• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Has Linux dropped off the face of the Earth?

  “Has Linux dropped off the face of the Earth?” The answer is obviously no. Linux is still around, stronger than ever, but the desktop OS does seem to be disappearing. Of course this is true of Windows and Mac OS, at least from the average user’s perspective. Desktop Linux is strong with those who use it; those who have been using it, but the buzz seems to be gone.

Server

• Penguin Computing Selects Dot Hill Storage for High-Performance Computing Solutions

• Spaniards prototype ARM-GPU hybrid supercomputer

  The Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain has been an enthusiastic supporter of using IBM’s Power970MP blade servers as a foundation for its “MareNostrum” massively parallel Linux cluster, which fills 44 server racks and delivers 94.1 teraflops of number-crunching punch.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation Announces Four New Members from Around the Globe

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that four companies are joining the organization: DENSO Corporation, Integrated Computer Solutions (ICS), ProFUSION Embedded Systems and Savoir-Faire Linux.

  These companies are joining The Linux Foundation to advance the Linux operating system for next-generation electronics, such as connected automobiles, phones and televisions, as well as for industrial automation and the development of mobile and web applications.

• Evolution of the Linux kernel source code tarball size

  Here is a graph showing the evolution of the size of the different linux.tar.bz2 source code packages. It starts with version 1.0 and finishes with the 3.1. We see that the evolution is mostly exponential, we could try to predict that linux-3.19.tar.bz2 should be around 100MB.

• Kernel Log: Coming in 3.2 (Part 1) – Networking

  The TCP stack is now faster at adapting the data transmission rate to the available line capacity. The drivers for Wi-Fi components by Atheros and Broadcom have matured considerably; other drivers will support more LAN and Wi-Fi hardware in 3.2 than they did before.

• AMD Linux KVM Virtualization Benchmarks

  In recent weeks there have been a lot of AMD Linux benchmarks of the latest-generation Bulldozer processor, namely the eight-core FX-8150. The latest unique look at the first-generation Bulldozer CPU under Linux is the KVM virtualization performance.

  Over on OpenBenchmarking.org are the AMD Bulldozer Virtualization Benchmarks that provide a look at the performance overhead of using the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine on this platform. Ubuntu 11.10 with the Linux 3.0 kernel was used on both the host and guest with stock settings. From OpenBenchmarking.org you can compare the Bulldozer KVM results against other Intel and AMD CPUs, etc. A wide variety of open-source Linux benchmarks were run from the Phoronix Test Suite.

• Linux 3.2-rc2 Kernel Doesn’t Bring Too Much Churn

  Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.2-rc2 kernel this morning. Considering the long development cycle of the Linux 3.2 kernel, this second development release is relatively tame.

  “For being an -rc2 release of a pretty large merge-window, it seems to be quite reasonably sized. In fact, despite this having been the largest linux-next in a release in our linux-next history (I think), rc2 has the exact same number of commits since rc1 as we had during the 3.1 release,” says Linus Torvalds in the kernel mailing list announcement.

• Linux Kernel Vulnerability Affects Ubuntu 11.10 OMAP4

• Linux 3.2-rc2

Applications

• Open Source Display Colorimeter: Is Your Monitor Showing Its True Colors?

  Look at the two birds. Do you wonder why the picture you took and edited on GIMP doesn’t look like the real bird? The reason is simple — your display is not showing you the ‘true’ colors. The solution is simple — use a colorimeter to calibrate your screen for accurate color matching.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Unix and Linux: a bit of history

  • How To Password-Protect Directories With mod_auth_mysql On Apache2 (Debian Squeeze)

  • Testing for Permissions

  • Installing Software With Aptitude

  • Live upgrade Fedora 15 to Fedora 16 using yum

  • Fedora 16 GPT disk partitioning guide

  • Extending Vim with Scripting

  • MySQL migrate to MariaDB

  • How to use whiptail to write interactive shell scripts

  • Get LibreOffice Thumbnails In Nautilus With OOO Thumbnailer

  • Remote Desktop in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

  • Automatic Indentation Detection in gedit

  • Autohide Top Bar Extension Finally Available For GNOME Shell 3.2 (Bonus: Hamster And Overlay Icons Extensions)

  • How-To Setup Android Build Environment On Arch Linux 64Bit.

• Games

  • Gaming on Ubuntu 11.10 – Still a long way to go?

    Cahilig.net has listed a comprehensive 100 “best free and high quality” games that run on Linux, but will all of them be gratifying if you’re running Ubuntu 11.10?

  • Sonic the Hedgehog went OpenSource?

    Turns out that there is an Open source version of Sonic the Hedgehog and its available on Linux.. (and Windows) I’m really now sure how this is available, if Sega Opened the code? However it’s here and it plays quite well…

  • New Comments By Ryan Gordon On Linux Gaming, Drivers

    Gordon is known for making interesting comments, going back to an interview I did with him over six years ago. Earlier this year Ryan made some controversial remarks about open-source GPU drivers not being ready (for mass consumption) and it’s putting Linux desktops into dangerous positions since distributions are relying upon them. He’s also made comments concerning open-source use of S3TC texture compression and is known for recommending the NVIDIA binary Linux driver as the only reliable Linux driver for serious users. Gordon continued with more Linux driver comments this summer.

  • Humble Voxatron Bundle Stops Short Of A Million

    The latest Humble Indie Bundle, which started as just the Voxatron game and was since expanded to include other titles, has now ended. This latest DRM-free pay-what-you-want offering of indie games has this time failed to pull in more than one million dollars. There’s also information on a new game bundle site as well as the Overgrowth Linux port.

  • Smokin’ Guns – The Game

  • Gaming In Linux : The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim

  • There’s A Patent Issue With Open-Source Doom 3

    There’s some good and bad news concerning the imminent release of the Doom 3 source-code. The bad news is that the lawyers for Bethesda / id Software have voiced concerns regarding some of the Doom 3 source-code due to a patent issue. The good news is that John Carmack himself is now writing some new code for this open-source drop of the popular game built on the id Tech 4 engine.

  • Latest Release of ‘Unknown Horizons’ Brings New Buildings, Ships, Combat System and More

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE vs. Trinity: Is One Really Better?

    The KDE 4 release series is nearly four years old. Yet many users still maintain that the KDE 3 series delivers a faster, more efficient, and more customizable desktop. However, their claims are rarely detailed, so the recent release of a new version of the Trinity Desktop Environment, the KDE 3 fork, seems a suitable time for an examination of the claim.

    The last time I compared the two KDE versions, KDE 4 was still working out some of its rough spots, such as using Akonadi to manage personal information in a database. Similarly, although based on what was then eight year old technology, Trinity was still fine-tuning, adding such features as the ability to run KDE 4 applications.

    Since then, however, both desktops have matured and added features. So how do they compare now in terms of speed, feature, and stability? It’s time for a point-by-point look.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Federico Mena-Quintero talks about the Document-Centric Desktop

    GNOME founder also issues some criticism about the current state of the desktop project

    Federico Mena-Quintero is one of the longest standing contributors to the free desktop, having started GNOME together with Miguel de Icaza back in 1997. He is still a very active GNOME developer, nowadays being employed by Novell / SUSE to work on the desktop. During this years Desktop Summit Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to conduct the following interview with the Mexican. In this Mena-Quintero talks about his concept of the “document-centric-desktop” and the importance of having a journal directly in the GNOME Shell, but also goes on to add some criticism about the current way decisions are made in the GNOME world.

  • Learning from GNOME
    

    Federico says (emphasis mine): “The latest thing is that now things have to go through the design team first, and I don’t think that is a good thing; there should not be a central body of control that decides how things are done, because that simply doesn’t scale. And it also doesn’t teach people in how to do design properly. I really would like to move to a model where, instead of having a central body of people who can veto things in or out, we can have a shared understanding of what constitutes good design and implementation.”

  • Get Gnome 2 Like Classic Menu In Ubuntu Unity

    The latest Ubuntu comes with flashy Unity, which offers different way of accessing apps and data. However, if you are used to the old style drop-down menu, you can still get that in Ubuntu — without having to ditch Unity for Gnome 3 or Gnome 2.

Distributions

• Puppy 5.3 “Slacko” – Slackware With Added Woof

  On 17/10 a new version, or edition if you prefer, of Puppy Linux was released, this time based on Slackware, and it is appropriately named Puppy “Slacko”, because we all know that Slackware users are lazy, right?

  I have not used Puppy before, in part because I felt no need considering the many distributions out there, and in part because some things like its original Ubuntu roots did not appeal to me, but a Puppy based on my favorite Slackware needs to be checked out.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2011 PowerPack just arrived!

    Right on time, Mandriva released its 2011 PowerPack version. With the announcement, they ratify that Mandriva will be now releasing one version per year, not two versions, as they had been doing.

    What does Mandriva PowerPack version offer? Well, the distro promises all drivers, the smart desktop technology, the Fluendo DVD player, and three months of free Web support, among other features.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Stock Hits New 52-Week High (RHT)

    Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) hit a new 52-week high Tuesday as it is currently trading at $52.37, above its previous 52-week high of $52 with 1.2 million shares traded as of 12:36 p.m. ET. Average volume has been 2.8 million shares over the past 30 days.

  • Red Hat Adds App Lifecycle Tools to PaaS Preview

    Red Hat has outfitted its OpenShift hosted application platform with a set of application development lifecycle tools to simplify deployment on the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), the company announced Tuesday.

  • Red Hat Expands OpenShift PaaS for Cloud Development

  • Red Hat’s OpenShift Adds Full Java Lifecycle Offering

    Red Hat’s OpenShift platform as a service offering has been in public beta for a while now. It offers a fairly simple way for people to jumpstart “cloud” development efforts by abstracting out all the messy business of setting up application and database servers. Instead, you simply publish your source code to OpenShift, and their platform does the rest. Supported languages are those used heavily by nimble, agile startup types: PHP, Python, Ruby. Interestingly, OpenShift also supports Java. That’s not a language that many people associate with cloud solutions. Today, Red Hat is announcing that they’re improving their support of Java on OpenShift with support for “full Java lifecycle for developers”.

  • RHEL 6.2 Will Support AMD’s Bulldozer Opterons

  • CentOS 6 Linux, A First Look

    I’ve been running CentOS 5.x for a number of years, mostly on servers, and have been extremely happy with it. In fact, I’ve upgraded servers along the way, up to 5.6 and have also been amazed at the seamless upgrade process from version to version. For those that don’t know, CentOS is the free derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The source is compiled and released as its own distribution that is so close to Red Hat Enterprise that packages can even be interchanged between the two. I have to tip my hat at the developers that release CentOS, they do a ton of work and the documentation on the CentOS Wiki site is excellent.

    This past weekend I finally got a look at CentOS 6, which every CentOS user has been anxiously waiting for since Red Hat announced RHEL 6 a while back. I’m a little late to the game, but unfortunately time has prohibited from checking it out sooner.

  • SGI(R) UV Achieves Largest Certified Configuration for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

    This certification highlights the benefits of the newest generation of Intel(R) processors and SGI’s high performance computing technology for customers with data-intensive workloads requiring outstanding performance in a high-density form factor with excellent power efficiency. Targeting the high-end supercomputing, large-scale database and data analytic environments, the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SGI(R) UV 1000 paves the way for customers in the government, intelligence, and scientific communities to deliver more meaningful scientific and technical results. As we enter the next generation of computing, moving from petaflops to exaflops, Red Hat and SGI are enabling some of the industry’s most mission-critical and large-scale computing applications.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Hardware Summit 2011 December 8th, Taipei

        This year’s Ubuntu Hardware Summit (UHS) will take place on December 8th at the Grand Victoria Hotel in Taipei. You can register your place at www.ubuntu.com.uhs

      • Ask Mark, Wednesday, 23 November, 1500UTC

      • Introducing MyUnity: Ubuntu’s Unity Configurator

        MyUnity is a small system utility for Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) that can handle the customization of the Unity Launcher and Panel.

      • ‘MyUnity’ Is a Small, Simple Unity Tweaking Tool

      • Ubuntu 11.10 is the new Mac OS X ?

        Now this is not a critic point of view type post. I really like ubuntu project and really enjoying ubuntu 11.10

      • Awoken 2.3 Brings New Themes, Better Support for Unity, GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.10

      • HealthCheck Ubuntu – The search for unity

        Ubuntu has over 20 million users around the world and is by far the most popular Linux distribution on the planet, but for the first time since the release of Warty Warthog in October 2004, an Ubuntu release is not being greeted with universal acclaim and there are mutterings of discord among the Ubuntu community.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint chief not carried away by success

          Given the rave reviews that Linux Mint has been getting recently, it would be perfectly understandable if the man driving the distribution was a little swollen-headed by this time.

          But Clint Lefebvre appears to have both his feet planted very firmly on the ground as he guides the team that produces what is now predicted to soon overtake Ubuntu as the most widely used GNU/Linux distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• Final PCB artwork

  As promised, here are the Gerbers (a visualisation of the printed circuit board or PCB) for the finalised version of the Raspberry Pi. I get several messages every day asking what it can possibly be that we are still working on: I hope you will understand on looking at this why the routing, which has to be quite spectacularly complicated to minimise expensive PCB features and to keep things tiny, took as long as it did! That snarl in the middle is the signal escape for the BCM2835, the chip at the heart of the Raspi. The elves have been working overtime.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Sony Ericsson details its Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update

      The firm spoke earlier of its plans to upgrade its handsets to the ‘next Android platform’ and has now confirmed that its entire range will get the latest version. The entire 2011 Xperia line will get ICS but Sony Ericsson has given no time frame for the rollout.

    • More than half of smartphones are Android

      Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza said, “Android benefited from more mass-market offerings, a weaker competitive environment, and the lack of exciting new products on alternative operating systems.”

    • Android snaps up 52% of mobile phone market

      RIM should start worrying though, as it lost over 4 per cent of its share and is now down to just 11 per cent, the reason that is cited is that the company has fallen out of favour with the US market.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Lenovo will launch an Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet this year

    CHINESE COMPUTER MAKER Lenovo could release a tablet running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) before the end of the year.

    The firm already has a handful of Android tablets and now could be the first to launch one with ICS. The 10.1in device will not only have the latest version of Android but also Nvidia’s recently announced Tegra 3 processor, according to Engadget.

  • Lenovo To Release 10.1-Inch Android Tablet

  • Amazon Releases Source Code Of Kindle Fire Tablet

  • Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is ‘really nice’ — but can it withstand the Fire?

    Lightweight, compact and speedy, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is a seven-inch Android 3.2 “Honeycomb” tablet with few minuses. Unfortunately, this eWEEK review adds, it’s saddled with a price twice that of Amazon’s new Kindle Fire.

Adobe Flex SDK bombshell STUNS developers

Adobe is to hand over its Flex SDK, which lets you develop applications for the Flash runtime using XML and ActionScript code, to an open source foundation. The company is committing to HTML 5 as the “best technology for enterprise application development”, according to a statement issued on Friday, November 11 by two Adobe product managers.

The news has caused consternation among Flex developers. “It feels as though Adobe is completely abandoning Flex, and ultimately Flash … My company has invested millions into committing to Flex for our enterprise applications and now I don’t know what to tell them.” says Erich Cervantez, senior Flex developer for a large chain of health clubs.

Adobe Donating Flex to Open Source Foundation; Continues Fire Sale on Formerly-Core Software

Open Source Desktop GIS: Let’s Get Started

A few years ago, a colleague at another institution asked my advice about offering a GIS class at his campus. He wanted to teach students the fundamentals of GIS and spatial analysis, both concepts and applications. The caveat was that he had no money to purchase software. He asked me if there were any worthwhile free applications that could be used for the class. At that time, the only free resource with which I had experience was Esri ArcExplorer Java Edition for Educators (AEJEE). AEJEE is a lightweight GIS tool for exploring geographic data. With AEJEE, you can classify and symbolize shapefiles, integrate image data, project on-the-fly shapefiles and use data over the Internet. A GIS course that relied exclusively on AEJEE would reach its ceiling very quickly.

FLOSS for Science Books October 2011

Apache Mahout: Scalable machine learning for everyone

DigitalPersona Open Sources New FingerJetFX Biometrics Technology for Mobile Devices, PCs and Servers

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Make Firefox Start Quicker By Only Loading Tabs As You Use Them

    If Firefox is a bit slow to start up and fast to use up RAM due to tons of open tabs, you can turn on a quick setting in Firefox 8 to only load tabs one at a time, when you click on them.

  • Firefox 10 Aurora Released, Gets WebGL Anti-Aliasing

    Mozilla just released Aurora 10, the developer version of Firefox that just graduated from nightly status and will move to beta in about six weeks.

  • Mozilla Adopts Real Life Firefoxes to Celebrate 7th Birthday

    Last week, Mozilla’s Firefox browser turned seven years old. To celebrate this milestone, the company has adopted several red pandas cubs (also known as firefoxes). Named Dolly (after Dolly Parton), Bernadette and Winston, the three cubs are said to be quite happy in their new home at the Knoxville Zoo. You might remember Mozilla adopting a couple of red panda cubs earlier this year. Dubbed Spark and Ember, the two pandas resided at the Knoxville Zoo until they were fully grown. They were then shipped off to Cleveland Metropark Zoo and Lee Richardson Zoo in Garden City, Kansas, with the goal of having some cute cubs of their own next year.

  • Mozilla Fights for the Internet’s Future

    Starting at midnight, Mozilla will join other leading Internet companies, public interest groups and citizens in opposing The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US House of Representatives. We’re censoring the Mozilla logo on many of our web sites as part of American Censorship Day and we sent Congressional leaders a joint letter together with AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Zynga raising our concerns with the bill.

  • Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, Release Candidate 2

  • Mozilla hatches plan to tackle memory leaks in Firefox add-ons

    Mozilla began an aggressive campaign earlier this year to trim Firefox’s memory footprint with a new initiative called MemShrink. The first fruits of that effort landed in Firefox 7, which was released in September. As a result, Firefox’s memory consumption is now between 20 to 50 percent lower. Building on that success, Mozilla is expanding the scope of its MemShrink initiative and looking to address memory consumption in additional areas.

  • Updated: Hollywood and Congress Target Mozilla

    Another dangerous bill is winding its way through Congress, this time it’s the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by Texas representative Lamar Smith. Smith’s bill would establish a system for taking down Web sites that the Justice Department “determines to be dedicated to copyright infringement.”

    The bill is, by nearly any sane measure, overreaching and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that the bill targets Mozilla specifically for refusing to comply with Homeland Security’s ICE unit.

  • How To Install Firefox 8 In Ubuntu 11.10

  • Firefox 10 Alpha is Here, How to install it in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric via PPA?

  • Rapid Fire: Firefox 9 Beta is Already Out for Download

    Firefox 8 was just released last week. Some of you have probably yet to update. However, the releases are coming fast these days, as is evidenced by the fact that Firefox 9 Beta is already available for download. Mozilla recently announced that the “new, faster” Firefox Beta is now ready for testing and download with support for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• We have a DevRoom at FOSDEM!

• So Oracle – Are you Supporting Linux or Unix?

  Oracle is in an interesting position. It is now a supporter of both Linux and Unix with their own Oracle Enterprise Linux and Solaris Unix operating systems. This past week, Oracle released Solaris 11 their first official Unix release and it made me wonder if the new Solaris is changing Oracle’s position on Linux.

  I asked Markus Flierl, vice president of software development at Oracle that question and the answer I got, was not what I had expected.

• Analysis: Spark of hope for Solaris 11

CMS

• My Take on PacktPub’s Open Source Awards

  This year I chose to sponsor PacktPub’s Open Source Awards by publishing and sharing the news of the various steps in the voting and nomination process. In return for the CMS Critic logo being posted on the awards page, I would publish their news releases as the process progressed.

Funding

• What recession? Lessons learned through Free Software

  It all started ten years ago, at a beach party called (appropriately enough) “Open Beach”. A young programmer named Douglas Conrad had discovered Free Software about two years before, and dreamed of having his own company devoted to Free Software, making a living from the use and production of Free Software.

  Douglas started his company “OpenS Tecnologia” a year later in 2002, but still did not have a good idea for a sustainable business plan. In the years between 2002 and 2006, his company grew slowly while Douglas investigated different parts of Free Software, until the year 2008.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Join the FSF on American Censorship Day

  When you visit http://fsf.org this Wednesday, November 16th, you won’t see the usual site. Instead, you’ll see a preview of what the site could look like in the future, if we were accused of copyright infringement by companies who routinely manipulate copyright law to attack free expression and sharing on the Internet — values fundamental to the free software movement.

Project Releases

• PHP 5.4 Hits RC1

  The first Release Candidate (RC 1) for PHP 5.4 is now out, marking the end of the feature development phase of the next generation of PHP.

Public Services/Government

• Still Crippled By “Free”

  The recent release of the Open Source Procurement Toolkit by the Cabinet Office has been interesting and encouraging, even if it did stir in me a certain scepticism that things will be different this time round. Under both Labour and Conservative administrations, the Cabinet Office has been tasked with increasing the adoption of open source by government departments, and each time a fine statement has been made that has resulted in very little change.

Licensing

• Germany upholds right to modify GPL-licensed free software

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Fingerprint recognition firmware released, including an open source ‘extractor’ package

    DigitalPersona is shipping Linux- and Android-ready fingerprint recognition software for biometric and mobile device manufacturers. FingerJet OEM provides fingerprint extraction, identification, and verification, runs in just 192KB of code space, and is compliant with NIST’s MINEX Ongoing Test standard — and the extractor function is available separately as a free, open source FingerJetFX OSE product.

Standards/Consortia

• 15+HTML5 Video Player Open Source Download

  Here is open source code HTML5 video player instead of the flash player available free download. HTML5 can play video online without adobe flash player. There are more beautiful HTML5 video interface built in, including a set of controls (play/pause etc.), so you don’t need anything else to play video in them.

  In addition to having a built-in player, browsers also give website developers access to the video functionality through a jQuery API. This allows developers to build custom video player controls or other interfaces, that utilize the browser’s core video functionality html5 video controls

Why Google Will Continue to Deliver Apps Across Platforms

The Chronicle raised the issue of Google’s recent app for Gmail on iOS, which was pulled only hours after Google delivered it. Girouard characterized it as a simple mistake, and stressed that Google will continue to develop apps for competing platforms.

Hardware

• 4004 to Sandy Bridge: A walk down CPU memory lane

• x86 Faces Unexpected RISC Competition

  After routing its RISC competitors, the x86 architecture is suddenly facing an unexpected and potent challenger: ARM

Security

• Apple fails to fix a longstanding sandbox vulnerability in OS X

  TABLET AND SMARTPHONE MAKER Apple has failed to fix a bug in its Mac OS X operating system that allows processes to bypass the sandbox protection in place.

  The flaw was discovered by Anibal Sacco and Matias Eissler from Core Security Technologies. They let Apple know about the problem on 20 September, and while Apple acknowledged their submission, it said that it did not see any security threat, forcing the Core Security Technologies team to publish the report to the public this month.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs International Advisor Mario Monti Is Italy’s New Prime Minister

  Not on even a Sunday is the headline barrage over:

  * MARIO MONTI ASKED TO FORM NEW ITALIAN GOVERNMENT
  * MONTI TO MAKE COMMENTS AFTER ACCEPTING OFFER TO LEAD ITALY
  * MARIO MONTI THANKS NAPOLITANO FOR OFFER TO FORM GOVERNMENT
  * MARIO MONTI SAYS ITALY MUST BE PROTAGONIST IN EUROPE
  * MARIO MONTI SAYS HE’LL ACT TO SAVE ITALY FROM CRISIS

  And so the international advisor to Goldman Sachs drones on. In the meantime, the €300 billion in BTP sales is set to resume in just over 13 hours.

  Yet the reason why the EURUSD is less than jubilant on the news is that Silvio apparently has just come back from the dead and has treatened to “pull the plug” on Monti.

• Walker Recall Gets Underway with Pajama Parties and Sabotage

  The effort to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker begins today, and organizers and volunteers are readying their clipboards to begin collecting more than half-a-million signatures throughout the holiday season. But as volunteers celebrated the launch at midnight “recall themed” pajama parties, the many challenges ahead were underscored by a deliberate, grinch-like cyber-attack on a key recall website.

• As Zuccotti Park is Cleared, Congress Moves to Gut Financial Reform

  In the dead of night last night, the movement to hold big banks accountable for their crimes took two major hits. Occupy Wall Street activists were swept from Zuccotti Park as radical members of Congress moved to gut funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and advance a series of shocking proposals to roll back financial reform.

• Seattle police pepper spray 84-year-old woman as ‘Occupy’ crackdowns occur nationally

  As much of the national press focused on protesters’ return to Zuccotti Park after their forcible eviction, crackdowns took place on “Occupy” protests nation-wide late Tuesday.

  During a crackdown on “Occupy Seattle,” an 84-year-old woman and a pregnant 19-year-old girl were among those attacked by police wielding pepper spray, according to reports.

  “Something funny happened on my way to a transportation meeting in Northgate,” said Dorli Rainey, the octogenarian who said she was nearly trampled after police became violent. “As I got off the bus at 3rd and Pine I heard helicopters above. Knowing that the problems of New York would certainly precipitate action by Occupy Seattle, I thought I better check it out.”

Censorship

• America Heading Towards The Internet Dictatorship?

  The greedy Hollywood is about to change the world as we know it. The entertainment industry which is failing to keep up with the innovation and is relying on Flintstones model is conspiring with the US congress to break the Internet and freedom on the web.

  After the Protect IP bill, the US congress is now working on yet another dangerous bill — SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), which is apparently a disguise to give unlimited power to Hollywood to break the Internet and shutdown any website without any trial.

Civil Rights

• Secret Snoop Conference for Gov’t Spying: Go Stealth, Hit a Hundred Thousand Targets

• DOJ: Violating a Site’s ToS Is a Crime

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 237 – You Need Classical Training for This

Kernel Space

• The Automotive Linux Summit Marks Linux’s Bright Future in Vehicles

  If you cycled the clock back a few years, you would find lots of people still debating whether Linux had the potential to dominate as a desktop operating system. Fast-forward to today, and it’s clear that Linux is in fact finding many of its biggest opportunities at the server level, in mobile devices, in embedded Linux deployments, and in other scenarios that lie outside the desktop computing arena. There are also more and more signs that the next frontier for Linux may be in cars, with big backers interested in the idea. And now, The Linux Foundation has announced its program for the first-ever Automotive Linux Summit taking place November 28, 2011 in Yokohama, Japan.

• AMD Linux KVM Virtualization Benchmarks

  In recent weeks there have been a lot of AMD Linux benchmarks of the latest-generation Bulldozer processor, namely the eight-core FX-8150. The latest unique look at the first-generation Bulldozer CPU under Linux is the KVM virtualization performance.

• Managing Live and Offline Migrations with Linux’s KVM

Applications

• PdfMasher–E-Book Conversion

• Instructionals/Technical

  • C development on Linux – Types, variables, operators – III.

  • RHEL6 volume encryption using LUKS

  • Set up a Lightweight Wiki in a Jiffy with LionWiki

  • Fast XML Parsing in Ruby

  • LibreOffice Easy Hacks Rotation

  • Packet Sniffing Basics

• Games

  • A New MMORPG On The Linux-Friendly Unigine

    It’s looking like next year may be quite a positive year for Linux gaming with the likely open-sourcing of Desura, open-source Doom 3 code being in the wild, hopefully the Rage Linux client, and several games powered by the Linux-friendly Unigine Engine gearing up for release, among other Linux gaming announcements.

    In fact, there’s another new Unigine Engine licensee that’s using this visually-intense engine to create a new MMORPG.

    Denis Shergin, the CEO of Unigine Corp, tweeted over the weekend: “I’m so eager to tell you about a new mind-blowing MMORPG powered by @Unigine engine, but we have to wait. Hint: GSTAR Korea.”

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Get a GNOME 2-like menu with Classicmenu Indicator in Ubuntu 11.10

Distributions

• “The New Linux Distros Edition” of Dr. Bill.TV Netcast #214

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • The brand new Mandriva Linux Powerpack 2011 is here

    Following the Mandriva Linux free 2011 Mandriva is proud to launch the Mandriva Powerpack 2011, the full version of Mandriva Linux! Based on its new product strategy, Mandriva changes the release procedure, aiming for a one-year period between major releases. However, Mandriva will also release updated versions of its products on a periodic time on a 6-month basis.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat reveals that RHEL 6.2 will support AMD’s Bulldozer power saving features

    LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has said that its upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 (RHEL) will support all of the power saving features of AMD’s Bulldozer Opteron processors.

    AMD’s Bulldozer Opteron chips deliver a number of new features that the firm claims help it beat Intel’s Xeon processors when it comes to all-important power consumption. The problem is few operating systems actually make use of AMD’s power tweaks such as the C6 state, but Red Hat has confirmed that RHEL 6.2 will support all of Bulldozer’s power saving features.

  • Taking oVirt for a Spin

    The new open-source project is focused on delivering an openly developed and freely licensed virtualization system.

  • Red Hat Provides Comprehensive Lifecycle Support for Java in the Cloud with OpenShift PaaS

    With OpenShift, Red Hat offers a compelling PaaS built on open source technologies that enables developers to quickly develop and deploy applications on the cloud. OpenShift provides built-in auto-scaling, supports a wide variety of languages, frameworks, middleware and clouds and is available free of charge. In August, Red Hat announced that it was the first to deliver Java EE 6 on a PaaS with OpenShift, powered by Red Hat’s JBoss application platform technology. Today, OpenShift expands upon its Java capabilities with the integration of several technologies that allow OpenShift to offer a fuller Java lifecycle for developers — developers can now code their application in an IDE, as well as build, deploy and scale it with OpenShift.

  • Red Hat: Let OpenShift cloud compile your Java apps

    Red Hat doesn’t just want to run your apps on its OpenShift cloud. It wants you to code, compile, tweak, and repeat the process on its cloud until you get the applications just right and get rid of that workstation or heavy laptop you lug around.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 KDE: Improving Perfection

      Desktop Environment is very important part of today’s Linux distribution which pretends to be used on desktop or laptop. There are some Linux distributions which give you only one Desktop Environment by default, being it Pardus with KDE or CentOS with GNOME. As opposite, there are distributions which are supplied with selection of different DEs available:

    • Fedora 16 Review: When An Ubuntu User Tries Fedora

      Fedora 16 was released a few days ago and I was looking forward to this release. I used to be a Fedora user in the early days, when I had more time to play with my PC. Ever since I switched to Debian and then Ubuntu, I just fell in love with apt-get’s smart dependency resolution. I was finally out of the RMP hell. I did dabble with Fedora here and there, once in a while but 14 and 15 were both quite unstable for me. So, I distanced myself from Fedora.

    • Almost that time of year…

    • Kororaa 14 no longer supported

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Kubuntu 12.04 LTS and Lubuntu 12.04 Highlights

          As we’ve stated in our previous article, Allison Randal from Canonical announced a few days ago the highlights for the upcoming Kubuntu 12.04 LTS and Lubuntu 12.04, as well as for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS and Edubuntu 12.04 LTS (presented in a separate article).

        • Get an Early Taste of Linux Mint 12

          Just a week or so after revealing that Linux Mint 12 would be taking a hybrid approach to introducing GNOME 3, the project behind the free operating system on Saturday announced the debut of a release candidate of the software.

        • Will a Spoonful of Mint Help the GNOME 3 Go Down?

          If a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, as Mary Poppins once sagely said, will a splash of Mint help users swallow GNOME 3?

          That, indeed, appears to be the question of the day now that the Linux Mint project has announced a hybrid desktop strategy for Linux Mint 12 that’s apparently designed to help ease users into the controversial new interface.

          “The future of Linux Mint is GNOME 3,” asserted Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint founder and project leader, in a recent blog post. “The present of Linux Mint is a simple question: ‘How do we make people like GNOME 3? And what do we provide as an alternative to those who still do not want to change?’”

        • Linux Mint 12 RC1 adds GNOME 2.x-like extensions to GNOME 3.2

          Linux Mint 12 (“Lisa”) RC1 was released, based on Ubuntu 11.10 and Linux 3.0. RC1 offers the GNOME 3.2 desktop, but augments it with “MGSE” extensions that let users create a more GNOME 2.3x-like environment, and also supplies a desktop called MATE that’s claimed to be a GNOME 3.x-compatible version of GNOME 2.x.

Devices/Embedded

• Wind River Linux stack targets residential gateways

  Wind River announced a pre-validated stack built on Wind River Linux 4.2, aimed at development of home gateway systems for automation and multimedia. Wind River Platform for Gateways supports two ARM11-based processors — the Mindspeed Comcerto 1000 and the Cavium Econa CNS3xxx — and features software from DigiOn (DLNA), Makewave and ProSyst (OSGi for Java), Works Systems (remote management), and Skelmir (virtual machine technology).

• Tuning Embedded Linux: When Less is More

  There’s a saying that you can never be too rich, or too thin. While that’s a bit of hyperbole, thin is definitely in when it comes to embedded Linux. Luckily, trimming the fat off Linux for embedded use is a lot easier than getting rich or losing that spare tire. Intel’s Darren Hart explained how he slimmed Linux down at the Embedded Linux Conference in October.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android 4.0 face recognition flawed

      The face recognition unlock feature in Google’s Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” mobile operating system has been bypassed by a simple photo trick. A blogger recently demonstrated how easy it was to unlock the device. He took a photo of himself using another phone and held it up to the front facing camera on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first smartphone to run Android 4.0, which was then unlocked.

    • Top Free Android Web Browsers

    • Google Releases Source Code for Ice Cream Sandwich. And yeah, there’s Honeycomb too

      Google has just released source code for the latest version of Android, that is Ice Cream Sandwich. According to this Google Groups post by Jean-Baptiste Queru a.k.a JBQ, the code for Android 4.0 is currently being pushed to the servers and will take some time to complete. The release, which also includes the source code for Honeycomb, will enable manufacturers to start prepping their own devices for the big upgrade.

    • Source Code Android 4 (ICS) released

      “Hi! We just released a bit of code we thought this group might be interested in. Over at our Android Open-Source Project git servers, the source code for Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is now available.”

    • Google Slaps Critics, Releases Android 4.0 And Honeycomb Source Code

      Google has shut the mouth of its critics by releasing the source code or Android 4.0 aka IceCream Sandwich. Jean-Baptiste M. ‘JBQ’ Queru, software engineer from AOSP (Android open source project) wrote on Google group, “Over at our Android open source project git servers, the source code for Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is now available.”

    • Rugged handheld offers capacitive touch plus 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor

      Winmate announced a rugged handheld computer that includes a 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen and runs Android 2.3.4 on a 1GHz Cortex-A8-based Texas Instruments DM3730. The E430T offers IP65-level sealing, up to 512MB of RAM, five- and two-megapixel cameras, plus wireless technologies including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 3.5G cellular.

    • Google releases Android 4.0 source — and Honeycomb too

    • Google releases Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ source

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Amazon’s Kindle Fire ships a day early

    Amazon began shipping its Kindle Fire tablet device Nov. 14, a day early. The $200, seven-inch Android tablet will compete against the Nook Tablet and Apple iPad, among others, for holiday dollars.

  • HTC to unveil quad-core tablet PC at MWC, says paper

    HTC is likely to unveil a new Android-based tablet PC running on a quad-core CPU from Nvidia along with two new Android smartphones in February at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2012, according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report.

Adobe moves Flex SDK to independent open source project

Adobe will move its Flex SDK to the Open Spoon Foundation. The vendor said that the “Spoon Project” was created from within the Adobe community, and that it will continue to maintain and develop the SDK. Although Adobe now advocates HTML5 as the best technology for enterprise application development, it has promised to continue contributing to the development of the Flex SDK.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • What Is Mozilla’s Mobile OS?

    Linux users have always been happy with the sheer amount of choice available to them. When the mobile sector is considered, yes, it does lack in the field of choice when compared to the thousands of distros available for the desktop. Well, mobile users, its time for a treat. Mozilla Foundation’s Boot 2 Gecko project is said to be finalized by Q2 2012.

  • HTML5 games, video get boost from full-screen API in Firefox nightly

    Support for the HTML full-screen API was recently enabled in Firefox nightly builds. It allows Web applications to toggle the browser into full-screen mode and stretch a single page element so that it fills the user’s display.

    The feature will be especially useful for the HTML5 video element, making it easy for developers to add native full-screen playback to their custom HTML video player interfaces. It will also likely be useful for games and other kinds of content where fullscreen interaction is desirable.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle v. Google – Google Files Writ; Oracle Complains About Production of Witnesses

  Google has now filed a petition for a writ of mandamus with the Federal Circuit seeking review of the district court’s ruling on the Lindholm emails. The petition was filed November 4 and the matter is denominated In Re Google, 2012-M106. Oracle is required to respond to the petition no later than November 28.

  A writ of mandamus is an equitable remedy. Consequently, the Federal Circuit has discretion in considering the matter and responding to it. While Google certainly has a good faith argument for protecting the Lindholm email, there should be little doubt that they are swimming upstream in their continued attempts to suppress the email.

• Oracle v. Google – Copyright Fight Moves To Trial; Oracle Gains Some Depos

  Not surprisingly, Google disagreed (615 (PDF; Text]) with Oracle’s characterization that Google was refusing to produce witnesses for depositions. (See, Google Files Writ; Oracle Complains About Production of Witnesses) However, in the end it doesn’t make any difference because Judge Alsup has made the call. (617 [PDF; Text]) Google had offered to make two of the witnesses available to Oracle for deposition (Bray and Rizzo), but Google refused to produce the other five (Agarwal, Bornstein, Rubin, Swetland, and Yellin).

  Judge Alsup, in what appears to be a more and more frequent use of the “split the baby” approach, has granted Oracle the right to depose any three of the seven. Oracle may depose those three for up to two hours each, but only on their testimony related to the Leonard and Cox damage reports.

Social

• AP: Ilya Zhitomirskiy, co-founder of social network Diaspora dies at 22

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Run today’s GNU!

  It’s a fresh QEMU image of GNU (aka. GNU/Hurd), the extensible operating system designed to liberate users from the tyranny of sysadmins, professional kernel hackers, and other restrictions to Freedom #1.

Project Releases

• Tomahawk media player version 0.3 released

  The Tomahawk developers have released version 0.3 of their open source media player. The cross-platform application has the ability to play any file chosen no matter its location. Version 0.3 has many additional features, including a global search bar which can search across all available sources.

Licensing

• GPL upheld in Berlin case

  AVM Computersystems had sought legal sanction to prevent Cybits from making changes to the code that is used in its routers, in particular code covered by the GPL in its popular Fritz!Box product.

  According to the Free Software Foundation Europe, this code comes from the Linux kernel and is thus open to modification, provided the changes are made available to anyone to whom the code is then distributed.

Openness/Sharing

• What a classroom will look like in 10 years

  Classrooms of the future will be equipped with technology that supports the open source way – openness, transparency, collaboration and diversity. We may need to wait more than 10 years, but hopefully not!

Programming

• AMD Bulldozer only FMA4 and XOP instructions are supported by GCC

  AMD’s Bulldozer Opteron 6200 series chips might be the firm’s first 16-core processors but the firm has done a bit more than increase its maximum core count by four, adding two new instructions. Both 4200 series and 6200 series Opteron processors have AMD-only FMA4 and XOP instructions, and the firm told The INQUIRER that popular compilers including the GNU C Compiler (GCC) already support these instructions.

• Obfuscated C contest returns after five year break

  The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) has returned and announced the start of 20th competition; the contest had been on hiatus, with no results published for the last one, which was held in 2006. Now, the contest is back and, from 12 November 2011 to 12 January 2012, entries are being accepted in the competition to write the most obscure or obfuscated C program which will illustrate, perversely, the importance of programming style, stress C compilers with strange code, and demonstrate the subtleties of the C language. Although the competition is already open, online submissions will only be accepted from 1 December 2011 as the submission system is being upgraded.

Health/Nutrition

• Free pharmaceutical drugs prescription: FreeDiams reaches 0.6.0

Finance

• A Decade of MSFT

  M$ can afford to maintain share price by increasing dividends but they cannot stem the flow of mindshare to other technologies. At the moment, predictions are that ARMed thingies will continue to grow while x86 stagnates for years. At this rate, M$’s installed base will start to shrink shortly and it will do well to save 50% of shipments for itself within three years. With that kind of competition the monopoly will be truly dead.

Privacy

• W3C privacy workgroup issues first draft of Do Not Track standard

  W3C has published the first draft of a new Web standard that addresses online privacy. It establishes an official specification for the mechanism that browsers use to broadcast the “Do Not Track” (DNT) privacy preference to websites. The draft was authored by a new W3C Tracking Protection Working Group and could be ratified as an official standard by the middle of next year.

  Mozilla originally introduced the DNT setting in Firefox 4 earlier this year. The feature consists of a simple HTTP header flag that can be toggled through the browser’s preference dialog. The flag tells website operators and advertisers that the user wants to opt out of invasive tracking and other similar practices that have become pervasive with the rise of behavioral advertising.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The Coming Fascist Internet

  Around four decades ago or so, at the U.S. Defense Department funded ARPANET’s first site at UCLA — what would of course become the genesis of the global Internet — I spent a lot of time alone in the ARPANET computer room. I’d work frequently at terminals sandwiched between two large, noisy, minicomputers, a few feet from the first ARPANET router — Interface Message Processor (IMP) #1, which empowered the “blindingly fast” 56 Kb/s ARPANET backbone. Somewhere I have a photo of the famous “Robby the Robot” standing next to that nearly refrigerator-sized cabinet and its similarly-sized modem box.

  I had a cubicle I shared elsewhere in the building where I also worked, but I kept serious hacker’s hours back then, preferring to work late into the night, and the isolation of the computer room was somehow enticing.

  Even the muted roar of the equipment fans had its own allure, further cutting off the outside world (though likely not particularly good for one’s hearing in the long run).

  Occasionally in the wee hours, I’d shut off the room’s harsh fluorescent lights for a minute or two, and watch the many blinking lights play across the equipment racks, often in synchronization with the pulsing and clicking sounds of the huge disk drives.