-downs for support of Western sovereign debt (at the margin), China would be advised to fill its own inventories quickly when these brief, five-to-seven day discounts on oil arrive, only to disappear.

• Finance

  • Bank of America in $8.5 billion settlement

    In the biggest reckoning of the 2008 financial crisis, Bank of America said Wednesday it will pay $8.5 billion to investors burned by fraudulent mortgage securities.

  • Goldman Sachs Plans To Hire 1,000 In Singapore While Cutting U.S. Jobs

    Goldman Sachs, the country’s fifth-largest bank by assets, plans to hire 1,000 people in Singapore while laying off a significant number of workers at home, according to Fox Business News.

  • Why Some Housing Prices Are Still Falling and Subprime Loans Are Still Sliding

    In October 2007, CNBC’s Diana Olick called me about Countrywide’s so-called plan to modify mortgage loans scheduled to reset to higher rates. Subprime borrowers with a strong payment history would be able to refinance and possibly get prime FHA loans. Current paying borrowers with credit issues would be offered Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac loans under a new expanded program.

  • Noise, Not a Recovery

    The State of California reported a loss of 29,000 non-farm payrolls in May. Actually, California added 88,000 jobs in May when using the total employment data for the month. However, as I have pointed out over the past year, these oscillations are just noise. Our nation’s largest state faces a protracted, structural level of unemployment that renders these month to month rises and falls unimportant. The over-focus on this data by the media, however, reveals an ongoing conceptual problem currently afoot in the US: the persistent belief we are in a standard, post-war recession. | see: California Employment in Millions (seasonally adjusted) 2000-2011.

• Censorship

  • Copyright Interests Force Private Censorship into OECD Communiqué

    Paris, June 29th, 2011 – The final OECD communiqué on Internet Policy-Making Principles has been published. The entertainment industries and a few governments ultimately let blind copyright enforcement repression undermine the text’s support of fundamental freedoms and the Net’s openness. La Quadrature du Net supports the civil society coalition’s rejection of a bad compromise and of the final document.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Citizens, Artists and Consumers in Favour of the Legal Recognition of File Sharing

    The Création-Public-Internet (CPI) platform brings together consumer, artist and citizen organisations such as La Quadrature du Net in France. Today, the CPI is launching a campaign for the legal recognition of not-for profit file sharing between individuals and for instituting new statutory resource pooling for the fair and democratically governed financing of digital creation.

  • Copyrights

    • OECD Draft Internet Communiqué Sacrifices Freedoms to Copyright

      La Quadrature du Net adds its voice to the 80 global civil society groups that have declined endorsing the OECD’s communiqué on Principles for Internet Policy-Making. Although the text puts forward positive recommendations, rights and freedoms online are severely undermined by the call for private policing of the network, opening the door to automated censorship in the name of copyright.

      The 80 global civil society groups represented at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) under the umbrella of CSISAC have rejected the draft communiqué on Principles for Internet Policy-Making. La Quadrature du Net adds its voice to that of CSISAC, and regrets the OECD member countries’ stubborn defense of the entertainment industries’ obsolete business models, which is bound to undermine the very principles that the communiqué rightly puts forward.

    • Will OECD serve Hollywood against our Freedoms?

      Paris, June 27th, 2011 – The OECD countries are finalizing a communiqué about the future of the Internet. The outcome could either be a text favourable to citizens’ fundamental freedoms, or a push towards more repression and private policing of the Internet, in line with the ACTA agreement, the G8′s conclusions and EU copyright strategy.

Reader’s Picks

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • A former CIA and Marine intelligence officer calls for the creation of an “Open Source Agency (OSA)” to replace secretive organizations

    an Open Source Agency (OSA) that would create public intelligence in the public interest while encouraging everything open — Open Spectrum, Open Source Software, Open Data Access are just a few examples. It would create National Intelligence Estimates using only legally and ethically available information in all languages … creating intelligence (decision-support) that is totally public and transparent in nature …

    Imagine Open Core government. You are free except where you are not and there are no secrets except where there are. As in software, it’s better to call it “free” and be clear about what you mean.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • US citizens: send messages to your senators and representatives in favor of the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. This bill would limit use of antibiotics on farm animals.

  • Republicans want to destroy the Clean Water Act.

• Finance

  • Bank America sweeps some of its Countrywide debt under the rug

• Anti-Trust

  • Facebook blocks KDE photo upload, deletes user photos that had used the

    I got the “Facebook Call Failed: Invalid API key” error. I don’t typically use Gwenview to upload photos, so I can’t see of my photos missing, but I’ll take my friend’s word for it….

    So much for the “social desktop” using Microsoft captured web services, if all the other problems were not enough. PJ adds, “if you know enough to use KDE apps, what are you doing still on Facebook?” Facebook backed off and restored pictures but the point is proved and people should move on to Freedombox and other self hosting.

• Censorship

  • Israel is trying to prevent press coverage of the Gaza aid fleet by threatening to deny journalists entry to Israel and Palestine for 10 years.

    The US Government has shamefully smeared the flotilla as aiding terrorists, “aiding Hamas” is illegal.”

  • The MPAA is trying to impose Internet filtering on the UK through a lawsuit.

    Separately … ISPs would [voluntarily] block access to websites such as The Pirate Bay on a list drawn up by copyright owners.

    The article uses the propaganda term “piracy” to refer to unauthorized sharing and confuses hosting copies with linking to them. These efforts have turned me off and I minimize my MPAA entertainment spending because of them.

• Privacy

  • HBGary email leak reveals a massive US spying and PR campaign against millions of Arabs.

    This would not be surprising, given the way the US government currently does the same to US citizens but the “active involvement” of Google is only tenuously supported. Everyone should avoid non free software, especially on network connected devices like cell phones.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Bell Canada wants to have US style spectrum auctions.

    Those auctions are corrupt [2] and perpetuate monopolies which should no longer exist.

  • Dutch Internet Freedom Laws translated to English

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Pam Chestek of Red Hat calls for baratray lawsuits against patent trolls, similar to those launched against Righthaven.

    there are often mysteries around the financial relationship between an inventor and the troll company, or the various interrelated companies, in patent troll lawsuits. If we start really digging, might we find some barratry going on there too?

    Yes, software patents are judicial extortion with some obvious guilty parties. Someone should sue the hell out of them but that won’t happen while people who know better pretend there are “good” software patents.