• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

IQnection Revitalizing Linux.org

SJVN Tells How Reporting on Linux Has Changed in the Last 10 Years (Video)

SJVN is, of course, the well-known nickname and abbreviation for Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, who has been covering technology as a journalist since… since longer than he cares to admit… and has been covering Linux and FOSS since the 1990s. This was basically a one-question interview: “How has reporting on Linux changed in the last 10 years?” After that, except for a couple of words requesting clarifications, we just let the webcam roll. (Note: if you know someone who would make a good Slashdot video interview victim, please put us in touch with them. Thanks.)

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 259 – Turn to the Purple Side

Kernel Space

• Linux Foundation takes Linux pulse in progress report

• LInux 3.4 Kernel Has x32 ABI Support

• Oracle Continues With DTrace On Linux

  Another noteworthy session from this year’s Linux Foundation Summit was two Oracle engineers talking about DTrace on Linux.

  Kris Van Hees and Elena Zannoni of Oracle were at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit to promote DTrace on Linux. Last year was when it was reported Oracle was bringing DTrace to Linux. In particular, they wanted to bring this Solaris technology from their Sun Microsystems acquisition over to their RHEL-derived Oracle Enterprise Linux.

• Udev will become part of systemd

  Sievers explained that it will still be possible to install udev independently of systemd. He added that this option will be supported in the long term because separate builds are required to ensure that initrds (initial ramdisks), which don’t include systemd, work correctly. Distributions that don’t use systemd can continue to build udev as before, but will have to use the systemd sources. With the addition of udev, systemd’s version will jump from 45 to 184 to ensure that its version number is higher than that of the last independent version of udev.

• When Will Android be a First Class Linux Citizen?

  Android is now back in the Linux kernel as of the recent 3.3 release. That doesn’t mean that Android however is a first class Linux citizen, according to developers speaking at the Linux Collaboration Summit this week.

• Counting Contributions: Who Wrote Linux 3.2?

  Once again, it’s time to take stock of the contributions to the Linux kernel. The Linux Foundation has released another report on the speed of Linux kernel development, as well as who’s doing the work and what companies are sponsoring development. Since tracking has began, nearly 8,000 developers from just shy of 800 companies have contributed to the kernel.

• Despite killing Maemo, Nokia contributed more work to the Linux kernel in 2011 than Google

• Linux Kernel Development Has Levelled Off

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Finally Publishes New Gallium3D Driver (RadeonSI)

  • X/Wayland Is Coming Along Nicely, But Work Is Left

    Keith Packard spoke on Wednesday of the 2012 Linux Foundation Collaboration concerning Wayland and its backwards compatibility support for X applications.

    Here’s my notes from Keith’s talk concerning X/Wayland. Nothing from the presentation was particularly new or surprising, but largely summarized information from past mailing list discussions (covered in earlier Phoronix Wayland articles) and past conferences like X@FOSDEM 2012.

Applications

• Nitro – Simple Task Management Tool for Ubuntu Linux

• Xnoise Media Player 0.2.0 Gets Refreshed Layout, More

  Xnoise, a simple and fast media player for Linux, has reached version 0.2.0, getting a refreshed layout, support for dockable media sources, a redone application button and more.

• MComix: User-Friendly Comic Book Reader

• Award-Winning Autism Application Comes to Linux. Oh Wait…..No it Doesn’t

  I am not sure how this happened, and the last thing I want to do is criticize an over-worked single developer, but the Linux version was DOA on the announcement page.

• Xiwtool: Convenient and (Hopefully) Easier Wireless Scanning and Configuration for Linux

• Jitsi 1.0 released

• Instructionals/Technical

  • HowTo: Find Uptime and System Load in Linux

  • Get A New Desktop Look With The Hope Theme [Linux]

  • Stop An Application From Being Update in Ubuntu

  • Reset account password (Ubuntu Linux) without CD

  • Nifty Vim Tricks

  • Clear recent documents in Gnome 3

  • How to Back Up Your Linux System With Back In Time

  • Install Horde 4 Webmail For ISPConfig On Debian Squeeze Through PEAR

  • Creating and managing user accounts in a GNOME 3 or Ubuntu desktop

  • Simple Toning in digiKam

  • Elementary GTK Theme 3.0 Released, Install in Ubuntu 12.04

  • Build Cross-platform GUI Applications with wxWidgets

  • how to setup gitorious on ubuntu server 11.10

  • LPI offers promotional exams at Indiana LinuxFest

  • Quick Tips: How To Change Network Card Speed and Duplex in Ubuntu 12.04

  • Hack and /: Automatically Lock Your Computer

  • Review: “The Linux Command Line”

    In short, “The Linux Command Line” is more than a complete introduction — it’s a full education in 432 pages (not counting the index).

• Games

  • Open Source Tool Lets You Control Linux Desktop and Play Games by Tracking Your Gestures

    Skeltrack is a Free and Open Source Software library by Igalia for tracking the human skeleton joints from depth images.

  • There Exists A Native Linux Port Of CryEngine 3

    While most Linux gamers are currently eager for the imminent news concerning Valve’s Linux client efforts, there’s some more interesting news that I’ve learned this week as well: there exists a native Linux port of CryEngine 3.

    CryEngine 3 is the latest version of Crytek’s CryEngine, which was released in H2’2009. I have confirmation from a source this week that a Linux port does exist, which also means an OpenGL renderer. CryEngine 3 under Microsoft Windows uses a DirectX 9/10/11 renderer while this game engine has also been ported to the Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii U, and Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles.

  • Trine 2 Beta For Linux Now Available

  • PC game Trine 2 now available for Linux machines

Desktop Environments

• Xfce 4.10pre1 released!

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • A more elegant KDE Plasma Window Manager and Compositor

    Recently I have spent some time to make our window manager even more elegant. That is I decided to fix a few rough edges in our user experience offerings. All of these issues had actually been reported in our bugtracker as feature requests some time ago and listed as Junior Jobs, on the KWin ideas Wiki page and of course recently been added to the 4.9 milestone plan.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Controlling GNOME 3 with your hands

    Last week Igalia released an important piece of software called Skeltrack which, to put it simple, allows to retrieve the human skeleton joints from depth images. It had a good coverage from many important news websites and blogs and I received good feedback with kind words and even use cases I hadn’t thought of.

  • Control Gnome With Your Hands

  • GNOME 3.4: A Question Searching for an Answer

    To anticipate the first question: No, the newly released GNOME 3.4 does nothing to change the general structure of GNOME 3. Nor does it install by default with any of the extensions that reproduce GNOME 2, although users can download many of them from the GNOME Extensions page.

    Instead, GNOME 3.4 is an incremental release, focusing on polishing the GNOME 3 release series without introducing any major structural or conceptual changes. Specifically, the new release begins the implementation of the design concepts summarized two months ago by Allan Day.

  • Quick Peek at GNOME 3.4

  • An Experimental GNOME Shell Running On Wayland

    On Wednesday of the 2012 LF Collaboration Summit, besides the X and Wayland integration talk, there was a second discussion concerning Wayland/Weston during a Tizen track. During this talk were a few tid-bits of interesting information revealed, such as an experimental GNOME 3.x desktop on Wayland.

    Keith Packard did the first Wayland talk at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was about X-Wayland and ensuring legacy X applications will be able to run within the Wayland Display Server by having a seamless nested X experience with the modified xorg-server being automatically and transparently started when needed. That talk was covered in full in this article (the Phoronix video is still coming soon).

Distributions

• Legacy OS 4 Mini needs only 800 MHz & 256 MB

• Porteus, The Portable Community Linux

  Porteus grew out of the fan project that gave us the Slax Community Remix, a continuation of Slax 6.1.2, the last official Slax release for quite a while, dating back to August 2009.

• Introduction to AnoN-1mOS a new Linux Distribution

  Surely you have heard of “Anonymous”, a group of hackers and activists that are quiet active in these days and so they have become sort of famous on the net, they have made ​​for fun a customized version of Ubuntu that uses LXDE desktop/OpenBox with Metacity, Cairo-Dock, Tor, and nurtured a series of excellent programs.

• Foresight Linux Newsletter – Issue 02 2012

• New Releases

  • Wary (and Racy) 5.3

  • Clonezilla 1.2.12-46

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • April 2012 Issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine

  • Mageia 2 Beta 2 Review

    Mageia is nearly in its second iteration, and the Mandriva fork has gone a long way to establish its own identity while retaining the best bits

  • Anne Nicolas Retains Mageia Board Chairmanship

    Anne Nicolas has been chairman of the Mageia.Org Board of Directors since its first election a year ago. From the outside looking in, it appears she has performed professionally and skillfully. Apparent the board agrees, because she was again elected by secret ballot to its highest position.

  • Final release of Mageia 2 postponed

• Red Hat Family

  • Congresswoman Niki Tsongas Gets Tour of Red Hat

    With expected expansion of their Littleton Road facility coming soon, Red Hat invited Congresswoman Niki Tsongas (D-Lowell) on Wednesday for a quick tour of the facility and a discussion about the future of the company here in Westford.

  • Red Hat to expand in Westford

  • Red Hat’s Billion-Dollar Coup

    “Red Hat represents a new kind of capitalism,” suggested Google+ blogger Alessandro Ebersol. Specifically, it’s an example of “the company that really helps society and gives back to society, not like the others (M$ and Apple), which only take advantage of society and give nothing back. I wish more companies were like Red Hat.”

  • ClearOS,the Missing Link LAN Server

    There is a recurring lament that there are no Linux distributions equivalent to Windows Small Business Server, no nicely-integrated Linux LAN server that doesn’t need a lot of tweaking. But there is one that is billed as a drop-in replacement for SBS, and that’s ClearOS.

    Linux is a flexible powerhouse in the server room, but is sometimes criticized for not being like Windows Small Business Server. This is a good thing, because making Linux worse doesn’t make sense. But the idea of SBS is a good one, a nicely-integrated LAN server that can be up and running with a minimum of fuss, and Linux does have one of those: ClearOS. Let’s take a look at ClearOS 6.2 beta 3, which is the current release.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora online defragmenter for ext4 filesystem

      The man page tell us: reduces fragmentation of extent based file. The file targeted by e4defrag is created on ext4 filesystem made with “-O extent” option (see mke2fs(8)). The targeted file gets more contiguous blocks and improves the file access speed.

    • rc.local in Fedora

• Debian Family

  • Debian Edu interview: Wolfgang Schweer

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • That Juju that you do (Part II: A magical balm to sooth your ills)

        If you’re not familiar with Juju, I’d urge you to pay a visit to the Juju website to learn more, but in brief, I’ll explain: Juju is an orchestration service for Ubuntu. Using Juju allows you to deploy services rapidly, scaling up or down as you need. Each service is contained within a Charm, which is at it simplest a set of scripts that ensure that a given Juju unit does what it’s supposed to do at the appointed time (for example: install and config_changed are two of the most common hook scripts for a charm to have). We realised that in order to make our life simpler when testing our parallelisation work we could develop a pair of Buildbot Charms (one for the master, one for the slave) which when deployed through Juju, and given the right set of configuration options, would give us a working Buildbot setup on which to test Launchpad.

      • Ubuntu hammers out Metal-as-a-Service tool for microservers

      • Ubuntu Founder Pitches New Tool for Server Provisioning

      • Introducing Metal as a Service: provisioning for the hyperscale era

        As we move from “tens” to “hundreds” to “thousands” of nodes in a typical data centre we need new tools and practices. This hyperscale story – of hyper-dense racks with wimpy nodes – is the big shift in the physical world which matches the equally big shift to cloud computing in the virtualised world. Ubuntu’s popularity in the cloud comes in part from being leaner, faster, more agile. And MAAS – Metal as a Service – is bringing that agility back to the physical world for hyperscale deployments.

      • Canonical Metal-as-a-Service: Not Quite As Cool As It Sounds

      • Metal as a Service: Canonical announces Ubuntu server provisioning tool

        Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced a new tool called Metal as a Service (MAAS) that is designed to simplify the provisioning of individual server nodes in a cluster. It primarily targets computing environments that have many physical servers.

      • Shuttleworth defends Ubuntu’s Linux contributions

        Lots of companies, even Microsoft, contribute to the Linux kernel. When you look at the top 20 list of who’s been contributing to Linux’s heart, you’ll find many familiar Linux names such as Novell (now SUSE), Red Hat, and The Linux Foundation. Who you won’t find is Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company. Some people wonder how Microsoft could do more for Linux than Canonical does. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, has a response to such claims: “Our focus is on the user experience, making things ‘Just Work.’”

      • Looking Towards Ubuntu 12.04

        Here we are, just a matter of weeks away from the Ubuntu 12.04 release on 26th April 2012, and what a cycle it has been.

        Ubuntu 12.04 is a release that has been talked about within the Ubuntu community for quite some time. It marks our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, an important milestone for Ubuntu deployment in business, education and elsewhere, and an important checkpoint in delivering precision and quality in Ubuntu.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Is A Mixed Power Story

        Similar to the mixed boot performance results for Ubuntu 12.04, the power consumption results are also mixed. For some hardware, Ubuntu 12.04 is the most power efficient Ubuntu Linux release in recent history while for some other hardware the Precise Pangolin is continuing in a power binge.

      • Official Ubuntu 12.04 Wallpapers Land

        Previously the shortlisting and the final selection of the Ubuntu 12.04 wallpapers were announced. This selection however was not final and can change a bit. Finally, the official wallpapers for Ubuntu 12.04 have landed in an update today. It includes 14 wallpapers selected by the community and the default purplish wallpaper. Some submissions were replaced by others.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Lubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) LTS Beta 2 Screenshots Gallery

          The Lubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Precise Pangolin Beta 2 release of lubuntu 12.04 gives a preview of the next LTS version of Lubuntu.

        • Two Weeks With Bodhi Linux 1.4.0

          Bodhi Linux is a fresh, Ubuntu-based, Linux distribution that utilizes the Enlightenment desktop manager and only needs 1.2GB of space for a fresh installation. Bodhi is a semi-rolling release with two primary goals. Bodhi Linux aims to promote user choice and provide a minimal environment. I’ve used it for several weeks now and, although it took some getting used to, I have been impressed by several of the features of Bodhi Linux 1.4.0.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android overtakes 50% market share according to comScore

    • Sprint to keep smartphone data unlimited on LTE, for the same price as 3G

    • New Motorola Webtop platform to run Android as a laptop

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • A Linux user’s Nook experience

    Well, anyway, lesson learned. I don’t think I will buy any DRM digital books ever again. The silver lining here is that the experience has reassured me that my beliefs are not crazy, that digital freedom is a very valid concern and us FLOSS folks aren’t just silly hippies.

  • Motorola’s WebTop 3.0 Is No Match For Ubuntu For Android

    Motorola’s WebTop OS was expected to get some major overhaul with the next version. But if we look at the YouTube video of WebTop 3.0 beta, it leaves a lot to be desired. It is by no means a desktop OS. It seems to be nothing more than Android on a bigger screen.

Open Source in Automotive Industry Rising

Bearing Point Consulting just published a study on the use of open source software in the automotive industry. It shows how open source is on the rise, no surprise.

Events

• From Facebook to the New York Stock Exchange, the Linux foundation successfully hosted the ultimate Open Source collaboration summit

  After receiving a briefing from MITA and MARSEC-XL, I hopped over to London followed by a long-haul flight to the west coast, finally arriving in Silicon Valley a day later.

  Today, in downtown San Francisco the 6th Linux collaboration summit got off to a great start with an exceptional key note from Jim Zemlin the Executive Director of the Linux foundation. He showcased how Linux and its kernel is dominating all domains, ranging from desktops to enterprise servers, with 850,000 android phones being registered on a daily basis in comparison to the 30,000 windows phones. Since 2005, 8000 developers have contributed to the Linux kernel, resulting in 15 million lines of code, proving that the Linux project is the World’s largest collaboration software project.

SaaS

• ownCloud Needs Better Integration With File Managers

• ownCloud releases new business and enterprise editions

• OpenStack Essex Adds Dashboard and Identity

• OpenStack “Essex” Release Delivers Pluggable Cloud Operating System to Power Global Clouds

• “Essex” version of OpenStack debuts

  The fifth release of OpenStack, code named “Essex,” debuted today, with enhanced quality, usability and extensibility across enterprise, service provider and high performance computing (HPC) deployments, the project announced. Essex is integrated in Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04.

• The Open Source Implications of the CloudStack Announcement

• Citrix Walks Away from OpenStack, Moves to Apache CloudStack

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Apache OpenOffice: who knows where the time goes?

  In March Rob Weir put up a blog entry entitled “Where did the time go? (A look at the Apache OpenOffice timeline)”, showing the slow progress of Apache OpenOffice through the process of acceptance into the Apache fold. Richard Hillesley looks at the issues…

• LibreOffice goes money printing

  You may have heard the rumors already although there is nothing official yet: There is an exciting new idea making the rounds in LibreOffice circles. LibreOffice made and continues to make amazing progress pushing not only the product, but also the project as a whole to new levels. While the development of LibreOffice at the Document Foundation is widely supported by a diverse set of contributors and supporters from all over the world, there is always more we could do, if we had more time and money.

• LibreOffice Files

• The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5.2

• Pros Tips for Extending LibreOffice

• Government of Malaysia Continues to Increase Usage of FLOSS

• OmniTI Delivers OmniOS to Replace OpenSolaris

Education

• Unschooling is the open source way

  Unschooling is an approach to education that follows a child’s innate curiosity and desire to learn. It is not based on the direction of a teacher or a set curriculum. It is self-directed learning.
  Unschoolers take a hands-on, community-based, real-world approach to education–everything and everywhere is a learning possibility. Unschoolers may use an open source textbook like those found at CK-12 Flexbooks, take classes online through a program like Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning, or continue on to in-person coursework at a local college.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • In an Exploding Web Market, Nginx Gaining Against Apache

    Any way you look at it, this month’s Netcraft Web Server Survey has some astounding numbers. The competition between Web servers is always interesting, but more so is the fact that the number of sites surveyed since April 2011 has more than doubled. Netcraft’s April 2012 survey received responses from 676,919,707 sites – more than double the number of sites from 2011, a mere 312,693,296.

BSD

• Review: DragonFlyBSD 3.0.1 — the longest DragonFlyBSD review ever — Part 1: Preamble

Programming

• About BerliOS-SourceForge Partnership

• GCC 4.8 Aims To Switch To C++ Mode By Default

• Programming Raspberry Pi

Standards/Consortia

• ODF Interoperability: Brussels ODF Plugfest, 19-20 April 2012

Security

• Interview With Incarcerated NASA Hacker Jeremey Parker

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Opposition Against Fracking in Australia Grows, but Government Fails to Enact Moratorium

  Worries over the safety of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” as a method to extract natural gas and oil from the shale bedrock, continues to grow across the world including Australia.

Finance

• The Race for BTU

  The world’s major central banks — including the Bank of Japan (BOJ), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Federal Reserve — appear to have finally won a major battle in the deflationary war that broke out five years ago in 2007. While the ultimate victor is yet to be determined, it now seems likely that a period of nominal growth could ensue for another two years, perhaps even longer.

  This will not be high-quality growth. And little of the growth will be real.

  Commodity prices will surely eat away at most, if not all, of any gains that may occur in global GDP. Additionally, while non-OECD growth actually has a chance of achieving some GDP gains in real terms, the prospects for the OECD are not as encouraging.

• MF Global: JPMorgan Produces Smoking Gun

  When New York-based MF Global collapsed on October 31, 2011, its $41 billion in assets made it the eighth largest bankruptcy in U.S. history and the biggest financial firm to implode since Lehman in September 2008. Then Chairman and CEO Jon Corzine is connected to the head of one of his key regulators, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), through his former protégé at Goldman Sachs, Gary Gensler. He also knows the Fed’s William Dudley, a key member of the Fed’s Open Market Committee, from their days at Goldman Sachs. The Fed approved MF Global’s status as a primary dealer, a participant in the Fed’s Open Market Operations, less than one year after Jon Corzine took its helm. Corzine is also a former New Jersey governor, a former New Jersey U.S. senator and was a major campaign contribution bundler for President Obama.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Breaking News: Coca-Cola Dumps ALEC

  According to a statement Coke made to the Washington Examiner, “Our involvement with ALEC was focused on efforts to oppose discriminatory food and beverage taxes, not on issues that have no direct bearing on our business. We have a long-standing policy of only taking positions on issues that impact our Company and industry.”

Censorship

• Julian Assange makes McCann media coverage comparison

• WikiLeaks chief: I’ve made 75 press complaints

  WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange has made 75 official complaints over what he describes as the shoddy reporting of his long-running extradition battle, the online activist said Thursday.
  Assange itemized the complaints in a submission to Britain’s judge-led inquiry into media ethics, which is examining the standards and practices of the country’s scandal-tarred press.
  He said in a statement published by the inquiry Thursday that he had been subjected to “ongoing, widespread inaccurate and negative media coverage” and that Britain’s press watchdog had failed to protect him.

• WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange: PCC stood by as I was libelled by media

Copyrights

• ACTA

  • De Gucht: Please wait, Europarl!

    What he doesn’t consider is that the IPR lobby is willing to surrender ACTA but not the entire Article 207 TFEU process which is challenged by the ECJ ruling invoked by De Gucht. And finally, the upcoming IPRED+ is more interesting than the dossier which allegedly does not change anything.

  • EU Commission Shamelessly Persists In Trying to Delay ACTA Vote

    The EU Commission has made public the text of its own referral of ACTA to the EU Court of Justice. This initiative comes a week after the EU Parliament voted not to refer ACTA to the Court, which would have suspended the parliamentarian procedure for at least 18 months. The Parliament is expected to vote on ACTA this summer, and must continue to resist the Commission’s shameless technocratic tricks to save ACTA.

  • ACTA referral, here you are

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Little Drive, Big Deal

  You’ve heard of Linux, but haven’t had a chance to see what all the fuss is about. After all, your computer runs Windows. But what if you could plug in your USB drive and temporarily turn your PC into a Linux system? Even better, when you’re done, your machine will go back to its regular Windows-powered self, with no trace of Linux left behind?

  You can work this bit of OS prestidigitation with UNetbootin, a free Windows utility that downloads and installs any version of Linux to your flash drive, then makes that drive bootable. It’s an easy, hassle-free way to test-drive the OS, which runs entirely from the drive, making no changes whatsoever to your

Server

• Dell-Clerity: Shifting IBM Mainframe Apps to Linux, Windows

• Can An ARM-Based Supercomputer Become the World’s Fastest?

  Ramirez, a manager with the center, is in the midst of building a new supercomputer, called Mont-Blanc, that will use the same kind of low-power chips that you can find in tablets and smartphones today. Starting next month, his team will start assembling the first Mont-Blanc prototype using Nvidia’s Tegra 3 processors instead of the RISC or Intel x86-compatible processors that are used on virtually all of today’s supercomputers. The Tegra 3 will handle communications between different parts of the system while the actual number crunching will be done by yet-to-be-determined low-power multicore Nvidia graphics processors similar to the GeForce 520MX.

Kernel Space

• Android As A First Class Citizen To Linux Kernel

  Greg Kroah-Hartman was asked today during a panel he was moderating at the 6th annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit about Google’s Android on the mainline Linux kernel.

  For those that haven’t been paying attention, since last year there’s been a concerted effort to mainline more of Google’s Android changes into the mainline Linux kernel. Android patches that went into the mainline Linux kernel previous suffered some rot, but this latest effort has the backing of several companies and is finally coming to fruition within stable kernel releases.

• Who Are the ‘Unkown’ Linux Kernel Developers?

  There are a lot of different people that contribute code to the Linux kernel. In fact, according to the 2012 Linux Kernel Development report from the Linux Foundation, more than 7,800 developers from nearly 800 different companies have participated in Linux kernel development.

  Not all of those companies and developers participate in every kernel release. According to the report, for the recent Linux 3.2 kernel release, some 1,316 developers contributed, representing 226 different companies. While there is lots of participation, over the last five years the top 30 developers have contributed 20 percent of the total code.

• The Linux Foundation Releases Annual Linux Development Report

• How is Linux Built? Our new report and video.

  When you work for the Linux Foundation you get a lot of questions on just how Linux is built. Given the massive scale of the development and ubiquity of Linux today, some of us in the community might think everyone understands how the largest collaborative project in computing works. How you submit a patch. How maintainers work with Linux creator Linus Torvalds. But because of Linux’s unprecedented growth in mobile, embedded and cloud computing, among other areas, new companies and developers are looking to participate. More than ever before, actually.

• How Linux is Built

• Linux boss: We’re number one where it counts

  “We want to continue our trajectory in every corner of the industry,” Zemlin told The Register. “We’re seeing Linux as the primary platform for greenfield sites in large enterprises, the primary operating system for cloud computing build outs, and we’re seeing tremendous growth in mobile and the embedded markets.”

  While some in Redmond might point to the fact that Linux is still not king of the corporate desktop, Zemlin said that that battle isn’t particularly relevant anymore. People use a wider variety of computing devices to use computers, and the browser is the becoming the most common interface for most users.

• Linux Kernel 3.3.1 Is Available for Download

  Greg Kroah-Hartman announced on April 2nd the immediate available for download of the first maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.3 kernel series.

  Linux kernel 3.3.1 incorporates ARM fixes, updated drivers (wireless, Radeon), USB updates, as well as some improvements to various filesystem, such as CIFS, EXT4, XFS and NFS.

• Slideshow: Live from Collaboration Summit

• How Linux Talks to the Internet of Things: A Look at IEEE 802.15.4

  If you pay much attention to the futurists on the Web these days, no doubt you’re familiar with the term “Internet Of Things.” It may be yet-another-buzzword, but the central concept is quite real: the spread of low power, Internet-connected devices that use wireless networks to communicate with our PCs and servers. After all, you don’t need a computer in your water heater or electric meter: you just need a sensor, and way to read it remotely. Linux will be a major player in this space, but most developers still aren’t familiar with the network standards that make it work, like IEEE 802.15.4.

• What is tmpfs ?

• Graphics Stack

  • Non-Linux OSes Still Playing In An Intel UMS World

    While Intel has a lot of interesting work going on right now within their Linux kernel DRM driver and elsewhere within their open-source graphics stack, operating systems like OpenIndiana/Illumos and FreeBSD are still catching up, but they’re still a ways off.

    Pushed out yesterday was an updated Intel graphics driver for the OpenSolaris-derived OpenIndiana. This new Intel X.Org driver is derived from xf86-video-intel 2.9.1… Yes, what was released as upstream in October 2009 while the latest Linux users are now running xf86-video-intel 2.18.0 with many, many features and changes since that point.

  • Intel outlines open source development projects

    The director of Intel’s Open Source Technology Center Imad Sousou outlined the chip giant’s plans to invest in the open source community and provided an update on two key projects, speaking at the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco.

  • Kernel Log: Intel hibernate bug fixed

    New versions of the Linux kernel fix a bug in Intel graphics drivers which could cause memory corruption. AMD has released X.Org drivers for its new Trinity processors. In September there will be a conference for X developers in Nuremberg. Progress has been made on GPGPU support in Mesa 3D.

Applications

• Recoll Looks High, Looks Low, Finds Your File With Ease

  Recoll is a powerful yet simple-to-use full-text desktop search tool that indexes the contents of many file formats. You can perform simple searches as well as advanced operations like searching for the author, file size, file format as well as operators like “AND” or “OR.” And setup is a breeze.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Become a Linux Terminal Power User With These 8 Tricks

  • Creating An NFS-Like Standalone Storage Server With GlusterFS 3.2.x On Ubuntu 11.10

  • 10 great and powerful Linux commands you may need to know

  • Hassle-free Reverse SSH Tunneling with localtunnel

• Games

  • Excited.

  • Wanna play Steam games now?

  • Exclusive: Much Awaited Game Client Finally Running Natively on Linux

    One of our reader has emailed us a link to a working test build of a popular game client. This client is long awaited by Linux gamers and the company behind it is undoubtedly the leader in computer game distribution industry.

  • Trine 2 Finally Arrives on Linux

    Dear Linux gamers, the wait is over, as Frozenbyte unleashed a few days ago the Linux version for its award winning Trine 2 cross-platform game.

    Trine 2 is a side-scrolling puzzle adventure/action game developed by the Finnish studio Frozenbyte, will be ported to Linux and officially launched sometime during 2012.

    There’s no official announcement from Frozenbyte about the Linux client but it is available for download if you purchase it from here.

  • Linux Tycoon lets players “manage” a Linux distribution

    Bryan Lunduke, software developer and host of the Linux Action Show podcast, has announced the beta release of his game, Linux Tycoon. The game lets players manage the daily tasks involved in creating a popular Linux distribution. Players assign people and resources to development tasks and their distribution is rated by the number of users compared to its competitors.

  • Valve seeking out Linux developers

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Krita Coming With Photoshop File Import Feature

    Krita is a very powerful image editing tools similar to GIMP and Photoshop. KDE’s own Photoshop Krita will soon be seeing a major upgrade with the upcoming version 2.4.

  • KDE Ships April Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform

• GNOME Desktop

  • elementary GTK Theme 3.0 Released

  • GNOME 3.4 Live CD Available for Download Now

    After the successful release of the GNOME 3.4 desktop environment on March 28th, the GNOME Project are once again proud to announce that a Live CD Linux distribution with GNOME 3.4, based on Fedora, is now available for download.

  • GNOME 3.4 Looks Good and Feels Good (Eventually)

Distributions

• What DEFT brings to the table

• New Releases

  • Elastix 2.3.0

• Red Hat Family

  • CentOS Desktop

    I may be (half) joking sometime, but it happens to be serious too: encountered an old laptop (in bad shape, lot of dead pixels and such, it was a workhorse back in its time) which refuses to play along with Windows: bluescreen at startup, bluescreen at fresh install, hardware problems. The first thought: memory problems but memtest96 running from a Fedora live CD disagrees… but if I booted the device from that CD, just for the kicks I booted the distro (F14): works correctly, no lock-up, even WiFi is supported OOTB (so I suspect the hardware problem lies with the video card and is triggered by real use, not by the VESA driver).

  • Red Hat’s $1B milestone notable but chump change vis-a-vis overall Linux industry

    The Linux Foundation’s exec director saluted Linux distribution leader Red Hat for reaching $1 billion in revenues but pointed out that the overall Linux industry is worth many, many billions today.

  • Red Hat Turns More Into More

    Margins matter. The more Red Hat (NYS: RHT) keeps of each buck it earns in revenue, the more money it has to invest in growth, fund new strategic plans, or (gasp!) distribute to shareholders. Healthy margins often separate pretenders from the best stocks in the market. That’s why we check up on margins at least once a quarter in this series. I’m looking for the absolute numbers, so I can compare them to current and potential competitors, and any trend that may tell me how strong Red Hat’s competitive position could be.

  • Porticor Joins Red Hat Innovate Initiative

    Porticor®, the leading cloud data security company delivering the only cloud-based data encryption solution that infuses trust into the cloud by ensuring customer keys are never exposed, today announced it has joined the Red Hat Innovate™ program, enabling Porticor to leverage the power, openness and collaborative nature of open source communities, including enhanced access to Red Hat collaboration initiatives and software programs.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • 5 problems with Ubuntu 12.04 part 1: Unity Dash usability issues

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin: Will April Be A Magic Month?

      • New Canonical Tool Tackles ‘Hyperscale’ Data Centers

        In the run-up to the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Linux later this month, Canonical is offering its new “Metal-as-a-Service” provisioning and management tool for customers who want to test it out with the new Ubuntu beta.

        The MaaS tool, a component of Ubuntu Server 12.04, helps IT administrators configure and manage large-scale server farms — including those used to provide cloud computing services.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Installing Kubuntu 12.04 On Older Non-PAE Computers

        • Kubuntu Active 12.04 beta 2 screen shots

Devices/Embedded

• Mentor Embedded Linux supports open source Yocto Project

  Mentor Graphics Corporation has released its next generation Mentor Embedded Linux platform that includes support for the Yocto Project, an open source collaborative project established by The Linux Foundation. The Mentor Embedded Linux platform helps developers build Linux-based embedded systems, independent of hardware architecture. With the new Mentor Embedded Linux platform, developers also gain the ability to easily select the best Linux kernel for their needs, irrespective of the kernel developed by Mentor Graphics or by a semiconductor company or by any third party.

• Phones

  • Android

    • First impressions of my new Android phone

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Motorola’s WebTop 3.0 Software Launches Android 4.0 RAZR in Tablet Mode

    Motorola has cleverly followed in the footsteps of the upcoming ASUS Padfone. Previously, the Motorola Lapdock will connect to a Linux desktop OS once a compatible Motorola smartphone is plugged in, as seen in our Motorola Atrix review. However, the new WebTop 3.0 software update will instead display an ICS tablet mode when connected to one of their Android 4.0 devices.

  • Vivaldi open source tablet launch pushed back a month

Adobe releases open source malware classification tool

Adobe Systems has released a malware classification tool in order to help security incident first responders, malware analysts and security researchers more easily identify malicious binary files.

The Adobe Malware Classifier tool uses machine learning algorithms to classify Windows executable and dynamic link library (DLL) files as clean, malicious or unknown, Adobe security engineer Karthik Raman said in a recent blog post.

As Yahoo Trims Down, Open Source Contributions Could Pick Up

Forrester Predicts Increase in Use of Open Source DI Tools

The next train at platform #1 is open source

Events

• Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit – see the stream

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Writing a web app

SaaS

• ownCloud offers open source Dropbox rival

• More Cloud Turbulence: CloudStack Heads to Apache Foundation

• An Open-Source Food Fight in the Cloud

• Creation and Evolution of OpenStack

• Citrix CloudStack vs. OpenStack: Real or Imagined Cloud Battle?

• Why Use Dropbox, When You Can Own Your Cloud?

• Former VMware exec to launch new Cloud Foundry PaaS?

• Is a Cloudy Battle Shaping Up Between OpenStack and CloudStack?

• Oracle: Ready to Manage IaaS Clouds?

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• OmniTI Debuts OmniOS, an Open Source Operating System for the Solaris Community

CMS

• Westpac New Zealand using Open Source CMS SilverStripe

• Joomla surpasses 30 million download mark

  The organization announced the landmark download count this morning, also saying that its CMS is used to 2.7 per cent of the Web. The downloads of Joomla grew from 22 million in March 2011, and the actual number of downloads is higher than the count since the organization started counting in 2007, and the software has been available since 2005.

Education

• Totara Learning Solutions Extends the Life of Moodle 1.9

Business

• opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM Update

Funding

• Open-source customer relationship management service SugarCRM raises $33M

BSD

• The longest DragonFlyBSD review ever — coming up in Click

  My DragonFlyBSD 3.0.1 review is finished. (Finally!!) It will appear here in Click in six daily parts starting the morning of April 4, 2012. A new part will appear at 3 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time each day until all six are exhausted on April 9. Read them all and I bet you’ll be exhausted, too.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GIMP 2.8.0-RC1: 1st release candidate now available

• In Braga

  Please fill out our form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Paris, Avignon, Marseille, Braga, Lisbon, Madrid, which RMS visited while he was in Europe on this last trip.

Licensing

• First Creative Commons 4.0 draft open for public comment

  The non-profit Creative Commons (CC) organisation has released the first draft of version 4.0 of its suite of Creative Commons licences and is asking for feedback from the community. Diane Peters, CC General Counsel, writes in a blog post that the draft focuses on three overarching design goals: consideration of the needs of users who cannot use the current version 3.0 of the CC licences because of conflicts with national laws; maximum interoperability with other “copyleft” licences; and longevity and ease of use.

• Announcing New Open Compliance Template

Openness/Sharing

• An Open Source Live Bus Data Monitor

  Many cities have acknowledged this problem and offer open APIs with real-time bus data. This is crucial, as any bus rider knows that buses rarely arrive on time, because, unlike subways, buses are dependent on traffic and delays caused by riders. But it’s also a hindrance to taking the bus: who wants to wait at a lonely bus stop, which is subject to the elements and may not be safe? Not to mention boring.

• Takeda joins open-source research consortium

  Japan’s Takeda has become the latest pharma company to join the open-source Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), which determines the three-dimensional structure of biomedically-relevant proteins.

• Qbo robot strips for open-source titillation

  The Qbo robot may be open-source, but open-casing is what creators TheCorpora have been showing recently, stripping the sensor-studded ‘bot down and then reconstructing it in a new timelapse video. Intended to be straightforward for robotics tinkerers to put together themselves, the footage shows the 168 minute build from the basic Qbo frame up to the various ultrasonic sensors, PC mainboard, camera-toting head and more.

• Open Data

  • Next generation open data: Personal data access

    Last Monday I had the pleasure of being in Mexico City for the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) High Level Meeting on e-Government. CIO’s from a number of countries were present – including Australia, Canada, the UK and Mexico (among others). But what really got me going was a presentation by Chris Vein, the Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation.

    In his presentation he referenced work around the Blue Button and the Green Button – both efforts I was previously familiar with. But my conversation with Chris sparked several new ideas and reminded me of just how revolutionary these initiatives are.

Programming

• SourceForge Chosen by BerliOS as a Trusted Partner to Deliver Open Source Downloads

Security

• Anonymous China: Hundreds of Beijing’s Government Websites Defaced

  The Anonymous hacking collective has landed in China, home of some of the most tightly controlled internet access in the world, and defaced hundreds of government websites in what appears to be a massive online operation against Beijing.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The Fracking Frenzy’s Impact on Women

  Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has generated widespread media attention this year. The process, which injects water and chemicals into the ground to release “natural” gas and oil from shale bedrock, has been shown to contribute significantly to air and water pollution and has even been linked to earthquakes. But little has been reported on the ways in which fracking may have unique impacts on women. Chemicals used in fracking have been linked to breast cancer and reproductive health problems and there have been reports of rises in crimes against women in some fracking “boom” towns, which have attracted itinerant workers with few ties to the community.

Finance

• Exclusive: The $1.3 billion bond deal haunting Goldman

  The Securities and Exchange Commission is likely to bring charges soon against Goldman Sachs (GS) for a 2006 mortgage investment deal. The agency hasn’t said which one yet, but Fortune has learned there’s a good chance the SEC’s case will focus on Fremont Home Loan Trust 2006-E, a bundle of more than 5,000 mortgages that has cost investors, including mortgage guarantor Freddie Mac and by extension U.S. taxpayers, an estimated $545 million.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Copyright paradigm shift in visegrad countries

    The field of copyright is associated with important cultural, social, and technological aspects, all of which have to be taken into account when formulating policy in this field. In the last 20 years, copyright and patent holders in different fields of industry and art have entered into a period of redefinition. Today, the copyright that served to protect the interest of creators in the last centuries is a barrier of invention and knowledge-sharing.

  • US government: We hear there’s child porn on those Megaupload servers, judge!

    Megaupload wants the servers back to help with its defense, but with most of its assets seized by the federal government, it can’t pay for them. Carpathia would normally wipe the servers and lease them to new clients, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation is demanding that legitimate users of the site be allowed to retrieve their personal data first. The Motion Picture Association of America doesn’t want this to happen without assurances that its copyrighted content won’t be retrieved and distributed again; besides, it might want the servers for a future lawsuit of its own. And the federal government yesterday announced that the servers “may contain child pornography,” which would render them “contraband” and limit Carpathia’s options for dealing with them.