07.10.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Desktop
-
Apparently, if you consider only that other OS you can make a proposal look good. Against MacOS and GNU/Linux the costs are staggering. TDSB has 60K PCs and 256 support people, 240 machines per support person. RedHat and others can set up systems where one support person can deal with thousands of machines. Could it be that the IT people did not believe CMS’ advice and lay themselves off upon migrating to Vista? Chuckle… The truth is only M$ and its partners benefit when a school board migrates to a product from M$. On top of that students are harmed by the exposure, instilling dependency on that other OS.
-
We use Linux.
Now, Diane is well aware of the problems that Windows Users face. She’s been one of them for as long as she’s been using a computer but once she sat in proximity to a Linux computer and someone who knew how to use it, that all changed.
Diane is retired from the Airline Industry. She spent years in the Accounting and Purchasing Divisions of several airlines and companies so she’s no stranger to spreadsheets and databases. In the last part of her career she also used many on line applications to do her work.
-
Server
-
Linux provides the basis for much virtualization technology — Xen, VMware, KVM and OpenVZ, for example. Cloud vendors that use Linux exclusively, such as Amazon.com, attest to the fact that Linux provides the perfect virtualization backdrop for their services.
[...]
Linux is no longer viewed as just an anomaly among “real” data center OSes. Its developers and converts have made it a respectable and competitive choice for businesses that seek to lower their IT overhead and regain some profit. Converting to Linux isn’t difficult, even for those who find themselves drowning in a sea of proprietary software and hardware. It’s a real choice for developers, cloud vendors, database vendors, virtualization companies, hosting companies and you, the business owner. Linux is here to stay. Linux is a real commercial offering. Linux has proven itself as a real data center OS. And, the developers keep it real for everyone.
-
Google
-
In a matter of weeks, Google’s very first operating system aimed squarely at computers will be upon us: Chrome OS. As Dana Blankenhorn notes, Google has a FUD engine going surrounding the operating system that rivals the very best FUD campaigns from Microsoft’s past. Google is spoon feeding us 100 Chrome experiments, and appears to be wooing powerful hardware makers such as Dell. Like the iPad, the pent-up love for all things Google will probably make Chrome OS a short-term success, but where does it really fit in?
-
Applications
-
Now a Linux version is available. TeamViewer offers a bit more than just remote desktop sharing. It comes bundled with a host of other features such as the ability to manage share lists, record sessions and have voice conversations using VoIP.
-
rekonq has a clean minimalistic interface – the type of interface most web browsers prefer nowadays. It has a Chrome type wrench icon from where you get the various browser options. There is also the bookmark next to it. Like Google Chrome, it has an integrated URL bar from where you can search the web, your history or simply enter the URL. It also serves as an indicator when a page is being loaded.
-
-
Multimedia
-
Free Linux music packages Ardour, Hydrogen and Jack will help you fall in love with a whole new world of creative possibilities
-
A few things I’d like to see implemented include some of the more helpful items that were in Amarok 1.4 such as being able to add a “play count” column in the queue display list, and some of the playlist builder functions (“random 50″ and “random 100″ were two that I used a lot in Amarok 1.4).
That said, I’m extremely happy with what it can do as it currently stands, and those wants are pretty minor compared to what they’ve already done with it. I’m really kind of amazed that there isn’t much buzz surrounding this great application. So here’s to hoping that this quiet little project gets the attention it deserves!
-
When I was still using Windows, I remembered playing or should I say scratching with the popular audio/video mixing software made by Atomix Productions called VirtualDJ. Though I didn’t really enjoyed DJing that much, I missed those days when I finally get to somehow experience what it’s like to be a DJ. So I started looking for DJ software program that I could install on my Linux box. Unfortunately, I only found a few and most of them are really old or are poor in quality if compared to VirtualDJ. But there is one Linux-compatible, free and open source DJ software program that is quiet promising, and its name is Mixxx.
-
Instructionals
-
Xfce
-
As we continue on with our travels down the Xfce path, I thought it would be smart to highlight the Xfce calendaring application Orage. This tool is not an “all in one” tool like Evolution, nor does it have all of the bells and whistles of the Mozilla Sunbird calendar. But what it does, it does well and does so without taking up tons of your resources or your desktop real estate.
-
-
Reviews
-
Puppy will run upon pretty much anything out there.
It gives you a blisteringly fast machine with a sensible selection of pre-installed applications.
-
New Releases
-
Red Hat Family
-
The open source KVM virtualization technology is being promoted by many different vendors, often as a mechanism to help enable cloud deployments. Among the biggest backers of KVM are Linux vendors Red Hat and Ubuntu, though in at least one use case the solutions they’re marketing aren’t necessarily the solutions that cloud deployments are using.
Hosting provider The Planet recently launched a new cloud service offering built on KVM technology without the benefit of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) or Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). Instead The Planet has chosen to take its own path, leveraging the freely available Ubuntu Lucid LTS release and without engaging in a commercial contract with Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Stemming from Canonical’s relatively modest customer base, especially outside of cloud deployments, the vendor behind Ubuntu doesn’t have to worry about existing customers doing a similar price comparison between the pay-per-usage cloud approach and traditional support subscriptions. This is definitely an advantage for Canonical over Red Hat.
-
Lucid, 10.04, was released nearly 3 months ago and still to this date the Ubuntu Chicago LoCo Team has not received our shipment. Not only has our shipment not been received but nobody seems to be answering my emails. Getting a bit tired of telling everyone, nope you can’t have any CDs because I don’t have any CDs, and not being able to have a decent gathering to promote Ubuntu because we have zero materials. Maybe this blog post will make its way to someone’s desk that can help or who possibly cares.
-
Ubuntu 10.10 (codename Maverick Meerkat) is well into the development cycle, with the planned celebrity release date of 10 October 2010 (10/10/10). The development time frame of Ubuntu is quite condensed, and this is managed with a number of stages. These stages tend to symbolise milestones of the schedule, and usually refer to a restriction on what activity can happen during this time.
We have long passed the Alpha 1 CD image stage and I anticipate the release of Alpha 2 by the time you read this. You will no doubt be eager to test Alpha 3, which is currently scheduled for 5 August. Alpha 3 will be the last CD image created before the development of Maverick starts entering the second half of the ‘freeze’ stages.
-
-
The fragmentation of Linux has become a hot topic in recent weeks as industry leaders debate how the community can collaborate to compete against single, vertical operating systems without creating an ecosystem that pulls the community in too many directions at once to be truly effective. As FOSS developers work at a fever pitch to create Linux-based OSes, handheld devices, enterprise-level servers, and mobile phones, the point at which they join forces can make the difference between getting a leg up on other operating systems and lagging behind.
-
Nokia/MeeGo
-
Tests run by independent benching site Carrypad confirmed that Google’s open source OS took a licking. The benchmark was the Sunspider Javascript test. This is a processer intensive test that measures how quickly applications get displayed in a web browser.
-
As I begin a series of tests on the Aava prototype phone today, the first thing I wanted to get out of the way was a Sunspider javascript test. It’s CPU-intensive and forms an important part of the chain of events that take place to get a web application displayed on your browser. Yes, it’s one of many variables but it’s a good indicator of CPU performance.
-
Android
-
iOS game developer OpenFeint has announced that the company will be bringing its open-source gaming platform to Google’s Android OS.
-
Apple ranked number two with 24.4 percent share and Microsoft third with 13.2 percent, while Palm rounded out the top five with 4.8 percent.
Android’s growth should come as no surprise to mobile enthusiasts. More than 20 Android phones are available in the U.S. currently. Handset makers such as LG and Samsung that have been slower than rivals Motorola and HTC in adopting Android are now planning to launch new Android devices.
Earlier this week, LG said it will have two Android smartphones and an Android-based tablet available by the end of the year. Samsung has already announced that its first 4G Android phone on Sprint will be available this summer.
-
OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE HOUSE Google has updated its Android software development kit (SDK) to match the latest version of Android 2.2.
-
MindTree is using open source software to build the applications. This was the choice of the authorities in charge of the project. But Lahiri says open source such as Linux is scalable and mature enough for a project like this. Mindshare will use some vendor applications.
-
One of the better blogs you might like to read up on in follow up to this event comes from Scott Wilson who talked about open innovation, development and collaboration. Wilson said that his focus was on barriers to community as he discussed areas such as, “Governance, diversity and personal barriers to engaging in an Open Source development community and how as a member of such a community you can make a contribution.”
-
Five years on, Simon Brock catches up with those original open source projects he covered in this very column
It’s now five years since this column changed its title to Open Source, before which it had been restricted to Unix server software. We changed it because so much of the open-source Unix software we covered was also available for Windows and the Mac, and a broader remit seemed more sensible.
-
“Does this mean that [moving forward] all newsrooms will publish using Scribus or will tone all photos using Gimp? No, but if an operation — part Journal Register or an outside company — wanted to, they could,” the press release read. “The tools we discovered, trained on and used as part of the Ben Franklin Project could allow a news organization to throw away their old methods and start anew.”
-
The person making these comments is a professional writer who I follow, with several books published. So the opinion about the software not being feature rich is a valid issue and being too complicated is something that I too find with writing software in general. But that the author feels it is less feature rich because it is Open Source, or more correctly, because it is free is something that bothers me.
-
Symbian
-
Product Development Kit (PDK) 3.0, released today by the Symbian Foundation, is targeted at device developers. The kit includes all the source and binary files required to generate the new S^3 operating system and run it in the supplied emulator.
-
-
-
Web Browsers
-
Both Opera and Google are obsessed with the speed of their browser. With each release, each claim to be the fastest browser. Google has even gone on to make a game to demonstrate the speed of its browser Chrome. With today’s release of Opera 10.60, Opera is now claiming that it is the fastest browser on earth. So, we decided to see if it is indeed the fastest browser or if it is Google Chrome. We also decided to throw in the latest dev build of Chromium and Firefox 4.0 beta to the test.
-
Mozilla
-
Mozilla is perhaps best known today for its Firefox web browser. Underlying that browser however is the open source license that enables its development community to thrive. The Mozilla Public License (MPL) has remained nearly untouched since 1999 and now at long last is undergoing a process of evolution.
-
SaaS
-
If you’re slightly bewildered by all the buzz over this new technology with the funny-sounding moniker, you’re not alone. The official story is that Hadoop was the name of the inventor’s kid’s stuffed elephant. However, for most IT professionals, it could easily be an acronym for “Heck, Another Darn Obscure Open-source Project.” The fact that Hadoop, managed by Apache, includes subprojects with similarly opaque names–such as Pig, Hive, Chukwa, and ZooKeeper—contributes to the queasy feeling that this is an untamed menagerie of squealing beasties.
-
Open source technology is going to seriously impact the cloud computing world, and there are two main reasons why: Open source software is essentially free, and it is not generally encumbered by the software license models of proprietary software. Many proprietary software vendors, such as Microsoft and Oracle, are trying to maintain old and expensive license models, even though they impede the flexibility gained by virtualization and cloud computing.
-
Databases
-
Since Ingres was re-created in 2006 we have tripled our revenues and established ourselves as the second-largest open source company after Red Hat.
-
CMS
-
Business
-
While Consona has aquired a number of software companies based on this model, that doesn’t seem to be the strategy behind the Compiere deal. Compiere brings only 130 customers to Consona and I doubt Compiere’s open-source business model was generating big profits. Instead of buying customers and profits, Consona seems to be thinking ahead about how they can lead the market in the next generation of technology. The acquisition is more about growing organically – selling more Compiere systems – than it is about harvesting customer support contracts.
-
BSD
-
The PC-BSD project brings a user-friendly pre-configured KDE desktop to the FreeBSD community. Which is all well and good, but what if you’re more of a GNOME person? Well, it turns out there is a project in the works for you too. The GhostBSD project is in its early stages, but it’s paving the way for users who enjoy running GNOME on a FreeBSD base without any configuring or installing extra software. I had a chance to exchange emails with Eric Turgeon, the project’s founder and lead developer.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Have you ever heard someone saying “Intellectual Property is a dumb term, please do not use it” in the parliament? Well it happened in the German Bundestag: Prof. Dr. Thomas Hoeren said it during the internet enquote this week. Afterwards one of the other experts, Prof. Rainer Kuhlen supported him and added that collecting societies abuse this term “so they can get goods with licensing agreements and circumvent copyright law”. (I already wrote about that in German blog entry.)
[...]
A bit later in 2004, Richard Stallman also wrote about that topic, in his article “Did You Say ‘Intellectual Property’? It’s a Seductive Mirage”:
It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—plus a dozen other laws into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely.
-
Government
-
John Ferlito, president of Linux Australia, has revealed that he and several associates are developing a way for open-source users to interface with the government’s Standard Business Reporting (SBR) system.
-
National Linux advocacy body Linux Australia has added its support for the federal government’s Standard Business Reporting initiative by planning an open source SBR integration project, meanwhile work begins at the ATO on AUSkey for Linux.
-
It wouldn’t be anything really new, either, for the U.K. government to look toward open source. In 2003, the government signed a five-year agreement with Sun to look at using some of its open source systems in government.
-
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Sara Coffin likes to think of Schreibstuck as the dance equivalent of open-source software that allows members of the public to modify and redistribute the original code to suit their own needs.
-
Open Data
-
AOL’s MapQuest has announced an interesting partnership open-source online mapping outfit OpenStreetMap. Through the partnership, MapQuest will begin using data provided by OpenStreetMap to power a version of its product. This new product, available for now in the UK at open.mapquest.co.uk, will reside separately from the main site and will not use any commercial mapping data.
-
-
Open Hardware
-
OSCON this year will be a delight for anybody interested in working with hardware. A full open source hardware track offers a range of talks to get you started with hardware hacking, and gives a great insight into the current options for prototyping.
-
Programming
-
The open source Python language is at a crossroads with two major versions available to developers. The end of the road for the Python 2.x branch is now a little closer, with the release of Python 2.7 this week.
Python 2.7 is intended to be the last major Python 2.x release as the open source project aims to help developers migrate to the newer Python 3.x release codebase. Python 3.x first hit general availability in December of 2008. Though the Python 2.x branch is now at the end of the line in terms of new releases, Python 2.x still has a lot of life left in it.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
There are already a number of Flash alternatives available to users, including the promising open source Lightspark and Gnash players.
The most interesting alternative, however, is not a replacement Flash player but a separate technology that converts existing Flash content into HTML5 and Javascript, on the fly.
-
Stuart sends over a column from a Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Terry Savage, that I could have sworn was satire until someone convinced me that it’s not. Savage is apparently a “financial” columnist, who apparently is a bit confused about her basic economics. Over the long weekend, she decided to celebrate the American way by berating and lecturing some children who set up a lemonade stand because they wanted to give away the lemonade for free. According to Savage, these kids represent all that is wrong with America. I’m not joking.
[...]
Wait, what? You know what the Declaration of Independence also didn’t include? Anything about how much “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” costs. You know why? Because it has nothing to do with whether or not something costs money or is free. So that’s not “something to think about” because it makes no sense.
-
Given the massive backlash against Best Buy for this move, it appears the company is backtracking quickly. Best Buy’s CEO did a blog post saying the company had “completed its investigation” and Brian was being offered his job back. The CEO also points out — as people did in the comments, that some of the original concern wasn’t so much about the famed iPhone/Evo video (which doesn’t mention Best Buy), but other videos he had done that had mentioned the company (which have since been taken down).
-
Security/Aggression
-
Roger Thompson chief research officer at AVG revealed a Javascript injection attack that lures users by providing a link to a video, which it claims “99% of people can’t watch”. The link forwards users to another page that asks them to paste Javascript code into their browser’s address bar.
-
The US National Security Agency (NSA) is embarking on a secret domestic surveillance project dubbed “Perfect Citizen”, intended to monitor and protect important national infrastructure such as power grids and transport systems.
-
-
The National Security Agency plans to launch a program aimed at assessing vulnerabilities and developing capabilities to help secure critical infrastructure like power plants, air traffic control systems and the electrical grid.
-
The results of a Cyber-Ark global survey show that 35 percent of respondents believe their company’s highly-sensitive information has been handed over to competitors. Thirty-seven percent of the IT professionals surveyed cited ex-employees as the most likely source of this abuse of trust.
-
Finance
-
At a minimum, once U.S. firms will be required to detail their payments to foreign governments, the citizens of these countries will know how much their governments are receiving and from whom, giving them a fighting chance to hold their government accountable for investing those funds in critical needs such as food, health and education.
-
The fate of the Wall Street reform bill is up in the air after the death of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. The bill is a single confirmed vote short of the 60 votes needed to get past a threatened filibuster by Senate Republicans. From day one, the Bankster team has supported the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and that is still one of the strongest pieces of the bill. It is a great time to send off the last emails to Senators telling them to put a new cop on the block in the form of a CFPB.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
In addition to recommending a professional PR campaign to try and coax tourists back to Arizona in the wake of the state’s tough new immigration law, the task force appointed by Governor Jan Brewer suggested that Arizona try to “change the tone of the dialogue” by talking about the effects that tourism boycotts have on vulnerable employees within the state.
-
It’s a move that outraged observers have decried as an attack on First Amendment rights. And CNN’s Anderson Cooper describes the new rules as making it “very easy to hide incompetence or failure.”
-
For the first time, thanks to an ongoing “open records” investigation by the Food Rights Network, the public and the press have easy online access to dozens of internal SFPUC files, documenting the strange tale of Chez Sludge, or how the sewage industry bedded Alice Waters.
[...]
San Francisco’s SFPUC is in the forefront of the latest maneuver in this toxic scam, “composting” its toxic sludge and marketing it as “organic Biosolids compost,” thus co-opting a venerable terms used in Organic agriculture. This greenwashing scam slipped rather unnoticed by the public from 2007 until the fall of 2009. That is when the San Francisco Chronicle reported on an effort by two public interest groups who petitioned the [SFPUC to halt the program. In December 2009, the The Atlantic reported that the city had rejected the petition and that the SFPUC was preparing to increase its toxic sludge to gardens giveaway ten-fold in 2010.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
-
The wireless industry urged the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) not to mandate that cell phone companies make their billing practices clearer, a possibility the agency is considering in its effort to mitigate “bill shock.”
The commission started a proceeding in May seeking comment on whether it should make regulations to prevent consumers from receiving higher-than-expected cell phone bills.
[...]
An FCC survey released in May picked up national attention for reporting that nearly one in five American consumers have been subject to sudden and unexpected rises in their monthly cellular phone bills.
-
Copyrights
-
This interesting abuse or misuse of copyright law again shows an old fox obeying the law but getting what he wanted, including great publicity in a campaign where it is not all that easy to get news coverage.
-
Sharron Angle has resorted to an unusual maneuver to counter Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s attacks on her past quotes and positions, the Reid campaign has announced: A cease-and-desist letter, demanding that Reid no longer republish Angle’s previous campaign website.
-
-
CMR International, a firm that tracks that performance of the pharmaceuticals sector, released a rather depressing report on research and development productivity last week. The report will set you back $10,000, but highlights have been made public:
[...]
- Pharma is having a tough time selling its new drugs: New drugs launched within the last five years accounted for less than 7 percent of industry sales in 2009, down from 8 percent in 2008, highlighting the big problems that companies are having in trying to reinvigorate their portfolios.
-
There are so many reasons to love Woot, including their recent awesome letter and video about their acquisition. But, even better may be that in today’s Woot offering, they mock the Associated Press for its coverage of the Woot acquisition, because the AP just happens to have also copied text from the awesome Woot letter. Now, that’s all well and good for most publications, but this is the AP that we’re talking about. The same AP that threatens bloggers for copying headlines and snippets. The same AP that insists it needs “hot news” to protect others from “free riding” on its work. And, most importantly, the same AP that has a famously ridiculous pricelist for quoting five words or more from an AP article.
-
It’s no secret that the Associated Press is hot for the “hot news” doctrine (even as they seem blind to how it will come back to bite them). However, most of the lawsuits involving “hot news” to date have strayed away from really testing the legal limits of, say, blogs writing about newspaper stories and quoting parts of the story in the process. That may be changing. Dean Singleton is the chair of the Associated Press, as well as the CEO of MediaNews, one of the big newspaper chains out there. Apparently he’s decided to test the waters on threatening bloggers over “hot news.”
-
THE composers of the legendary 1980s international pop smash hit Down Under have been ordered to pay five per cent of earnings from the song after it was found to have breached copyright law.
-
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of academics and public policy groups are urging a federal judge to dismiss a criminal indictment that could give websites extraordinary power to dictate what behavior becomes a computer crime.
-
Neil Hull had bought a Performing Rights Society (PRS) licence… however, the relatively unknown Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL) took him to court because, unbeknown to Neil, he needed a licence from IT, too
-
Late last year, Summit sued to shut down an unofficial Twilight fan magazine, in part for using stock publicity photos that Summit had distributed to the news media. The production company had licensed the use of the photos for “journalistic purposes,” and it argued that Beckett Media, the magazine’s publisher, violated the license because its use of the pictures wasn’t journalistic enough.
-
The MPAA is at it again, going after movie pirates. This time, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is helping out the movie industry, and they’ve seized nine different domains: Movies-links.TV, nowmovies.com, thepiratecity.org, filespump.com, planetmoviez.com, zml.org, tvshack.net, ninjavideo.net and thisninja.net. These were mostly ad-supported movie streaming sites that showed pirated versions of current theatrical releases.
-
According to the Wall Street Journal, federal authorities seized 9 domain names of sites that were offering pirated movies.
The nine domain names were registered using U.S.-based registrars, allowing authorities to take control of their site addresses.
-
The Federal Court of Appeal issued is decision today [not online yet] on whether Internet providers can be considered broadcasters within the context of the Broadcasting Act. The case is the result of last year’s CRTC New Media decision in which many cultural groups called on the Commission to establish an ISP levy to fund Canadian content. The ISPs argued that such a levy was illegal since they fell under the Telecommunications Act, not the Broadcasting Act. The cultural groups argued that ISPs should be considered broadcasters in the case of the transmission of video programs. The CRTC punted the issue to the Federal Court of Appeal.
-
Digital Economy
-
News that TalkTalk and BT are challenging the Digital Economy Act in court is extremely welcome. It is a vindication of our view that the legislation should not have been rammed through parliament in the dying days of the last government.
CLUG Talk – 09 Oct 2007 – Gentoo Portage (2007)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 7:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Linux is easy to learn, highly capable of fulfilling a typical computer user’s needs, and 100 percent free. So why is it that Linux still has such a miniscule share of the overall desktop market? Maybe its gratis nature has been keeping it down. It seems that when consumers don’t know enough about a product, they judge it by its cost — and “free,” at least on a subconscious level, translates to “not as good.”
-
Many security professionals who find themselves needing to analyze a specific piece of malware end up in a difficult situation. The classic approach to analyzing malware is to set up a virtual machine on a PC specifically designed for that purpose and then let the malware loose and see what it does. But that usually only shows you part of the picture; much of the malware’s behavior can remain hidden without the ability to do some deeper analysis.
-
Google
-
Is a command line really what Google needs now? Opinions were mixed at the debut of GoogleCL, the search giant’s new and daringly named command line tool. Reactions ranged from “I’ve had to write bits and pieces of it myself. Thanks!” all the way over to “The APIs were already out there. Of course, the best APIs can already be used from the command line with curl, so I care even less about this.”
-
Ballnux
-
Rumors of a June 8 launch of Telus’ HTC Triumph — a rebranded version of the Desire, seemingly — came and went without a trace, but now, we’ve got another reason to think that the model’s launch might be just around the corner.
-
Sprint announced a Samsung handset running Android 2.1 that sells for $100 with a two-year contract. The Samsung Intercept is equipped with a 3.2-inch touchscreen display, a 3.2-megapixel camera, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and an optical joystick, says the company.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Applications
-
One of the common misconceptions about GNU/Linux is that it “doesn’t have any applications”. Every time I hear this, I immediately respond with “how far did you look?”. Truth is, Linux has thousands upon thousands of applications. Some are installed by default in Linux distributions, and some are purposely not installed, but available and can be installed with a couple of clicks. Depending on which distribution you use, and how you install it, your list of installed applications when you are finished installing the operating system itself will vary.
-
If you are a movie junkie like me, chances are you have quite a number of movies on your computer that would be nice watching on your DVD player or home theater system, mobile phone or portable multimedia device.
-
Instructionals
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Let’s say you are doing research on your desktop browser and you need to leave your computer to run some errand. Wouldn’t it be great if you can sync what you are reading to your mobile phone so that you can continue your research on the move? If you are using an Android phone (running Froyo) and Google Chrome/Firefox, you just got yourself a great deal.
-
Lifehacker offers a straightforward solution. Once your removable media has served its purpose, simply format them on a PC booted up with a Live CD. Live CDs are self-contained boot discs (usually running a variant of Linux) that let you use a computer without accessing—or installing—anything on your hard disk.
-
-
K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
-
At LinuxTag 2010, the KDE community announced the “Join the Game” campaign to support KDE e.V.’s Supporting Membership Program. The first new member was Georg Greve, founder of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). We caught up with him for a ‘short’ interview that turned into a two hour conversation about life, the universe and everything. The pertinent bits are excerpted below.
-
-
-
The Gnome project creates the desktop environment used in Ubuntu, Red Hat, and many other operating systems. Each distribution tweaks Gnome a bit by adding or removing applications, but most of it is the same between the different systems. For all practical purposes, to the non-techie, non-geek, Gnome is the operating system, because it’s what they see and interact with. In Ubuntu, the default Gnome browser, Epiphany is removed and replaced with Firefox. The Gnome office suite is not used, favoring the more popular OpenOffice.org suite instead. Each distribution picks what it feels are the best parts available from the open source community.
-
New Releases
-
Salix LXDE edition 13.1 has been released! Based on Slackware 13.1, it features the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, “an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment”, with a clean look and feel. The main applications that complete the LXDE experience are the lightweight and fast PCManFM file manager and the popular Openbox window manager.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
The PCLinuxOS developers have released the quarterly ISO updates for the GNOME, KDE and LXDE editions of their Linux distribution. The 2010.07 releases include a number of desktop and package updates, but don’t add any new features to the operating system.
-
-
-
-
There was a time in which Mandriva was considered a somewhat “intermediate” Linux distribution. In 2009, when I started using it, I found it slightly “difficult”. However, with the 2010 release, I have noticed how the distro has been oriented to the ease of use. I’m not saying that it is easy, as no OS is, but I must confess that I perceive less entanglement now. So, today I can confidently recommend beginners to install it as their debut distro in the fascinating world of Linux.
-
Reprieved from its financial troubles with fresh investments, Mandriva released the final version of Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring. The latest stable release is touted for offering faster boot times, enhanced “Smart Desktop” file-organization technology, easier printer and wireless configuration, new scientific apps, plus updates including GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.3, and the new Go-OO branch of OpenOffice.
-
“Mandriva possesses in its DNA all the requisites of an Open Source world leader. A community of 3.5 million users, a leading position in the BRIC zone, and prestigious clients in both the public sector and major business,” stressed Jean-Noël de Galzain, President of IF Research. “We are going to focus on the company management and promoting a new, dynamic commercial activity based on innovative products offered on a new distribution network.”
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Today, July 7th, Canonical proudly announced that it will support the Ubuntu Free Culture showcase, which will offer photographers, artists and musicians from all over the world and with any background, the opportunity to see their work in the next release of the Ubuntu operating system, Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), due for release in October 10th, 2010.
-
-
NetLogic Microsystems announced a Linux-based hardware/software development kit it says is the first fully deterministic networking solution that concurrently processes Layers 2-7 at 40Gbps wire-speed. The NLX321103A solution combines the MIPS-based XLP832 eight-core, 32-threaded system-on-chip with the NL11k and NETL7 Layer 7 “knowledge-based” processors, the company says.
-
Until now Brit chip shop ARM’s processor designs have been restricted to smart phones and other embedded devices, but new developments in a partnership between ARM and Canonical, the company which develops Ubuntu Linux, could see a new push into the traditional computing market.
-
Phones
-
Movial has announced enablement and certification services for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 on both systems-on-chip and mobile platforms for MeeGo and Android.
-
Nokia/MeeGo
-
-
MeeGo will be used on everything from advanced smartphones to netbooks, connected TVs, and tablet computers, the two companies say. Nokia still hasn’t announced its first MeeGo-based product, but it will be delivered this year, says Vanjoki.
-
Android
-
Russian Rover Computers has revealed five new tablets, ranging from 5- to 7-inch models. The processors are also varied and include Samsung ARM chips, while the range-topping RoverPad TegA W70 gets NVIDIA’s Tegra CPU. All five are likely rebadged OEM offerings, with the TegA W70 based on the Compal Tegra tablet.
-
With the market moving so quickly, things are bound to change. The survey was conducted before Apple’s latest iPhone 4 was released in June. Also, look for Google to exceed Microsoft’s share in the next period since it is trailing by a minuscule .2 percent.
-
The Android 2.2 SDK that was released at Google I/O contained a preview of the Froyo system image and today, we are releasing an update to bring it into sync with the system image pushed to Nexus One devices.
-
And we have yet another cell phone maker joining the Android bandwagon. Various Japanese media, for example Sankei Digital [JP], are reporting that Fujitsu is currently working on an Android-based smartphone.
-
One of the most popular sides of Google’s Android operating system is the openness to hacks and modifications it enables. We’ve already had the chance to take a look at a wide range of custom made Android ROMs for handsets that would not taste the platform otherwise, but today’s news bring something new into the equation. An Android 2.2 Froyo port available for users of a HTC Hero on Sprint’s airwaves in the US has just emerged accompanied by a video of Nexus One running under Ubuntu, complemented by detailed instructions on how this can be done.
-
Android’s share of the smartphone OS market went up between February and May of this year while everyone else took a hit, according to the latest data from comScore. The analytics firm released its three-month MobiLens report Thursday, observing that Android’s share of smartphone subscribers had gone up a full four percentage points in the US, though it still remains fourth on the list after RIM, Apple, and Microsoft.
-
Motorola
-
Motorola announced a low-end Android 2.1 phone for T-Mobile equipped with a new version of its MotoBlur UI layer. The Motorola Charm is equipped with a 2.8-inch, 320 x 240 touchscreen, 802.11b/g/n, a three-megapixel camera, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and a “Backtrack” touchpanel on the back of the device.
-
eWEEK has run two favorable reviews of the Motorola Droid X, praising the phone’s multimedia performance, call quality, battery life, and camera, but criticizing its Wi-Fi performance and MotoBlur interface. A Wired review, meanwhile, calls the Droid X “one of the finest Android devices available” — if one can handle the size.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
This update carries over 100 bug-fixes, including the upgrading of the Linux kernel against the 2.6.33.5 kernel, improved 3D performance via DRM and Mesa updates, web browser enhancements, improvements to visuals and the window manager, full support for the GNOME Proxy, and many other changes.
-
The pre-selection of project management programs started by focusing on some of the most famous web-based ones, excluding the following (for the following reasons):
-
Katonda has published a list of top 9 bugs and blunders of the last few weeks. In that list Apple and Microsoft seems to lead the world of bugs by delivering some of the most lethal bugs.
-
Mozilla
-
Firefox has been taking heat from Google Chrome over speed for some time, but the world’s most popular open source browser is getting ready for a comeback. Can Firefox 4.0 woo back some of the early adopters who’ve embraced Chrome? It looks like it will have a very good shot.
-
-
Business
-
Commercial open source software is a newer trend than open source software itself. Over time, it is likely that the distance, in terms of feature sets, between proprietary software packages and open source ones will be closed by contributions from commercial interests. At least that’s true for many important packages. It goes to show that even though many people in the open source community frown on commercial interests, companies that back open source projects can have a profoundly positive effect on them.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
By working together for free software in a focused movement, we can do much more than the sum of our individual or project efforts.
That’s where this campaign is headed–to strengthen the entire movement by promoting the underlying message that all free software projects work for a unified ideal: an end goal of software freedom. It represents a new theme in the Free Software Foundation’s work and a shift in focus that recognizes we are ready to engage a much wider audience. The approach for “Working together for free software” is to find new common ground to facilitate an effective public campaign for software freedom that will benefit everyone.
-
-
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) project occupies a unique niche in the free software community. As Richard Stallman is fond of reminding us, much of what we run on our systems comes from the GNU project; much of that code, in turn, is owned by the Free Software Foundation. But most of the GNU code is relatively static; your editor wisely allowed himself to be talked out of the notion of adding an LWN weekly page dedicated to the ongoing development of GNU cat. GCC, though, is FSF-owned, is crucial infrastructure, and is under heavy ongoing development. As a result, it will show pressures that are only seen in a few places. This article will look at a couple of recent episodes, related to licensing and online identity, from the GCC community.
-
Project Releases
-
The WordPress developers have announced the release of version 1.3 of their WordPress for Android app. Using the mobile application, users can easily post to and edit their WordPress blogs from an Android mobile device.
-
RDPDesk, one of the leading companies in the field of security connection solution development would like to announce the launching of version 3.0 of RD Connection manager, a free open source remote desktop management solution which is licensed under the GNU General Public License
-
Government
-
When I started working on GNU C++ in 1987, I could almost feel the course of history changing with every line of code I wrote. When I started Cygnus Support in 1989, I was convinced that it was only a matter of time before companies began to realize that proprietary software restrictions did nothing to help their competitive advantage and everything to harm it. And though early funding for my work came from government agencies (US DARPA in 1987 and French INRIA in 1988), I never quite expected to be visiting and promoting open source in Malaysia [short version] [longer version]. Yet such is the reach of open source software! Now the Government of Malaysia proudly reports an astonishing 97% adoption rate for open source software in this new report:
-
Science
-
A black hole only slightly heavier than our Sun is emitting the most powerful jets of energy ever seen, rivaling that of quasars a million times larger, and creating a bubble of hot gas and fast-moving particles 1000 light-years across.
When black holes devour matter, they release massive amounts of energy. Physicists had thought this energy mostly took the form of radiation, primarily X-rays. However, as this newly discovered black hole so dramatically illustrates, at least as much energy, if not a great deal more, is released as jets of fast moving particles. These streams of particles smash headlong into the interstellar gas nearby, which heats up the gas and causing rapid expansion. The resulting bubble is a mix of the hot gas and the particles from the black hole.
-
-
Security/Aggression
-
Security weaknesses in the hugely popular file-sharing Web site thepiratebay.org have exposed the user names, e-mail and Internet addresses of more than 4 million Pirate Bay users, according to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity.com.
-
Finance
-
They’re decrying the fact I might fault them for having anything whatsoever to do with the rise of the price of global wheat. Harper’s will publish the letter, of course, with my response . . .
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
Trying to get out in front of what they call a censorship arms race, a team of researchers has come up with technology that lets users exchange messages through heavily censored networks in countries such as China and North Korea in hidden channels via user-generated content sites such as Twitter or Flickr.
-
Google Australia breached the Privacy Act when it inadvertently collected data from private wireless networks using its Street View cars, Australian Privacy Commissioner Karen Curtis said today.
In response, the search and advertising giant was forced to publicly apologise.
-
The Australian government is conducting an independent review of websites due to be blocked by its controversial internet filter.
-
Copyrights
-
The basic recording contract upon which most of the popular music business has been based for the past 50 years is fundamentally broken.
This is not the sentiment of one of the countless critics who throw stones at the music industry from afar, usually for vague philosophical reasons, but rather the pragmatic opinion of a true insider: Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records, which sold millions of records by hip-hop artists including Club Nouveau, Coolio, De La Soul, Digital Underground, Everlast, House of Pain and Naughty By Nature.
-
Brazil recently unveiled its much anticipated copyright reform proposal and it provides a statutory example of applying this principle. Article 107 includes an interesting balance to legal protection for digital locks.
Not only does the proposal permit circumvention for fair dealing and public domain purposes, but it establishes equivalent penalties for hindering or preventing the users from exercising their fair dealing rights. In other words, the Brazilian proposals recognizes what the Supreme Court of Canada stated several years ago – over-protection is just as harmful as under-protection.
-
ACTA
-
As our mission here at the Free Software Foundation is to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users, we also have to defend against ill-conceived and misguided laws. Many of you may already be aware of an international trade agreement being negotiated by the G8 nations called ACTA, but another law known as the Digital Economy Act is of concern, specifically to citizens of the UK.
We have already published a petition condemning ACTA on a number of specific grounds which we urge you to sign if you haven’t already. If you would like to know more, please read the rationale for this declaration. Right now, you can take action!
CLUG Talk 28 October 2008 – GPU Computing (2008)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.09.10
Posted in News Roundup at 2:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Desktop
-
By splitting the rendering framework into composite and opengl plugins, Compiz can be used as the known compositing window manager or as a backend for other 3D desktop programs such XRender or Clutter. Another significant change, decoration reparenting, will allow Compiz to run with decorations as non-compositing when used with the revamped GNOME or KDE Window Decorators. Integration with QT main loop and the creation of a KApplication provides better integration with KDE. A new DBus plugin will now use the screen number to identify the Compiz instance. A major redraw bug that caused ripping or skips in rendering was also fixed.
-
-
Linux is growing in popularity for many reasons, and as an operating system it is many things to many people. While we all have our own reasons for liking Linux and open source, here are my top five (and a half!) reasons why, as a power user, I prefer to use Linux. You’ll notice that these reasons are quite a bit different from why I think Ubuntu makes a great operating system for Mom, which just goes to show how versatile Linux can be.
-
Linux and the GNU project’s software was developed to offer an alternative to proprietary software. It is a system of open source and distributed under the GPL, i.e. anybody can get it, make changes and redistribute it. Although there are paid versions of Linux, but the vast majority of distributions is completely free. You can download the ISO images at no cost. Additionally, you can make changes to adapt it to suit your needs. Above all, you have the freedom to pass a free Linux distribution to your friends without committing software piracy.
Windows is a closed source and proprietary software. The price for the acquisition of Windows operating system is already something that one could consider prohibitively expensive and complicated for a personal computer user.
-
Audiocasts
-
In this episode: The first Mozilla 4 beta is here while Nokia is moving rapidly forward with MeeGo for mobiles. We report back on our You Dare Us challenge and hear Paul tackle Python.
-
-
AskoziaPBX is a complete telephone system. It can speak to nearly any telephony technology in the world and is configured via a highly intuitive WebGUI. Designed to run on low-resource systems.
-
On this episode of Linux Outlaws: A big announcement (kind of), ASCAP declares war on Creative Commons, Bilski comes down, new Fedora project leader, Microsoft kills Kin and Apple drops the ball on the iPhone 4.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
-
You won’t need to tile windows location by yourself any more, with this simple applet you can simply Tile windows in many ways to get best view for active windows. I usually use tile mode to easily compare between to windows and included content inside both, also you can use it to simply drag and drop element from window to another.
-
-
-
-
Games
-
All of these games are cross-platform, so you can enjoy them on other operating system as well. Theres’ variety to be had, too. Single player, multiplayer, at home or online, role playing, classic strategy, puzzle solving. I have not intended to have balance in this list, but the games kind of naturally filled the right spots.
I recommend you start with demos and trials and see what gives. I believe you will have found a new collection of great items to play and explore. Along with the freeware collection, you have the rest of 2010 to get convinced in my choices. You won’t be disappointed.
-
While I was on sabbatical, Protektor sent in a whole mess of Linux games we’ve yet to mention:
* Summoning Wars, a dungeon hack game
* Super Tux Kart, an enhanced version of Tux Kart
* Dragon History – a Czech adventure game that runs under ScummVM
* Shotgun Debugger – a 2D top-down shooter
[...]
-
-
Indonesians are known to have spirit to share, and eager to help each other. Hence, BlankOn Developers believe, that it is their part of identity, to be more active and involved in Free/Open Source Software activities.
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
Fedora
-
Nonprofit organization One Laptop Per Child on Thursday said it is adding a multitouch screen to the upcoming XO-1.75 laptop and is modifying software to take advantage of the new hardware.
The XO-1.75 with a touch-sensitive 8.9-inch screen will start shipping next year. The laptop will run on an Arm processor and is the successor to the current XO-1.5 laptop, which runs on a Via x86 processor. OLPC will also add a multitouch screen on the next-generation XO-3 tablet, which is due to ship in 2012.
Customers could be interested in buying XO-1.75 laptops as low-power replacements to existing XO-1 machines, which don’t have touch capabilities, said Chris Ball, lead software engineer for OLPC, in an e-mail.
-
I saw an announcement the other day about a development OS release (os16) for the OLPC XO-1 laptop that basically brings it into parity with the release on the XO-1.5. I downloaded it, got a developer key, unlocked an OLPC, and figured out how to install it. Once you become familiar with the process, it is actually easy and straight forward. I even played with the FORTH-based firmware for the first time.
-
Jack Wallen itemizes the improvements that have made him a Fedora fan again.
-
Debian Family
-
What I expected to happen some time ago, is finally becoming reality: Debian is now my favourite distribution for desktop systems.
-
The most exciting thing is seeing the traction Ubuntu has as a mainstream choice for consumers. The alignment between Ubuntu, the community, developers and the hardware ecosystem is really coming into its own at this point. In my new role I am involved in more strategic discussions with our partners and customers, and the road ahead is looking very exciting.
-
-
In parallel with the rapid development of mobile computing, various Linux-based OS pop up one after another—from Android, LiMo, MeeGo, Ubuntu to webOS.
-
Huge inventories of netbooks resulted because people wanted cheaper netbooks. Those inventories are now cleared but OEMs are taking a wait-and-see attitude before offering for sale the latest Wintel systems. Even the $11 price increase for the latest Atom is seen as too much. Wouldn’t a $50 reduction for using GNU/Linux look good about now? Wouldn’t a $50 reduction for using ARM look good about now?
-
Kirk Wylie, CEO of London based startup OpenGamma, has announced the company has come out of stealth mode and in the coming months, will be presenting its financial analytics platform to the world. The company is developing a common infrastructure and applications for financial services firms. The platform unifies batch and live calculations to create more consistency in risk and analytics calculations and is designed to be the core technology in batch risk analysis, commercial trading systems, bespoke trading systems and event driven alerting systems.
-
Events
-
Web Browsers
-
-
Mozilla
-
You’ve no doubt heard about or even seen Firefox 4′s new Chrome-like interface. More important are the many new features generally lumped together under the catchall standard HTML5, a specification that’s still a draft but has become more of a rallying cry for AJAX, JavaScript, endless tags, and life beyond plug-ins.
-
Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now available and ready for testing. This first version is filled with dozens of new features and improvements. Here are more in depth explanations of some of the Firefox 4 Beta 1 features from the Firefox team…
-
I want, I really want Firefox to become a top-of-the-line Web browser again. It was Firefox, after all, that broke IE’s (Internet Explorer) strangle-hold on Web browsers. Even Microsoft owes Firefox some gratitude. If Firefox hadn’t pushed Microsoft into making IE into a decent Web browser, many of us might still be stuck with crapware like IE 6. Unfortunately, I’m not sure Firefox 4 is going to get Firefox back into competition with IE 8, much less, what I see as today’s leading Web browser, Google’s Chrome 5.
-
Education
-
IT directors across the country are implementing open source software in their K-12 districts–a decision often prompted by the improving quality of open source options, as well as cost savings.
Selection of OSS is sometimes a value-added option when the commercial version would never be financially feasible. In other cases, IT directors are replacing existing solutions with OSS, instigated by license agreements that are ending, the need to refurbish old computers, or the purchase of netbooks.
While there are no recent surveys to measure use of open source software (OSS), anecdotal evidence reflects growing interest in–and use of–alternatives to proprietary software.
A few years ago, an OSS talk at the National Educational computing Conference (NECC; now ISTE) would draw about five attendees, and there would be just a “smattering of people” in the open source lab. Now the rooms are full, said Alex Inman, director of technology for Whitfield School in St. Louis, MO.
-
Business
-
There is renewed and meaningful discussion going about open core with several good insights and arguments: Simon Phipps, Mark Radcliffe, Stephen O’Grady and our own Matt Aslett to name a few.
-
BSD
-
FreeBSD 8.1 is slated to be released this month as the first significant update to FreeBSD since the rollout of the 8.0 release last November. With the second release candidate of FreeBSD 8.1 having just been made available a few days back, we have conducted a set of tests comparing the performance of FreeBSD 8.1 RC2 versus FreeBSD 8.0 and an Ubuntu 10.10 development snapshot.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
A couple of days ago, I was writing about how Richard Stallman’s GNU GPL uses copyright as a way of ensuring that licensees share code that they distribute – because if they don’t, they are breaching the GPL, and therefore lose their protection against claims of copyright infringement.
That’s all very well, but as many people have pointed out, this does result in the paradoxical situation that the GNU GPL actually *depends* on copyright, an intellectual monopoly, in order to spread intellectual freedom. Moreover, it seems to doom free software into a kind of symbiosis with copyright, forcing it to remain a supporter of that monopoly, since without it, the approach used to make the GPL so powerful would not work.
This is obviously a slightly troubling prospect, so a little while ago I thought I’d raise the point with RMS himself, since he was bound to be aware of the issue, and presumably had a solution (I hoped). This issue has come up a few times in recent months, so I thought it might be worth publishing his answers to my questions to shed some light on this important topic.
-
Project Releases
-
The Samba team isn’t expecting to release Samba 4 until the first half of 2011 (optimistically) but work on support for Microsoft’s SMB2 — and older SMB/CIFS — has moved ahead quite nicely.
Samba leader Jeremy Allison said support for SMB2 — which was introduced in the Windows Vista client — is finished and will be made available for testing in the next significant Samba release.
-
Unfortunately a rather bad bug sneaked into GIMP 2.6.9, so here’s another release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series to fix this issue.
-
-
GNU Dico is an extensible modular dictionary server with a set of database modules, a command line client utility and a web interface.
-
-
Government
-
U.K. government staff suggested replacing Microsoft Corp. operating systems on computers with free alternatives in response to a call for ideas for Prime Minister David Cameron’s cost-cutting drive.
Cameron asked the 600,000 government workers last month to make suggestions on saving money as his administration seeks to cut Britain’s record budget deficit. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne today published a sample of the 56,000 submitted ideas, which including abandoning Microsoft, switching office lights off and centralizing stationery procurement.
“In terms of spending less, what about migrating the whole of government (the NHS, education etc.) from Microsoft products to Linux and open-source software like Openoffice,” read one of the suggestions displayed on the Treasury website. Two of the 31 listed proposals, whose authors were not named, suggested dropping Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft.
Open-source software such as Linux and Openoffice offers free or very cheap alternatives to Microsoft’s Windows and Office, the world’s most popular operating system and productivity software. Osborne said before the Conservatives won power in the May 6 election that he favored the idea.
-
Imagine a country that has one of the best Internet infrastructures in the world, and yet its government effectively forbids the use of GNU/Linux through a requirement that everyone employ a decade-old Windows-only technology for many key online transactions. That country is South Korea, where 1 Gbits/second Internet connections are planned for 2012; and that Windows-only technology is ActiveX.
[...]
Either way, it’s great news for the long-suffering South Koreans, who finally get to choose which technology they use in their daily lives – after more than a decade of enforced Internet Explorer and Windows use. It’s also great news for open source, which gets a chance to compete on a level playing field – something that Microsoft keeps calling for whenever the EU proposes favouring open source, and yet somehow never mentions when that field is already steeply tilted in its own favour, as has been the case in South Korea.
That new opportunity is important, because of South Korea’s advanced Internet infrastructure. It means that the open source community there can now work on creating advanced applications that explore the possibilities of that kind of bandwidth, and that can be used by South Korean businesses and citizens in their everyday lives – something that hitherto has been impossible. It would be nice to think this may lead to a sudden outpouring of free software creativity, but the reality is probably that it will take a good many years to recover from what was probably the worst Microsoft monoculture on the planet.
-
Licensing
-
Open Data
-
This could get very messy, very quickly. Multiple reports have emerged overnight that the UK government is to consult the public over how to cut public spending via a dedicated Facebook page.
-
I had been reading about the Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) — a project to provide a really good detailed overview of government finances (more information in this previous post).
I was therefore expecting to see the local council assets and accruals data of the sort that is recorded in the L-packs as well as central government spending captured annually in the C-packs. But it wasn’t there.
-
The new fund will support projects in specific communities—it over the next year to help expand and enhance the geographic data available to developers, designers and other users as part of AOL’s commitment to open-source technology.
-
Open Access/Content
-
I do not think that CC licences, or any licence to that effect, requires a court decision in order to be valid. There are thousands and thousands of commercial End-User Licence Agreements that are never tested in court, yet they manage to have legal effects and are usually followed to the letter by its users without producing a conflict. True, many licences contain clauses that when analysed by legal practitioners and scholars may seem doubtful. But even then a court case is required to declare the clauses invalid. One could say that a licence is valid until proven otherwise.
-
Programming
-
-
The Haskell 2010 report was published in July 2010, and is the current definition of the Haskell language. It is freely available online, in the following formats:
* read it online: The Haskell 2010 Report
* PDF [1368K]
* HTML (tar + gzip) [336K]
-
Standards/Consortia
-
To OASIS members, Public Announce Lists:
The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC has recently approved the following specification as a Committee Draft and approved the package for public review:
Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.2
This standard specifies the characteristics of an XML-based application-independent and platform-independent digital document file format, as well as the characteristics of software applications which read, write and process such documents. This standard is applicable to document authoring, editing, viewing, exchange and archiving, including text documents, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, drawings, charts and similar documents commonly used by personal productivity software applications.
-
THEY may not have the name recognition of a Google or a Yahoo!, but they can claim to belong in the same league. The websites of Digital Sky Technologies (DST) account for more than 70% of page-views on the Russian-language internet. Naspers is Africa’s biggest media group, both offline and online. And Tencent is China’s largest internet company by market capitalisation—and the third-largest in the world.
-
Science
-
An experimental solar-powered plane landed safely Thursday after completing its first 24-hour test flight, proving that the aircraft can collect enough energy from the sun during the day to stay aloft all night.
-
Security/Aggression
-
More than 21,000 fines of between £60 and £120 were issued for motoring offences such as stopping to drop off family and friends.
Neil Bennett, 60, from Blandfield Road in Balham, was caught twice in the same night in Grant Road behind Clapham Junction when he went to collect someone.
He said: “For a total of 40 seconds outside the station, the fine was £240. I didn’t realise I wasn’t allowed to do it, there wasn’t adequate signage.
-
-
Developer Sean O’Neill, famous in cryptographic circles for designing the EnRUPT hash algorithm, has released an open source Skype library that emulates the modified version of the RC4 encryption algorithm used by Skype. Skype chose to modify key generation for the stream cipher to make its product incompatible with other IM clients and ensure that it remained a closed system. However, initial analysis suggests that O’Neill’s publication does not mean that Skype’s encryption can be considered ‘cracked’. Further study will be needed to determine whether key expansion and initialisation vector generation are secure.
-
Environment
-
More than one-in-four of all flowering plants are under threat of extinction according to the latest report to confirm the ongoing destruction of much of the natural world by human activity.
As a result, many of nature’s most colourful specimens could be lost to the world before scientists even discover them, claims the research, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
-
My imagination was ignited a few weeks ago when I came across a post on BLDGBLOG about crypto-forests: forgotten patches of urban land where nature has taken its course. What we call weeds are actually demonstrations of the irrepressible force of nature–plants overtaking urban areas designed to keep nature at bay.
BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh describes crypto-forests quite lyrically: “Weed patches in which the earliest emergent traces of a thicket can be found; clusters of trees growing semi-feral on the edges of railroad yards; forgotten courtyards sprouting with random saplings unplanted by any hand.” It’s reminiscent of the scenario David Byrne vividly predicted in the Talking Heads song “Nothing But Flowers,” but smaller in scope and without the apocalypse.
-
Heat waves like the one now roasting the Eastern Seaboard are likely to become commonplace over the next 30 years, say scientists at Stanford University – even if global temperatures rise by only one degree Celcius.
-
Researchers have discovered two previously unknown species of bottom-dwelling fish in the Gulf of Mexico, living right in the area affected by the BP oil spill.
Researchers identified new species of pancake batfishes, a flat fish rarely seen because of the dark depths they favor. They are named for the clumsy way they “walk” along the sea bottom, like a bat crawling.
-
-
Finance
-
A civil lawsuit brought by federal regulators against a financial adviser suspected of stealing millions of dollars from celebrity clients was temporarily halted on Thursday by a federal judge in Manhattan who said a criminal case against the adviser should be dispensed with first.
-
-
-
More than 450,000 people filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week, as joblessness continued to hamper the U.S. economy and other new economic indicators reflected mixed signs about the recovery.
-
First-time requests for jobless aid dropped by 21,000 to a seasonally adjusted 454,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. The decline takes claims to their lowest level since early May, erasing the increases of the last two months.
-
The catastrophic economic downturn that began two years ago was supposed to shake up the global economy, ending an era in which Americans consumed too much and saved and exported too little.
-
The International Monetary Fund is calling for the United States to make a stronger effort to curb its budget deficits.
-
-
“The commission had some real questions of credibility about whether an institution as sophisticated as Goldman can’t tell whether it’s making money or losing money on the derivatives business,” said Angelides. “They have 1.2 million derivatives contracts and it just seems logical that they should be able to produce the management information to show us the scale of its business.”
-
There’s no indication, at this point, that any sort of quid pro quo took place, nor is Issa mentioned directly in the suit. But a three million dollar windfall for a congressman does seem like the sort of scandal in which Issa would usually take a keen interest.
In addition, CityBeat goes on to detail Issa’s extensive investments in Goldman Sachs’ High Yield Fund and a potential conflict of interest that may have occurred when he launched an investigation against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the timing of their fraud lawsuit against Goldman.
-
Meg Whitman, gubernatorial candidate in California, has been tainted for her associations with the company. But a commentary in the New York Times notes rightly: “Despite the political haymaking, the truth is that Goldman Sachs did nothing differently in the years leading up to the crisis than did other firms of its stature. Nothing has come to light in any of the very public recent assaults on the firm that also could not be discovered by looking through millions of documents at every other Wall Street firm with large trading and capital-markets businesses.”
-
Goldman was among the most aggressive players on Wall Street in marking down the value of mortgage bonds as the financial crisis brewed, and ultimately benefited in protecting itself from the housing downfall. A.I.G., on the other hand, had a large positive bet on housing through the billions of dollars of mortgage securities that it insured for Goldman and other banks.
-
The bank lobbyists, it turns out, missed one. They and their congressional allies were able to gut the Volcker Rule, the Lincoln Amendment, and almost everything else that could have had a meaningful effect on the industry.
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
The case, in which the Internet Technologies Association argues that the restrictions illegally discriminate against millions of users, is the latest front in an ongoing dispute that raises questions about free speech in a country attempting to join the EU.
-
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy this morning announced a number of wide-ranging modifications to the Government’s controversial mandatory internet filtering policy, including a delay of at least a year to the project while the state and Federal governments review the Refused Classification category of content which the filter would block.
-
• Film shows airstrike that killed 12 and crew laughter
• Analyst accused of trying to bring discredit on forces
-
France and the Netherlands called Thursday for international guidelines to prevent private firms from exporting high-tech equipment that could be used for Internet censorship.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
A review of the Kenyan constitution has been undergoing for a long time, and only now has a final draft proposal for a new constitution been released. But, despite the stated aims of freedom, democracy, participation and the free exchange of ideas (pdf), the released draft seems far from that ideal: Kenya is taking the Euro-American route to heavier information restrictions, including more copyright, more patents and more private knowledge monopolies, instead of keeping their legal environment open to creativity, participation and sharing.
[...]
Intellectual property law is still based in the nation state, but is very much shaped globally. A reform in one part of the world does not go without consequences in other parts, but, contrary to what some may imagine, the effects are rarely beneficial to either party.
An approval of the intellectual property rights provisions in the Kenyan constitution could come to be an example of that.
-
While India’s Right To Information laws have received widespread acclaim in the media for ousting bureaucrats in what appears to be a revolution in local government accountability, less conspicuous reforms such as the low costs associated with processing requests in Mexico deserve equal attention. In the day-to-day implementation of an effective access to information regime, it’s often the small things that make a difference.
-
July 10, 2010 marks EFF’s 20th anniversary! To thank you for your support over these two decades, please enjoy this new animation created especially for us by celebrated cartoonist and free culture activist Nina Paley. This short cartoon highlights some of the reasons why EFF is here.
-
Copyrights
-
If you follow the entertainment business at all, you’re probably well aware of “Hollywood accounting,” whereby very, very, very few entertainment products are technically “profitable,” even as they earn studios millions of dollars. A couple months ago, the Planet Money folks did a great episode explaining how this works in very simple terms. The really, really, really simplified version is that Hollywood sets up a separate corporation for each movie with the intent that this corporation will take on losses. The studio then charges the “film corporation” a huge fee (which creates a large part of the “expense” that leads to the loss). The end result is that the studio still rakes in the cash, but for accounting purposes the film is a money “loser” — which matters quite a bit for anyone who is supposed to get a cut of any profits.
-
I still think that if something is available for sale legitimately, you should pay for it (books, music, photos, movies, sheet music). A lot of the Bach, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff in Mr. Hawley’s collection is certainly available, and handing it to friends on a flash drive is absolutely depriving the publishers of their revenue. True, the composers are long dead, but editing and publishing sheet music is still worth something.
It’s those obscure, out-of-print, not-available-anywhere items in his collection that make a tougher case. How many hours are you obligated to research and dig just to find out if something is available for sale? In this case, the barriers to a legitimate purchase are ridiculously high. Isn’t digital piracy justified in that case?
-
ACTA
-
The Greens/ EFA group yesterday adopted an urgent appeal for transparency in the negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). With this action, the Greens/EFA protest against the decision by ACTA negotiators to keep a new version of the draft treaty secret after the 9th negotiation round concluded in Switzerland on 1 July. This decision clearly ignores the European Parliament’s Resolution adopted by a grand majority in March 2010. The Resolution clearly carried an expectation of a continuous policy of transparency. But instead, there was a one-time release of a draft text in April designed as a piecemeal appeasement of the parliament, and then again after a complete lack of transparency. The Commission’s flagrant disregard for the demands of the Parliament is completely unacceptable.
-
Digital Economy Bill
-
The great and the good of the internet world turned out in force last night at the London Marriott, DJed and evening gowned, to learn who had won prizes at the ISPA annual awards dinner. What a difference a year makes: last year the talk was all around safety, particularly for children. Last night the focus had shifted, with digital economy and the right way to fund creativity on the net very much to the fore.
CLUG Talk – 30 October 2009 – Netbooks (2009)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.08.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Dell is working with Canonical to help customers float Ubuntu-powered open-source clouds while also cozying up to developers.
-
Desktop
-
A new poll into Operating System popularity by a British computer magazine has revealed that an incredible 37 percent of respondents are still using Windows XP. That’s more than Windows 7 which managed to woo 30 percent of the folk taking part, and Vista could only garner a pretty poor 16 percent of support. This being a PC magazine it should come as no great surprise to see Linux being used by 8 percent of respondents and Mac OS by 7 percent.
-
After a successful first year, the Needham High School Linux Club delivered its first batch of computers to residents of the Needham Housing Authority. Penny Kirk, Residents Service Coordinator, will distribute them to families who have requested them.
-
The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has remained defiant in forcing Australian taxpayers to electronically submit their tax returns through Windows-only software.
A help topic posted on the ATO website attributes the lack of Mac or Linux-based e-tax software to priority focuses on compatibility with tax legislation.
-
A help topic put up on ATO’s website attributes the absence of Linux and Mac-supported software for the e-tax to priorities on compatibility with tax law making.
-
A couple of months ago the nice ZaReason people sent me their Teo Ubuntu netbook to review. I was favorably impressed and gave it a positive review. Then they let me take it on my vacation, so little Teo traveled 2500 miles with us. This was the ultimate portability, performance, and battery test. How did Teo do? Splendidly.
-
All in all, it’s clear that the market for virtualization solutions targeted at desktop Linux users is rich and flourishing. While the traditional staples, VMware and VirtualBox, remain the most intuitive options, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Ubuntu endorse an “official” desktop virtualization infrastructure based on KVM or Xen a year or two in the future.
-
IBM
-
MAINFRAME VENDOR IBM has released a Linux development kit for the Open Computing Language OpenCL.
-
-
-
Ballnux
-
-
Samsung
-
Considering that Apple’s iPhone 3GS sold a little over 800,000 units in roughly 8 months, this is big news for Samsung.
-
If you don’t need a full Windows environment, HyperSpace Instant-on takes you online in seconds, if you don’t want to wait for Windows 7 to boot. This is a Linux set-up which may not suit all users but is certainly quick.
-
The Samsung H1 runs off the Linux-based LiMO operating system, using the Vodafone 360 skin, and features an 8-megapixel camera and one of Samsung’s fab Super AMOLED screens, as seen in the Samsung Galaxy S.
-
-
-
-
Kernel Space
-
Power management features for Radeon graphics chips, the first groundwork for supporting 3D with Evergreen GPUs, H264 decoding in Intel’s Ironlake driver and the support of Intel’s next generation of desktop and notebook chips, are some of the major graphics driver advancements of Linux 2.6.35.
-
-
Applications
-
The developer of Minitube, the desktop YouTube player for Linux, has revealed a new music player called Minitunes. There are innumerable music players players available for Linux; many of them no different from the other.
-
Flavio Tordini, an Italian software developer and creator of Minitube, has announced the release of the first version of his new cross-platform Minitunes music player. According to Tordini, who considers his application to be “just another music player, only better”, Minitunes is designed to provide a “clean and innovative interface”.
-
Using two note-taking applications in tandem — Basket Note Pads and QToDo — leaves the user wanting for few, if any, additional features. Basket’s extensive use of tags is a real plus, and its always-on nature makes quick access a breeze. Meanwhile, QToDo shines in task-tracking. Perhaps merging both sets of functions into one app would create the ideal note-taking environment.
-
For some reason, text editors are something that us Unix geeks get very passionate about. Whether it’s an argument over which editor is better, or just professing our love for our favourite keyboard shortcuts, it’s an emotive issue.
-
When browsing and culling a folder of RAW files (in my case Nikon NEF) Irfanview is exceptionally fast as it reads the embedded JPEG preview rather than interpreting the RAW data. The preview file is a full resolution file, but compressed with “basic” JPEG quality. When you shoot RAW files and review the images on the camera’s LCD, it’s the preview files you’re looking at.
Irfanview is also fast and intuitive for batch functions such as resizing images and IPTC captioning.
For the first time since switching mostly to Linux almost two years ago, I can do all my image editing in Linux without compromise, even for the most complex professional jobs.
-
If Evolution is overkill for your needs than a simple Gmail notification application is ideal.
There are plenty of solutions available – in fact we’ve reviewed two such applications previously.
Say hello to another, then, as we peek at GMailWatcher – a simple Messaging Menu application for alerting you to new mails in your inbox right on your desktop.
-
Instructionals
-
-
This section would cover how to install PHP, MYSQL and Apache and then hook them together to build an interactive site. The goal would be to install WordPress and maybe Joomla as examples of the LAMP server. The actual process to make this all come together is straightforward but there are a lot of little things that can trip you up. One goal here would be to teach you how to create, use and backup your MySQL databases.
-
-
Have you been looking for open-source storage management tools that are easy to use and provide a graphical representation of your storage. Alas, there are no comprehensive tools but there are graphical tools that you can pair with command-line wizardry, particularly LVM.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Games
-
Most of the Linux sites that list games tend to highlight the same bunch; however, there are a few hidden gems that you may have missed but are still worth playing. In no particular order, here are four you might want to try.
-
July is when the summer doldrums start to threaten. If you feel your hammock calling, resist the temptation, and turn instead to Chromium B.S.U., an adrenaline-pumping 2-D vertical shooter.
The game has been around for about 10 years. Creator Mark B. Allan came up with it after trying out a Linux port of a DOS shooter called Raptor. “I began to wonder how hard it would be to write a similar type of game using OpenGL. I had been wanting to experiment with SDL and OpenAL for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity.”
-
There are several “unknown” game companies which are very friendly towards GNU/Linux, yet because of the poor publicity none heard about them.
One of those GNU/Linux friendly gaming companies is Sake Visual.
They released 3 games so far and all of them have a native GNU/Linux client, 2 of the games where released as freeware.
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
-
It looks like I’ll be at least making the migration from GNOME to KDE, even if I don’t leave the *buntu family of distros, so I needed to make a list of what apps I use regularly and see if they work under KDE (without needing to install libraries) and if not what apps may do the job. Apps I now use are listed in BOLD text if I absolutely need to use it regardless of what distro I use, although if I can keep the same features in a different program that will be acceptable.
-
Not everyone can make it to Akademy, although given the record number of people captured in the group photo, it probably seems like everyone did.
-
Today, KDE delivers the second release candidate of the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.5. The final version will be available in August 2010 and this RC is intended for testers and early adopters who can help by finding and reporting bugs. It will also interest those who want an early look at what is coming to their desktops and netbooks this summer.
-
I started using KDE when version 4.0 was out. I had had a taste of KDE 3.5, which I didn’t like, but release 4.0 looked like a big step forward, so I was tempted to give it a go. Just like so many others, I found KDE 4.0 disappointingly slow, unstable and unintuitive. However, I did see lots of potential in it and kept using it release after release.
Up until recently, I was mostly a GNOME user. I considered it faster, leaner, more intuitive… and certainly not as ugly as some say! No matter how hard I tried to like KDE, it would always feel a bit alien and I would always end up going back to GNOME. The tide has shifted lately, though, and I have found myself leaning towards KDE desktops more and more. I believe that is mostly a result of the incredible work the developers are putting in place to improve and polish the product, but also down to the fact that I have been learning more about its “secrets”.
-
-
GNOME Desktop
-
Gnome is the most popular Linux desktop environment and one of it’s key features that makes it so wonderful is the “gnome panel”. For those unfamiliar the “gnome panel” is the bar that is typically located at the bottom (and top sometimes) of the screen where your menu, task-bar, and icon tray are located. If you have never done it, try right clicking on some blank space and click “add to panel”. You will be presented with a list of applets you can add to the panel. While there are a good number to choose from by default, there are piles of other applets you can find online to install. The following is a list of my four favorites I use on my various Linux systems around my house.
-
With the upcoming release of GNOME 3.0, software development interests will focus increasingly on improved user experience, accessibility and application use. While the GUADEC 2010 conference aims to prmote all of these ideals through the work of the GNOME Foundation, the GNOME Open Desktop Day will place important attention on the desktop in government and education.
-
Xfce
-
In this piece of the puzzle we are going to take a look at Xfce’s “control panel”, the Xfce 4 Settings Manager. From this tool you can configure nearly all of the preferences for the Xfce 4′s desktop. It’s a very handy tool to have installed and will keep you from having to poke around the menu system to find the various setting tools.
-
-
Reviews
-
This release of Sabayon is proving to be easy, fast, and stable. It is available in x86 or 64-bit KDE or GNOME versions as well as a CoreCD consisting just of the basics. With the included XBMC, Sabayon can easily become a home theater center as well. It is also the only known live distribution to offer musical accompaniment during boot. All the technical aspects aside, the best thing about Sabayon is – it’s just plain fun and easy to use.
-
Following the release of the first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 back in April we delivered our first RHEL 6.0 benchmarks while putting it up against CentOS 5.4 and Fedora 12. Now that the second beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 was released last week, we took the workstation build and have benchmarked it against the latest releases of Ubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
The Spring version of the popular Mandriva Linux distribution is now available for download on mirrors worldwide. With the release of Mandriva Linux 2010.1 “Spring,” we definitely know that Mandriva is alive and kicking. The final release comes in three editions: One Edition, Free Edition and Powerpack Edition. Mandriva Linux 2010.1 is available for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, with GNOME and KDE4 LiveCDs.
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
Linux giant Red Hat has announced that Linux System Dynamics (LSD), an open source consulting firm, has been appointed a Red Hat Premier Business Partner for the Southern Africa region.
Red Hat Premier Business Partners are top-tier Red Hat partners, who have demonstrated expertise in the Red Hat product portfolio and have met the stringent technical, sales and training requirements specified by Red Hat, in order to deliver the benefits of Red Hat services and products to customers.
-
Debian Family
-
When it comes to Linux distributions, Sidux is an interesting character. While many distro’s “piggyback” on well known distributions (especially Ubuntu) and release their own “flavor” after the parent distribution is released, Sidux does things a bit differently. Sidux is still built on top of a parent distro (Debian) but is made to be a rolling release distribution by taking the packages that are in Debian Unstable, though adding customizations to make it stable.
I tried out Sidux very briefly a few months back, and was turned off by the number of updates that were available initially and the fact that they broke my system. The problem was that so much time had passed since their last spin (the previous version was released in April of 2009), that there have been so many changes that the updates just completely broke my system. (Linux changes faster than any other operating system, bar none, so having updated spins is a very important thing).
[...]
Sidux is a really good distribution, though it’s not perfect. It’s clearly not for beginners, though there is a nice manual included so it may not be all that bad. As a power user, I had absolutely no problem using it and getting it up and running. I can see that excessive updates may be a problem to a beginning user, as package update overload can sometimes break things, but for me it’s been stable. As a matter of fact, if I wasn’t using Arch, Sidux would probably be my next best choice as I don’t think I could use anything but a rolling distro. Sidux is definitely well worth checking out, though I do recommend you try it in a Virtual Machine first to get the hang of it before installing it on a production machine.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
The framework for supporting paid applications in the Ubuntu Software Centre will almost certainly be in place for Ubuntu 10.10 – but what could users expect to see on sale?
-
Fonts
-
When Canonical unveiled Ubuntu’s branding overhaul and new desktop theme earlier this year, the company also revealed that it had commissioned well-known type foundry Dalton Maag to design a new font specifically for Ubuntu. The font will likely be used by default in Ubuntu 10.10, which is scheduled for release in October.
Today Canonical launched a closed beta for the new font, making it available to testers and Ubuntu contributors. I tested it on my desktop computer, running Ubuntu 10.04. After installing the package, I enabled it in the GNOME appearance preference dialog. It matches the new Ubuntu logo font, but it’s designed for optimal screen readability. It looks very smooth on my LCD monitors and is very easy on the eyes. I think it’s a big improvement over Bitstream Vera Sans, the font that currently ships by default in Ubuntu.
-
-
Canonical Design has introduced new Ubuntu fonts which will be used in the next release, Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. The new fonts will not be available to everyone, though, as it has been released as a private beta. Only Ubuntu Members are allowed access to the new font through a private PPA. The fonts will be released as a public beta on 8th August. So if you are not an Ubuntu Member, you have to wait till then.
-
This “closed fonts beta” thing was a big PR mistake.
It’s not enough for you to push a proprietary font into Ubuntu in the default install. No, you can’t even release it publicly. You just had to release it as a closed-doors, “members-only” beta.
-
Having read some of the comments and bugs I thought it might be useful to add some clarification on a couple of terms.
-
You should be able to find the Liberation fonts on most distributions, though they may not be installed by default. Search for Liberation in your favorite package tool, and you should find a package with all three or separate packages for each. On Ubuntu 10.04, for instance, you’ll have the ttf-liberation package. Actually, if you do a search for ttf, you’ll see a number of fonts you can grab from the Ubuntu archives.
But the open font movement, if can be called such, has progressed beyond Red Hat’s triple header of Freedom. Check out the Free Font Manifesto, for example. It links to a number of fonts that have licenses that allow redistribution and modification, as well as a manifesto about free fonts. Check out the blog as well if the free font issue is important to you.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
Last evening while reading the SA forums, I encountered a thread about Linux and what was required to bring it to the general public. One of the goons mentioned a post that indicated ten reasons why Ubuntu wasn’t ready for the desktop in India. I kid you not – the most ridiculous reason was because users couldn’t perform the important ritual of right click/Refreshing on the desktop five or more times before getting down to work.
-
-
In an earlier blog I wrote about the TI eZ430-Chronos. This is a $50 development kit with a twist. Instead of a generic target board, you get a wristwatch. Its more of a “Casio-style sports watch” than a Rolex, but inside is a fairly powerful MSP430 CPU and I/O including a 3-axis accelerometer, a temperature sensor, a pressure sensor, and a wireless connection back to a PC. You also get a USB programmer, and the USB receiver for the watch. Use coupon code HALFMSPTOOL (don’t know when that expires) and the price drops to under $25.
-
The platform is currently a prototype, based on Sirrix’ Turaya Security Kernel, which handles encryption, VPN and a trusted user interface; and the OKL4 Microvisor, which can host the Sirrix trusted desktop alongside a variety of guest OS, including Android and other Linux variants, in OKL4 secure cells. The platform will initially run on Nokia’s N900 product, which runs Linux-based Maemo.
-
FemtoLinux is a new Linux flavor optimized for real-time embedded systems. Our design goal is a low system call and interrupt-to-application latency and overhead. We achieve this by allowing to run critical Linux applications in kernel mode.
-
-
Intel/Nokia/MeeGo
-
The video above shows the MeeGo VT320 video terminal start up. It takes 17 seconds from pressing the power button to a login prompt on the video terminal. That includes 11 seconds for the BIOS, 1 second for bootloader and a further 5 seconds for MeeGo to get its act together.
-
For one thing, it runs on the Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system. This is one very niche device aimed specifically at those passionate guys that reside within the wider Debian and Ubuntu communities – the ones who love to tinker with things.
-
Meanwhile, Google’s Chrome OS netbooks will dispense with the operating system completely when they become available in late fall in favor of apps from the Chrome Web App store.
Of course, Linux and Windows netbooks like the ones Intel is targeting with the AppUp Store can run whatever software you want them to run — just like laptops and desktops. Their rebranding as things that run apps is, if anything, a step backwards.
-
Steve Paine, who edits the Carrypad and UMPC portal got his hands on a prototype smartphone running Intel’s chips and MeeGo, a Linux-based operating system developed by Intel and Nokia.
-
Android
-
It used to be that folks would be busy trying to get Linux running on various electronic devices, such as an iPod, but the latest trend is to get Google’s Android OS running on phones that don’t officially support it.
-
Google’s Android Market offers the largest share of free apps at 57 percent, while the Windows Mobile Marketplace offers the smallest share at 22 percent, says a report on mobile app stores released last week by Distimo.
-
The Android operating system is a free Linux-based open-source platform for mobile devices. It managed to appeal a lot to users around the world, mainly due to the fact that it can take great advantage of the hardware resources packed inside mobile phones. Already adopted by a wide range of manufacturers and carriers around the world, Android has all chances to lead the smartphone market in the near future.
-
Considering how hackable the Nexus One is already, we can only imagine a whole new host of interesting things thanks to Ubuntu running on the device. [Max Lee] set his heart out on getting not just Ubuntu on the Nexus One, but also Debian, and he wrote a perfect install guide to help out those wanting to give it a shot.
-
Froyo was unveiled at at the Google I/O developer conference in May during a keynote presentation by Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra. Stabilizing the platform for an official Nexus One release took Google a little bit longer than expected, but the software is now being made available to users through an over-the-air update. We took it for a test drive to see how it compares to the previous version.
-
Motorola
-
Thankfully, Blake tells us that the Droid X is awesome. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know what to make of the 4.3-inch screen, 1GHz processor, 8-megapixel camera, 720p video…
-
-
OK, we admit it. Despite our public loathing of Motoblur, the Motorola Charm (just announced for T-Mobile) has piqued our interest a bit, given that it’ll be the first front-facing QWERTY Android phone. Motorola’s done up a cute little video showing off its latest. And while we’re not exactly convinced it’s going to be the Android messenger we’ve been dreaming of, we’re definitely looking forward to giving it a shot.
-
OLPC
-
Manipur has been added to the global project One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a mission to empower the children learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child with the commencement of distribution of the laptop to four schools today.
-
IBM, in collaboration with the European Union, industry and academia, is launching a research consortium which aims to help businesses more easily take advantage of Internet-based services – or “e-services” – to create collaborative business operations and achieve shared business goals.
The unique effort focuses on the development of a new computer science model that will enable organizations to greatly accelerate the typically time-intensive process around the coordination of e-services and increase the automation and efficiency around deploying new e-service blends. The research will enable even small to mid-sized businesses to create or join into flexible e-service blends, without investing in expensive IT expertise. The initiative will create open-source software to enable many organizations around the world take advantage of the technology.
-
In general I have found that, in terms of quality, number of bugs and ease of usage, there is no real difference between OSS and proprietary software. I know that many people will disagree. I also know that they disagree because they have a biased point of view. As these people are used to a particular piece of software, for example msoffice or photoshop, then the OSS equivalents, open office and gimp, seem to be inferior.
-
Events
-
The conference landscape evolves constantly. Old events pass away, new ones arrive and it’s good to get pointers to know what’s worthwhile. I can recommend this year’s Open World Forum, happening in Paris on September 30 and October 1.It’s a volunteer-run conference for the open source and free software community and covers multiple tracks and events both for business and community interests.
-
-
Slides and videos of the presentations at Red Hat’s annual convention provide a host of information about the features and capabilities of current and forthcoming Red Hat products. The presenters offered a particularly wide range of details on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, scheduled for release in the coming months, and on the various virtualisation products in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation family.
-
Mozilla
-
Absolute Linux 13.1.2 has been released bringing several updates and fixes as well as the switch to Google Chrome as the default browser, replacing Mozilla Firefox. Chrome was found to have several advantages over Firefox and the developers believed it to be the better choice for the light-weight distro. Firefox is still available on the second CD.
-
Firefox has successfully grabbed a quarter of the browser market, but Google Chrome is growing very rapidly, and the fact remains that the world is moving to a new, need-driven browser model. For many people, it makes sense to run more than one browser. I’ll definitely adopt Firefox 4, primarily because I use a lot of the best Firefox extensions, but I’ll run Chrome as well.
-
Buzzbird is a Firefox based twitter client for Linux. And like Firefox, Buzzbird too, just works. Buzzbird is fast, have all the basic functionalities and it almost never crashes.
-
Databases
-
CSQL is a very powerful command line interpreter. You are recommended to read our online Wiki CSQL Interpreter Tutorial. You will learn about reading, saving, and appending SQL statement, Shell command execution/registration, transaction processing, outputting schema information/syntax rules and examples, parameter setting, etc, which are beyond those provided by CUBRID Manager or other simple query editor tools.
-
CMS
-
MIT OpenCourseWare ( http://ocw.mit.edu/ ) is a web-based publication of virtually all course content from the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (MIT). It is a resource that is used by students, teachers and average people around the world via the web, giving average citizens access to a wealth of information previously only available to students who could attend one of the world’s most recognized and respected universities.
-
Education
-
1. Don’t buy any software. No, seriously, just stop buying software licences. If you’d like to carry on using your Windows machines, check out the Open Education Disc, with a comprehensive suite of absolutely free applications providing tools for (almost) every area of learning within and beyond the curriculum, including OpenOffice.org, Inkscape and the GIMP, to replace Office, Illustrator and Photoshop for starters.
Furthermore, you’re allowed, indeed encouraged, to duplicate this so your pupils have access to the same software, legally and for free, at home too. Better still, put the temptation to buy more software firmly out of your grasp by switching to Linux desktops, such as the undeniably excellent Ubuntu. This comes as standard with a great suite of applications, with at the last count 30,046 packages (such as Tablix, a genetic algorithm based timetabler), that you can install (for free) over the net as and when you need them: think app store for a desktop, but all free and (generally) of very good quality.
If you’re worried that your pupils won’t cope with an unfamiliar interface, don’t be, they’ll quickly adjust and will be far more discerning users of computers as a result; if you’re worried that this won’t prepare them for the world of Windows, don’t be, just have a glance at Ofsted’s comments about alternative operating systems.
-
BSD
-
AccProbe uses IAccessible2 platform services to assist developers in discovering and correcting code problems in their Windows applications. It was developed in Eclipse by IBM and donated to The Linux Foundation’s Open Accessibility Workgroup.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
The Free Software conferences held in Berga during the last weekend, where eyeOS participated with a conference and a workshop, ended with a very special moment: The official inauguration of the first “Free Software” street in the world.
Richard Stallman, founder of GNU Project and Free Software Foundation, was invited and after speaking, officially inaugurated the street.
-
Project Releases
-
Core
* Mult-screen feature: support of many opened editors and viewers (#1490)
* Reorganization of menu and configuration dialogs. More options are available in UI (#320)
* Mark of text in input fields is available now, DEL removes selected/unchanged text (#2161, #2228)
* Now copy/move dialog shows the full path with file name in the field “to:” (#1907)
* Removed hardcoded shortcuts in dialog.c (#212)
* Added new actions for panels: PanelMarkFileUp and PanelMarkFileDown (#2021)
* Added new capability to create relative symlinks: menu item and “C-x v” default shortcut (#2042)
* Now we can use external utility to copy/paste text to X clipboard (#30)
* Cursor is hidden in menu and listboxes (#1771)
* All hotkeys in MC (in menu, checkboxes, etc) in the middle of a word are in the lowercase now (#2168)
* Use system realpath(3) function if available (#1911)
* GLib deprecated functions are not used (#2085, #2249)
-
-
CMS-Maestro is a new PHP-based content management system (CMS) released by South African Web development company Valente Online.
Easy to install and use, CMS-Maestro offers the basics such as page and article management and adds to that the ability to add additional widgets, and manage menus and a range of media formats. In a release the company says that “CMS-Maestro is built with extensibility in mind and is designed in a modular fashion, therefore additional features and functionality can be added easily to the Maestro”.
-
Licensing
-
One key element of open source compliance is to know your obligations. There is a lot of confusion about what open source means exactly and some people believe that open source means you can do whatever you want. While open source grants users many freedoms, open source code comes under specific license terms which often include obligations that have to be followed by companies distributing open source software.
-
Open Data
-
Last week I participated in the third (and sadly final!) conference of Communia project, a European thematic network on the digital public domain. The theme of this conference was University and Cyberspace and several of the talks articulated a vision in which universities, academics, and students play a key role in creating, curating and promoting the digital commons.
-
Programming
-
Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, said the Helios release introduces important innovations in areas such as Git support, Linux development and JavaScript support.
-
Science
-
The European Parliament reiterated its opposition to meat and milk produced from cloned animals yesterday (7 July), piling pressure on the European Commission to ban food produced in this way.
-
Security/Aggression
-
Every politician understands what is in his or her short-term interest. They know what the party leadership wants, what their campaign contributors want, and what lobbyists want. At what point does the long-term interest of the nation as a whole come into play? Who represents the interests of future generations? Today, our future is determined by cowardly politicians who can only think as far as the next election. Our economy is guided by short-sighted corporations that only care about hitting their quarterly numbers, lest their stock nosedives and they get taken over by a rival corporation.
-
Prosecutors in a New Jersey ticket scalping case are pushing the envelope on the federal computer hacking law, setting a precedent that could make it a felony to violate a website’s terms of service and fool a CAPTCHA, according to electronic civil rights groups intervening in the case.
-
Imagine that right after briefing Adam about which fruit was allowed and which forbidden, God had installed a closed-circuit television camera in the garden of Eden, trained on the tree of knowledge. Think how this might have changed things for the better. The serpent sidles up to Eve and urges her to try the forbidden fruit. Eve reaches her hand out – in paradise the fruit is always conveniently within reach – but at the last second she notices the CCTV and thinks better of it. Result: no sin, no Fall, no expulsion from paradise. We don’t have to toil among thorns and thistles for the rest of our lives, earning our bread by the sweat of our brows; childbirth is painless; and we feel no need to wear clothes.
-
Mr Shim said a French company was already offering simulated kidnapping packages, in which people can pay to be abducted without warning, bound, gagged and imprisoned for between four and ten hours.
-
The police’s use of controversial counterterrorism stop and search powers against individuals is to be scrapped immediately, the home secretary announced today.
-
As we’ve seen so often before (indeed, we’ve got a whole category devoted to it) – law enforcement throws funds at this technology which then can’t be spent elsewhere, policing becomes dependent on that technology, and it promptly fails.
-
Environment
-
Want to slow global warming? Save a sea otter. So says Chris Wilmers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose team has calculated that the animals remove at least 0.18 kilograms of carbon from the atmosphere for every square metre of occupied coastal waters.
That means that if sea otters were restored to healthy populations along the coasts of North America they could collectively lock up a mammoth 1010 kg of carbon – currently worth more than $700 million on the European carbon-trading market. Wilmers explained this at the annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology in Edmonton, Canada, this month.
-
From China to New York, the more we cool ourselves, the hotter we’re going to get
-
MEPs voted to approve a political inter-institutional agreement on a new regulation that sets obligations on operators that place timber or related products on the EU market.
The new legislation issues a ban on illegally-harvested timber. Covering the whole timber supply chain from logging sites to European consumers, the law aims to guarantee legally-sourced products access to EU markets while halting deforestation in third countries.
-
The slow-moving airship will be arriving at the Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport in Mississippi after more than a month of travel from Yuma, Arizona where it’s based. The blimp will ultimately operate from a mooring three miles southeast of the Mobile Bay shoreline in Alabama.
The primary purpose of 178-feet long MZ-3A airship will be to spot and monitor for oil contamination along the Gulf Coast.
-
But, does that mean oil in ocean water can’t possibly become involved in the hydrologic cycle? Nope. There is some evidence, according to the Christian Science Monitor, that floating oil can evaporate under the right conditions. In that case, though, you wouldn’t get oil droplets falling from on high. The more likely result would be normal-looking rain tainted with chemical compounds from the oil. According to Popular Mechanics, the only way you’d really get black “rain” is if a hurricane picked up polluted water and dumped it—sans evaporation—onto a coastal area.
-
Finance
-
The financial overhaul bill awaiting final action in the Senate includes a new regulator whose aim is to make sure mortgages, credit cards and other products from big banks don’t abuse or confuse you.
-
What to do about the size of too-big-to-fail banks? Order a study. How to hold stockbrokers accountable for their dealings with clients? Another study. How to ensure the reliability of credit rating agencies? Study that, too.
-
In what could be a first step toward restoring confidence in the health of European banks, a panel coordinating stress tests of major institutions has confirmed that they will be much broader than initially planned, covering most of the market. It also set a date of July 23 for releasing the results.
The Committee of European Banking Supervisors, made up of national regulators from across the European Union, said it will release results of the anxiously awaited tests for 91 banks. Those banks account for 65 percent of the E.U. banking market and at least 50 percent of the market in the respective countries, it said in a statement late Wednesday.
-
A standard refrain from U.S. banking industry lobbyists is “you cannot put us at a disadvantage relative to our overseas competitors.” The Obama administration has largely bought into this line and cites it in public and private as one reason for opposing size caps on our largest banks and preventing Congress from raising capital requirements.
The US Treasury puts its faith instead in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision process, a somewhat murky convocation of bank regulators from various countries that has a weak track record in terms of setting sufficient prudential standards (also the assessment of Dan Tarullo, now an influential Federal Reserve governor; disclosure, I have a part-time position at the Peterson Institute, which published his book). But, the official US reasoning goes, the crisis of 2007-08 was so traumatic, our European counterparts will now want to be more careful.
-
Wells Fargo said Wednesday that it would no longer make subprime mortgages and as a result would close a 100-year-old finance division that specialized in those loans.
The bank has a reputation as a conservative lender, but it has been battling heavy losses amid the financial crisis on its own subprime mortgages as well as on the loan portfolios it acquired when it bought the Wachovia Corporation.
-
Target-date mutual funds — investment vehicles that automatically change your mix of assets as you near retirement — are thought by many investors to be a safer investment choice that’s relatively insulated from market gyrations as the funds get closer to the target date.
But lately, people on the verge of retirement have been surprised to see how much these funds have been affected by recent turbulence on Wall Street. In some cases, the funds have performed far less well than had been anticipated.
-
Federal Reserve officials, increasingly concerned over signs the economic recovery is faltering, are considering new steps to bolster growth.
With Congress tied in political knots over whether to take further action to boost the economy, Fed leaders are weighing modest steps that could offer more support for economic activity at a time when their target for short-term interest rates is already near zero. They are still resistant to calls to pull out their big guns — massive infusions of cash, such as those undertaken during the depths of the financial crisis — but would reconsider if conditions worsen.
-
It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, and rice by 320 percent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in over 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, called it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.”
[...]
For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer and the global price is high, he’ll lose some cash, but if there’s a lousy summer or the price collapses, he’ll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked well.
Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into ‘derivatives’ that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in “food speculation” was born.
-
The U.S.’s Financial Reform bill is over 2,000 pages. It includes exemptions and lots of opportunities to create loopholes. Behavior that caused our ongoing global financial crisis is guaranteed to continue, if we don’t have swift and effective deterrents.
-
When the nation’s most prestigious investment banks found themselves on the verge of total annihilation in the fall of 2008, the most radical and effective government response was not the infamous $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The wildest salvation scheme for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the securities system at large was a plan from the Federal Reserve to give these speculative institutions access to cheap loans from the central bank. It worked. With access to unlimited cheap funding from the Fed, the Wall Street titans survived. Hurrah.
-
A well-coifed, dulcet-toned Harvard Scot named Niall Ferguson says that’s a bad idea and bond market vigilantes will show up in the dark of night and pummel U.S. bonds to applesauce, twist Uncle Sam’s arm around his back, and force him pay through his bleeding nose to borrow.
-
Poised as we are for the most comprehensive financial reform in this country since the Great Depression, it is time to fess up to the fact that it likely would not have occurred without a concerted effort by the Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress to demonize Goldman Sachs.
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
Army intelligence specialist Bradley Manning was charged yesterday for allegedly leaking video and documents to secret-sharing website Wikileaks. He faces up to 52 years in prison. Now, nerds are waging fierce campaigns to discredit both Manning’s informant and Wikileaks itself.
Bradley Manning was arrested last month after his confidant, ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, turned him in. Lamo won Manning’s trust by portraying himself as a minister and a journalist, and likely traded on a shared queer identity to convince the 22 year-old, deeply troubled soldier to confess his illegal activities over instant message. Lamo immediately notified Army investigators and spilled the story to his long-time unofficial mouthpiece, Wired’s Kevin Poulsen.
-
A German data protection official said Wednesday he launched legal proceedings against Facebook, which he accused of illegally accessing and saving personal data of people who don’t use the social networking site.
Johannes Caspar said his Hamburg data protection office had initiated legal steps that could result in Facebook being fined tens of thousands of euros for saving private information of individuals who don’t use the site and haven’t granted it access to their details.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Separately, some governments are now kicking off investigations into Monsanto’s advertising statements about the very same Roundup Ready soybeans. Combine all of that and Monsanto also reported dreadful earnings, with a 45% profit drop.
Once again, we’re seeing what happens when you live off of artificial monopolies. They can make you rich in the short term, but they’re no trick to building sustainable businesses. What the government gives in the form of monopoly rights, it can also take away.
-
The piece was written by Christina Mulligan, who recently got plenty of attention for her thoughtful piece on the mixed messages on copyright found in the TV show Glee. It’s great that a paper like the Washington Post is giving her a platform to write about these concerns. Hopefully it will finally reach some of our more stubborn and misguided DC-based politicians that intellectual property is being widely abused in troubling ways.
-
Copyrights
-
Today, the BPI announced that 2009 was the best year for single sales ever.
-
-
BT and TalkTalk are seeking a judicial review of the controversial Digital Economy Act, BBC News has learned.
The two internet service providers want the High Court to clarify the legality of the act before it is implemented.
CLUG Talk 25 November 2008 – AGM: New Features in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (2008)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.07.10
Posted in News Roundup at 5:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
When I adopted GNU/Linux the impetus to change was the persistent failure of that other OS to run through a single 45 minute period of class time without fail. Perhaps the latest vulnerability in that other OS will be the impetus for many more to migrate. This one is not a bug but a feature of that other OS to permit working with foreign character-sets. That other OS welcomes executable files to manipulate foreign characters and in the process allows the system to be owned by aliens. Malware is out in the wild exploiting this feature of that other OS.
-
Desktop
-
As a sidenote on Linux lack of success in China on the desktop, I have to mention a discussion end of last year with CS2C that has been doing OEM (original equipment manufacturer) deals for quite some time, which was just a way to avoid the Microsoft tax for some PC makers. For the first time in the company’s history, people are actually keeping the preinstalled Linux system and using it, “forcing” CS2C to start a customer support line.
-
Fedora is second most popular Linux Distro next to Ubuntu. Even the Linux God Linus Torvalds uses it (an old claim, not verified). The latest Fedora 13 (Goddard) as usual has lots of goodies like OpenOffice, KDE, and much more. A versatile operating system for home and office users.
-
In Windows, the process goes like this:
1. Temporarily Disable System Restore.
2. Reboot computer in Safe Mode.
3. Locate nice.exe virus files and uninstall nice.exe files program. Follow the screen step-by-step screen instructions to complete uninstallation of nice.exe.
4. Open the registry editor.
5. Delete/Modify any values added to the registry related with nice.exe.
6. Exit registry editor and restart the computer.
7. Clean/delete all nice.exe infected files :nice.exe and related,or rename nice.exe virus files
8. Delete all your IE temp files with nice.exe manually.
9. Run a whole scan with antivirus program.
10. Run the antivirus program in your USB drive.
Very easy, right? The process can take more than an hour (that is, if you know where to start!)
In Mandriva Linux, you say good-bye to Mr. Nice by doing this:
1. Select nice.exe from your USB drive.
2. Delete it. If you get a message saying you cannot do it,
3. Change the permissions of the file and delete it.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Qualcomm has found itself unwittingly annoying the open-source community by posting the source code for OpenGL ES 2D/3D Linux kernel driver for its Snapdragon chipset, as found in the Nexus One, Dell Streak and many other devices. However, while the kernel driver is open-source, Qualcomm’s user-space driver remains closed; that prompted David Airlie, who maintains the DRM for the Linux kernel at Red Hat, to tell Qualcomm – and anyone else considering doing the same half-hearted thing – “If you aren’t going to create an open userspace driver (either MIT or LGPL) then don’t waste time submitting a kernel driver to me.”
-
-
Applications
-
A new GIMP Plugin Registry version was released today in Debian – 3.5, which failed to build under Ubuntu (because of a Python bug in Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid). After exchanging lots of emails with Bernd Zeimetz, the Debian maintainer of the GIMP Plugin Registry, he was able to locate the issue and fix it so Ubuntu users can enjoy these new plugins already. That’s why he released yet another version today – 3.5.1. And as always, the latest version is now available in the WebUpd8 PPA.
-
The Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard (VMPK) is a MIDI event generator – a program that converts mouse actions and keystrokes in your computer into MIDI events, which can be sent to other programs or devices that understand MIDI and produce sound. It also receives MIDI events from other programs or external devices, displaying note events as highlighted piano keys, indicating control change events by moving the knobs in the toolbars, and so on.
-
The Linux Foundation’s Open A11y (Accessibility) Workgroup has announced the release of IAccessible2 for Windows version 1.2 under a BSD licence.
-
Instructionals
-
Games
-
Winter Wolves which I posted about earlier, is a very friendly company towards GNU/Linux users and released many games for our beloved platform (and many are yet to come).
They are now working on a Japanese style Sci-Fi RPG game which resembles the old (2d) Final Fantasy games a little (at least in turn based battle mode gameplay).
-
GNOME Desktop
-
In the following Q&A, OSCON speaker and GNOME foundation executive director Stormy Peters discusses the risks of cloud computing, the continued importance of desktop computing, and the interesting relationship between new mobile form factors and free software adoption.
-
-
I can’t think of a better way to learn something new by playing. Since the “spin era” has begun with Sabayon Linux by using molecule, it’s something new to learn. Joost has posted a quick run down of how to do a basic spin. I’ve been messing around with this molecule thing and have found that adding and subtracting packages is simple enough to do. I do find that specific customizations of the user and root accounts a bit more complicated. I’m still trying to figure that one out yet. Scripting isn’t my strong point at all. I understand what it needs to do, but assembling a script of commands and paths is like writing hieroglyphics. I’m not sure where the script should be placed at in my spec file nor when the script should be invoked.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
Mandriva is one of the cornerstones of Open Source, a technological pioneer offering the sole independent Linux distribution on the European market. Nevertheless the company has been faced with a mounting financial challenge for several years due in part to its size and lack of a clear publishing strategy.
Mandriva also plays a strategic role in the Paris Saclay innovative ecosystem centred on the Pole System@tic Paris Region and Cap Digital. The company is involved in a dozen R&D projects in partnership with some 60 research and industrial laboratories working on themes such as the semantic desktop, Linux Real Time distribution, shared infrastructures or cloud computing.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Just Dial currently has more than 200 servers with its mission-critical Intranet and extranet applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
-
-
-
Debian Family
-
At keyring-maint, we got a request by our DPL, querying for the evolution of the number of keys per keyring – This can be almost-mapped to the number of Debian Developers, Debian Maintainers, retired and deleted accounts over time since the keyrings are maintained over version control.
-
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
I’ve been using Ubuntu as my distribution of choice for VM’s and server instances, and on a lark I took a swag at installing Ubuntu desktop onto a VM yesterday. I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty usable setup.
-
Fixing poor descriptions of Software Centre applications is listed as a papercut milestone for Ubuntu 10.10 because, as one tester during Canonicals’ user testing day put it: “Software centre descriptions are geeky.”
-
-
Robotics and artificial intelligence enthusiast Francisco Paz has launched a new open source robot called Qbo. Paz’s five-year-long personal project is an attempt to realise the recently stated goal of Tomomasa Sato, director of the Japanese Robotics Association, to develop “an open source Model-T robot in which all global standards may be applied to achieve a result as revolutionary as Ford’s Model-T was for the car industry.”
As with other projects in the growing open source hardware space, Qbo will be made, as far as possible, from off-the-shelf components, and all design plans, firmware and control software will be distributed under an open source licence.
-
An estimated 20 billion ARM processors are installed worldwide, around four per person and up to four or five per device.
For Sophie Wilson (pictured at left), who wrote the original instruction set back in 1983 for what was conceived as a co-processor for Acorn’s BBC Micro computer, they are still a “little bit awe-inspiring.”
-
Almost everything that ARM could be doing it is except for widespread use in PCs.
-
Nokia/MeeGo
-
The MeeGo open source project merging Intel’s Moblin project and Nokia’s Maemo into a single Linux distribution has just initiated what it is calling “Day 1″ of its MeeGo Handset User Experience Project.
-
-
Android
-
Android is now activated on 160,000 phones daily, that’s almost 5m every month, demonstrating a significant take-up of the operating system and Android app Marketplace. Google has also just announced plans to expand into emerging markets in a bid for a further slice of the mobile market.
-
“Adoption of Android-powered devices is growing globally by leaps and bounds. We want our users to have the enhanced experience that the Galaxy S Android 2.1 offers, whether for browsing the Web or tracking important tasks on your phone,” said Cathy Santamaria, Globe brand head.
-
Apple wins the battle with Android for hosting the most paid applications, which are also on the whole more expensive than its open source rival’s.
According to a report by Distimo, the iPad store boasts the largest percentage of paid-for apps, at 80%, with the iPhone commanding 73% of costly applications, in contrast to Google’s Android store where the majority of apps are free.
-
Ever since Google officially launched their open source mobile operating system entitled Android, handset manufacturers like HTC and Motorola have seemingly been scrambling to get as many smartphones onto the market, powered by platform, as humanly possible.
-
Adobe
-
Adobe says it works directly making contributions to projects including the SQLite embedded relational database management system and the Eclipse software development environment, which is primarily rooted in Java but extensible to a variety of other languages via plug-ins.
-
A new open source project dubbed frash will allow iPad users to experience Flash in the Web browser as Adobe begins demonstrating its own efforts to port Flash 10.1 to the newly released Android 2.2 “Froyo”.
-
-
-
-
-
The Open Source Initiative has worked hard to show that open source software, which are products primarily known for offering access to software source code, can provide economic value and strategic advantages to business practices around the world.
Twelve years ago, open source was implemented by software developers, and the importance of this non-proprietary software has only been compounded as open source developers and users have tailored their codes to truly evolve and grow as needed by individual companies and users.
[...]
According to the Open Source Initiative Web site, “the prehistory of the Open Source Initiative includes the entire history of Unix, Internet free software, and the hacker culture.” While the hacker culture may have been the birthing place of open source, different companies, users and communities have come to heavily rely on open source for several reasons.
-
This may seem obvious to some, but there are lots of commercial open source companies that don’t grok the importance of the “support first” mantra. Many commercial open source companies spend a lot of time detailing the feature-specific advantages their products have instead of detailing support options. It’s a cart-before-horse issue. Like Red Hat, Cloudera, Acquia and other commercial open source startups increasingly understand all of this. Their understanding will definitely make a difference over time.
-
-
-
-
Originally, it was called the Fedora Directory Server, introduced in 2005, but it was later renamed to 389 Directory Server. It can interface with Microsoft’s Active Directory, and since it is LDAP based it is extremely fast and powerful, and can be interfaced with from other devices that support LDAP authentication. Even client authentication is possible (in Linux, configuring PAM to use it as an authentication service). It also offers a full featured console for easy remote administration.
-
Mozilla
-
Last week the Mozilla community had quite a few releases, and the MPL team, not wanting to be left out, is excited to announce the first Alpha draft of the next version of the Mozilla Public License.
-
-
SaaS
-
Recently Adobe released Puppet recipes that they are using to automate Hadoop/HBase deployments to the community. InfoQ spoke with Luke Kanies, founder of PuppetLabs, to learn more about what this means.
-
Oracle
-
Through the deal, Oracle acquired the Java software language that underpins its Fusion middleware, as well as the Solaris open source operating system and open source database technology MySQL. The deal also saw Oracle acquire Sun’s hardware business including servers, storage and desktop workstations.
-
CMS
-
The Guardian has released a free tool that allows owners of WordPress blogs to publish articles from its archive onto their sites.
The free plugin, called The Guardian News Feed, allows users to browse the archive of Guardian content and then either post articles directly to their blog or store them in the drafts folder for later publication.
-
Barebones CMS is an open source product. It is dual-licensed under both the MIT and LGPL licenses and is therefore free for both personal and commercial use. Financial donations to the project go toward future development.
-
-
Healthcare
-
Business
-
By contrast, Schott notes, open source may cost time (i.e. money) to set up and evaluate, but you save that on the back-end, on lower subscription costs and no initial license cost. You have to sell yourself, in other words, but you save big.
-
-
Semi-Open Source
-
Don’t mention “open core” to Larry Augustin. Trust me, not a good idea.
He gets a small twitch in his face and enough clouds build that, even though I’ve got a few inches, a lot more pounds, and some martial arts training on him, I felt it prudent to take half a step back when I stupidly lumped SugarCRM in with open core products in a barroom conversation with him last month.
-
Project Releases
-
Following five release candidates, IPFire Project Leader & developer Michael Tremer has announced the release of version 2.7 of the IPFire open source firewall. IPFire is a Linux distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive, or installed to a computer’s hard disk drive.
-
Foresight been using stable release of Gimp until 2.7.1 released. 2.7.0 was too unstable to update to.
Now users can easily use the “Single-Window mode” of gimp, it will make all windows in Gimp to be one. Looks more like photoshop.
-
The Yorba developers have released version 0.6.1 of their open source Shotwell photo manager for the GNOME desktop. According to the developers, the latest update to their free digital photo manager includes a number of bug fixes, language support improvements and several new features compared to the previous 0.5 release from mid-March.
-
-
Government
-
But this can be taken one step further. By applying the principles of shared services to the exchange of best practice and technical knowledge, web teams from across the country can benefit from each other’s innovation and experience. And this is where open-source software is critical, particularly for applications such as web content management.
The question for local authority leaders is whether the enthusiasm for efficiency savings will be enough to overcome traditional barriers to open-source uptake. These have been well documented and include shortage of vendor support, lack of control and worries over cost transparency. Potential users can also be put off by uncertainties about product road maps and, with so many parties involved, over where responsibility lies when things go wrong.
-
Jeremy Allison of Google and Terri Molini of Initmarketing, both presenting on behalf of Open Source for America (OSFA), joined us for the first Open Your World Forum. OSFA is organized to advocate for open source technology use in the US Federal government, and represents well over a thousand members, including tech industry leaders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academic research institutions.
-
Licensing
-
As readers of this blog will doubtless know, Richard Stallman’s great stroke of genius at the founding of the GNU project was to use copyright when crafting the GNU GPL licence but in such a way that it undermined the restrictive monopoly copyright usually imposes on users, and required people to share instead.
That so-called copyleft approach has allowed a vast and thriving ecosystem to arise, but one that depends critically on the validity of the GNU GPL. If the GPL were shown to be unenforceable, then its terms would be void, and free software would have some problems. For that reason, every time somebody is threatened with legal action for allegedly violating the GPL, lawyers’ hearts beat a little faster at the prospect of a definitive ruling on whether it is valid or not.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Google-owned video sharing service YouTube is creating a movie titled Life in a Day with director Kevin Macdonald and producer Ridley Scott, besides roping in hundreds of its online open-source contributors, reports said.
-
This got me thinking that this social largesse was not unlike the open source movement. When left to their own devices people will help for free for the sake of helping and the social web helps drive this desire.
-
Open Data
-
As these examples show, the license under which data is originally released can have significant consequences on its downstream use and commercialisation. The open source software community has know this for years, of course, which is why organisations like GNU have two different licenses – GPL, which keeps software open by tainting other software that includes GPL libraries, and LGPL, which allows libraries to be used in closed/proprietary code. There is a good argument that by combining data from different open sources in a particular way valuable results may be created, but it should also be recognised that work may be expended doing this and a financial return may need to be generated (so maybe companies shouldn’t have to open up their aggregated datasets?) Just how we balance commercial exploitation with ongoing openness and access to raw public data is yet to be seen.
(The academic research area – which also has it’s own open data movement (e.g. Panton Principles) – also suggests a different sort of tension arising from the “potential value” of a data set or aggregated data set. For example, research groups analysing data in one particular way may be loathe to release to others because they want to analyse it in another, value creating way at a later date.)
-
Open Access/Content
-
The survey attempted to gather information from a broad spectrum of research institutions in developing and transition countries in order to get a better understanding of the current state of the implementation of open content licenses. Open content licenses or some explicit statement attached to the article when it is published in an open access journal or deposited in an open access repository help to refer to a specific type of libre open access.
-
Open Hardware
-
“That’s one of the beauties of open source,” said Bre Pettis, one of the founders of MakerBot Industries, a company in Brooklyn, NY. What are Makerbots? Inventor Bre Pettis talks about how a Makerbot is like Ikea furniture, here are the reasons why it may be the next personal computer.
-
-
-
European Digital Rights has prepared a “frequently asked questions” document to explain the changes between the SWIFT agreement previously rejected by the European Parliament and the current text under discussion.
-
Science
-
Another study in 2007 showed that men who took two-hour walks in a forest over two days had a 50-percent spike in levels of natural killer cells, and a third study found an increase in white blood cells that lasted for a week in women exposed to phytoncides in forest air.
-
Doctors have made their views about homeopathy clear, but their position on whether placebos should be knowingly prescribed is distinctly vague
-
Business Models
-
The role of the disruptor is not to make life easy for the disrupted. Swisher and these execs seem to be confusing the role of certain folks in the legacy industry with the overall entertainment industry itself. As noted, the entertainment industry is thriving. More movies, music and books are being created. More money is being spent. It’s just that it’s going to different players. There’s no reason to “figure out a way to keep talent from being dragged into the future.” The opportunities and wide open path are there. The problem isn’t that tech leaders haven’t made it easy for them. They have. It’s that these guys are so myopically focused on the way they used to make money they don’t realize that the new opportunities are already there and have been embraced widely by others.
-
Longer hours, more pressure, decreasing quality and less enjoyable work. Old media is a dark, dark place for journalism – at least that’s the mood of many of the journalists who were interviewed for the annual Oriella digital journalism study.
There are some reasons to be cheerful, which include journalists not being quite as pessimistic as the previous year. Are things really that bad?
-
Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. Time.com didn’t go behind a paywall this week and there aren’t plans for that to happen. Technically, Time magazine didn’t put one up for its online content either—that is, you can’t pay to read the contents of current issues of Time (NYSE: TWX) online. What the Time Inc. flagship did was slip on the magazine equivalent of a condom, a barrier between online readers and the full content of the magazine.
-
Security/Aggression
-
Britain’s fight against terrorism has been a disaster, because its “flawed, neo-conservative” direction alienated Muslims and increased the chances of terrorist attacks, a former leading counter-terrorism officer has told the Guardian.
-
There’s a power struggle going on in the U.S. government right now.
It’s about who is in charge of cyber security, and how much control the government will exert over civilian networks. And by beating the drums of war, the military is coming out on top.
“The United States is fighting a cyberwar today, and we are losing,” said former NSA director — and current cyberwar contractor — Mike McConnell. “Cyber 9/11 has happened over the last ten years, but it happened slowly so we don’t see it,” said former National Cyber Security Division director Amit Yoran. Richard Clarke, whom Yoran replaced, wrote an entire book hyping the threat of cyberwar.
General Keith Alexander, the current commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, hypes it every chance he gets. This isn’t just rhetoric of a few over-eager government officials and headline writers; the entire national debate on cyberwar is plagued with exaggerations and hyperbole.
-
What’s far, far more serious is the suggestion that the government be allowed to set up a National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. This sounds good. The plan is to create an Internet-based identity ecosystem, “where individuals, organizations, services, and devices can trust each other because authoritative sources establish and authenticate their digital identities.”
-
Last month, we discussed a bill nicknamed “Katie’s Law” that would give states financial incentives to collect DNA samples from individuals arrested for certain crimes. At the moment, less than half of the states currently collect DNA samples from these arrestees. If Katie’s Law were enacted, the remainder of the states would likely expand the scope of their DNA collection practices, greatly increasing the number of samples collected.
-
Environment
-
As temperatures rise, smart-assed tweets about Al Gore from Republican senators appear to fall
Living in Berkeley, Calif., it can be difficult getting excited about the weather back East. Every blogger on the East coast in my RSS feed has been moaning and bitching about the record-breaking heat wave, but in Berkeley, I was wearing a sweater in the mid-afternoon and the thermometer hadn’t broken 60. And guess what, the exact same conditions prevailed during the great Snowpocalypse-ageddon earlier this year. So while Washington and New York convulse in cataclysms of sweltering heat and pounding blizzards, in the Bay Area we just hope the fog lifts, eventually.
-
The launch of environmental disclosure rules was hailed as a turning point for eco-protection in China’s business world. But two years on, they have all but been forgotten, says Huo Weiya.
When chinadialogue organised a talk last May to mark the first year since publication of China’s environmental transparency regulations, “Measures for the Disclosure of Environmental Information” (or “Measures” for short) Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), said the biggest problem had been “the almost total lack of action from business”.
China’s firms may be unwilling to reveal environmental data, but when it comes to green marketing, there is no shortage of enthusiasm. In public, top executives never doubt the importance of environmental protection, nor do they deny their social responsibilities.
-
Finance
-
If you want to see what’s wrong with Africa, take a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The size of Western Europe, with almost no paved roads, Congo is the sucking vortex where Africa’s heart should be. Independent Congo gave the world Mobutu Sese Seko, who for 32 years impoverished his people while traveling the world in a chartered Concorde. His death in 1997 ushered in a civil war that killed 5.4 million people and unleashed a hurricane of rape on tens of thousands more. Today AIDS and malaria are epidemics. Congo, then, is not a place you’d normally associate with a yuppie.
-
China tried Wednesday to allay concern about the political impact of its $2.5 trillion foreign reserves, saying they are not a “nuclear weapon” to control other nations and its vast holdings of U.S. Treasury debt “should not be politicized.”
-
Agricultural Bank of China’s $22 billion initial public offering is making headlines as potentially the world’s biggest. It is also underlining the cash squeeze Chinese banks are facing after a massive lending binge.
-
Financial shares pulled the stock market higher Wednesday after State Street Corp.’s second-quarter profit forecast topped analysts’ expectations.
-
Unemployment in rich countries may have peaked – but there are still 17 million more people out of work than at the start of the crisis, the OECD said Wednesday.
-
In one of the darkest tallies of the nation’s still-sputtering recession, experts say financial desperation has played a significant role in increased calls to suicide-prevention hot lines — and likely has led to increased suicide rates.
-
The European Union’s executive says Greece is “broadly on track” with budget cuts and economic reforms linked to euro110 billion ($138 billion) in bailout loans from EU nations and the International Monetary Fund.
-
In the study’s white paper, “When Executives Rake in Millions: Meanness in Organizations,” professors from Harvard, Rice and the University of Utah argue that rising income inequality between executives and ordinary workers results in “power asymmetries in the workplace such that top executives come to view lower level workers as dispensable objects not worthy of human dignity.”
-
Some Wall Street firms aren’t waiting until the Volcker rule kicks in to shake up the trading desks that wager the banks’ own money.
-
Goldman Sachs reported an increase in the number of signs of slowing U.S. economic growth and China. Specialists Goldman Sachs warned of worsening situation in the U.S. housing market. Regarding China, the experts reported that the intensity of the recovery of the Chinese economy is now the most important factor to which regulators should pay special attention.
-
Apparently there’s massive growth ahead for nappies, but we’re not sure if Goldman’s Ontex will target young children or European debt traders.
-
TPG Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s (GS) private equity business are close to buying Ontex NV, Europe’s biggest private-label nappy manufacturer, for more than EUR1.2 billion. The deal to purchase Ontex from Candover nearly collapsed when Goldman Sach’s original equity partner pulled out, but the late addition of TPG has kept the deal alive, and the belief is the deal could be completed as soon as this week.
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
-
Google Inc (GOOG.O), which runs the world’s largest search engine, is in a pickle as it could lose its licence to operate a China-based search page, while trying to hold onto its anti-censorship stance.
In a bid to appease Beijing and keep its China license, Google said this week it will stop automatically redirecting China users to its uncensored Hong Kong site.
-
Australians may not be censored online after all.
Under new leadership, the Oz government’s commitment to instituting what’s euphemistically called a net ‘filter’ is starting to look a little shaky.
Mandatory ISP filtering legislation will be “out by November”, Aarnet has the scheme’s frontman, Stephen Conroy, stating. And “Sooner rather than later.”
-
Labour overstepped the mark on civil liberty issues, leadership candidate Ed Miliband has admitted.
The shadow energy and climate change secretary made the comment in an interview with Liberal Conspiracy in which he came close to endorsing gay marriage and branded himself a feminst.
-
Army Specialist Bradley Manning, the intelligence analyst who leaked the “Collateral Murder” video of US pilots shooting down Iraqi civilians (including two Reuters photographers) in cold blood, is finally being charged. For revealing to the American people the truth about what’s going on in Iraq, Manning faces horrendous legal consequences – nearly sixty years in prison if convicted on all counts. One of the charges, incredibly, is espionage. He was a “spy,” according to the US government – for letting Americans in on the “secret” that we are committing war crimes in Iraq, and around the world.
-
Copyrights
-
The major digital issue, with the still to be resolved Google Book Settlement, is Orphan Works. These are works that are still in copyright but where the rights owner can’t be traced, or fully determined and many believe is a goldmine of works that can’t be legally digitised today. Different countries have different rules over length of copyright and the criteria under which they get impacted. Some claim the number of titles impacted is relatively small and that there is little value in them, other would suggest the opposite. Now a review involving responses from 22 cultural institutions and published by the European Commission claims, that not only books are affected but that there is a significant high percentage of orphan works among photographs and audiovisual collections and the numbers are high.
-
We’ve pointed out many times just how ridiculously complex various licensing collection agencies are in the music space, especially when multiple collection societies cover the same music. The whole system seems designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to actually play music legally. Take, for example, this situation in the UK, pointed out by reader mike allen, involving a hairdresser who had paid for a license from PRS For Music just to be allowed to turn on a radio in his shop… only to discover that he failed to pay the other UK collection society, PPL (home of the infamous CEO who insists that “for free” is a bogus concept). So even though this guy thought he was legit, he still ended up with a fine for £1,569.
CLUG Talk 29 September 2009 – Virtualbox (2009)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 3:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Desktop
-
According to the figures, 87% of computer using patients in Mental hospitals used linux as their main operating system. According to the mental health professionals, the mental collapse is caused by the overwhelming strain of installing and using Linux. This OS forces a person’s brain to short circuit. The deeper they go with the OS, the more they become catatonic. They first begin to exhibit signs of helplessness, suffer depression symptoms as the operating system pushes them to the limit, and every step of the way they find themselves unable to grasp the terminology used and this undermines their self esteem and importance as a person.
-
After wiping the hard drive and reinstalling Windows XP countless times, the computer refused to get to the Windows loading screen. So I decided to take the plunge and borrowed a buddy’s Mandriva Linux disc — and things actually worked.
-
Ballnux
-
LG announced an LG Optimus Series of mobile devices, including two Android 2.2 smartphones — the Optimus One and Optumus Chic — and promised an Android-based Optimus tablet. Meanwhile, a rumor about an Android 3.0 “Gingerbread” platform split-up has been squelched, and a photo of the Android-based “HTC Vision” emerged as the device’s manufacturer announced robust 2Q financials.
-
Applications
-
We have all read stories about people who have experimented living without spending any money whatsoever. By growing their own food, washing in the river, using a solar panel to provide electricity, and bartering for certain goods and services, these adventures have met with limited success. However, for us mere mortals the simple fact is that we need money. Money to buy food, to purchase clothes, to pay our bills, as well as indulging in our other infinite wants and desires.
-
-
VIPS is an image processing system designed with efficiency in mind. It is good with large images (images larger than the amount of RAM in your machine), and for working with colour. It can perform many image manipulation tasks much faster than other packages such as ImageMagick and the GIMP and includes some special features such as creating single “mosaic” images from multiple parts.
-
Qmmp is a simple, fast and versatile Winamp or XMMS like music player for Linux. It is written primarily with the help of Qt library. Qmmp supports almost all kinds of music formats out there and it is down to earth simple to use and configure.
-
Many Linux enthusiasts associate desktop Linux with their repetitive daily routine. Same old, same old.
Looking to mix things up a little, I thought it’d be fun to take a more entertaining look at what we can do with our Linux boxes. I’m listing ten noteworthy Linux applications that I find very fun to use.
-
It seems like I have a lot to talk about these days when it comes to digital media, and this article is no exception. As I discussed in a previous article, I feel that physical media (CD’s, Blu-Ray, DVD) is going away and in the future digital media will rule all. While this is a blessing since less shelf space would be taken up by stacks of media, it is also a curse since companies will likely push DRM. However, what if you wanted to adopt digital media on your own terms, using free software? Well, Handbrake is here to take care of digitizing your DVD collection.
-
The description of Rekonq is simple: the Konqueror browser using the WebKit engine. But it’s not quite that simple. Rekonq will be the new default browser for Kubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). This is a new project that will, hopefully, overcome some ofthe shortcomings of the current Konqueror browser. And in this article we will take a look at this new browser so all the Ghacks readers will be prepared when it lands on the new KDE desktop.
-
Proprietary
-
Instructionals
-
-
Two popular Linux distributions recently released new developmental versions on the road to their finals. One is early in its cycle and the other is about to cross the finish line.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Today, virtually all of the free software available can be found in packaged form in distributions like Debian and Ubuntu. Users of these distributions have access to a library of thousands of applications, ranging from trivial to highly sophisticated software systems. Developers can find a vast array of programming languages, tools and libraries for constructing new applications.
This is possible because we have a mature system for turning free software components into standardized modules (packages). Some software is more difficult to package and maintain, and I’m occasionally surprised to find something very useful which isn’t packaged yet, but in general, the software I want is packaged and ready before I realize I need it. Even the “long tail” of niche software is generally packaged very effectively.
-
In this video, Jerone Young, Partner Engineer at Canonical explains the status of software optimizations and development to make ARM Powered Laptops and Desktops a reality. He tells about some of the fascinating challenges where Canonical is working together with the their partners at the Linaro group of companies (ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST Ericsson, Texas Instruments…) to realize a full desktop experience on ARM Powered devices, including full and fast web browsing and full access to most of the most useful Ubuntu applications.
-
That Linux is a significant player in the enterprise comes as no surprise: Enterprise customers are a lot easier from which to generate revenue. It makes economic sense: if you have a business product to sell, it’s far easier to sell 1,000 products to one or two big companies than to do all the footwork to sell 2,000 products to 2,000 companies. Or even among 100 companies.
For some time, the big commercial Linux vendors have been happily wandering orchard of low-hanging enterprise fruit, almost completely eschewing markets such as consumers or small- to medium-sized businesses.
That single-minded focus may not serve them well against a relative newcomer to the enterprise Linux market: a newcomer that has quickly obtained a large percentage of the desktop Linux market and–more importantly–the hearts and minds of Linux developers.
-
-
Android
-
In April, we learned HTC expected to ship 4.5 million handsets worldwide which would be responsible for raking in a hefty $1.6 billion in pure revenue. Today, it’s been revealed that they surpassed their own estimation by posting an astounding $1.88 billion in revenue in the second quarter of the year (April, May, and June).
-
Imagine you are there on the day of Open Your World forum and listening to all the talks that day, seven hours so far with a few fifteen minute breaks. You are learning, things are clearer, but all the ways of applying the open source way outside of software may have you feeling a bit lost in a sea of new ideas.
-
LinkedIn
-
That, in its turn, has allowed all kinds of new businesses to be created that hitherto would not be economically viable. Alongside Google, there is Facebook and Twitter, both of whom have been vocal in their support of the software they depend on. But I hadn’t realised that LinkedIn was also part of this growing club until I read the following…
-
At LinkedIn, we love open source. We’re committed to contributing to Hadoop and Pig and giving back to the open source community through projects like Azkaban and Voldemort. We are determined to provide the open source community with the complete and painless data cycle that we enjoy – to enable even casual hadoop users to analyze data from their application at scale, to mine it for value and store it easily and reliably so that it can drive use and close the data loop. Look for new open source tools and projects from LinkedIn Analytics in the coming months that will help make this possible!
-
Mozilla
-
Firefox 4 Beta 1 is now ready to download and test! This first version gives an early look at what’s planned for Firefox 4. Stay tuned, because there is more to come and we plan to release new beta versions every two to three weeks. Your feedback is essential to help shape the product which is why we’re launching now to hear from you early in our development process.
-
Mozilla released the first beta for Firefox 4 on Tuesday, introducing a new interface design to a wider Windows audience, support for multiple technologies that aim to be essential to Web browsing in the future, and a plan for updates far more aggressive than those of the past.
-
Ads and banners are a staple of the Internet. We know this, and many just try to ignore them as they surf along. And while ad revenue helps out the providers of the site you are visiting, they don’t necessarily help you — often they will hinder you because waiting for those ads to load tends to slow down the entire page. AdBlock Plus is a great add-on to get rid of them. When you first install it you will get to choose a subscription list to use, which is a list of filters to block. The “EasyList (English)” list, if you do your browsing in English, is a very good list of filters that auto-updates and should cover the majority of your needs.
-
SaaS
-
There is no doubt that the cloud is relevant for some businesses and some applications, but this is a market that is still evolving. A suppler who can offer a hybrid can give the best advice and make sure you only pay for what you need without being locked in.
-
A survey finds “54% of those surveyed either currently use or plan to use cloud computing within the next 12 months for their applicatons”. (TFA comes from Google’s cache because the original site seems broken now…)
[...]
It’s a chicken and egg thing. Will GNU/Linux take major share because consumers lap it up in stores or will GNU/Linux take major share because businesses adopt it widely? IT shifts can spread either way from the consumer space to business or the other way round. It seems to me that many businesses running XP are clinging to XP because they can keep it working but are exhausted from the effort and want nothing more to do with M$’s high cost of maintenance.
-
Databases
-
I am happy to see that SkySQL, a new home for MySQL talents, is being formed.
-
With the impending release of version 9.0 of the open-source Postgres database, due in mid-August, the developers behind the project are hoping that the new features will attract more interest from enterprises.
-
CMS
-
I really only want two things for my website: (1) I want the software that runs my website to be high-quality and (2) I want my website’s content to be high-quality. It sounds easy and straight-forward but I assure you it isn’t.
I want the software that runs my website to be stable, efficient at handling my website’s traffic, and flexible. Good content management systems meet these requirements, but it took years to get where we are today, and we still have a really long way to go. Fortunately, all my websites run Drupal, so the first part of my requirements presents no problem. If you want, you can have a Drupal site too — it’s free! 
-
Government
-
This news is also great for the open source world: if I understand correctly, the French government is aiming to boost quality of service while reducing costs. And to succeed, I don’t see many other alternatives than relying on open source solutions! I cannot imagine a government – which is planning to cut costs – deciding to select expensive and inflexible systems offered by proprietary vendors.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
-
Free software may stem from a research mind-set, where shared results lead to a greater good. Free software has built this around various licenses such as GPL and BSD. The ideals behind free software have spread beyond software and can also be seen in other areas: documentation, game mods, illustrations, music – all types of content creation can be licensed in an open and free way.
-
Open Data
-
My blog post on Friday about the local spending information, the open data that isn’t, and the agreements that some councils seem to have struck with Spikes Cavell raised a flurry of tweets, emails, and a reassuringly fast response from the government’s Transparency Board.
It also, I’m told, generated a huge number of emails among the main protagonists – local and central government bureaucrats and private companies, who spent much of Friday and the weekend shoring up their position and planning counter attacks against those working for open data, and thus threatening the status quo.
-
The new Government will be working with local government not only to put online information on spending, tenders and contracts over £500, but also to publish job vacancies online, in an open and standardised format, for anyone to use, re-publish and ‘mash up’ without charge. There will be no public sector monopoly – the jobs data can be used by anyone, from commercial recruitment, newspapers to pressure groups.
-
The following guest post is from Hjalmar Gislason, an open data activist, member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on EU Open Data, and founder of structured data start-up, DataMarket.
-
Secretary of State for Communities & Local Government Eric Pickles followed this up with a letter to councils saying, “I don’t expect everyone to do it right first time, but I do expect everyone to do it.” Great. Raw Data Now, in the words of Tim-Berners Lee.
Now, however, with barely the ink dry, the reality is looking not just a bit messy, a bit of a first attempt (which would be fine and understandable given the timescale), but Not Open At All.
-
Open Hardware
-
For electronics hobbyists, the open source chipset BeagleBoard that packs as much punch as a smartphone processor might seem like the key to paradise.
Yet it is the relatively underpowered 8-bit microcontroller Arduino that has captured the attention of DIYers.
-
Science
-
Last week, the hilarity was that Rand Paul refused to say how old he thought the earth was. The new chew toys are creationist apologists for ignorance trying to justify it, while also refusing to state how old they think the earth is. The amusement lies in the way these guys puff themselves up into a state of moral superiority while claiming that scientists are dogmatists…because, you know, they know stuff.
-
The discovery in Gabon of more than 250 fossils in an excellent state of conservation has provided proof, for the first time, of the existence of multicellular organisms 2.1 billion years ago. This finding represents a major breakthrough: until now, the first complex life forms (made up of several cells) dated from around 600 million years ago.
-
Security/Aggression
-
141 arrested from 30,000 – or 0.47% of those stopped – is a disgraceful return. Just like Section 44, the overwhelming feeling we get is that thousands of people have had their journeys interrupted because the police needed to hit a target – we are little more than a statistic.
-
A pub boss has hit out after being cleared of an offence under the Licensing Act.
Police claimed Tony Griffiths, managing director of Wylam Leisure, failed to hand over CCTV footage to Northumbria Police after an incident at city centre bar The Glass Spider.
-
Workers’ Protests
-
Police in Bangladesh using bamboo staves, teargas and water cannon fought with textile workers demanding back pay and an immediate rise in monthly wages on the streets of Dhaka today.
-
Zhang Liwen found out that she was about to go on strike over a breakfast of steamed buns and congee rice porridge at her factory dormitory. Fifteen minutes later, she was taking part in industrial action for the first time in her life.
“I was worried, but everyone was excited and determined,” recalls the 21-year-old migrant worker at the Denso car parts plant in China’s southern province of Guangdong. “We started our shift at the normal time, but instead of working we just walked around and around the workshop for eight hours. The managers asked us to return to our jobs, but nobody did.”
-
Environment
-
Greenpeace has filed a Freedom of Information request with Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s office asking for records of his communications with climate change ‘skeptics’ and ‘conservative’ organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the Cato Institute. Greenpeace is seeking to expose some of the inner workings of the network of denialists who are attempting to discredit the work of certain climate scientists and stop EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, SolveClimate reports.
-
-
PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has found no errors that would undermine the main conclusions in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on possible future regional impacts of climate change. However, in some instances the foundations for the summary statements should have been made more transparent. The PBL believes that the IPCC should invest more in quality control in order to prevent mistakes and shortcomings, to the extent possible.
-
Barack Obama’s hopes of leveraging public anger at the Gulf oil spill into political support for his clean energy agenda fell flat today after he failed to rally a group of Democratic and Republican senators around broad energy and climate change law.
-
-
Climate scientists in the US say police inaction has left them defenceless in the face of a torrent of death threats and hate mail, leaving them fearing for their lives and one to contemplate arming himself with a handgun.
-
The White House Thursday enacted stronger rules to prevent the media from showing what’s happening with the oil spill in the Gulf Coast.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported that evening, “The Coast Guard today announced new rules keeping photographers and reporters and anyone else from coming within 65 feet of any response vessel or booms out on the water or on beaches — 65 feet.”
-
Earle, explorer in residence at National Geographic, believes it may have been the largest such congregation ever observed by scientists in the northern Gulf of Mexico. “It was an ocean full of whale sharks. I can’t even begin to count the fins,” she said. “We almost had them bumping up against the boat.”
-
Friends of the Earth said it was astonished that BP was not planning to completely change all aspects of its business. “This [the BP statement] is sticking two fingers up to those who care about climate change and believe we should invest in low carbon technologies,” said Mike Childs, head of climate change. “It is saying its ‘business as usual’ and the share price falls may continue also.”
BP faced intense criticism over the tar sands from Greenpeace and socially responsible investors including the Coop with 620,000 votes cast at the oil group’s annual general meeting to review these operations.
-
Here’s a consequence of climate change you probably haven’t thought of. Space buffs know that Earth orbit is littered with junk, including defunct satellites, spent rocket boosters, and other random debris–about 11,500 objects bigger than 4 inches across, according to NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office (it’s their graphic you’re looking at). It’s a worry: every one of these speeding bits of hardware could potentially damage, or even smash up a working satellite. The latter could create a lot more debris, potentially triggering something called the Kessler Syndrome, in which fragments of a smashed satellite go on to smash more satellites, creating fragments that go on to smash more…and so on.
What does this have to do with climate change? Maybe a lot.
-
It’s very important, incentives to keep the forest rather than cutting it. Right now there are laws all over the tropics that say once you cut your forest you own it. Logging is encouraged by the governments. We have to reverse that somehow. We need laws and compensation for preserving forests and biodiversity.
-
A revolutionary scheme backed by the World Bank to pay poor countries billions of dollars a year to stop felling trees is the best way to stop logging and save the planet from climate change, according to wealthy countries and conservationists, yet documents seen by the Observer show the plan is actually leading to corruption and possibly more logging.
-
Well this becomes more entertaining by the moment. Those who staked so much on the “Amazongate” story, only to see it turn round and bite them, are now digging a hole so deep that they will soon be able to witness a possible climate change scenario at first hand, as they emerge, shovels in hand, in the middle of the Great Victoria Desert.
-
Finance
-
Two-thirds of U.S. counties became economically healthier in May, thanks to more manufacturing jobs in the Midwest and fewer home foreclosures in the Sun Belt, according to The Associated Press’ monthly analysis of conditions around the country.
-
My starting point: a BBC report on Who owns the UK’s debt?
From there, I ended up finding loosely related data at:
National Statistics – UK Accounts
UK Debt Management Office Quarterly Review
Bank for International Settlements
-
This looks like just another attempt at creating positive PR. The moratorium is just until the financial reform laws are passed. So, if financial reform happens tomorrow, then the moratorium is lifted. However, this new report by Charlie G. is worth watching. He does make some very good comments and observations. Watch and post your comments.
-
Today, during the FCIC’s second day of hearings, Goldman CFO David Viniar was forced to provide additional data about the firm’s AIG CDS trades. Luckily the firm kept a record of all entry and exit points, and thus will be able to confirm just what the P&L of the associated trades is (and if not, we are happy to teach Goldman’s risk department how to use the Bloomberg CDSD function in conjunction with RMGR run scraping to build a real time CDS portfolio tracker)… Which is ironic, because when asked by Brooksley Born why the firm has not yet provided a break down of its derivative revenue Mr. Viniar by all accounts perjured himself. As Bloomberg reported: “We don’t have a separate derivatives business,” Viniar told the panel. “It’s integrated into the rest of our business.”
-
The recovery has hit a wall. In June, the U.S. economy lost jobs for the first time this year. Existing home sales plunged 30 percent in May. Time to pump money into the economy!
But wait. The national debt is projected to jump to 62 percent of the economy by the end of this year. That’s the highest level since just after World War II. Time to cut back!
-
With the financial reform bill likely to hit President Barack Obama’s desk in coming weeks, Wall Street’s top political players are warning Democrats to brace themselves for the next phase of the fight: the fundraising blowback.
-
Debt-hobbled Greece may see a slightly milder than expected recession this year and aims to issue bonds again on international markets in 2011, the finance minister said Monday.
-
Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club chain is teaming up with a lender to offer loans of up to $25,000 to its small business members.
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
When the anger of a prominent young thinktanker causes one of the world’s largest web-hosting companies to shut down a site that monitors lobbying and transparency, it is time to start asking questions about online free speech and censorship.
Last week, as Hugh Muir reported in the Guardian diary, the website SpinProfiles was taken down by the domain name registrar, 1 & 1 Internet, following a complaint from Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, son of journalist Christopher.
SpinProfiles, run by sister organisation Spinwatch, aims to stitch together publicly available information to provide a detailed picture of who’s who in the shadowy world of lobbying. It features close to ten thousand profiles of think tanks, lobbying organisations and those associated with them.
-
-
A quick analysis of the present charges against Bradley Manning. I’m not a lawyer, but I can read statutes. Mentions here of WikiLeaks and the identification of the video as “Collateral Murder” are my own interpolations.
-
The American Civil Liberties Union plans to sue the U.S. government Wednesday on behalf of 10 citizens or legal permanent residents who have been placed on a no-fly list and, in some cases, stranded abroad.
In the suit, the ACLU accuses the government of violating the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Oh those jokesters over at the AP — the fun never ends! Last night, we wrote a post noting that Woot was (humorously) calling out the AP for not following their own ridiculous rules when quoting from content. By Woot’s calculation, using the AP tool, the AP owes them $17.50 (but Woot was nice enough to offer them the chance to buy some headphones off of Woot instead). The AP didn’t like that story — neither our’s or Woot’s.
This morning, Paul Colford, the Director of Media Relations for the AP sent emails to both me and Woot CEO Matt Rutledge.
-
Copyrights
-
Loreena McKennitt published an op-ed supporting copyright reform in the Winnipeg Free Press over the weekend that focuses on the harm of infringement and the need for C-32. The piece raises at least a couple of issues. First, there is the claim that “even popcorn sellers are struggling to stay alive” in light the current state of Canadian copyright law. This claim arises from some declining interest in big music tours, which is taken as evidence that performances are not a viable alternative for many musicians. What copyright reform has to do with concert venues, performers or popcorn sellers is anyone’s guess – promoters of struggling music tours say it has everything to do with a tough economy, competition for the entertainment dollar, and high ticket prices rather than music downloads or IP enforcement. Copyright reform won’t change the financial dynamics of the touring industry, which will presumably still leave those same popcorn vendors struggling to stay alive.
-
French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the man who shepherded the French version of ACTA’s Three Strikes element (HADOPI) into law on behalf of Hollywood and the Big 4 Record labels, has been accused of receiving 150,000 euros (C$199,081) in illegal party financing.
-
NDP MP Charlie Angus has issued a lengthy letter to Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement that challenges them on the digital lock provisions in Bill C-32. In a release on the letter, Angus states “the digital lock provisions will subject Canadians to arbitrary limitations on their legal rights of access. The government is trying to create the impression that this unbalanced approach to digital locks is necessary in order to bring Canada into compliance with WIPO and the Berne Convention. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
-
ItsHidden is a VPN service that was set up with torrent users in mind, allowing them to hide their identities from ‘third parties’ who choose to snoop on their activities. The service launched less than a year ago, but with the increased demand for anonymous BitTorrent it has already amassed 300,000 members.
CLUG Talk – 13 May 2008 – The Conary Package Manager (2008)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.06.10
Posted in News Roundup at 9:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
This press release is to announce that for the month of July 2010 ERA Computers & Consulting (ERACC) is following the idiomatic phrase, “Put your money where your mouth is!” when it comes to our Linux PC sales. What do we mean? Read on.
For every PC purchased from us in July 2010 with any Linux distribution preinstalled ERACC will donate 5% of the sale to the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) project of your choice. As with most such offers there are caveats. These are:
* The PC must be ordered and paid for within the month of July 2010.
* The PC must be configured with at least the minimal configuration to have a working PC (case, power supply, motherboard, cpu, ram, hard drive, video adapter and operating system). You can choose to use your existing monitor and input devices.
-
When it comes to GNU/Linux, even though I was a late adopter amongst geeks, I am still an early adopter compared to many. I found another article describing the experiences of a non-geek with GNU/Linux. The important points I get from stories like these:
* non-geeks can use GNU/Linux well
* they do appreciate some of the many advantages of GNU/Linux
* they do appreciate some help from family, friends or whoever sold the PC
* if we all helped our friends migrate to GNU/Linux, the share of GNU/Linux would be pretty decent
-
Desktop
-
The first step was booting Ubuntu 10.04 from an USB hard disk to check the Linux support. Using Ubuntu, everything worked out of the box, including stuff like HDMI audio support or output switching. An exception may be the DVD drive, which only works if you set the SATA mode to compatibility. Non-DVD media also works in AHCI mode, but only if you start with a disc inserted in the drive. Playing DVDs requires setting a region code using setregion(8) [otherwise they do not work at all] and SATA compatibility mode [otherwise they only work partially].
-
LXDE is desktop environtment like KDE and Gnome. But it’s lighter than KDE and Gnome. But it’s still need middle spec computer like pentium 3/4 and with Minimum Ram 128-256 MB Ram. LXDE is simple, but for newbie user like me it’s still little hard. LXDE support compiz fusion for eyecandy your desktop. My First LXDE Linux distribution was PCLinuxOS 2009.1 KDE. I install PCLinuxOS 2009.1 then install task-lxde, then remove kde 3.5.10.
-
Server
-
The new virtual server service uses the KVM – Kernel-based Virtual Machine software from The Linux Foundation, based on the Canonical Ubuntu Server.
-
Audiocasts
-
Kernel Space
-
Like most community-run events, the second SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) featured the standard set of positive talks on Linux and open source. It also featured a somewhat more controversial talk about failures to get some features merged into the Linux kernel by Ryan “icculus” Gordon.
-
So go out and test -rc4. It fixes a number of regressions, a couple of them harking back to from before 2.6.34. Networking, cfq, i915 and radeo. And filesystem writeback performance issues, etc. It’s all good.
-
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of several stable kernels: 2.6.27.48, 2.6.31.14, 2.6.32.16, 2.6.33.6, and 2.6.34.1.
-
Applications
-
A flashcard stores information on a set of cards, with the information being typically portrayed as words and numbers. The purpose of flashcards is to enable individuals to store verbal and visual information, often as a learning drill by way of spaced repetition. The Leitner system is a popular method of studying with flashcards using spaced repetition.
-
-
But now Kupfer 201 has been released featuring loads of new plugins but also some important bugfixes. An important bug fixed in Kupfer 201 is the one I was telling you about above, so the Twitter, PicasaWeb and Gmail plugins finally work – just make sure you give it some time to authentificate after entering your credentials. Unfortunately this bug is only partially fixed.
-
Text editors on Linux. Few things conjure up more images and memories of heated flame wars. Sure, you have the classic KDE vs. GNOME, and today’s Firefox vs. Chrome, but those battles pale in comparison to the mother of them all: the Emacs vs. vi wars. Who won? We all did.
-
If you are a movie junkie like me, chances are you have quite a number of movies on your computer that would be nice watching on your DVD player or home theater system, mobile phone or portable multimedia device.
-
Me TV is a digital television viewer for GNOME. Me TV was developed for the modern digital lounge room with a PC for a media centre that is capable of normal PC tasks (web surfing, word processing and watching TV). It is not designed to be a full-blown media centre, such as MythTV, but will integrate well with an existing GNOME desktop.
-
Proprietary
-
In other changes, Bing finally makes it onto Opera’s default search options list, and Opera has tweaked the “O” logo menu that debuted in Opera 10.5 by adding the word “menu” to clarify what it’s for. The Windows changelog, Mac changelog and Linux changelog are available at the Opera website.
-
The Wine development release 1.2-rc6 is now available.
What’s new in this release (see below for details):
– Many translation updates.
– A lot of bug fixes.
-
-
Instructionals
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
In this tutorial our aim will be much lower. All we are going to look at is how to use Javascript with the help of Jetpack to create a Firefox “hello world” addon. We are not going to be generating a complete UI but adding to the existing Firefox UI.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
-
After a successful first day of talks and the Akademy party, hundreds of KDE contributors returned to the University of Tampere for the second day of the conference. Already, the slides and videos are starting to be uploaded on the Akademy website, for those of you who couldn’t make it to Akademy or are here but couldn’t attend two presentations at once.
-
This year’s general assembly of KDE e.V., the non-profit organisation that represents the KDE Project in legal and financial matters, is also taking place today during the event. The annual Akademy KDE world summit is taking place in Tampere, Finland. It began on July 3rd and runs until the 10th of July. All of the latest files are available to download from the Conference Program page.
-
KDE SC and Plasma:why?
We still hear again and again that KDE is to heavy and too bloated to run on any modest hardware. Of course technically the situation can be improved and it will, for instance the platform profiles that are being cooked right now will be able to provide a law fat (as in Kevin words you will find information about that in the upcoming future on the planet.
n the other hand, complaints are often not completely true, we need better communication about what the advantages of a KDE based solution are, and where the problems are: we pushes the edges of what all the layers of our platform can do, Being Qt, X, or graphics drivers, due to our hard beating the quality of the whole stack is really increasing (and this funningly enough is benefiting non KDE users as well).
-
Top Kubuntu developer Aurélien Gâteau (agateau) has been honoured with an Akademy Award for 2010. The Akademy Awards are given out each year at the annual KDE Akademy conference; the jury being formed of previous prize-winners.
Aurélien won the award for his work on Gwenview, the image viewing application which ships with Kubuntu. He was also commended at Akademy for his work in getting the KDE Status Notifier specifications adopted by the Ubuntu project, where they are known under the name Application Indicators along with necessary DBusMenu additions.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
-
The Slackware-based Absolute Linux 13.1.2 was release yesterday. Absolute Linux features the IceWM window manager which is very fast and lightweight. This version of Absolute has opted for the popular Chrome web browser where previous versions included Firefox as the default. Numerous other features, enhancements, and security fixes can be viewed on the Absolute news page.
-
I will point out though that almost all of the distributions have done a good job of lowering memory usage with system updates, which is very commendable. Also it’s important to note that even though RAM and disk space increase with updates so might performance so it’s all about which metric you hold as most important.
-
New Releases
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
· Announced Distro: Linux Mint 9 KDE RC
· Announced Distro: Dreamlinux 4.0 Beta 6
· Announced Distro: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 Beta 2
· Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 1.5.7
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 2
· Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 RC2
· Announced Distro: Absolute Linux 13.1.2
-
PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
Mandriva has confirmed that the next major release of its Linux distribution, originally expected to arrive on the 3rd of June, has once again been delayed. In early June, the French Linux distributor surprisingly issued a second release candidate (RC2) and postponed the release date for the distribution indefinitely. According to a post on the Cooker mailing list by Mandriva Director of Engineering Anne Nicholas, the delay was caused by “internal organisation and some hardware problems”.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the second Alpha release of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system, due for release in October 10th, 2010. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.10 development.
-
As the 10.10 development cycle rolls along various user-created themes are submitted for potential inclusion in the ‘Community Themes’ package.
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
EeeBuntu Linux has been one of the most popular independent Linux distributions for netbooks for the last few years. And when I say independent, as the name makes clear Eeebuntu started out as a modified version of Ubuntu Linux — which is maintained by a nice big institution called Canonical. But Eeebuntu releases typically pack a number of customizations that make Ubuntu run better on low power netbooks with small displays. The latest release wasn’t even based on Ubuntu anymore, instead using Debian Linux as its base (Ubuntu is also Debian-based).
-
-
Open-source software has also been maturing for the last decade, and now has passed Microsoft in keeping up with usage trends, according to Michael Kress, senior director at Canonical Ltd., a provider of support, engineering services and hardware and software certification for the Linux-variant Ubuntu.
“We are taking the best of all the open source software available today and bringing it together into a single platform. Linux continues to evolve, coming out with a new version every six months, unlike Microsoft which is much slower to respond,” said Kress. “We think that Linux is the one—with Android, Amigo and Ubuntu leading the smart devices revolution.”
-
Android
-
One of the core features of Linux has always been the ability to switch to a different distribution in the eternal pursuit of something shiny, new, and different. Linux on handsets should be no different. Someday, with any luck at all, we’ll be able to change between systems like Android and MeeGo on a single handset. For now, the options are a bit more limited, but there are still toys to play with. Your editor took the CyanogenMod 5.0.8 announcement as the perfect opportunity to avoid real work for while. In short: CyanogenMod is a classic demonstration of what can happen when we have control over our gadgets.
-
Google plans to push its Android mobile software in India and China and is exploring ways for developers to make more money from applications, stepping up competition with Apple and Nokia.
-
-
That’s right. The HTC HD2 can now run Android as well as Ubuntu with the official XDA Developers blog confirming that early builds of the OSes are working fine on HD2s.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
Yes, we are getting to it. It is in the world of open source that most of the operating systems, that are tailor-made for netbooks, have emerged. While Ubuntu had always been in the lead, with the Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) Netbook Remix, Intel is also inching forward with its much celebrated Moblin (recently out of beta and now launched as v2.1). Th en there is one of the most interesting distributions we have come across—JoliCloud, developed by Tariq Krim ( founder of Netvibes), and based upon Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
-
Tablets
-
The table computer trend continues with the announcement of Cisco’s Cius Android-powered tablet. The device is targeted at business users providing them access to a wide range of Cisco mobile communication and collaboration tools that include HD video streaming, multi-party conferencing, email, messaging, web browsing, and creating, editing and sharing content or files stored locally and in the cloud.
-
There are so many off-the-shelf web solutions out there, many website owners are asking: Why should I bother building it myself? When thinking about their eCommerce platform, a site owner faces three key choices: the Software as a Service hosted solution, download and install an open source or purchased solution, or just build it yourself.
-
Events
-
Ubuntu has released the schedule of this year’s Ubuntu Developer Week. The event will take place from July 12, 2010 to July 16 2010 and will cover several aspects of Ubuntu development, from crash-courses in getting started with working on Ubuntu to more advanced topics.
-
-
SaaS
-
Cloud computing represents the rise of the Internet of services. As digital technologies are increasingly penetrating every nook and cranny of the economy and society in general, we are seeing an explosion in the volume and variety of cloud-based services flowing through the Internet. Consequently, the cloud computing model requires a highly disciplined approach to the management, delivery and consumption of services for individuals and companies.
-
Oracle
-
With entering the timeline for the new feature release OOo 3.3, a new master workspace (MWS) was created: OOO330. In HG (Mercurial) the OOO330 branch can be found here: hg.services.openoffice.org/hg/OOO330. It was branched off from DEV300 m84 and will help to stabilize the new milestones towards 3.3. The first milestone is scheduled soon.
-
Business
-
Project Releases
-
Licensing
-
From Version 0.8.18 (the next release) on Denemo is going to be GPL v3 (or later) instead of GPL v2.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Using these tools, any number of geographically distributed users can collaborate simultaneously on scientific projects, using the same virtual machine, the same analytic tool, the same data.
-
Open Data
-
Also, dear NMBS/SNCB, please provide us with an API. Clearly, I’m not the only one interested in open data and APIs. This would make small projects like this quite a bit easier and would greatly increase the end quality. Data scraping just doesn’t fit web2.0.
-
-
Web
-
The Overbite Project is an open-source effort to produce browser plugins and client applications that enable support for Gopher, an early network protocol that preceded HTML and the contemporary World Wide Web. The lead developer behind the project is retrocomputing enthusiast Cameron Kaiser, one of the few remaining champions of gopherspace. His latest undertaking is a mobile Gopher client for Google’s Android operating system.
-
There was a moment, sometime near the end of the last century, when it rather suddenly became clear that Apache’s web server was going to cement its position as the dominant webserver — what the Web ran on. This meant that a loose nonprofit affiliation of moonlighting, largely unpaid volunteers had just massacred the giants of Silicon Valley — Sun, Netscape, Microsoft — on their own turf, on their central battleground, a space on which those corporate giants (I knew from reading their annual reports) had focussed their full attention and hundreds of millions of dollars.
-
Global web server usage: The Apache server leads by some 55 percent share serving 112,663,533 web sites.
-
A new donation pool has been created to raise funds for development of the Ripple project, with an initial contribution of $500.00. The final amount will be donated to the Ripple project to support the development of a standalone Ripple server to provide open decentralized payment through the Ripplepay site as well as other services using Ripple. All content created will be released under an open license.
-
At least $9m (£6m) was corruptly paid during the “endgame” in Iraq and Indonesia, simultaneous court hearings in London and Washington were told in March. According to court documents, Octel bribed at every turn. Brown envelopes with £1,000 “pocket-money” were slipped to various officials visiting London. Octel even agreed to pay $13,000, purportedly for a top Iraq oil ministry official to honeymoon in Thailand in 2006.
-
Figures released by the National Population and Family Planning Commission have estimated China’s population will reach 1.39 billion by the end of 2015, with those aged 60 or over topping 200 million people. Over the next five years, China’s urban population will also surpass its rural counterpart, with city dwellers expected to exceed 700 million.
-
On the other hand, there are no real technical flaws or an absurd selection of workloads that the Intel crew, under captain Victor W. Lee, could be accused of. The fourteen benchmarks they used are classics, mostly taken from the scientific sector: SGEMM, FFT, Lattice Boltzmann (LBM), Ray Casting (RC), Search & Sort, Collision Detection (GJK), Constraint Solver (Solv) and so on.
-
Environment
-
In criticising Dr Richard North, below, for not having checked [ eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/and-now-for-amazongate.html] whether there was a reference to the claim that up to “40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” in the WWF Report, I was unaware of, and therefore omitted to mention, that Dr North had himself later spotted that there was a reference to the 40% figure in the WWF report. His initial mistake had been corrected on another page [ eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/corruption-of-science.html ] (before the Sunday Times article had been written) and he had added a cross-link to the original page, which I failed to note. Apologies.
-
River currents could be harnessed at four bridges across the capital
-
Reintroduction of species that Charles Darwin saw raises conservation hopes for other wildlife
-
Environmental groups are nevertheless saying the Wabash River discovery creates a new threat to Lake Erie’s fishing and tourism industry and that safeguards must be put in place to keep the carp out of Ohio.
-
BP
-
Methane at 100,000 times normal levels have been creating oxygen-depleted areas devoid of life near BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill, according to two independent scientists
-
Are environmentalists putting the Louisiana fishing industry in peril by overstating the potential disastrous consequences of the Deepwater Horizon spill? That might seem like a crazy question to ask on the same day that the Associated Press reports that the BP disaster may have just passed the 1979 Ixtoc gusher as the worst oil spill in Gulf history. But that’s the message conveyed in a Financial Times article this morning, claiming that while the fish will surely come back to the Gulf, the fishing industry may be permanently damaged.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Farmers markets are hot right now — so hot that big supermarkets want in on the act. But attempts by local Safeway stores to host so–called farmers markets have created an uproar.
-
On May 13, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer appointed a task force to address flagging tourism amid the backlash created by Arizona’s strict new law on immigration enforcement. The task force recommended that Arizona undertake a public relations campaign to reassure potential visitors that Arizona is “a safe and welcoming destination” and promote the idea that boycotts against the state hurt “the most vulnerable employees.”
-
Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
-
media law promulgated on 25 June 2010 will further restrict media freedom in Fiji and perpetuate violations of people’s right to freedom of expression, warns Amnesty International.
-
-
Developing countries should be able to adopt a ‘polluter pays’ principle for ecological disasters – just like the US has with BP
-
Iran’s ministry of culture has released a catalog of government-approved hair styles, in an effort to eliminate the menace of “decadent Western cuts.” According to the Islamic Republic News Agency, forbidden ‘dos include ponytails, mullets and spiky hair. But styles resembling those of Elvis Presley, Simon Cowell, or eighties-era floppy fringes are totally fine. Also, hair gel in moderation is acceptable. With the exception of goatees, facial hair is frowned upon.
-
Lisan Jutras was on the streets of Toronto this weekend taking in the events and watching the many demonstrations. In the end, she was one of the citizens held at Queen Street West and Spadina Avenue on Sunday night, only to be released just before 10 p.m. Lisan works at The Globe and Mail and although she wasn’t accredited for the summits or on assignment, globeandmail.com was using some of her tweets in our live coverage.
-
-
Finance
-
And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world – most recently at the weekend’s deeply discouraging G20 meeting – governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.
In 2008 and 2009 it seemed as if we might have learned from history. Unlike their predecessors, who raised interest rates in the face of financial crisis, the current leaders of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank slashed rates and moved to support credit markets. Unlike past governments that tried to balance budgets in the face of a plunging economy, today’s governments allowed deficits to rise. And better policies helped the world avoid complete collapse: the recession brought on by the financial crisis arguably ended last summer.
-
It was billed by Barack Obama as the toughest crackdown on Wall Street since the great depression. But top US banks could be given until 2022 to comply with the so-called Volcker rule, which is supposed to restrict financial institutions’ risker trading activities.
-
Were A.I.G.’s credit-default swaps — which were supposed to be insuring billions of dollars worth of AAA subprime securities — fatally flawed? Did the collateralized debt obligations — those infamous C.D.O.’s — that Goldman was creating and A.I.G. was insuring offer anything of value to the larger society, or were they simply a means by which Wall Street made giant, useless, bets? Given that the taxpayers have put out $185 billion to prop up A.I.G., these are certainly questions worth asking.
-
Banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest derivatives dealer, have provided estimates to investors. The top five U.S. commercial banks, including Goldman Sachs, generated an estimated $28 billion in revenue from privately negotiated derivatives in 2009, according to company reports collected by the Federal Reserve and people familiar with banks’ income sources.
-
A federal commission questioned whether the investment bank deliberately discounted prices to push markets lower because it had bet on a decline in the value of subprime mortgage-backed debt.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
A report that attempts to force the hand of the European Parliament on IPR enforcement – including a possible weakening of the Telecoms Package outcome – has been temporarily stalled.
The Gallo report dealing with copyright and IPR enforcement has been stalled following a vote today in the European Parliament in Strasbourg. The Parliament voted 140 to 135 in favour of postponing it until September, which will allow more time for scrutiny of the text.
-
Copyrights
-
Despite a pending lawsuit against 5,000 Hurt Locker downloaders and the promises from its makers to sue even more, the film is still being downloaded by thousands of people every day. Interestingly, the makers do not seem to be sending takedown notices to torrent sites, most likely because that would ruin their business plan.
In recent years copyright holders have been trying to find creative ways to turn piracy into profit, with some success. One way to make money from file-sharers is to collect the IP-addresses of the people sharing a particular file, get a court to subpoena ISPs to reveal the identity of the sharers, and then ask the alleged sharers for a settlement of several hundred dollars to avoid a $150,000 fine.
-
Men At Work have been ordered to pay 5 per cent of royalties for plagiarising part of their 1980s hit Down Under.
In February the Federal Court ruled the iconic Aussie band plagiarised part of the song, which was penned in 1979 but only achieved worldwide success after a flute riff was introduced to the track two years later.
-
Gotta love those guys at Woot. They just sold to Amazon for $110 million, but that’s not stopping them from calling anyone out as they see fit. In this case, we particularly love it because they’re calling out the AP — and they’re doing so right on their highly trafficked homepage.
-
Pint-sized popstar Prince will be giving his latest album away for free in a UK newspaper this week. Declaring the Internet “completely over”, iTunes nor any other online store will get access to his music. “Computers and digital gadgets are no good,” he declared in an interview, just as millions of file-sharers line up to use their hopeless number crunchers to suck his latest offering down the pipes.
-
ACTA
-
A round of negotiations on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) just finished last week in Luzern, Switzerland. While the negotiators expressed their will not to release any further draft of the text, the European Parliament has now a unique opportunity to oppose both the process and the content of ACTA. There is just a few days left to collect 110 signatures from Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to Written Declaration 12. Will you spend 5 minutes to help defeat ACTA?
-
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement rolls on. Negotiators have just wrapped up another round of talks this week in Lucerne, Switzerland, and more than two years into the ACTA process, have actually started to meet with civil society groups to talk about the actual ACTA draft text. (Many governments have previously asked for comments on ACTA, but before releasing the full text.)
CLUG Talk – 29 Jul 2008 – Open Source advocacy, awareness and community building in Europe, with emphasis on women in IT (2008)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
07.05.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
On Friday I was honored to sit in front of a group from the Techrepublic community and talk open source. The driving force of the debate was open source vs. proprietary software. The ever-present subtext of that debate is Linux vs. Windows. The audience was pleasantly surprised when the debate never turned sour. Why is that? So many asked. The answer, although one-sided, is simple.
-
Every now and then, I receive emails from people who are asking me to explain the benefits or advantages of using Linux. I just answered them with a link or two to articles that could give a good explanation regarding the subject matter. But since I realized that it would be better if my response were based on my own experience, I finally decided to write a simple list that I could use to answer those who want to know the benefits of using Linux.
-
Linux is not an OS, it is actually a kernel which is the middleware between your Apps and Hardware! The Better the Kernel, the better the system responds! and better error handling!
-
I created this video to give a few extra reasons why Linux doesn’t have viruses besides the common ones that get thrown around, like “linux is not popular enough” or “linux distributions each use a different kernel that is recompiled with every release”.
-
For me, the Linux desktop is all about being efficient. Yes, I do enjoy the eye candy as well. But having an incredibly efficient desktop just makes for much faster, more reliable work. And much to the surprise of most users, Linux should be hailed as the king of desktop efficiency. There are many ways to have an efficient desktop in Linux, but I have narrowed the list down to these five tips. Even if you employ only a couple of these techniques, your desktop experience will become far more efficient.
-
I am writing this out of my close association with GNU/Linux for quite sometime.I have had been using it everywhere to do my day to day work.
First I have started or introduced to the UNIX system way back in 1996 during my Diploma classes.One day I was sitting in front of a blank and black terminal in the classroom ;so my instructor came to me and said ” why are you sitting idle”…I replied back with a pretty confusing face that ” I am not able to understand what to do with this(the black and blank terminal)..with small cursor blinking on it”. My teacher/instructor smile at me(rightfully) and said ” Bhaskar it is challenging you to play with it and waiting for your intervention”..that spark me!! From that day onward I fall in love with that fellow called “UNIX”.Yes,it was SCO UNIX ..those days it was used in almost all the academia.Oh yes before that incident happen I was given a book or two about UNIX operating system and I went through them ..but little infer.
[...]
Basically corporate houses buy or run something which is quite stable and proven track record and should have paid support.The reason behind this is that business data are absolutely crucial to the business and which will fetch revenue with that.
I had have the exposure of handling production box running RHEL(Enterprise version of REDHAT), SLES(SUSE Enterprise version),CentOS(derived from RHEL source) and to my surprise! Gentoo for one of my job assignment.And in the very same place Debian for hosting server.
-
Desktop
-
I won’t talk here about the awful user interfaces (supplied by the carriers and you must use them) which make your eyes hurt, brain explode and usability die (compared with them NetworkManager is a breeze). My problem here is with making them both work together on the same computer, which on Linux is natural: you add the connections in NM (with a wizard) and just select whatever you want from a menu.
-
Ballnux
-
Yet another electronics manufacturer has announced plans to launch a tablet computer powered by Google’s Android operating system: LG. According to The Wall Street Journal, the device will launch in the fourth quarter of this year, though no other details were immediately available.
-
Applications
-
This is the first unstable release of the Compiz 0.9 series. This release represents a complete rewrite of the 0.8 series from C to C++, brings a whole new developer API, splits rendering into plugins, switches the buildsystem from automake to cmake and brings minor functionality improvements. This release represents the first developer and tester preview of what will eventually make the 0.10.x stable series. Please note that as such, it is not yet ready for general use as there are a number of known issues, regressions and incomplete functionality.
-
If you’re running lucid, you should have the latest version 3.6 of Firefox from Mozilla.
Here are some hidden features disabled by default, similar to Compiz expo and shift-switcher.
-
Ailurus is cross-Linux-distribution GPL software, which aims at making Linux easier to use for beginners. Rather than a Ubuntu Tweak alternative, Ailurus is the kind of app you can use along Ubuntu Tweak. Ailurus is available for Ubuntu, Fedora and Mint while Ubuntu Tweak is a dedicated Ubuntu only application.
-
Linux users are already spoilt for choice when it comes to free online cloud storage. UbuntuOne and Dropbox both offer 2GB for nothing whilst newly announced project SparkleShare aims to better both of these.
-
Awesome way to control applications, installed operating system, sound recognition text typing without using mouse or keyboard. working on multi platforms, user interface KDE, Qt.
Also including Simon add ons download center support many applications Media centers, Web browser, text editor, Multimedia applications, and utilities application such as Gnome Screenshot tool.
-
-
Back in May we reported on the Lightspark Flash Player that was developed by a free software developer using Adobe’s released SWF/Flash documentation and has hit a point where its ActionScript 3.0 support is nearly complete, has a JIT engine that leverages LLVM, supports OpenGL rendering, and boasts various other features as an open-source Flash Player alternative to Adobe’s binary plug-in. Today a new release candidate of Lightspark 0.4.2 is available.
-
Instructionals
-
I gave a presentation this week at Hack in the Box in Amsterdam about hacking wireless presenters (slides here. My demo showed how I could abuse vulnerabilities in the product to get a Metasploit payload on to the PC of someone using a wireless presenter, by just sending keystrokes to it. This article describes how I did it and why you may be at risk if you use any wireless input device (such as a wireless mouse).
-
Ubuntu does not ship with in-built support for various media formats such s .mp3, .mp4, flash and Java files. Ubuntu restricted extras will add codec and file to support them and enable you to enjoy your music collection without any hassle.
-
-
-
-
At the request of our readers and because today is Independence Day in the United States, we have decided to revive our old desktop customization tutorial for the Ubuntu OS and other major Linux distributions powered by the GNOME desktop environment.
-
-
-
-
-
Games
-
A new game has been brought to our attention called LettersFall which is a cross between between Scabble(R) and Tetris(R). This game offers the following items to the Linux community.
-
A new version of MegaGlest will be released sometime today! Once it is head over here to download it! A short changelog can be found here.
MegaGlest is a relatively recent fork of the quite well known FOSS Game Glest, which ceased development some time back. Now that Megaglest has taken up the development, things have advanced quite quickly (in contrast to the other promising Glest fork GAE) and Glest now finally has the long deserved cross platform multiplayer and a proper master-server with a games lobby! Furthermore Megaglest includes all the factions known from the Megapack before, bumping the total number up to 5.
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
-
After many years of successful meetings in great locations, Tampere has a lot to live up to as this year’s Akademy host city. On the basis of the first day at least, it has not disappointed. After the opening keynote by Valtteri Halla a series of other talks followed and we have had plenty of discussions in the open spaces between the conference rooms. Read on for an impression of the first day of the biggest and coolest Akademy ever!
-
-
In Tampere, Finland, the pre-Akademy party kicked off the conference last night. Hundreds of KDE contributors were there, meeting old and new friends and enjoying the party. Rowdy Brazilians and Dutch cheered on their teams as their countries battled each other in the World Cup on the big screen. Others spent time reliving their childhood on the classic arcade machine.
-
Not only does he help Akademy organizing teams year after year on the march towards success (and this year’s Akademy has been a roaring success this far!), but he’s worked to get videos up for the keynote presentations in a timely fashion. His poor little netbook churned all night long to encode four videos: the opening, the first keynote, my keynote and the Telepathy presentation. More videos are coming as they get encoded and you can find them on the conference program page, starting right now with the four aforementioned videos.
-
As 6 people are female who completed the questionnaire there must be 18 male people who completed it as well (one was missing ;-). Of the 25 people 11 were already in Switzerland and for 14 it was the first time. The average age was 29 years. The group distribution shows 8 people from amarok, 10 from the kdeedu team, 1 from the games team and the remaining 5 ticked off “multimedia general (other)”. Now to the rating questions where I always indicate the average rating (scale: 0 = not good, 1= could be better, 2 = good and 3 = very good).
1. Accommodation: Bedrooms: 2.32
2. Accommodation: Group and meeting rooms: 2.417
3. Location (house) in general: 2.6
4. Location (area, geographically): 2.8
5. Food (Breakfast, lunch & dinner): 2.917
6. Transport/travelling to the meeting: 2.375
7. Infrastructure: Power: 2.28
8. Infrastructure: Network (cable): 2.318
9. Infrastructure: Network (wireless): 1.76
10. Information about the meeting beforehand: 2.36
11. Organization staff friendliness: 2.96
12. Organization staff competence: 3
-
-
GNOME Desktop
-
The GNOME foundation provide Amazon referral links for your browser. That is, every time you search for a product using the referral link and end up buying something GNOME get a paid a referral fee based on the amount you spend. The best bit is that it costs you absolutely nothing extra but helps keep GNOME in servers, ballpoint pens and developers.
-
-
On this, July 4, 2010, the day the United States celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I thought I would take a moment to celebrate that same day with a toast to those Linux distributions that shirk all non-free software. This means EVERYTHING on these distributions is protected under, at least, the GPL.
There aren’t tons of these distributions and some of them are threatened, daily, to disappear from lack of support. So it is my honor to hopefully introduce the Ghacks audience to these distributions.
-
Switching to Linux has many reasons – Security, Stability, Performance, and of course, Cost. Be whatever the reasons, performance becomes the eventual priority for desktop as the viruses, malwares and breakdowns don’t come in the linux-users way.
How to get the most out of a Linux desktop? Well, there are so many tricks, tweaks and hacks such as using a just right, well customized kernel, removing unnecessary services, apps, packages, paralleling boot process, using a lightweight window manager and desktop environment….and a dozen others. A long time user often dabbles to do these things of which the first, and perhaps the most important is hacking the kernel fitting impeccably to his/her hardware and working requirements.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
All Magazine Issues
* Welcome From The Chief Editor
1. KDE 4: The KDE Netbook Interface
2. World Population Day: July 11, 2010
3. Reclaim Your Background: The Widget Dashboard
4. Xfce 4.6.2: Xfce Settings Manager, Part 2
5. Screenshot Showcase
6. Double Take
7. Mark’s Gimp Tip
8. ms_meme’s Nook: Deep In The Heart Of Linux
9. OpenOffice: Writer
10. Xfce 4.6.2: Customize Your Xfce Panels
11. How Teenagers View PCLinuxOS
12. Xfce 4.6.2: Panel Plug-ins
13. Alternate OS: Haiku, Part 1
14. Game Zone: Osmos
15. Create A Basic RPM Package For PCLinuxOS
16. Create A PCLinuxOS Packaging Environment In Phoenix
17. ms_meme’s Nook: That Ol’ Linux Call
18. Forum Foibles: ByteS From The Bunkhouse
19. Command Line Interface Intro: Part 10
20. Getting Started With folding@home
21. Computer Languages A to Z: Netlogo
22. Configuring and Using Epson Stylus NX415
23. KarlM: The Loss Of A Friend, Supporter
-
I’m not a huge fan of third-party branding. One of my (minor, when put into perspective) gripes about PCLinuxOS is that they sorta go nuts with it. One of the apps that’s the target of their branding is Firefox. If you are equally bugged by this, debranding the default profile used as the template for new profiles isn’t that hard.
-
Red Hat Family
-
That’s certainly borne out by the recent top500 supercomputer listings, where 91 per cent of the world’s fastest supercomputers run some form of GNU/Linux (Windows runs on 1%), the fact that the open source Apache Web server well over half of the Web – as it has for the last 10 years – and the near-parity in Europe of Firefox’s market share with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
-
Fedora
-
Our new Fedora Project Leader has been named: Jared Smith. The announcement stated that he is gone but not when he’d return: Right now, Jared has limited email access until next week. He’ll be around next week and a lot more when he returns from his LATAM travels (more on them below).
Jared will be making a blog post when he returns and it will be listed on Fedora Planet. He will be traveling together with Paul Frields to the Red Hat Raleigh, NC office for orientation, and they will be meeting up with Max Spevack while there. Jared will also be introduced to various folks around the Red Hat Raleigh office.
-
This build brings us more inline with the work being done for the XO-1.5, as well it includes several changes incorporated from the Paraguay builds.
-
Debian Family
-
Here is a short update on my my Debian Lenny-)Squeeze upgrade testing. Here is a summary of the difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I’m not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when aptitude try because of missing conflicts (#584861 and #585716).
-
-
Spring Design Alex
Although powered by Google’s Android OS, I’m still including this dual-screen e-book reader in this list. After all, the original Android was based on Linux. So what do I mean by “dual-screen”? Well, some e-book reader manufacturers like Spring Design have recognized the advantages of a brightly-colored touch screen and the superior reading qualities of a gray-scale e-ink screen.
Hence, Spring Design decided to put together these two screens into one device. The 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD screen is for browsing, while the 6-inch e-ink display is for reading.
-
Android
-
- Android stands out as the platform most popular among mobile developers. Survey results suggest nearly 60 percent of all mobile developers recently developed on Android, assuming an equal number of respondents with experience across each of eight major platforms. Second in terms of developer mindshare is iOS (iPhone), outranking Symbian and Java ME, which were in pole position in 2008.
-
Just before a small community of distraught developers gear up to sue HTC in an effort to get that kernel source they’re required to release for the HTC EVO 4G, they’ve done it. It’s been a month since the device has launched, and – compared to how long it took HTC to offer up the goods for the HTC Hero – I’d say that EVO owners and developers are lucky to be getting the source so soon.
-
Most of the news and photographs on the pages, and the layout of those pages themselves, were prepared for publication without using the usual newsroom software for writing, editing, toning, cropping and paginating.
Instead, all this work was done using free software available to anyone on the Internet. And yes, it was hard work. The proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relative fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.
[...]
But between us, producing today’s paper wasn’t easy for the newsroom. News Editor Paul Tackett has been working days and nights, on top of his usual job, to set up most of the day’s pages in a layout program called Scribus.
-
The Saratogian tried an experiment for Independence Day – run free software for a day, to produce the July 4 2010 issue of their (web and print) newspaper. They called it the Ben Franklin Edition *. The free software experiment is part of the Ben Franklin Project of the Journal Register Company, which owns The Saratogian.
-
In the open source republic, the hacker is your representative. He codes on your behalf, and should his idea find favor, the project leader approves the idea, and the idea becomes part of the code base. Should your ideas and the hacker’s ideas differ, you are free to contact someone else on the dev team. If nothing is done to your liking, your are free to secede from the union and fork the code. In the real world, information is free for the taking, and where law forbids the exchange of ideas we see rather inventive means of circumvention come to fruition. In most free nations around the world, people were supposed to be at the forefront of government. In the USA, politicians were once called public servants. The open source community is much the same. While many do make money off of open source software, the motivation to create open source software and to open source already existing projects was initially the want to help others, make a better product, and lower development costs by allowing anyone to contribute. Only one of those three motivations has anything to do with monetary cost.
-
Open source software developer Exist Global foresees a 100 percent revenue growth this year to $4 million on back of a vibrant US market and local companies’ willingness to pay for high-valued software.
The company believes this year is the start of sustained profitable operations from a slowdown in the US market after it was adversely affected by the global financial crisis.
“As far as Exist is concerned, I think the worst is behind us. We’re receiving a lot of requests, indicating that the second half is going to be healthy. We’re beginning to focus on hiring again,” said Winston Damarillo, Exist Global founder, in an interview at a company celebration for its first half performance.
-
Today’s a legal holiday in the US, but we like to post an entry in the blog every weekday to keep you from getting bored. I can’t promise to relieve the boredom today, because today’s entry is about me.
-
Events
-
The organisation behind Australia’s flagship annual Linux conference has requested formal proposals from parties interested in hosting the event in their city in 2012.
-
Mozilla
-
Over the last several weeks of the beta, members of the mobile team have written blog posts about most of the new features and improvements you’ll find in the browser. Here, with quick summaries, are links to all of them – enjoy!
-
With the popularity of Android phones, it seems strange that it was not released there first. There is a massive Android user base already, who are apparently hungry for a well known browser that is familiar to the one they use on the desktop. This is shown in the success Opera Mobile has enjoyed and one look at the comments in the marketplace suggest that it is widely favored over the default browser that is packaged with the users phone. Speaking as an HTC Desire user, I certainly prefer Opera to the native browser and even though I cannot set it as default, I would much rather use that than the default offering.
-
Oracle
-
GSteamer and its libraries are installed by default on many distributions, like Ubuntu and its derivatives, and is contained in the repository of many others. It has become very stable in recent versions and supports most multimedia codecs. If already installed, users need not take any further action to enjoy the benefits of GStreamer in OpenOffice.org, one of which is much better performance. Distribution developers can disable this support by choice if desired and cause OpenOffice.org to revert to using Java.
-
Education
-
We are going to have to face a very uncomfortable fact in the coming weeks and months. This new Coalition Government is out of love with ICT in schools.
I am certainly not the only pundit who has noticed the resounding silence surrounding matters ICT amongst the noisy plethora of other announcements concerning educational reform.
All we know so far is that virtually the very first act of this government was to abolish Becta, an act they had uniquely signalled months in advance of coming to power and carried out with a ferocity resembling a pogrom.
Something about it, taken in combination with stories from ex-Becta employees who (subsequently) complained about apparatchik style cronyism within the organisation makes me think that ICT has been linked deeply with the previous administration..and not in a good way.
-
Business
-
Is Mark suggesting that OSI intended to facilitate less freedom for the code and end users than the GPL offers, that this was an OSI goal, that “software freedom for the software user” isn’t and never was an OSI goal? Does freedom mean only the right to fork the code? If so, I’d like OSI to say so clearly and on the record. If so, it might provide insight into why OSI is struggling and provide indisputable proof that they were foundationally wrong. I hope they’ll weigh in on this debate and plant their flag, because if that is what OSI stands for, maybe it’s time to let them float out into outer space without the community, thus making it clear there really is no connection between the real FOSS community and OSI any more.
If that is not what OSI stands for, I’d like to hear them say so. I hope it isn’t. But the community wants to know where they stand, and for what.
For myself, I believe that OSI, in order to be relevant, needs to reinvent itself and restructure to represent the entire community with its license list and its definition. Enough with the old divisions and the debates. The community needs to face the world more unitedly now, as a broad spectrum, including those who had the foresight to realize that VC guys and proprietary types would be coming along someday and would try to close down the freedom of the code and the freedoms of those using it just to make a buck.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Since, as Larry Lessig famously pointed out, “code is law” (and vice versa), it’s natural to try to apply open source methodologies in the legal world. Indeed, a site called Openlaw existed ten years ago:
Openlaw is an experiment in crafting legal argument in an open forum. With your assistance, we will develop arguments, draft pleadings, and edit briefs in public, online. Non-lawyers and lawyers alike are invited to join the process by adding thoughts to the “brainstorm” outlines, drafting and commenting on drafts in progress, and suggesting reference sources.
Building on the model of open source software, we are working from the hypothesis that an open development process best harnesses the distributed resources of the Internet community. By using the Internet, we hope to enable the public interest to speak as loudly as the interests of corporations. Openlaw is therefore a large project built through the coordinated effort of many small (and not so small) contributions.
Despite this long pedigree, open source law never really took off – until now.
-
Open Access/Content
-
The good news is that she is starting from a solid base: Wikipedia runs on GNU/Linux, Apache, Squid and MySQL. The bad news is that – unbelievably – Wikipedia is essentially run out of Florida (plus that troublesome caching site in Amsterdam). For such a globalised project – just think of all the languages supported – to be running like this is, frankly, bonkers – and makes outages like today’s almost inevitable.
-
Science
-
Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet, researchers from Washington State University (WSU) have created a compact, never-before-seen material capable of storing vast amounts of energy. Described by one of the researchers as “the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy,” the material holds potential for creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high temperature superconductors.
-
The picture is the first full-sky image from Europe’s Planck telescope which was sent into space last year to survey the “oldest light” in the cosmos.
-
The paper, “Increased Food and Ecosystem Security via Perennial Grains,” points out that perennials have longer growing seasons and longer, denser roots than annuals. Those longer roots, which can reach down 10 to 12 feet, allow the crops to reach and hold more water and nutrients, reduce erosion, and condition the soil. Because the plants grow for a greater length of time, they also sequester more carbon from the atmosphere.
-
In a study published in Nature Methods, they describe how they were able to capture fruit fly development on film, and were the first to clearly record how a zebrafish’s eyes and midbrain are formed. The improved technique will also help to shed light on processes and organisms, which have so far been under-studied because they could not be followed under a microscope.
-
Security/Aggression
-
Hidden cameras in areas of Birmingham with large Muslim populations will be removed and any counter terrorism involvement stopped, police say.
-
A SCOTTISH company has created a new personal CCTV system which could offer safety protection for frontline public service workers.
-
The USSR, as Russia once was, used to epitomise the police state.
After the G20 civil rights violations, Canada could almost make the claim.
But in fact Britain is the country which has undeniably become the poster child for Big Brother among allegedly democratic countries.
-
The cyber-attacks on Estonia in 2007 and on Georgia in 2008 (the latter strangely happened to coincide with the advance of Russian troops across the Caucasus) are widely assumed to have been directed by the Kremlin, but they could be traced only to Russian cyber-criminals. Many of the computers used in the attack belonged to innocent Americans whose PCs had been hijacked. Companies suspect China of organising mini-raids to ransack Western know-how: but it could just have easily been Western criminals, computer-hackers showing off or disillusioned former employees. One reason why Western governments have until recently been reticent about cyber-espionage is surely because they are dab hands at it, too.
-
The truth is, we could have left whenever we wanted but the goal was to make some sense of the contradictory policies in place regarding photography at the Metrorail stations.
But instead of getting answers, we were told we would never be allowed on the train again. For the rest of our lives. We were told we would be arrested for trespassing If we dared set foot on any Metrorail property for as long as we live.
-
Environment
-
Besides the oil already spilling into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of up to 60,000 barrels daily, a group of British scientists says one can expect to see elevated levels of arsenic as well.
The research, published in the journal Water Research, showed that oil prevents naturally-occurring arsenic from being filtered out of the water by the sediment on the ocean floor. Oil coats the individual sediment particles and blocks the arsenic making contact with the minerals that would ordinarily bind to it.
-
Copyrights
-
In less than two years the RIAA has sent copyright infringement notices to 1.8 million Internet subscribers and 269,609 to colleges and universities. Despite this staggering average of more than a million infringement notices every year from the recording industry alone, the effect on file-sharing levels seems unnoticeable.
-
Today the Pirate Party can announce the launch of our new community blog, PirateShip.org.uk.
The Pirate Ship is what is known as a “blog aggregator”, which takes posts from the blogs of party members and presents them all together in one website, allowing you to keep up to date on the latest political issues and debates without ever having to leave the page.
-
GateHouse sued a company that sells reprints of articles — including articles from the Register Star — on fancy plaques to the people who are featured in those articles. Since GateHouse has its own reprint business, it views the defendant’s work as a competitive threat.
-
During the last few weeks many file-sharing sites have been taken down by threats, legal action and police raids. From the mighty Pirate Bay to lesser known torrent sites across Europe and streaming giants around the world, the theme isn’t capitulation after a setback, but getting back online as quickly as possible.
-
The following guest post is from Séverine Dusollier, who is a Professor in Law at the University of Namur and a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on the Public Domain. She recently completed a Scoping Study on Copyright and Related Rights and the Public Domain commissioned as part of the WIPO Development Agenda (particularly its recommendations 16 and 20). We asked her to write about her findings…
-
There’s a new meme in town these days: “rights of the artists”. The copyright industries have worked out that cries for more copyright and more money don’t go down too well when they come from fat-cat monopolists sitting in their plush offices, and so have now redefined their fight in terms of struggling artists (who rarely get to see much benefit from constantly extended copyright).
Here’s a nice example courtesy of the Copyright Alliance – an organisation that very much pushes that line:
Songwriter, Jason Robert Brown, recently posted on his blog a story about his experience dealing with copyright infringement. Knowing for a long time that many websites exist for the sole purpose of “trading” sheet music, Jason decided to log on himself and politely ask many of the users to stop “trading” his work. While many quickly wrote back apologizing and then removing his work, one girl in particular gave Jason a hard time.
-
ACTA
-
The 9th round of ACTA talks concluded last week in Lucerne, Switzerland. I briefly noted the official statement last week, but a subsequent news report makes it clear that the most important development to come out of the meeting is the breakdown of a consensus on transparency. Following the New Zealand meeting in April, there was consensus achieved on the need to release a draft version of the text. It is now clear that the overwhelming majority of countries favoured continuing this approach by releasing updated versions at the conclusion of subsequent meetings. That did not happen after the Lucerne meeting, however, with both the Swiss and European Commission delegations indicating that they favoured releasing the text but that one delegation did not. It is a safe bet that the U.S. is once again the key holdout on the transparency issue.
-
CLUG Talk – 12 August 2008 – The Process Model of the Transputer (2008)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA