07.28.09
Posted in News Roundup at 4:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The phrase “Iron Linux” had become a motto for Promwad Innovation Company when preparing reports for V International LVEE conference. Company’s employees presented a range of presentations, the main goal of which was to show to the audience uncommon examples of application of Linux on different hardware platforms, or, in other words, show “Linux life forms in hardware and how to locate it there”.
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UNIX
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Whenever an operating system — however obscure — comes up with a killer feature, it’s worth sitting up and taking notice. And there’s no doubt that OpenSolaris’ Time Slider feature is heavily armed and dangerous.
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AT&T-owned Bell Laboratories withdraws from development of Multics, a pioneering but overly complicated time-sharing system. Some important principles in Multics were to be carried over into Unix.
Ken Thompson at Bell Labs writes the first version of an as-yet-unnamed operating system in assembly language for a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer.
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Applications
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Recently I profiled the latest LiVES video editing system, and in that article I mentioned that I intended to buy a camcorder for use with LiVES and other video editing software. Since then I purchased a Samsung SC-D382 midiDV recorder. Studio Dave is now on its way to becoming Studio DV.
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And just for the sake of completeness I must mention that VLC can read from V4L (Video for Linux) and V4L2 devices, i.e. your webcam. Too cool.
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Desktop Environments
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These are not the only desktops available for GNU/Linux. Many regard LXDE, another lightweight desktop, as an up and coming choice, although it lacks some of the polish of Xfce. Others prefer one of the time-honored window managers, or simple graphical environments, such as IceWM or FVWM, or the tiled window managers like ratpoison. Without straining, you should be able to find several dozen alternatives, most of them catering to a specific need or design philosophy.
But, mostly, GNOME, KDE, and Xfce are the deskops that people are likely to see most often. Each is a useful place to start, and, if it doesn’t suit you, one of the others can be installed in minutes. Graphical environments can be confusing in GNU/Linux, but one thing is sure — you’ll never lack alternatives.
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I am a big fan of light desktop environments. Well, most people looking for a lighter alternative normally settle for a lightweight window manager, such as Fluxbox or AwesomeWM.
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Thasunke Witko is the Oglala Lakota name for the native American more commonly known as ‘Crazy Horse’, one of the main leaders of the tribes who fought the white man at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.
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Overall, Mint 7 offers most of the software that an average user needs. Though I have issues with the OS, it still can be used as a “light” desktop.
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Matthew Szulik, Red Hat’s former CEO and current chairman, has been in semi-retirement for the past two years, but you’d never know it from listening to his interview with the BBC’s Peter Day. Szulik, ever the revolutionary, talks up open source’s opportunity to disrupt conventional software and promote social reform.
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Ubuntu
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As I scour the market for a potential Ubuntu netbook purchase, I’ve stumbled onto two interesting tidbits of info: First, Ubuntu netbook demand recently exceeded supply at System76. Second, another niche Ubuntu PC maker will introduce a netbook this August.
Sorry I don’t have specific “sales figures” for you. But I do have anecdotal pieces of info…
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CrunchBang is a fine distro. It is very fast, and thanks to OpenBox, full of configuration options for the power user. The initial drab desktop can be configured to a very graphical environment, or left as-is.
A casual Linux user might be better served to start with a more standard distro like Ubuntu or OpenSuse, with all the graphical eye-candy. CrunchBang ain’t pretty out of the box, but it surely gets the job done quickly!
If you have an older machine, or are looking for a fast distro with many customization options for you to design the desktop of your dreams, then you will definitely want to try CrunchBang Linux.
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GE Fanuc has announced a Linux-compatible SBC (single-board computer) using the military-friendly VPX format. The VPXcel3 SBC341, “available in five ruggedization levels,” includes an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, DDR3 memory, and 1GB of flash storage, according to the company.
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Atmel announced a new member of its Linux-compatible ARM9-based SAM9G family of industrial-focused embedded processors. Touted for supporting DDR2 memory and 100Mbps+ data rates, the “AT91SAM9G45″ clocks to 400MHz, supports LCD touchscreens and 3.3 V power, and offers a 480Mbps USB interface, says the company.
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VDC Research issued a report estimating that Wind River has pushed past MontaVista Software, taking the top spot among commercial embedded Linux providers. In a separate study on the overall embedded market, meanwhile, VDC said that real-time solutions outperformed the general embedded market last year, with nine percent growth over 2007.
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Timesys Corporation (http://www.timesys.com), provider of LinuxLink, the first commercial software development framework for building custom embedded Linux based products, today announced LinuxLink availability for the new OMAP-L137 processor from Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI). This represents the first LinuxLink release for the low-power OMAP-L1x applications processors and will be followed by support for the OMAP-L138 processor.
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With our international program still developing, technological kinks being worked out, and our local teacher and University students still exploring and researching ways for the XO’s to be integrated into the California 3rd grade curriculum, we have not yet done extensive documentation and created a resource model. We have been conducting sit-in observations of the class, and working with the teacher to understand his needs, concerns, and ideas for the future.
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Today we are going to create some realistic graffiti in the Gimp. This tutorial is partially inspired off of Photoshop tutorial by DreamDealer v5.0 at DreamDealer.nl Let’s get started!
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The open source project that aimed to get iPods and iPhones working with Linux and other software should be re-posted next month.
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As a college student, open source philosophy has a lot to offer you. You can not only take advantage of the great resources open source has, but also become a part of a movement that shares more freedom of ideas. In these lectures, you’ll learn more about the open source philosophy and what it can be used for.
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The current stable release of Plex is version 0.8.1 released under the GNU General Public License (GPL2), apart from the Plex Media Server which is currently closed source and connects to the GPL licensed client over the network.
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This “Community Edition” is a free version under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.
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Calibre is under GPLv3 license for Linux, Mac OS and Windows download.
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Office Suites
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OpenOffice.org 3 is developed using an open-software, “no secrets” approach. Anyone can look at the programs and suggest improvements, or fix bugs. Anyone can report problems or request enhancements, and anyone can see the response from other users or developers. The status of current and future releases is displayed on a public wiki, so you can decide if and when you want to upgrade to take advantage of new features. Anyone used to commercial software and its hyping and marketing speak will find OpenOffice.org 3 refreshingly different. Enjoy the benefits of open-source!
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What’s not to like about Google Apps? It has a ton of features, it’s incredibly easy to collaborate with other people, and it’s free. Well, how about the fact that your data is only as accessible as Google decides to make it? If you’re looking for the usefulness of a Web-based collection of office apps but want complete control over your data, OpenGoo might be just the answer you’re looking for.
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Hours before the second P2P file-sharing trial in the US gets underway, the judge finally rules that defendant Joel Tenenbaum cannot claim “fair use” in the case. The proposed defense would be “so broad it would swallow the copyright protections that Congress has created,” she wrote.
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TASER International has – at least for now – dropped a trademark infringement suit against Linden Lab, which operates Second Life.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 07 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Linux is a fantastic platform for audio production. Find out how to build the perfect production environment.
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ALSA, or the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, sits within the Linux kernel itself as a series of hardware drivers. Audio data is passed from ALSA to the user-level applications that manipulate the audio. But despite this low level integration and a built-in potential for good low latency performance, most default Linux installations make poor audio production computers. That’s because there’s still too much going on in the background, and too many throwbacks from the time when Linux was designed primarily for server installation.
Luckily, Linux is a highly configurable operating system, and this means that you can create the perfect audio platform just by making a few tweaks. We’ve chosen the latest version of Ubuntu to be our guinea pig.
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The Linux Foundation, the non-profit that supports the growth of the Linux kernel, is today announcing an affinity Visa Platinum credit card for people who want to contribute to advancing the OS through the organization’s initiatives. Reading the press release announcing the new credit card made me raise my eyebrows, but after giving it a bit of thought I think that this is actually not that bad an idea.
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But I highly doubt that! Simply, GNU/Linux equates to Communism and we have to be aware of this.
Also, if you think even for a second that I am being serious, then you might have some serious issues…
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And now in 2009, their conclusion still holds true, I guess. You can run all the applications that a normal user will want to run – be it in Windows or Linux, in a PC or laptop which sports just 1 GB memory. Windows Vista doesn’t count, as it is an aberration.
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This future in automotive linux is a possible reality. Fast booting and reliable embedded systems, hardened open source linux and willing manufacturers will make it work.
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Desktop
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It’s typical, sensible, and useful for a conference wrap-up keynote address to look at the big picture, with session descriptions like, “Where Linux has been and where it’s headed.” At last week’s Open Source Convention, the role of identifying the major Linux trends and challenges was given to Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.
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There are essentially two types of software: proprietary and open source. Proprietary software may be sold (Microsoft Windows comes to mind) or given away (shareware or freeware). In either case, the source code behind proprietary software is subject to legal protections. Programmers are not to access, modify or redistribute proprietary code. Open source software, on the other hand, is has completely “open” (accessible) code which can be manipulated and shared freely. It is my opinion that although much of what is in common use today is proprietary, such will not always be the case.
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Rather than buy proprietary software, companies can (and should) grab open source software and either use it as is or pay developers to tailor it to specific business needs. This, I think, is the future of software.
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There are four different app bundles to choose from, depending on the age level of the user: Tertiary for university-level students, Secondary for 13-18 year-olds, Primary for 6-12 year-olds, and Preschool for the five and under set. Alternatively, you can download the complete educational desktop and receive all four bundles at once.
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If you are going to wipe your hard drive, but before you pay a dime for Windows 7, try a Linux desktop distribution. If you don’t like it, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? You spent no money other than for a burnable CD or DVD, a little time, and you just have to wipe your disk again before installing Windows 7.
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Linux does not lack user friendliness any more. Ubuntu. openSUSE. Try them out.
Linux does not lack quality software. Openoffice.org. Firefox. Pidgin. Thunderbird. They all run on Linux.
Linux does not lack power. It runs on the widest range of hardware.
Linux does not lack company backing. Novell. Canonical. Red Hat. They are large corporations.
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Server
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The new offering is available as a standalone product or in an Enterprise package. Both packages include Sun Grid Engine software. The Enterprise package also includes Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Linux and a version of Reliance, which is reportedly Univa’s proprietary infrastructure and application service governor.
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Applications
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# Patches rarely receive feedback – positive or negative – on the wine-patches list
# Patches that are rejected aren’t labelled as such, or publicly given a reason for why they were
# Hundreds of patches don’t get in, that just need a tweak or two, that would REALLY improve the wine experience
# These failed patches can’t easily be seen by anyone unless they know exactly what to Google for
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Gnaughty is a program to automatically download adult sex content, i.e. porn movies and pictures, from a known Internet porn directory.
Providing a friendly interface, users who feel like having some porn can have it served fastly and directly to their desktop.
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Celtx is a media pre-production editor that allows you to easily create screenplays and storyboards for your next movie. You can use it to create a whole assortment of media, including theater, comics, advertising, and video games.
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The game is set in the not too far future of London 2099, where climatic catastrophes have changed the Earth’s climate permanently. In this interactive novel, bionic beings and complex technologies, clash with complicated relationships and even more complicated romance. Wise decisions build relationships with other characters, but one wrong move could ruin a friendship forever.
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K Desktop Environment 4.3
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Overall though, KDE 4.3 is shaping up to be a nice release, and it brings some much-needed fit and finish to the KDE4 desktop environment.
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With KDE 4.3, I think I will start using KDE part-time again, so congrats to the KDE team for their bold move to rebuild their desktop from scratch! I hope Gnome 3 brings an equal amount of innovation.
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Hannah Montana Linux is clearly geared toward those who are, in fact, Hannah Montana fans. I’m guessing that this group must be comprised mainly of very young people. I can’t imagine adults really being fans of this obnoxious little TV pop tart.
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An update of the noteworthy Cooker changes was long overdue. Here’s a short, incomplete summary:
* KDE is now at version 4.2.98 aka KDE 4.3 RC 3. Other KDE related updates include KOffice 2.0.1, Amarok 2.1.1, Digikam 1.0 beta 3, Kipi plug-ins 0.5.0. The KMess MSN Live instant messenger had its first stable KDE 4 release with version 2.0.0.
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Africa
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The Linux4Afrika development help project that is active in a number of east African countries has released the next verson of its software distribution. The donated used hardware will be expanded by new functionality.
The newest version of the Linux4Afrika terminal server solution will no longer require interested parties to buy from One Laptop per Child (OLPC) to test its Sugar learning interface. The GUI can be installed optionally and, after registration, started simply from the dropdown menu.
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Ubuntu comes on a live CD which you can try without having to touch your existing installation. And if you like it, there is an icon right on the desktop where you can install the system as you are testing it.
These are just a few of the reasons why I would very much encourage my African brothers and sisters to give Ubuntu Linux and other Linux distros a try. After all, they are free, great, safe and you become part of a worldwide community.
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Red Hat
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Red Hat, a leading provider of open source solutions, will host a series of sales enablement boot camp sessions by Red Hat’s worldwide sales trainer, Brian Cole.
The camps are available to Red Hat Ready Partners and Red Hat Advanced Business Partners across Australia and New Zealand.
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Going back to May before the release of Fedora 11, features that were planned for Fedora 12 (the release that’s codenamed Constantine) began to get laid out. Among these features were LVM enhancements, replacing nash/mkinitrd with Dracut, and using Empathy as the default instant messaging program. With time more features have come about for Fedora 12, such as re-basing the desktop environments to KDE 4.3 and GNOME 2.28, updating the kernel, etc. Over the weekend though, the Fedora Project Wiki was updated to reflect a whole batch of new features that are now planned for Fedora 12. Below are some of these new features.
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Ubuntu
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Canonical has organized its Ubuntu partner program into three segments — business partners, technology partners and training partners. But to spot the next generation of potential Ubuntu channel partners you need to check out two areas: Cloud computing and the so-called Ubuntu Marketplace. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.
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Dig a little deeper and you’ll find a new segment listed as Cloud Partners — a critical area that could make-or-break Canonical’s server strategy. Early cloud partners include Eucalyptus Systems, Amazon Web Services, Cohesive Flexible Technologies and RightScale.
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READY: One thing we underestimated was the number of semiconductor engineers and partners working on Linux to enable Linux on chips. That happened faster and at a larger level than we thought. When we started out building MontaVista Linux earlier in the decade, we had to make the assumption that Linux may not exist on a given piece of hardware, or that if it was available, the kernel version might be four or five rev’s back. Beyond that, Linux was still somewhat unstable. So we developed a set of requirements and industrial processes to produce a commercial quality Linux that could go into any device. But now Linux has gotten really deep into the fabric of the chip business, and we are now adjusting to that reality with our new MDE approach in MontaVista Linux 6.
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Two versions will be available, the Linux-based G60 and the Windows Mobile 6.1-based M20, both of which have touch-screen displays that feature three primary icons: Call, Search and View Map. All other features are available through a gesture-based interface.
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It’s got an HDMI port, though don’t expect to be pumping out lots of HD without that Ion chip, and it’s got a very low energy consumption, as well as recyclable packaging materials. It comes pre-installed with Vista, XP or Linpus Linux.
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Active Media Products (AMP), manufacturer of SSDs and WWF series USB drives, today announced immediate availability of a bootable Linux USB (BLU) drive that is compatible with Windows® 7 and benefits WWF. These new penguin BLU drives are preloaded with the full installation of Ubuntu Linux 9.0.4.
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Phones
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Meet Proxoid, a proxy server application that lets you use your phone as a modem without hacking its system. Making Proxoid work does require a few steps, but the entire process is simple enough even for uninitiated users. Here is how to make Proxoid work with an Ubuntu-based system.
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The move is another sign that the Linux-based OS is picking up some steam, and Google said it expects up to 20 handsets to be released by the end of the year. Because it is a free OS, some of these handsets will be from relatively unknown manufacturers, but Android has drawn interest from top-five cell phone makers like Samsung, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson.
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While Android has enjoyed the lime-light of being the “open source, linux based” mobile platform — and it is all of that and more, the Palm webOS is heavily invested in Linux
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Sub-notebooks
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The $499 version of the Mini 110 weaves its wallet-friendly magic by opting for the free Linux operating system instead of Windows XP. HP has done much to make Linux a doddle to use, including a customised home screen that looks slicker and more professional than anything we’ve ever seen out of Microsoft. You’ll also find some bespoke programs, such as a multimedia player that resembles Apple’s Front Row.
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Zimbra, a Yahoo company, offers next-generation open source e-mail and collaboration. With this partnership, Linux Warehouse hopes to satisfy the local market’s growing demand for more sophisticated and cost-effective collaboration tools, says Linux Warehouse MD, Johnny Martins.
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Wookie, a Java based server application which eases deployment of Web widgets, such as the W3C Widgets, has begun incubating at the Apache Foundation. The Wookie project started life at the University of Bolton, where a team, supported by the TenCompetence EU project and supported by the CETIS Widgets Working Group…
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Browsers
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The new Chrome with the 3D acceleration features is all set to be introduced in the second half of 2010.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has released mockups that show how Firefox 4.0 conceivably might look, and two words spring to my mind: Google Chrome.
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Last week we took a look at initial design mockups for Firefox 3.7, and now the busy designers at Mozilla are back with some theme mockups for the even-further-into-the-future Firefox 4.0.
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Keeping up with the evolution of Mozilla platform, Thunderbird 3 Beta 2 was released a few months ago with a number of cool features and massive bug fixes. Mozilla’s desktop email client includes archiving like Gmail and a new Activity Manager that helps you get a clearer idea about what Thunderbird is doing. Further, Thunderbird 3 beta includes new Add-ons Manager, improved address book and more. For Mac users they’ll be able to see better Growl notification and have more keyboard shortcuts.
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OSCON 2009
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I’d be hard-put to say whether OSCON or RubyConf is my favorite conference of the year; when I miss either I’m grumpy. Here’s a brief report from the latest San Jose instalment, with pictures.
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If you weren’t at OSCON this morning, here is what I spoke about in my keynote, Standing Out in the Crowd. I’m including most of the key visuals, so my apologies for the image-heavy post. I’ll also be uploading to slideshare.net (with voiceover I hope) and I’m told there will be video up at the OSCON blip.tv channel in due course. (ETA: it’s up.)
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Funding
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The initial round of funding was also used to create the Schooner MySQL appliance. This unit puts a highly optimized version of the InnoDB 1.0.3 transactional storage engine in a System x box equipped with solid state disks and an OEMed version of Sun’s MySQL 5.1 Enterprise Edition database, which Schooner has shown in benchmark tests can deliver about eight times the oomph of a plain vanilla x64 server running Linux and MySQL. The MySQL appliance costs $45,000 as well.
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Government
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It began at the dinner table with two software engineers at a VistA Community Meeting and ended 3 weeks later with Graphic User Interface Scheduling for VistA.
While coming equipped with powerful text-based scheduling capabilities, the private-sector VistA and WorldVistA(tm) Electronic Medical Record system communities have long wanted but lacked a Graphic User Interface scheduling front end. Ignacio Valdes, MD, MS reports “The wait is over. Sam has done it.”
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Standards/Consortia
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Last week, at OSCON, a San Jose startup known as Cloudkick unveiled an open source project that hopes to provide a single programming interface for a host of so-called infrastructure clouds, including Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud Servers, Slicehost, and GoGrid. Dubbed libcloud, the project reaches for a world where developers can build an app that’s easily shuttled from one cloud to another.
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Over in Russia, for example, it appears that a bunch of telco execs are complaining about Skype. They at least try to pass off a plausible non-save-our-asses reason: mentioning security, but they don’t do a very good job hiding the truth.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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A few folks have submitted the news that, apparently, AT&T is blocking access to a certain subdomain of 4chan. I just checked on my own AT&T DSL account and it’s true that I can’t get there (I can get there if I don’t go via AT&T). That doesn’t mean that AT&T definitely is blocking it, but there are reports that folks at AT&T have admitted that it’s true. If you don’t know what 4chan is, the 4chan Wikipedia page is probably the best way to understand it.
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Those designing the DRM “simply refuse to face reality,” he concluded. “I have a machine with an AMD 7550 Dual Core, a ton of RAM, and most importantly nearly a TB of hard disc space, and yet I am supposed to keep my games and my movies piled around my machine so I can stuff in a disc every time I want to use them? What good is all that space for if DRM won’t let me use it?”
In short, “and it pains me to write this,” hairyfeet said, “I have to agree with RMS for once. DRM is simply too nasty to allow it to infect Linux.”
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Intellectual Monopolies
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It’s becoming more and more and more clear that the Associated Press does not like the rules of the Internet and intends to resist them. That’s actually pretty predictable when you think about it, because the Internet doesn’t like the AP either.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 06 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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07.27.09
Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In the past few months, we’ve discussed (among many other things) ZeroShell. Its a live CD that turns a mundane PC into a router and provides numerous servers and features for your network. Well, now we’re going to discover the Untangle Network Gateway. Another open source solution, it installs onto a PC to help you protect, control, and monitor the online activities of all your small business or home computers.
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Desktop
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It is my personal opinion that Linux should be targeting the desktop. My reasons are that, due to the way the operating system is designed, depending on how the distribution is configured, Linux for the desktop is inherently more stable and secure than the average configured windows desktop installation. Maintenance and support of desktop Linux systems are more straight forward and are easier to remotely maintain without interrupting the end users work. It is harder for amateur malicious programs to gain a foothold in the guts of the operating system. At worst they will just mess up the users home directory, not the core operating system. Program and security updates are automatically managed across all installed programs from the official repositories which leaves less to chance for malicious programs to fall through operating system cracks.
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As I go through the daily grind on my trusty Thinkpad, I once in a while notice quirks in Linux Mint / Ubuntu that makes me miss certain small but important conveniences from Windows Vista. I’ve been taking notes, and here’s my list.
1. Too many reboots. I distinctly remember being able to use Windows Vista for 1 to 2 weeks without ever having to shut down my notebook. The Suspend feature worked great. On Linux Mint / Ubuntu, I probably reboot every two to three days because of the screen going totally blank or my notebook becoming unresponsive. And the most irritating experience is when I come back from lunch to find my notebook had rebooted by itself.
2. Slowdown in graphics. I honestly believe better graphics makes for a more pleasant and easy-to-use operating system, Linux included. But related to my first point, I notice I have to restart my computer or at least GNOME a few times in a week because Compiz starts slowing down. Whatever the cause for this is, I never had this problem in Windows.
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Server
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Vegesna: We are completely open-source at the core of Zoho, from the operating system (CentOS) to the database (MySQL) to the application server (Tomcat) to Hadoop for scaling our systems.
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Applications
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Have you ever gone somewhere and needed some files, only to find that you forgot your flash drive? Well, that can all change with a simple solution: Dropbox. As long as you have a connection to the Internet, your files can be with you wherever you go. Using Windows? No problem. Using a Mac? No problem. Using Linux? Of course, no problem. And soon there will be an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Prices are quite reasonable, and they even offer you a free 2GB account that never expires.
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Multimedia
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Adding Songbird and aTunes to the list, with the note that they can’t actually “win” because they aren’t in the Ubuntu repository.
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I still reach for VLC Media Player when I want an open source player that I know will handle almost any video file format that I throw at it. It’s out in a much overhauled new version as well, and is particularly good for broadcasting video content online. However, the community behind Miro has wisely focused it on playing and organizing video and audio content from all around the web, especially videocasts and podcasts. It really shines at that, especially this new version.
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Extensions
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OpenOffice is possibly one among the finest examples on what can be achieved in the world of Free Software. For starters, OpenOffice is an office application suite in the lines of Microsoft Office and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The latest stable release is OpenOffice 3.1. You may want to know how to install OpenOffice 3.1 in Ubuntu. Now let us take a look at the list of extensions you could use in OpenOffice.
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Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past year, you know that microblogging is all the rage. Web sites like Twitter, Identi.ca, and Laconica are incredibly popular for exchanging snippets of information, chatting with others, and quickly sharing links to interesting online content. It’s really a pain to jump from site to site to read your friends updates or provide your own, so here are five microblogging extensions for Firefox to help you out.
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So now I have my system functioning again and able to do what I need. Jaunty will be my base camp, the place I can go back to when/if I run into show-stopping difficulties. Now comes the exciting part: trying new distros and seeing how they compare to this baseline.
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Our verdict: Other distros are in danger of being outbuntu’d by this freedom loving, Gnome-centric star performer.9/10.
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Jolicloud is a Linux-based netbook OS that is built on top of Canonical’s Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It uses Mozilla’s Prism environment to make Web applications accessible outside of the browser.
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Syntext, Inc., a provider in developing software for XML content authoring solutions and related services, recently announced that it has released Serna free XML editor as open source software.
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While some educators have been quick to grasp the potential and promise of open source software, many others have been hesitant to stray from the comfortable zone of commercial applications. Yet that’s changing.
More teachers and institutions are now participating with organizations like SchoolForge, the Open Source Education Foundation, and Open Source Schools. These educators are beginning to see that the open source philosophy has the power to transform education in several key ways.
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Because the project is entirely open source, Wallis expects others to add useful files which users can just pick up and pop into their own websites. A tame programmer or web developer might save you a little time but this stuff is fairly straightforward, providing you resist the urge to panic or think “this is too techie for me”.
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Second, open source software is coming out from the realm of geeks into the real world. Many open source products have reached enough scale and maturity to seriously challenge their proprietary software counterparts. Claims by proprietary software firms that open source products suffer from a higher lifecycle cost and lack good quality support appear to be a case of sour grapes given the rapid proliferation of open source products such as Linux and the rise in the number of IT firms offering implementation and support services for open source products.
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At the press briefing, ASTI OIC Peter Banzon said that it was envisioned that the new technopark would welcome locators developing applications on the cutting edge of Open Source technology such as software that rely on the cloud computing model. However, it would also welcome locators developing bread-and-butter applications such as Open Source software for accounting and human resource administration.
[...]
Open Source software, such as Linux, belongs to this category. Their developers have built their revenue stream models on after sales services and consultancies.
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OSCON 2009
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In Silicon Valley, innovation is the fertilizer that makes the crops grow. With open source, software is more like topsoil, and those who nurture that soil believe they will prosper longer than those who just throw fertilizer on it.
Invention is the plant corporations harvest for their profit. Software is the environment on which everyone’s survival depends.
OSCON, I think, is better off in Portland.
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Google
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We already know that beginning September 30th, 100,000 invites to Google Wave will be released. But that’s a full two months away – what if you just can’t wait anymore to get your hands on Google WaveGoogle WaveGoogle Wave?
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Google programmers open source two components of the Google Wave messaging and collaboration prototype. One includes the Operational Transform, which forms the complex center of the Wave model. Google Wave is an example of the Pushbutton Web, where real-time communications rule the roost.
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Government
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Today’s Report of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, “A Healthier Future For All Australians: Final Report,” makes the e-health system a central plank in the future of health management in Australia.
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Eugene Teo, honorary member of the Linux Users’ Group Singapore (LUGS), said in an interview with ZDNet Asia, that interest among local developers have been moving toward mobile, Web and cloud computing platforms.
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‘Open Source’ as PR Ploy
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It’s not necessarily surprising that during the week of O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (aka OSCON), companies release open source code — just as they often release flashy consumer products during tradeshows to garner the most buzz from contingent news cycles.
[...]
Adobe and Microsoft are now engaged in similar forms of open-washing, applying the tastes-great, less-filling label, while doing everything they can to maintain their control and dominance in a given area — further cementing the historic distinction between “free” and “open”.
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Intuit, the makers of popular Quicken and Quickbooks software, today announced the out-of-beta launch of code.intuit.com, an open-source community where users can share information to enhance SaaS apps via the Intuit Partner Platform, announced last month.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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A growing number of civil libertarians and customer advocates wants Amazon to fundamentally alter its method for selling Kindle books, lest it be forced to one day change or recall books, perhaps by a judge ruling in a defamation case — or by a government deciding a particular work is politically damaging or embarrassing.
“As long as Amazon maintains control of the device it will have this ability to remove books and that means they will be tempted to use it or they will be forced to it,” said Holmes Wilson, campaigns manager of the Free Software Foundation.
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Yes, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos has apologized for the Orwellian removal of Orwell from digital book readers tucked inside the pockets of American citizens. And yes, the new-age retailer has promised not to repeat its Big Brother moment. But that’s not a promise it can promise to keep.
[...]
This uneasy feeling was only exacerbated by the fact that Amazon removed the books out from under Orwell lovers without explicitly telling them it was doing so. There were refund notices sent via email, but nothing more. Many Kindlers were left to wonder why their books had disappeared – while others wondered why there was a refund.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Then in summer 2008, I arrived home to find a letter addressed to me. The return address said “Harvard Law School”. Curiously, I opened and read it. “My name is Charles Nesson, professor of Law at Harvard. I caught wind of your case,” it said. “I can be of any assistance, don’t hesitate to call.” I called. Nesson picked up. I said, “Yes, you can be of assistance!” My mom drafted a letter to him, summarising where we were. The opening line read, “Dear Professor Godsend”.
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The Swedish Pirate Party’s goal of reducing copyright duration to five years is facing scrutiny from an unlikely critic. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, fears that reduced copyright terms will undermine copyleft licenses.
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Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, said Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, joining the refrain of media moguls who say an era of free Internet content is ending.
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I have a history lesson worth reading for those who think news should or may have a price online.
The common discussion among such people these days goes like this: “We’ve always charged people to read us in print, and so people ought to pay something for reading us online, too.”
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One of the biggest challenges which videogames are going to face in the coming years, however, is a slightly more abstract business concept. Ushered in by the digital era – not just by the technology, but by the subtle yet fundamental shifts in consumers’ thinking created by that technology – the concept of Free is slowly gathering pace, and threatens to wash away many of the business models which have supported media industries for a century or more.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 05 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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On the massively tardy show for this week, Dan & Fab talk about Microsoft submitting code to the Linux kernel, one-second boot times, Apple screwing with Palm, a cool RTS game that recently went open source and much, much more.
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Desktop
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My son arrived to identify what I was mumbling about and found the same scene. However, to him it was business as usual and he walked in to join Annie.
I asked him when he had learned to use Linux, to which he replied without hesitation, “Everybody knows Linux.”
He and Annie just kept playing and trying out some other games to see what I had loaded on the test machine.
Needless to say, for the next few minutes I just enjoyed the sight of my two kids fiddling with Linux, as if they had been using it for years. I couldn’t resist taking a few photos, and then of course it was time to get back to testing.
But in my amusement, I realized the significance of what had happened to me personally.
I realized that all of those years and countless people helping to promote Linux to schools had made a big difference.
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I’ve had many a discussion with people in various sectors of the professional world. Nearly every person I spoke with agrees with what I assumed to be a truth: At one point teaching school-age kids Microsoft, and only Microsoft, software was a safe bet. But things have changed. No longer is it safe to assume that every business uses MS software. Although most businesses are still sticking with one form of Windows or another, many of those same businesses are adopting OpenOffice, Firefox, and more as their software of choice. And thankfully for the students (and users of all ages and sorts) OpenOffice has done a great job of creating an interface that anyone used to MS Office will be comfortable with. So the preconceived notion that schools HAVE to teach Microsoft Office is not longer a given truth.
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The moral to this story is that people often associate the unknown with their problems. Linux was the thing that was different for him and, of course, it was to blame for his problem.
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Kernel Space
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While multi-seat computing has been available on Linux for years, it’s often been a chore to setup and required some time. Beyond just being time consuming and an unnecessary hassle, the way of setting up a multi-seat computer through an X Server with multiple nested Xephyr servers is not pleasant. There have been several attempts at improving the multi-seat Linux experience by creating a multi-seat display manager and taking various other steps, but to date this is still a challenge to setup. The good news though is that this may soon change.
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Applications
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But for the moment, Google sounds content to have Mozilla in the market. Mozilla and Google have been close, a relationship greased by a deal that makes Google the Firefox browser’s default home page and accounts for the lion’s share of Mozilla’s revenue.
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I can’t tell you how much fun I am having reliving my youth as I destroy those “muhah’ing” zombies. If you miss the days of SNES, I suggest you grab a copy of Zsnes and find your favorite ROM asap!
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In conclusion, the concept of Tiny Core Linux is an excellent one, and given it is a new distribution on the block I hope to see further development and expansion upon this concept.
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Ubuntu
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Shuttleworth, a former Debian developer, has spent millions of his own dollars funding Ubuntu and by all indications is genuinely committed to free software. If he decides to keep some code proprietary, he’s doing what he truly believes to be in the long-term interests of Ubuntu. But only time will tell whether Canonical’s policies will pay off.
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Finally, Ubuntu is a branch of Debian. Once a project grows beyond a certain point, it becomes difficult to make major changes on the spot. Major changes rarely come out perfect the first time, so they may need intensive regression testing before they can be considered stable enough even for development purposes. The changes also need to be coordinated with other developers, because they may interfere with their work.
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If you are going to try Linux, Rightardia recommends Ubuntu. You will get up to speed faster with Ubuntu.
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I am using Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Netbook-Remix, but these programs shoudl be platform independent. I will go with the pre-set menus that Ubuntu gives us all.
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To index progressively the changes as they happen, we should use inotify, this would then pass off the management process to the immediate computer run time. Threaded obviously.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #152 for the week July 19th – July 25th, 2009. In this issue we cover: Karmic Alpha 3 released, Launchpad is now open source, Ubuntu-US-NY is now an approved Ubuntu LoCo team, Focusing on the Launchpad UI, Answer contact can assign questions, Automatically import files to Launchpad using product release finder, Ubuntu Forums tutorial of the week, Kubuntu Translation Days, Ubuntu Podcast #31, and much, much more!
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According to multiple reports, Google is now offering developers a crack at some Android 2.0 features at the Android code repository. Android 2.0, which was codenamed “Donut,” was discussed at the Google I/O developer conference earlier this year. To listen to what Google had to say, watch the following clip (the Android part starts a couple minutes in).
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Earlier this month, when Google announced its Chrome OS and made clear that it is headed for netbooks, the news curbed many of the predictions people were making about the Android operating system’s prospects on netbooks. Google officials made clear that they were steering Android toward smartphones. That hasn’t stalled all of the efforts to bring Android to platforms other than smartphones, though. As PC World points out, device maker Touch Revolution is working on several types of touch-screen devices based on Android, including a line of cutting-edge remote controls for homes. Meanwhile, Japan’s OESF (Open Embedded Software Foundation) continues to push forward with plans to deliver devices running Android as an embedded operating system.
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After all, nobody is forcing anyone to use GPL code in their solutions. Well, at least I haven’t heard of anyone complaining of having RMS threating them with using GPLed code in their solutions or…. So if you don’t like the GPL, then don’t use code released under its terms. Stop wining about how bad the GPL is, do your homework and write your own code instead. I know…. there’s excellent GPL code out there and it’s gonna take time to reproduce it but… if you choose to use it, then abide by its rules. That’s all their creators asked for when they released the code under its terms after all, right?
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Standards/Consortia
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Wow! Now it says, “FAIL” in giant letters just to let you know that it does, in fact, fail. It probably says that in the IE7 rendering as well, but it’s difficult to tell what with all the mangled distortion of crap way up there.
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Furthermore, this demonstrates two existing IT trends. First one is wider adoption of ODF. Second is replacement of old, proprietary document formats with new, XML based, open and standardized document formats.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 04 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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07.26.09
Posted in News Roundup at 6:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This year they will be upgrading, installing WiFi and starting to use the laptops properly, something they didn’t do last year. Having spoken to this particular friend, I was pleasantly surprised and relieved to see that this little DELL Mini 9 was running Ubuntu Linux. Now the council obviously wanted to cut costs when preparing these, so they put Ubuntu Linux on them. I explained to this friend and her brother what Ubuntu was and the benefits but they didn’t want to accept it.
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Topics this year include OpenMoko, the collaborative web, parallelism, Drupal, GIMP, LVM, MPs’ expenses, spam fighting, and TeX. Plus there’s still the healthy social scene outside the talk sessions, where attendees can make new friends and renew old acquaintances.
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Before, we’ve posted here several cool and funny tux icons and some scary ones too. This time, we will showcase some of the finest tux icons that sports fans/Linux-users may love.
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Desktop
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When at press events like the Acer launch I was at today, I find myself asking this a lot – “will you be releasing a Linux version”. And more likely than not, I hear “nobody wants Linux, so no”.
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The good news for this blog is that the Linux experiment has worked. I have Windows virtualized on one machine using VirtualBox OSE for the occasional application that simply refuses to work with anything other than Windows.
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VirtualBox 3.02 seems to be really good though. The USB pass through and auto-filtering is just brilliant (so Ubuntu doesn’t alert when you plug in the iPod when the VM is running; it goes straight through to the Windows VM). It does seem to take quite a long time for the whole Windows/iTunes thing to settle down after I’ve plugged the iPod in but it might be just because it’s a big 120G iPod anyway… But it isn’t a major issue.
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Server
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The company’s “young tech wizards” had done an analysis, Quinn said. At the start, they hadn’t been sure about Sun’s future, although since then it had been bought by Oracle, so Quinn thought the company would probably survive. In the end, however, the team believed that Linux was more what the company needed. “We didn’t want to have four,” Quinn said.
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Kernel Space
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About a year ago I made some notes about plucking out parts of the 2.6.25.5 kernel — as well as some other ideas — with a goal of knocking down the boot time on an eight-year-old 550Mhz Celeron to about 16 seconds from Grub to X. I’ve configured a lot of kernels for a variety of machines in that time, and I have a few more subtractions to recommend.
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Applications
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To-do list programs can help you stay organized and boost productivity. Ars looks at GTG, KOrganizer, and other task management tools for the Linux desktop.
I’ve found that maintaining a proper to-do list consistently boosts my productivity. The challenge, however, is finding task management software that fits with my workflow. I’ve tried several web solutions—including Remember the Milk (RTM) and a self-hosted Tracks setup—but the problem with browser-based to-do lists is that I tend to ignore what’s not immediately visible on my desktop. Fortunately, there are several reasonably good open source to-do list tools for Linux.
I recently started using Getting Things GNOME (GTG), an organizer for the GNOME desktop environment that provides a robust feature set and a relatively high level of usability. Although it’s still at an early stage of development and has some rough edges, it meets my needs better than any of the other to-do list programs that I’ve tested. It has supported for nested substasks, tagging, and task notes.
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I’m very, very happy to announce that the KMess team has released KMess version 2.0, after more than an year and an half of development!
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One of the most important programs in the toolbox of any converter of ideas to physical things is Autocad. This program has pretty well become the standard of every research and development branch in factories. Many attempts have been made, and quite a few have been successful, to have Autocad running under Linux.
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Games
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Version 0.5 of the eSports oriented FPS is soon to be released, but for that the Warsow team is looking for in game scenes for a promotion trailer, as they state in an article on their website.
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If the thought of free frags makes your trigger finger twitch, take a look at AssaultCube. This open-source first person shooter doesn’t offer much in the way of snazzy graphics or major frills, and there’s no storyline or plot. Just a selection of maps where you can hunt or be hunted by other players or computer-controlled bots. But the multi-platform AssaultCube can run on Windows, Linux or Macs, and its minimum system requirements are so low that just about any computer should be able to run it (Pentium III 500Mhz and nVidia GeForce 256 or equivalents, 128MB RAM). Plus, the entire game fits into a compact 40MB download.
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If your gaming needs are a little off the cutting-edge, Linux can be a viable alternative. And it’s an alternative that has many advantages of its own. There are no viruses, no wayward processes chugging away in the background, no spyware, lie-ware, trojans or worms, and you have complete control over your system.
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KDE
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There’s a new Qt and Plasma theme in KDE 4.3 that looks pretty nice. Overall every release of KDE4 seems to become more stable, more polished, more eye-candy (if you want it).
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Aurelien Gateau and the rest of the Canonical Desktop Experience folks have been working super hard to get the visual notifications on KDE and Gnome united as part of their Project Ayatana. This involves uniting the Galago and KDE VisualNotification DBus interfaces. Along the way freedesktop.org had to get fixed to make such cooperation possible
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A new Plasma-based custom KDE desktop shell is designed to deliver a better user experience on netbooks and other devices with small screens. Ars takes a look at the prototype to see how it compares to the conventional KDE desktop environment.
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Red Hat
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Now some venture-capital firms are trying to tamp down the anxiety levels over taking a company public. Earlier this week, Benchmark Capital–which has invested in hits such as eBay and Red Hat over the years–held an IPO workshop for 20 of its largest portfolio companies. The event was designed to walk startup CEOs through the IPO landscape and to debunk some of the myths about the hurdles of going public.
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is trading 2.1% higher (up $0.48 to $23.72) today on volume of 2,464,566 shares. The stock has breached its 52-week high of $23.48.
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If you are one of those open source aficionados using Fedora, you must be looking to lend a cool look to your system. What could be better than allowing a complete makeover to your Fedora. Well, there are fantabulous Fedora themes that can enhance your desktop, background, icons and more. Fedora theme are no simple delights, each of them patronize and symbolize the inherent nature of the ever improving operating system that is said to hold a greate future. For now, its your turn to make your Fedora appear fascinating and inspiring. We have assorted the top notch Fedora themes just for you.
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Ubuntu
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I recently found the need to install Ubuntu on a machine with a poor CD drive (and no USB ports) that could not read large amounts of data, but could manage to read smaller amounts of data. As such, the machine could not read the 700MB but could read smaller amounts, like 10MB.
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So all in all I now have four installations of this OS around my house. My websever runs it (you’re using it right now) and my fileserver is running on it as well. No issues at all on these boxes, even during the upgrade to 8.10 and then onto 9.04. My laptop is now humming with some initial hiccups that were resolved as is my VMware installation. Will it kill Microsoft? Probably not. But it’s a damn good OS and, in particular applications, it’s the best OS for the job.
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I think that we in the Ubuntu Server Community are leading the charge in developing an energy-efficient server class Linux distribution.
It is my hope that by the 10.04 LTS release, the Ubuntu Server is widely recognized as the de facto Green Computing Server Platform.
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New Releases
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The CoreCD is a text-based release. There is no X-Server, Gnome, or KDE provided.
The Feature list is intentionally short:
* Bootable Image suitable for a CD or USB thumb drive (~400M)
* Text-Based installer
* Basic default networking
* Entropy and Portage ready
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The antiX-team is proud to announce that an updated antiX MEPIS 8.2 Final is available at MEPIS mirrors in the testing directory and the released/antix directory.
Anti announced “On behalf of the antiX-team I am proud to announce that antiX MEPIS 8.2 is a fast, light, flexible and complete desktop and livecd based on SimplyMEPIS and Debian Testing is now available in full and base versions. This release defaults to a fully customised icewm desktop (fluxbox is also installed) using a SimplyMEPIS 2.6.27-25 kernel and tweaked MEPIS Assistants for better compatibility in antiX.”
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Reviews
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I am really enjoying the time spent with antiX MEPIS 8.2. It’s speedy, it’s responsive, it has plenty of useful tools, it looks as good as an IceWM system can look (oh, I forgot to mention… I absolutely love the icons!) and it’s very flexible. Good stuff, really! 
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The announcement for the release of antiX M8.2 can be found here on the antiX forum site, and as usual, I recommend it.
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GoboLinux is a Linux distribution I heard about from a friend who said that it looked interesting for its flagship property – a simpler file structure. I decided to check it out.
I downloaded the distribution ISO from their website, which was easy enough, and booted up VirtualBox with that ISO mounted as a drive.
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All in all, I liked Crunchbang very much. It really gave new life to my old Vaio.
If you’re willing to use the command line every now and then then, with the help of a very active community you can setup your system any way you want. Crunchbang is easily the best compromise between speed, looks and difficulty I’ve found so far. I definitely recommend trying it.
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Mandriva 2009.1 is overall an excellent transition from Windows to Linux, and comes with many great features for the tech-savvy user who wants an improved, sleek desktop look and feel as well as an abundance of programs to use. Before its merger with Conectiva, Mandrake Linux was concerned with making the Linux desktop more compatible for the end user, easier to understand and operate, as well as all-around better looking. With those goals in mind, Mandriva Linux as it is known today has accomplished those goals of popularizing the Linux desktop all while creating an awesome user-interface that gives the utmost control to the computer user.
[...]
All in all, the Mandriva 2009.1 is a great Linux environment that has the power to give both Linux-familiar and new-to-Linux users an awesome look, feel, and experience! With the 20,000 program directory that Mandriva 2009.1 contains and all the new programs that are unique to Mandriva Linux along with the quick, easy, and out-of-the-box instant setup, anyone coming to Mandriva 2009.1 should find it to be an enjoyable time!
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Phones
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In another document that was given to us by our friends in the East Coast reads the following about the upcoming Bell Palm Pre: “Palm Inc. has chosen Bell as the exclusive carrier to introduce the 3G Palm Pre to the Canadian market – the most important launch in Bell’s history”.
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Today Palm made webOS 1.1 available for the Palm Pre. The changelog is outrageous. There’s only one new application, but most of the Pre’s systems see major updates. Oh, and Palm fixed the Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes.
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Palm has released Palm webOS 1.1 to target its Pre smartphone at enterprises, according to a Palm executive
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Sub-notebooks
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I did a fair amount of research this month on netbooks, and ended up choosing the Toshiba NB200 (or NB205 as it is in the US) as what I thought was the best option currently. I read quite a few reviews online, and paid attention to the reviews comparing among netbooks the real world issues that aren’t often covered by comparing specs. Each computer maker seems to have a netbook now trying to corner the market, and they’re almost all the same hardware it seems. But good notebook review sites measure practical concerns like screen brightness outdoors, contrast, heat, fan noise, keyboard feel, and actual battery life.
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* Boot is insanely quick. BIOS appears to take longer to come up.
* Alpha software, not Beta. Crashes a lot. Functionality doesn’t consistently work.
* Reworked UI hints at amazing amount of promise. So many interesting new possibilities. So many of which are yet unrealized.
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I consider software important. Really really important. Why?
Most people don’t really understand just how much power software has over our current society. Let’s pretend all the software in the world was really just one single person. What could that person do?
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The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), an open-source project that develops, tests, licenses and distributes Linux and Windows driver and middleware software for high-performance, low-latency Ethernet and InfiniBand networks, today announced that more than 40 percent of the 100 top-performing HPC systems, and as many as 60 percent of all new HPC installations worldwide, utilize OpenFabrics Software as an Enterprise Distribution (OFED) for parallel computing, low-latency interconnects, and/or file-system operations.
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Ever thrown your hands up in despair when that much-anticipated video file would not play without yet another round of codec/plug-in installations? If your answer is an emphatic ‘No,’ you probably are already on to the Video Lan way of life — free and independent, even literally so.
The VLC player, which finally released version 1.0 this month after a decade of development, is truly a labour of love — in true Unix tradition development, versions till now were numbered under 1.0. This is the legacy of the free software (and open source) world, where developer communities — and not corporations — develop and own the software and distribute it freely. VLC is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
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The students at Lincoln College have been breaking the mould and testing Linux Operating Systems as part of their IT courses. Local IT support company, ForLinux Ltd, has been working with the college over the last 6 months to support and aid the learning of Lincoln College students and to open their minds to the potential of alternative operating systems. ForLinux were initially approached at the start of the year by Barry Smith, a Curriculum Tutor from Lincoln College, and asked to give a presentation to students on Open Source operating systems and the relationship has grown from there.
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Celine and Charlene trumped most of the older competitors handily in the contest organised by the Information Technology Standards Committee and supported by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA)
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Speaking of the winners, here they are:
* Best Commercial Open Source Project: PortableApps.com (portableapps.com)
* Best New Project: Eeebuntu (eeebuntu.org)
* Best Project: PortableApps.com (portableapps.com)
* Best Project for Academia: XMind (xmind.net)
* Best Project for Gamers: ScummVM (scummvm.org)
* Best Project for Government: OpenOffice.org (openoffice.org)
* Best Project for Multimedia: Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net)
* Best Project for the Enterprise: Firebird (firebirdsql.org)
* Best Tool or Utility for Developers: Notepad++ (notepad-plus.sourceforge.net)
* Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin (phpmyadmin.net)
* Best Visual Design: PortableApps.com (portableapps.com)
* Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything: PortableApps.com
(portableapps.com)
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Web Browsers
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While hailing the emergence of an “Open Web,” a high-ranking Mozilla official on Friday nonetheless stressed that steps still must be taken to preserve openness in the face of potential threats.
The official, Mark Surman, Mozilla executive director, urged participation in the “OneWeb Day” set for September 22.
[...]
“If you want the Web to be more secure, let’s get rid of the 100 million copies of IE (Microsoft Internet Explorer) 6 that are still out there,” said Surman, whose employer is best known as the maker of the Firefox browser that rivals IE.
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Say you want to look up words using Cambridge Dictionaries Online Web site. Navigate to dictionary.cambridge.org, right-click on the search box, and select Add a Keyword for this Search. Give the new bookmark a name and assign a keyword to it, for example, camb. Next time you want to perform a search, enter camb followed by the query into the Location bar, for example: camb monkey. Hit Enter, and you should see a list of found results
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In its effort to detangle itself from the ongoing proceedings of the European Union antitrust case, it seems Microsoft is offering to include rival web browsers in the Windows OS. Revealed in a statement by the European Commission, Microsoft offered to give consumers a choice of browser installation through a browser ballot screen. New computer owners running Windows may get a chance to choose their browsers form a variety of software makers.
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Finally, users don’t need to wait for Google to get a simple, secure, open-source, Web-centric operating system. The versions of Linux shipping on many netbooks already match most of this description.
Want to turn a Linux netbook into a Chrome look-alike? Set its Firefox browser to run on startup in full-screen mode, then lock out access to every other application on the netbook.
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Audio
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Topics for this podcast:
* The Myth of Open Source License Proliferation
* Microsoft contributes Linux kernel drivers under GPLv2
* Linux and open source loom large in cloud computing
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Hosts: Randal Schwartz
“DHH” talks about Ruby on Rails, 37Signals, and how he came late to coding.
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On Tuesday night (July 21st) I gave a talk at a meeting of the Manchester Free Software group. It was about audio production with Linux and Free Software. Basically how I produce many podcasts and other things using only Free and Open Source software. I wanted to upload the slides and share them here with everyone. I hope they’ll be interesting and somehow useful on their own, but don’t worry there was HD video taken on the night – courtesy of Tim Dobson – which I hope to be able to share with you very soon. Everything is available under a Creative Commons license, naturally.
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Business
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The Enterprise Service Bus [ESB] has been intrinsic to many SOA programs in recent years. You can say you are doing SOA and not have done an ESB. But there is a high likelihood a successful SOA program includes successful ESBs.
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OSCON 2009
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Organizers of a major open source technology conference said today there’s a “good chance” they’ll return the event to Portland next summer following one year in San Jose.
The weeklong O’Reilly Open Source Convention spent six years in Portland before moving to California for the 2009 event, which wrapped up this afternoon. At the convention’s closing address, in response to a question, organizers told attendees they would probably move the event back to Portland in 2010.
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OSCON 2009 is now drawing to a close, and, before we hop on a flight back to the UK, we spent an hour or two typing up just a few snippets from some of the interviews we conducted at the conference. So, if you’d like to read what Jacob Kaplan-Moss thinks about Google, what Jim Zemlin thinks about Larry Lessig, what Michael Tiemann thinks about lobbyists, what Stormy Peters thinks about KDE, what Evan Prodromou thinks about Miguel de Icaza and what Bradley Kuhn thinks about Mono, read on…
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Openness
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The marketing agent, that is Google, had to share the cut with the data provider who was providing the content to the people. What if there was a way to not share the cut with the provider of the content? Yes there is a simple way – if you become the provider of the content. This is what Google tried to do next and is still in the process of trying.
Google Groups, GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube, Google Maps, Orkut, Blogger, are all attempts by Google to become THE place to keep your content if you indeed want to store content publicly. The deal they offered to the public was that they would store everybody’s content for free.
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In a settlement announced Monday, the world’s oldest and largest newsgathering operation forced All Headline News to discontinue its practice of rewriting AP stories and posting them to the AHN site with a new byline and no credit. The site, which sells news to the media, dubs itself as “The Missing Piece to Your News and Content Puzzle.”
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Mike Morgan, a Florida-based investment adviser who started the controversial blog GoldmanSachs666.com, has prevailed in a case he brought against the investment bank in April.
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Millions of people use torrent sites every day, but little is known about the people who operate these traffic moguls. This summer TorrentFreak will feature the workstations and offices belonging to some of the leading figures in the BitTorrent community, starting with the founder of BTjunkie.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 03 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Send this to a friend
07.25.09
Posted in News Roundup at 5:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Look for personal computer users to soon get their hardware in the same way that they get their cell phones: for free as part of telecommunications service subscriptions, the executive director of the Linux Foundation said on Friday afternoon.
In a presentation at the O’Reilly OSCON (Open Source Convention), Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin said a trend will emerge in which users would select a wireless or network service provider and get a free PC when buying a data plan. AT&T, he said, already is offering netbooks as part of a service plan, with the user getting the netbook for $50.
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CodeWeavers, Inc. today announced that recent sales trends position them to overtake Microsoft’s operating revenue in 2018, based on Microsoft’s fourth quarter report dated July 23, 2009 showing a 17 percent decrease in revenue quarter over quarter.
Yesterday while eating lunch at his desk, CodeWeavers President and CEO Jeremy White spied a story reporting that Microsoft’s quarterly revenues had decreased 17 percent – leading to the first year-over-year decline in their 34-year history. “I nearly spit a mouthful of a Jimmy John’s Turkey Tom sandwich onto my desk in excitement and awe,” he said, “because our own revenues had grown by more than 20 percent during our fourth quarter.”
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While we just shared that there are now patches available that introduce HDMI audio support for the xf86-video-ati driver, the RadeonHD driver has picked up improvements for power management, an area where previously the xf86-video-ati driver was in a better position. Novell’s Matthias Hopf added some power management support for an area of the AtomBIOS that he had reverse engineered, after AMD hadn’t provided any public documentation on the matter.
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Applications
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A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, typically carrying audio narration. Screencasting software takes a series of screenshots of a running application, recording the user’s actions, and creating a video file. The movies can be output in a variety of different formats such as Theora, Macromedia Flash (SWF), AVI, and Flash Video (FLV). This type of software was brought into prominence by the commercial Windows application Lotus ScreenCam in 1994.
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The latest version of Shutter (0.80) takes the “serious stuff” to the next level by adding six new features to the Edit tool. Shutter’s screenshot-taking features alone make it worth installing but the additions for editing make it the software of choice. This article describes the latest tools.
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Red Hat
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The Scientific Linux enterprise platform is available in version 4.8. Next to those from the upstream, downloads can be single packages.
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Red Hat is sowing the seeds of open source software development among college professors.
This week a fourth-floor meeting room at the company’s Centennial Campus headquarters in Raleigh is the site of a boot camp for faculty from a half-dozen universities, including N.C. Central and Elon. It’s a prototype for a program whose ultimate goal is to immerse computer science students in real-world open-source development projects.
[...]
Red Hat, which is poised to join the Standard & Poor’s 500 index after the market closes today, makes its money by bundling Linux with various levels of support services.
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Ubuntu
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A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu developers unleashed the third alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) operating system, which is scheduled for release in late October this year. As usual, we’ve downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up to date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 9.10 development.
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It’s clear from the approaches above that putting a hard number on Ubuntu’s market share is impossible. Canonical seems reluctant to put forward any qualified figure, which is unfortunate–minimally, it would be nice to see an honest attempt at transparent analysis similar to Fedora’s statistics.
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Phones
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The Nuvifone G60, which has a 3.55-inch touchscreen and uses a Linux OS, will be in stores July 27 in Taiwan and then in Singapore and Malaysia by the end of August, the company said. The smartphone will be available in Europe and the U.S. later this year.
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The touch-screen handset was first introduced by Garmin in January of 2008, and its location-based features made some industry watchers think it could be a decent alternative to Apple’s iPhone. But the handset has faced multiple delays as Garmin struggled to create a Linux-based mobile operating system from scratch, and Apple has already released two new iPhone models since Garmin first announced its handset.
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Sub-notebooks
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But lo and behold, Dell has brought back its itty-bitty Netbook for $199 until July 27. The price gives you bare necessities: the Ubuntu Linux OS, a 4G SSD, a Webcam, and other basic features.
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But wait! While searching the Ubuntu website, I noticed an advertisement for a local distribution known as “Netbook Remix”. After delving into the details, I found that this OS was DESIGNED, that’s right, designed, to be used on small laptops (much like my Acer).
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From the first prototype portable computer in 1968 to the OLPC XO (an inspiration for netbooks) to the CrunchPad Web tablet of the near future, these 16 notebooks mark important stages in the progress of laptops.
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Laptops are closing the price gap on less-powerful netbooks, with retailers delivering fully equipped systems for under US$300 as part of promotional offers.
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With Intel looking to Linux for its Moblin operating system solution for portable device, the Wintel alliance between Microsoft and Intel – which has long had the stranglehold on personal computing – is showing signs of weakening.
Of course Windows XP/Vista/7 will not run on an ARM processor, so this next generation of devices will see some interesting, not to say overdue, diversification in user interfaces. At the core of many if not most devices will be Linux, skinned with something a bit more approachable than a geeky command-line interface. Maybe even more user-friendly than the current ‘best fit’ of Ubuntu Linux that we saw on the Pegatron.
While Ubuntu is a reasonable clone of the Windows desktop paradigm, in order to make personal computing a truly easy ride for all generations of the family, we should see some interesting graphical interfaces appear on new ARM/Linux mobile internet devices.
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Fog Computing
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What worries free software advocates is that their software can be enhanced without sharing the source, if the software is hidden behind a web interface. I claimed that this is not really a threat to the free software movement because modern languages and development tools make it so easy to replicate a service. In fact, we have so many people creating so many services that nobody has time to try all the ones that interest him.
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- Tropo “Shims” for Groovy, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby programming languages. Tropo Shims adapt the Tropo core API for use in a specific programming language. Open-sourcing these components enables Tropo to quickly support other programming languages. By releasing this code and working with the open-source telephony community, Voxeo hopes to add support for additional programming languages such as Clojure, JavaFX, and Scala.
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Hardware/Hybrid
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We’ve all been on the wrong end of a solution that was sold as inexpensive, free, time-saving, energy saving or one that offered a quick return on investment only to end up spending more on that alternative solution than a mainstream one. For some technologies, you’re better off with a brand name, but for a select few, generic is the only way to go. FreeNAS is one of those surprising projects that not only saves you a huge amount of money but is so simple to use that you’ll wonder why there’s so much mystery surrounding network-attached storage(NAS).
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After years in the making, the AcceleGlove open source data glove is now available for purchase from Anthrotronix. Originally designed for use as an automated American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter, the AcceleGlove can be used for a host of other applications. Thanks to the open source Software Development Kit (SDK) provided with the glove, developers and hobbyists alike can adapt the glove for use in assistive technology, rehabilitation, robotics, video gaming, virtual reality or a computing input device to name a few.
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Business
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At the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), WSO2, also known as the open source SOA company, announced the availability of the WSO2 Governance Registry 3.0 and the WSO2 Identity Server 2.0, two new installments in its family of open source service-oriented architecture tools.
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A UK construction group’s growth has been assisted by outsourcing its IT systems to one of Europe’s fastest growing Open Source services groups. Killby & Gayford (K&G) announced today that its partnership with Sirius Corporation plc is part of a restructuring programme to lower costs and increase operational flexibility.
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Government
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We have examples of endeavours such as Wikipedia, that are only able to be created by a community, working together to create something they could not create individually. The Open Source Software community is another example. Such community efforts deliver efficiency, but the primary driver is an ethical one; as Glyn Moody comments when discussing the General Public License “It is not trying to be “efficient”, it is trying to be ethical; ideally you want both – and in many respects, the culture that the GNU GPL fosters is extremely efficient. But if efficiency and ethics clash, ethics win every time.”
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Government authorities in the Indian State of Kerala will save more $US2.27 million by using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) on computers to be installed in schools throughout the state as part of an $US11.7 million (Rs.57 Crore) expansion to its IT@School project.
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Licensing
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This is important not just because it shows that there’s considerable vigour in the GNU GPL licence yet, but because version 3 addresses a particularly hot area at the moment: software patents. The increasing use of GPL v3, with its stronger, more developed response to that threat, is therefore very good news indeed.
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Openness
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The meta-issues that question suggests, which touch on software as a service (SaaS), Internet architecture decisions, and “cloud” software licensing, were the topic of a panel discussion moderated by Bradley Kuhn from the Software Freedom Law Center, “With Software as a Service, Is Only the Network Luddite Free?”
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Programming
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The forthcoming standard for the object-oriented language C++ will not be released before 2010. It will also lack the planned ‘concepts’ mechanism. This is according to information in a Dr. Dobbs Journal article by C++’s inventor, Bjarne Stroustrup. Concepts have been “decoupled” – or in Stroustrup’s words “yanked out” – by the ISO group responsible for the standard, Working Group 21.
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Many tens of thousands of words have been printed over the years in attempts to answer the question “Why would anyone want to code for free?” Sometimes it is phrased more bitingly, like “Richard Stallman thinks programmers should work for free and starve to death!” With rare exceptions, various pundits, analysts, and random passersby have tried to explain these issues without asking any actual developers, or having any coding experience themselves. And thus in a daring deed of the blindingly obvious, I asked several experienced, professional developers for their views on the subject. These will be published next week in Part 2. Today I’m going to look at the value of Free/Open Source software to the non-coder, us lowly end users.
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WordPress is no longer just used to power blogs. It has become the CMS of choice for many web designers. It’s always interesting to see how it’s flexibility provides web designers with the freedom to design sites with no limitations. Here are 15 beautiful web sites all powered by WordPress.
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Google isn’t only crawling your Web site, it’s looking at your source code as well. That was the introduction for Chris DiBona, the open source programs manager at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), one of several keynote speakers here at OSCON 2009 today.
While Google Code Search has been available through Google Labs for some time, DiBona revealed some telling — and potentially — unexpected findings about the state of open source.
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Dear AP: your RSS feed is for syndicating your stories. If you don’t want the content out there, don’t syndicate the content!
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DRM has failed in almost every instance it’s been tried. Not only does it fail to actually prevent copying, it tends to piss off legitimate users and limit value rather than enhance it. And yet… people keep trying. But, honestly, I can’t think of anything as pointless as the latest move from the Associated Press which appears to be an attempt to DRM the news
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Most scholars will tell you, quite correctly, that the very first modern copyright law was the Statute of Anne. which was passed in 1710 in the Kingdom of Great Britain (now the United Kingdom). Prior to its passing, copyright was handled more by giving monopolies to publishers. The Statute of Anne had term limits, namely 21 years and a familiar goal, to promote the printing of new works.
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We’ve discussed a few times over the years how copyright gets in the way of academic work. Journals (who get all of their writing and reviewing totally for free) insist on holding the copyright for those works in many cases. I’ve even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn’t even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim.
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Last week, the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK sent a threatening letter to a Wikimedia volunteer regarding the upload of public domain paintings to Wikimedia’s media repository, Wikimedia Commons.
The fact that a publicly funded institution sent a threatening letter to a volunteer working to improve a non-profit encyclopedia may strike you as odd. After all, the National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1856, with the stated aim of using portraits “to promote appreciation and understanding of the men and women who have made and are making British history and culture.” [source] It seems obvious that a public benefit organization and a volunteer community promoting free access to education and culture should be allies rather than adversaries.
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We’ve noticed that pretty much every single new and innovative digital music startup that pops up eventually gets sued by the record labels.
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Restaurants and clubs threaten to pull plug over bid to increase background music fees
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Netizens of South Korea could find themselves at the mercy of a copyright infringement firestorm today, as a tough new copyright law takes effect. A prominent social networking site is sending warnings to its customers about their behavior, noting that far reaching penalties include 6 month Internet disconnections.
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The Big 4 record labels, Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US), are distinctly unhappy with France’s National Assembly.
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Internet service provider (ISP) Karoo, based in Hull, has changed its policy of suspending the service of users suspected of copyright violations.
The about face was made following a BBC story outlining the firm’s practice.
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It’s no secret that the web’s been buzzing about Tim Burton’s theatrical rendition of Alice in Wonderland, coming out in March 2010. With Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Anne Hathaway as The White Queen, and the unique directing style of Tim Burton, how could there not be throngs of excited moviegoers?
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 02 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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07.24.09
Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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BRU Server 2.0, an upgrade of the network backup solution. It supports networks of Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and many other Unix-platform systems. Enhanced functionality is delivered across multiple platforms.
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A U.K.-based provider of enabling technology for the communications market today announced the release of the latest version of its host media processing product with embedded support for Linux OS.
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Desktop
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In Germany, two of the top 10 best-selling laptops currently run Linux. What do these folks know that we don’t?
[...]
The popularity of Linux laptops in Germany suggests otherwise. The question remains, however: What accounts for the discrepancy? Does it make sense to suggest that Germans take a fundamentally different approach towards desktop usability compared to their American (or English, or French) counterparts?
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A look at the current (23rd July 2009) Amazon.de (Germany) Laptop/Notebook bestsellers list will be a nice surprise for any desktop Linux advocate and possibly a worry for Microsoft and Apple sales executives. At the time of writing there are two Laptops with pre-installed Linux in the top ten bestsellers, both in front of the first bestselling Apple Laptop.
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I finessed my way into regularly using Ubuntu Linux and Puppy Linux on all of my computers.
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I named this post “Tracker” first as I started writing from that perspective, but the problems I’m about to talk are more related to what is called “semantic desktop” and not specific to Tracker, which is just the GNOME implementation to that idea.
This post is a collection of my thoughts on this whole topic. What I originally wanted to do was improve Epiphany’s history handling. Epiphany still deletes your history after 10 days for performance reasons. When people suggesting Tracker I started investigating it, both for this purpose and in general.
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Kernel Space
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The 2009 kernel summit is planned for October in Tokyo. Over the years, your editor has observed that the discussion on what to discuss at the summit can sometimes be as interesting as the summit itself. Recently, the question of how user-space programmers can communicate requirements to the kernel community was raised. The ensuing discussion was short on definitive answers, but it did begin to clarify a problem in an interesting way.
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Intel’s Wind River subsidiary is now the leader in embedded Linux, at least when it comes to revenues, according to the market analysis by VDC Research.
Wind River, which was acquired in June by Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) for $884 million, has more than 30 percent of the total market revenue for embedded Linux, VDC found.
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Applications
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Micro-blogging is all the rage these days. It is a webservice which allows the subscriber to send short text updates or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. Subscribers can read microblog posts online or request that updates be delivered in real time to their desktop as an instant message or sent to a mobile device as an SMS text message.
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There’s really nothing that hard about installing programs on Linux. Anyone who still uses shell commands like say, “apt-get install some-program-or-the-other,” is doing so because they want to do it that way, not because they have to. Programs like Debian and Ubuntu’s Synaptic, Fedora’s yum or openSUSE’s YaST makes installing programs little more than a matter of point and click. Still, some people have trouble, so Ubuntu is reviving a dusty, old project, AppCenter so that anyone can install Linux programs.
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The Miro team has released the first Release Candidate of Miro version 2.5. There is not much information on what Miro 2.5 is supposed to be, but it seem much emphasis has been made to make Miro faster to launch and easier to hack on.
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Comic books, DVDs, old vinyl albums, Star Wars figurines — collecting things is fun. What’s not fun, though, is keeping track of it all. When you have large collection of anything from books to steampunk LEGOS, it’s important to keep an inventory so you know what you’ve got, what you still need, and who borrowed something. Here are five open source collection management apps to help you organize your stuff.
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Google is developing an O3D (Open 3D) plug-in integrated in Chrome browser which is meant for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in the browser window.
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Thunderbird 3 beta 3 is now available to download for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. The beta introduces some significant improvements to the open-source desktop client, from performance to interface.
The new beta is built on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.9.1.1 platform, keeping it up to date with the latest changes that affect Firefox. Mozilla also claims that there are more than 500 changes in this version, and hints at more alterations to come by stating in a press release that many of them are ”laying the groundwork for future changes”. On his blog, Chief Technical Officer of Mozilla Messaging Dan Mosedale said that many of the improvements will help support the new global database search engine. Based on these comments, more betas of Thunderbird 3 are expected.
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Desktop Environments
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Most communities fail to reach critical mass because someone becomes interested in your project, and just bounces off it, because of some difficulties they meet when engaging you. To build a successful community, it is usually sufficient to build a compelling vision, and remove all non-essential barriers to participation in your project that exist.
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For the Emerald window decoration I downloaded Liberty Green. To install it I click on Emerald Theme Manager by right clicking the Fusion Icon. Then I click on the import button and find where I downloaded the file. I could see the new theme available and double clicked it.
I used Murrina Verde Olivo for GTK. I created the directory ~/.themes and copied the downloaded tarball into it. From there I extracted the tarball then deleted it. When i went to Appearances from the Settings menu I could see my newly installed GTK Theme.
Jungle Green was my choice for an Icon set. I repeated the steps above for the GTK theme, only I created a ~/.icons directory. And in Appearances I found the new set listed under the Icon tab.
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KDE
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Let’s bust some myths today because a majority of KDE 4 haters out there have the same reasons for hating it. I’m pretty sick of seeing posts and news articles about “why I don’t like KDE 4″ and then seeing that the real reason the person is upset is because they don’t spend an extra few moments trying to figure things out…aka lazy and ignorant.
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During the final days of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the fourth edition of Akademy-es was held in the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Akademy-es is the sister of Akademy aimed at Spanish speakers.
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I still remember how eagerly I had waited for the KDE 4 release. I also remember how disappointed I was when it actually came out in January 2008. With that release, KDE lost one of its foremost advocates – Linus Torvalds, to its rival GNOME. Linus was also quoted as having said, “… I suspect I’m not the only person they (KDE community) lost”. He was right. I had given up on KDE too after being a user for almost seven years. Everything was broken. It wasn’t even qualified to be called a release. Since then, I think the project has come a long way.
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The minimum recommended requirement in order to use the main LiveCD is 256MB. However, you will only need 16MB for the “slitaz-loram-cdrom” flavor.
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Pardus is surprisingly good and is certainly well worth a download for anybody in the market for an off-the-beaten path desktop distribution. Beginners can certainly give Pardus a whirl and intermediate and advanced Linux users might also enjoy it.
If you aren’t sure about trying Pardus 2009 then hold off until the Live CD version is ready so you don’t have to install it to check it out.
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The 5.0 version of rBuilder boasts several major new features. eWEEK Labs’ tests of the platform, through Version 5.2.1, shows that rBuilder makes it easier to churn out virtual machine images for immediate deployment, and that the Web-based management interface that rBuilder pairs with the appliances it creates is handy. However, Labs did run into some configuration issues, as well as some issues with the new Flash-based Web front end.
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I happen to choose a trilogy of distributions because I am looking for three different styles of systems:
1. Cutting edge
2. Lean and fast
3. Stable and relatively non volatile
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The next installation of Infocomm Live! is here. This time, you get to meet Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat Inc.
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Ubuntu
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The development of the next version of Ubuntu continues with the third alpha release of Karmic Koala. According to the announcement, this alpha contains software updates which “are now ready for large scale testing”. Alpha 3 is one of a number of milestones which the Ubuntu developers release as they progress towards the final October release of Ubuntu 9.10.
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Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud package includes the UCSB-developed Eucalyptus cloud-building software — the first Linux distribution to include a do-it-yourself cloud kit. Eucalyptus adds a number of new functions to Ubuntu, such as end-user customization, self-service provisioning, legacy application support and automated power controls.
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Android
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Gadget manufacturers will launch a range of Android-based devices for use in and around the home this year, according to a touchscreen gadget company.
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In a sign that Google’s Android mobile platform has a future far beyond cellphones, San Francisco-based start-up Touch Revolution says a string of well-known companies will introduce a range of Android-powered household gadgets before the end of the year.
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We keep hearing that a lot of OEMs are working on Android smartphones, even though only a few have made it to market. There is an explosion of Android phones set to appear this year and early next year. Phone maker HTC is one of the biggest players in the smartphone world, and the largest maker of Windows Mobil phones around. It produces some of the most popular phones on the market, the Touch and Touch Pro among them.
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Sales of Android smartphones must been promising enough for HTC, the smartphone specialists, to plan a substantial increase in the proportion of Android-based smartphones it will ship in 2010.
This will be done at the expense of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile which was HTC’s preferred platform until now; Android currently accounts for 30 percent of HTC’s shipments and the company wants to push this to over 50 percent.
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The company has four partners that will brand and sell the Android phone, Liu said, declining to give their names. The partner launching the phone in Europe is a global brand, he said.
Chinese companies Huawei Technologies and Haier have also revealed plans to sell Android handsets in Europe. Huawei has said T-Mobile will launch its Android phone there during the third quarter. It first announced the 3G handset, which resembles the iPhone, early this year.
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Sub-notebooks
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If you are looking for compact, highly portable and very capable Linux machine, this combination is a great way to go. I definitely made the right choice.
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Alternatively, on Ubuntu or most other Linux distributions, you can go to the Package Manager, and select the nVidia proprietary binary drivers for download.
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Acer redefines mobile connectivity with Aspire one, the revolutionary netbook packed with fun and powerful computing features in a diminutive 8.9″ form factor.
[...]
This laptop comes with an Intel Atom N270 processor running at 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 16GB SSD, a 8.9-inch LCD monitor, Linpus Linux Lite, WiFi, SD Card reader and three USB ports.
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BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Thursday, July 23, 2009 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) welcomed the apology issued today by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, as negative reviews from DefectiveByDesign.org campaign supporters criticizing the Kindle’s use of proprietary software and Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to remotely delete ebooks continued to pour in.
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Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has entered into an agreement to acquire the professional services unit of Nokia (NOK) responsible for Symbian customer engineering and customer support. The Symbian operating system is the world’s most widely used platform for smartphones. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
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There are lots of reasons why open source software as a design, development and distribution model has made great strides over recent years. Distributed development and the ability to discover like-minded collaborators, made possible with the Internet, was a game changer that gave way to a host of lower cost, reliable alternatives to proprietary offerings. And the recent economic downturn is just another shot in the arm for lower cost options.
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OSCON
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Jono suggests that “Stories are vessels of best practice.” Whenever a community shares a story, it usually has a message attached to it–an anecdote that usually comes to some concrete point. Stories give community members a sense of purpose and belonging; he encourages people to tell stories in their communities.
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OSCON has a major problem: There’s way too much to do! So far, this week has been chock full of excitement.
Though not part of the “official” OSCON program, the Community Leadership Summit started on Saturday. Lots of people from OSCON were in attendance, but also a fair number of people from communities that have nothing to do with open source. This was a pretty good mix. A few hundred people showed up Saturday morning, and a smaller crowed turned up Sunday.
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Business
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SpringSource, the leader in Java application infrastructure and management, today announced that the City of Chicago has deployed SpringSource Hyperic HQ Enterprise to monitor and manage its large and complex web operations environment to guarantee satisfaction for residents and tourists making use of government-run services. SpringSource Hyperic HQ offers the most complete solution and experience for managing and monitoring large scale web infrastructure and mission-critical applications.
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Funding
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Acquia Inc. has closed $8 million in new financing — a story first reported on www.masshightech.com earlier this week, bringing to $15 million the total in funds raised by the company founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert.
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Database
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Open dictionaries are excellent examples of open knowledge projects. Whether monolingual or bilingual, and whether dealing with definitions, etymology, translation or pronounciation – they can often be large, collaborative undertakings.
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Government
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In the Washington Monthly, Charles Homans has an extensive investigation into the early efforts, both in Washington D.C. as a city, and on the government level after the high profile nomination (by Obama) of open government advocate Vivek Kundera.
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MEPs candidates before the European elections have been called upon to pledge their committment to digital freedoms, 34 of them have now been elected.
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I’ve been following with great interest the number of cities partaking in open data initiatives. With the online announcement yesterday of a motion going before Calgary’s City Council, things are again on the move. So what is the count at now? This little table tries to capture who’s done what so far. If I’m missing something please do let me know – I will try to update this from time to time.
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Openness
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To change the world, it is not enough to have revolutionary ideas: you also have the inner force to be able to realise them in the face of near-universal opposition/indifference/derision. Great examples of this include Richard Stallman, who ploughed his lonely GNU furrow for years before anyone took much notice, and Michael Hart, who did the same for Project Gutenberg.
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‘You have to think creatively about how to convert the reputation and attention you can get from Free into cash,’ Anderson says. If it ‘doesn’t work at all’, it’s not Free’s fault, he says, adding: ‘The only mystery is why people blame Free for their own poverty of imagination and intolerance of possible failure.’
It seems to me glib to dismiss anxieties about those things of undoubted value that Free is useless at delivering with an abrupt version of ‘The weak go to the wall’. But Anderson would presumably respond: ‘Don’t blame the weatherman for telling you it’s raining.’
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[Reader's remarks: See Paxman and some lawyer beat up on Gary's mom and no mention that the extradition treaty is asymmetrical, as in no US citizen could be extradited in the reverse direction.
And Paxo never picks up on her statement that Gary's 'confession' was extracted without a lawyer present.]
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Fog Computing
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Thank heaven for Hive, a data analysis and query front end for Hadoop that makes Hadoop data files look like SQL tables
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A team of researchers will release on Tuesday a paper showing that parallel SQL databases perform up to 6.5 times faster than Google Inc.’s MapReduce data-crunching technology.
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Running complete server-systems directly from robust, high-available and performant storage server is one of the main concepts of the openQRM Cloud Computing and Data-Center Management platform. With its unique architecture and data-center abstraction layer openQRM provides a complete separation between software- and hardware stack to make physical hardware replaceable at any time.
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Offers application services platform for on-demand deployment and management of Ruby on Rails production applications in the cloud
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Tech giants like Google and Amazon have laid out the formula to follow for open-source-driven cloud computing environments, according to experts from The 451 Group and Red Hat
[...]
For companies like Red Hat, ISVs have to more fully embrace moving apps that enterprises need to the public cloud, according to Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. For the future, the company wants to see a higher degree of compatibility between external cloud providers, zero cost of entry and exit for users moving to cloud-based environments, better data mobility, the elimination of ISV licencing obstacles, and an overall reduction in complexity for on-premise cloud installations.
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Last week, Google announced some interface changes to their Google Docs service that are designed to make finding your files easier. The changes are relatively minor – the “shared with” list has gone away, there’s a new “Sharing” menu, and you now have the ability to save your searches – but that hasn’t stopped some bloggers from theorizing that the shiny new UI is bringing us one step closer to the often theorized, yet never realized, “Google Drive” service, aka “your hard drive in the cloud.”
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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And while they often do a superficial job, in many cases they really don’t provide as useful or as thorough coverage as they could. And that’s opened up the market to others — both big and small. We’ve seen a bunch of stories about various “hyperlocal” startups growing up.
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Compared to other ISPs in the UK, this direct action against illegal file-sharing is surprisingly severe.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Will Page and Chris Carey, where they try to look more closely at the real numbers and conclude that for all the whining and complaining, the UK music industry is actually growing (warning:pdf).
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Hell hath no fury like a music-artist-who-sees-his-own-music-video-removed-from-YouTube scorned. The video sharing service may be doing its best to keep copyrighted material off its website, but London-based artist Calvin Harris, who saw the music video of his ‘Ready For The Weekend – Original Mix’ being deleted from his own account over copyright claims, is not amused. The artist has been lashing out on his Twitter account this morning, and you’re advised to turn your eyes away if you object to foul language.
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The attorney general in Brussels has concluded a three year investigation into the money trails at the the local music royalty collecting agency SABAM. The attorney general concluded that the copyright group is not paying the artists the money owed to them, and will prosecute five managers for forgery of documents and abuse of trust.
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The bullying of the copyright industry in Sweden inspired the launch of the first political party whose platform is to reduce copyright restrictions: the Pirate Party. Its platform includes the prohibition of Digital Restrictions Management, legalization of noncommercial sharing of published works, and shortening of copyright for commercial use to a five-year period. Five years after publication, any published work would go into the public domain.
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The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund has obtained government photos of March 2009 aerial wolf kills in which 84 wolves, every wolf they could find, was shot. Officials spotted and shot from the air. Government officials claim the wolf kill is for the good of the wildlife. The photos were obtained through a public records request.
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The East Sussex, UK Police are attempting to have speed camera photographs removed from websites by claiming they represent copyrighted material. In particular, the police are targeting a set of images taken in June 2008 that motorcyclist Peter Barker used to prove that a radar device that clocked him at 38 MPH must have been wrong. Based on measurements of the photographic evidence, a Brighton Magistrates Court judge agreed and threw out the case against Barker.
Luis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 01 (2004)
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07.23.09
Posted in News Roundup at 7:39 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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For FOSS devotees who’d like a sprinkling of Linux refreshment this summer, there’s a wide assortment of good Linux news — and a little Linux nonsense — to choose from. Among other things, bask in the knowledge that Red Hat has become the first Linux company to join the Fortune 500. Also, MontaVista has clocked a one-second boot time for embedded industrial apps.
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Back in 2003, Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, dismissed GNU/Linux as a “great environment for the hobbyist” but not for the enterprise. The relative success of Linux on Sun’s chosen ground, and the subsequent decline in the fortunes of Sun have proved McNealy’s assessment to be wrong, but Linux undeniably has its roots and inspiration among hackers and hobbyists.
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I am a Linux geek. There I said it. Actually, I am kind of proud of being a Linux geek. I slogged through the bad old days to get here. It seems like every day something new shows up that makes me glad that I chose Linux as my tool of choice.
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As an indication of the performance increase you might expect by replacing a hard drive with an SSD, a quick test using a $99 32GB Crucial Internal 2.5″ Solid State Drive reduced the time required to boot Ubuntu 8.04 to 18 seconds on a test system, compared to the 32 seconds required to boot the operating system using a fast SATA II hard drive on the same system. (This is not intended to be a rigorous test but goes some way to illustrating the significant improvements in read times that an SSD can offer.)
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Can this really be true? Can Microsoft be gaining ground through it all? LinuxInsider couldn’t resist asking around.
“I don’t think Microsoft is getting its edge back,” Montreal consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack told LinuxInsider.
“Windows 7 is better than Vista, but still more of a resource hog than XP was,” Mack explained. “Meanwhile, Linux has been lowering its hardware requirements. Previously it managed Vista-level desktop effects with less than XP resources.”
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The software is compatible with currently available editions of Microsoft Windows, as well as Linux, he said. ITRI is looking for partners to start distributing the software.
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In this episode: Google announces its own Chrome OS operating system and the Moblin project gets X Windows running with user privileges. We talk about how we got into Linux and discuss whether we think Google is becoming Microsoft.
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Some would say that comparing Ubuntu or even past them, Mint and PCLinuxOS, is like going to Mickey D’s. It’s like driving in and ordering the combo that has been pre-packaged to accommodate the widest groups typical wants or needs. Nothing wrong with that, lot’s of people like to do things just that way.
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Desktop
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Branding is expensive and very important. For example, folk will now buy Skoda cars because they know they are well engineered, good value and belong to the Volkswagen Audi group. Skoda sales-people like the SEAT sales-people remind potential customers that they are really buying an Audi at discount prices. Up-scaling a brand such as Skoda costs serious marketing money and even that required a lift up from an already long term expensively established brand (Vorsprung whatever).
Despite the best efforts of Red Hat and Ubuntu I doubt whether they have enough financial depth to build brands to rival Microsoft!
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Introducing “Always Up To Date”, our classification for Operating Systems that are ALWAYS updated on the day they ship from On-Disk.com, so you always receive the absolute latest we can provide. This freshness factor results in more secure, better performing installations where every disc is as fresh as a new release.
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The Republic of Macedonia, for example, chose NComputing for its massive, 180,000-seat educational computing initiative, which is the world’s largest Linux-based virtual desktop program.
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Some of the 23 projects currently listed, like BigView, reflect a developer focus. BigView “allows for interactive panning and zooming of images,” but only if you’re running Linux on your desktop.
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christian.einfeldt writes “Alan Lord, a FOSS computer consultant based in the UK, has announced that Amazon UK honored his request for a refund of the Microsoft license fee portion of the cost of a new Asus netbook PC that came with Microsoft Windows XP. Lord details the steps that he took to obtain a refund of 40.00 GBP for the cost of the EULA, complete with links to click to request a refund. Lord’s refund comes 10 years after the initial flurry of activity surrounding EULA discounts, started by a blog post by Australian computer consultant Geoffrey Bennett which appeared on Slashdot on 18 January 1999. That Slashdot story led to mainstream press coverage, such as stories in CNN, the New York Times on-line, and the San Francisco Chronicle, to name just a few. The issue quieted down for a few years, but has started to gain some momentum again in recent years, with judges in France, Italy, and Israel awarding refunds. But if Lord’s experience is any indication, getting a refund through Amazon might be as easy as filling out a few forms, at least in the UK, without any need to go to court.”
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Server
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“We are very excited about our relationship with Canonical,” said Woody Rollins, co-founder and CEO of Eucalyptus. “It is a pleasure to collaborate with a company that shares our commitment to innovation and technical excellence.”
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Building on the Call of Duty 4 engine, Call of Duty: World at War thrusts players into the ruthless and gritty chaos of WWII combat like never been before, and challenges them to band together to survive the most harrowing and climactic battles of WWII that led to the demise of the Axis powers on the European and South Pacific fronts. The title re-defines WWII games by offering an uncensored experience with unique enemies and combat variety, including Kamikaze fighters, ambush attacks, Banzai charges and cunning cover tactics, as well as explosive on-screen action through all new cooperative gameplay.
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In this technical brief white paper, IDC describes the importance of manageability in the selection of a blade platform and examines the needs of the market with respect to managing large volumes of homogeneous Linux platforms, with a specific focus on the capabilities of HP’s Insight Control Linux Edition.
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Kernel Space
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Yesterday NVIDIA released their first 190.xx Linux beta driver for their GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. The NVIDIA 190.16 Beta driver brought a number of VDPAU fixes, PowerMizer control features, a number of new official and unofficial OpenGL extensions receiving GLX protocol support, and there were a number of other fixes and enhancements too. However, now that we have had a chance to analyze this driver, there is more in store than what the change-log shares regarding this driver. There is in fact support for the unreleased OpenGL 3.2 specification.
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Ok, that was a fun week.
We had a binutils bug, a ccache bug, and a compiler bug. And that was just the bugs that were outside the kernel, but resulted in a broken build.
But while that was unusual, the rest of the stuff is pretty regular. Lots of small fixes all around. The patch is dominated by a couple of new network drivers, but apart from those, it’s generally pretty small – lots of one-liners and “few-liners”.
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While Luc Verhaegen (one of the original RadeonHD driver developers) has been out of work since right after FOSDEM when he was laid off by Novell due to cutbacks, he hasn’t quit coding. While Luc hasn’t been working on the RadeonHD driver, or any ATI driver for that matter, one of the projects that he has gotten involved with is CoreBoot, the project formerly known as LinuxBIOS.
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Applications
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Bordeaux is a Wine GUI configuration manager that runs winelib applications. It also supports installation of third party utilities, installation of applications and games, and the ability to use custom configurations. Bordeaux is written in GTK and requires GTK 2.10 or higher to be installed on a given system. Bordeaux also uses wget and cabextract extensively and they should be installed for Bordeaux to operate correctly.
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In less than two weeks we will be officially releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 “Sandtorg” and this by far is the biggest upgrade ever to our flagship testing and benchmarking software. While the Phoronix Test Suite is most often associated with Linux, this open-source software is also compatible with Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and BSD operating systems too, all of which offer new improvements with Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. In this article we have detailed some of the major highlights of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 and how we seek to drive innovation into PC benchmarking and performance profiling.
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Gaming
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It’s no secret that one of the areas that Windows has the advantage of Linux, is gaming. It’s not that Linux as an OS isn’t capable of running quality games, it’s just that game manufacterers don’t think the Linux gamers can make them any money. For that reason, it’s always nice when a game is released with a native Linux version, like World of Goo a couple of months ago, and Savage 2. Now, the same people who are responsible for the latter are working on a game called Heroes of Newerth. It’s being beta tested at the moment, and yes, the good people of S2 Games provide Windows, Mac and Linux version (both 32-bit and 64!).
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A few hours ago we invited everyone to come play this new Linux-native game with us, which happened to be Heroes of Newerth by S2 Games. This game is still under development and details surrounding this title are very scarce as the media (including Phoronix), is not yet allowed to post any media or really talk about the game that much. However, a closed beta is currently going on for this game, both with the Linux and Windows editions. S2 Games was surprised by the interest that was building around this new game of theirs on Linux, so they decided to let us start handing out keys to join the beta program. Well, so far, that is going extremely well.
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Desktop Environments
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The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 RC3, a release candidate of the 3rd iteration over the KDE 4 desktop, applications and development platform.
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Toorox Linux ships as a live DVD featuring KDE 4.2.4, Linux 2.6.28, and lots of useful applications. It uses KNOPPIX hardware detection, but what makes Toorox stand out is its extra tools and utilities.
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This distro has some great potential. Ubuntu and it’s derivatives may be influential in the English and French speaking world, I can see Pardus being influential in the Turkish and Asian speaking world.
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According to this posting to the fedora-test-list by Liam, there’s going to be some installation testing for the Fedora 12 (Constantine) Alpha candidate next week, on Wednesday July 29. This is a chance to shake out some of the new features in the Anaconda installation application that have come in over the past couple of months. The more testing we can get on the installer early, the more bulletproof we can make it for our final release by the time code is frozen in the fall.
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Ubuntu
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For new linux users however I would not recomend this. As such ones will find themselves tinkering with alot of things that work out of the box in other linux distributions.
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Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has recently released a beta version of their online file syncing service – UbuntuOne for public testing. This file syncing service is similar to the popular Dropbox service and it allows you to share and sync file across different computers.
[...]
Ubuntu One is still at beta mode and there are plenty of things that are not on par with other online storage solution such as Dropbox. However, with the vision of Ubuntu One and as Ubuntu become more and more popular, I won’t be surprised to see Ubuntu One becoming a major force in the file and data management arena in the near future.
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So, after two months, I’m back with Kubuntu. This time, I’ve installed KDE 4.2. Many of the kinks of the original Plasma version have been worked out. I’ve been reunited with all my favorite KDE apps in their native desktop environment. Even the sound card is working again. I’m happy to be back. The only real holdover from my Gnome days is Evolution. I’ve left Kmail, and for now have taken a real liking to Evolution as the best email app for my needs.
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Prentice Hall has published the fourth edition of The Official Ubuntu Book, covering the latest Ubuntu 9.04 release. As with previous versions, the fourth edition aims to bring new users up to speed on the popular Linux distro, from installation to configuration to exploring Ubuntu’s applications.
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New Distributions
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Available on mirrors worldwide from a week ago, Scientific Linux 4.8, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 8, was officially announced last evening by Connie Sieh and Troy Dawson. The new release comes with major improvements and package updates.
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The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the development version 1.9.37
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Being a Linux user, you’ll want to log into the administration panel to do some configuration first and then mount your network shares. NFS is the closest thing to a native network file system for Linux and I personally like to use NFS over CIFS.
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Pogo Linux announced the availability of the StorageDirector Z250, Z350 and Z450, the latest storage appliances in the company’s managed-storage product line. The new enhancements include support forIntel’s ( News – Alert) Xeon 5500 series processors and an upgrade to the NexentaStor 2.0 released recently.
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Phones
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1. Linux-based webOS
With webOS, the Palm Pre offers true multitasking capabilities that will enable users to run multiple applications at the same time. You can easily and fluidly switch between running applications (just like swapping cards) on Palm Pre’s touchscreen display. Meanwhile, the latest iPhone OS 3.0 still has a very limited multitasking feature.
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Sub-notebooks
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Now that everybody has jumped on the Netbook bandwagon, a new mobile device parade is pulling into town. Led by Qualcomm, so-called Smartbooks are slated to debut in late 2009. Expected to be slightly larger than the iPhone, Smartbooks are mobile Internet devices (MIDs) that run Windows, Google Android and a range of Linux alternatives.
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What I told them was that I resent being forced to pay a “Microsoft PENALTY” for a pre-installed operating system which I have no choice about, particularly when there has previously been a choice and ASUS decided to take that choice away from their customers.
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NEC, which builds WiMAX radios into several types of mobile devices, has promised to contribute to the Moblin project. Meanwhile, Intel- and Google-backed WiMAX provider Clearwire launched fixed and mobile services today in Las Vegas, its fourth urban market.
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Intel’s work promoting netbooks — the downsized PCs that are gaining in mindshare — was touted by a company official Wednesday, who stressed benefits in boot-up times, graphics, and network capabilities during a technology conference.
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Hacao, made a wise decision by choosing the Pico netbook which is based on the famous MSI Wind netbook. The MSI Wind is one of the most popular, easy to use, netbooks here in the Vietnamese market (though you will tend to see more EeePCs and Aspire Ones in the coffee shops). Pico is a good choice with it large keyboard and monitor screen. My students who own MSI Winds have no complaints.
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EBook
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iRex extended its electronic book line back in September last year, but it’s taken us more than a couple of weeks to get used to its new DR1000s Digital Reader and understand that this is really a new class of product, rather than an evolution of the smaller readers of the past.
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I think the Sony e-Reader is a much better choice as a result.
Yet another reason why people should Just Say No to DRM.
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Clear the decks, I’m now an avid Firefox user. It took me a long time to give up my treasured Maxthon, an Internet Explorer shell that I truly loved. When Maxthon was first released, it had features years before they were added to IE8–tabs, multi-threading, groups, add-ons — things the kids at Microsoft should have copied eons ago, but didn’t.
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As one can see, working with RAM disks on Solaris/OpenSolaris is fairly simple and can be configured in just a couple of steps. Who knows, you may find situations in your current environment which may benefit from the use of a RAM disk. Note – Do not forget to destroy the zpool and the RAM disks when not in use. The last thing you want to do is waste much needed memory.
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Opponents of SQL had their hands strengthened when Google’s SQL-free technique, “Map/Reduce”, showed it could search databases measured in petabytes. They look on relational databases as antiquated, a technique that can’t cope with today’s quantities of data or meet the requirements of full-text searching. Rather than relations, they rely on key-value pairs.
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Adobe has used the Open Source Conference (OSCON), currently taking place in California’s San Jose, to announce a new strategy for its Flash Platform. Some people are questioning Adobe’s motives.
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McNeill sees a growing placement for Linux support — and thus open source — for back end operations, and Bomgar noted that a lot more traction for Linux is occurring. Both factors mean a need for more tech support.
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July 16, 2009 — Insecure.Org is pleased to announce the immediate, free availability of the Nmap Security Scanner version 5.00 from http://nmap.org/. This is the first stable release since 4.76 (last September), and the first major release since the 4.50 release in 2007. Dozens of development releases led up to this.
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3. Open Source Operating Systems
Open source operating systems are easy to sell, however.
Linux ubiquity is here, and even if you pay for support contracts, the total cost of ownership is significantly lower compared to Windows servers. The stability is proven, as is the interoperability. Phasing out Windows servers by migrating services to Linux is a quick way to save large amounts of money.
Another common objection to adoption of Linux is staff skill levels. Controversial as it may be, you have to phase out systems administrators that only know Windows. For example, take your average Linux jockey, who has been exposed to the nuts and bolts and knows how the important protocols work, rather than just how one vendor’s GUI works, and thrust new tasks at her. She will quickly master anything and that is the type of sysadmin you want. This rarely works the other way around, yet the Windows-only administrator generally make the same salaries. The sound business decision is fairly straightforward.
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OmniTI today announced the availability of Reconnoiter, a new Open Source monitoring and trending system that handles highly distributed, heterogeneous environments and implement highly efficient probes for a rapidly growing number of services. As a full-service website consulting company that designs and manages sustainable architectures that can support hundreds of millions of users, OmniTI relies on being able to funnel its network monitoring back to a business intelligence system that is capable of graphing, trending, reporting and fault detection.
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With the rising popularity of cloud computing, entire operating systems designed to work in the cloud should come as no surprise. Indeed, virtual computing environments are becoming so predominate that some suspect Google’s development of the Chrome browser — and more recently the Chrome operating system — is nothing more than cloud computing in disguise.
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For any websites, blogs and portal owner, it’s essential to realize that results of their investment and hard work they are making in order to achieve the goals they have set should be closely monitored. The key to tracking the health of your site is web analytics software. To help things out we had already done with the top 10 web log analysis software. Given the line of top software, the O’Reilly Radar report shows open source growing exponentially, making it to the mainstream. With free availability joining the ease of scaling and agile nature, there’s a greater inclination towards open source software. Moving with the trend, we went for an extensive research to pick out the top 3 open source software for web analytics.
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At OSCON 2009 in San Jose, California, Google announced the winners of this years Google O’Reilly Open Source Awards. The awards have been presented each year since 2005 to individuals for their “dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source”.
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Business
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At OSCON in San Jose, Kaltura announced the public launch of its open source online video platform, called Kaltura Community Edition.
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How things are going at the Apache Software Foundation?
Justin: We currently have over 100 different projects under the Apache “umbrella” with over 2,000 committers and ~350 members of the foundation. Each project is independently operated by what we call a “PMC”. We have about 75 different top-level projects, ~30 or so projects either under Incubation (baby ASF projects), and a bunch of “labs” which are individual projects started by the foundation members.
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Fascinated by the Ruby on Rails development environment, he devised a sophisticated application layer to run “over” Asterisk which ultimately led to Adhearsion.
http://ivr.tmcnet.com/topics/ivr-voicexml/articles/60485-adhearsion-voxeo-launch-voxeo-labs.htm
Adhearsion and Voxeo Launch Voxeo Labs
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Talend Integration Suite is the first open source enterprise data integration solution, designed to support multi-user development, and to scale to the highest levels of data volumes and process complexity. The tool is a subscription service that extends award winning Talend Open Studio with professional grade technical support and additional features to facilitate the work of large teams and industrialise enterprise-scale deployments.
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The two open-source apps, OpenVPN and the Sendmail Mail Transfer Agent, are both extremely popular among business users. According to a Veracode press release, its “A” rating indicates that a software developer has “developed a secure application that has been independently evaluated for software vulnerabilities against industry standards.”
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Since the release of RapidMiner 4.4 in March, Rapid-I again invested a lot of effort into further improving RapidMiner to better meet the growing demand of data analysis, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), and BI (Business Intelligence). A lot of exciting new features found their way into the latest release of RapidMiner and can now be downloaded free of charge.
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I’ve been curious, for a long time, about when truly free open source software would start dribbling on to the DS marketplace. I describe them as truly free because there would be no upsell, but I totally agree with the sentiment that open source software is not free when you consider a skilled IT-type has to be put against the project to make it work and keep it running.
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Funding
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2. Consider open source
More and more organizations are running mission-critical parts of their business on open source. What was once thought to be the focus of a small group of uber-geeks has emerged as a viable enterprise option. The open source community boasts many developers, creating the next big breakthroughs. While large organizations may topple (read: Nortel), Open source can live on beyond the corporation. It also delivers cost-savings and avoids vendor lock-in.
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CMS
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Built on the open source blog platform WordPress Multi User (WordPress MU) and some custom themes and plugins such as WPDB Profiling, project leaders claim that the new platform has made it considerably easier and cheaper for WNET.ORG to roll out multiple user-friendly sites.
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As I came to learn in the interview, it’s as though Buytaert and Mullenweg were separated at birth. They were born only 6 years apart (The older of the two — Buytaert — was born in 1978 when I was a senior in high school). Both went on to create wildly successful PHP-based content management systems (Mullenweg did WordPress, Buytaert did Drupal). Both men open sourced those content management systems. And today, both are the founders of VC-funded commercial enterprises (Mullenweg’s Automattic and Buytaert’s Acquia) looking to capitalize on their founders’ art and fame.
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Government
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As mentioned before, sometimes EU funded projects overlap. Asking around about European open source initiatives, I happened to get in touch with Paul Adams. Apparently Paul is the only person who has worked on each of the three projects to whom the EC asked to collaborate, and I asked him more about such cooperation.
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Openness
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A friend pointed out to me the release of Reuter’s Handbook of Journalism.
He was seeing this as a blow against paid content. I am still trying to get my arms around what will happen in the paid content world. I can make a case for a few models, but the thing I believe the most in is that revenues for specific content go down, while diving down to specific demographics of the audience will get a higher premium.
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Standards/Consortia
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Last November, the EFF took Apple to task for threatening the owner of a wiki site. Apple claimed that an ongoing discussion on the site about how to build interoperability between iPods and iPhones and alternative software other than iTunes violated the DMCA — which requires quite a novel interpretation of the DMCA. After Apple refused to back down, EFF sued in April. Somewhere along the way, it looks like Apple’s lawyers started to realize that it had pretty close to no chance whatsoever and has now withdrawn this particular threat.
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Adobe has released the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) and the Text Layout Framework (TLF) as open source under the Mozilla Public Licence, to address what the company sees as the needs of developers, publishers and media companies.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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How Amazon’s remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning’s digital future.
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Eventually the new website for getting feedback will be open to the public, FCC Chair Genachowski says. For now it’s an internal portal.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A report released by the International Intellectual Property Alliance shows that copyright-related industry has been booming in recent years. But a closer examination of the data shows that the numbers don’t add up so easily.
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Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has presented its demands to the former Pirate Bay operators and its prospective buyer. Today, in a court case against the three co-founders of the site, BREIN demanded that they block access to all Dutch visitors.
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Myth 5: YouTube is only monetizing 3-5% of the site. This oft-cited statistic is old and wrong, and continues to raise much speculation. In our view, the percentage is far less important than the total number of monetized views, and we are now helping partners generate revenue from hundreds of millions of video views in the U.S. every week (and billions worldwide), more than any other video site has total views. Monetized views have more than tripled in the past year, as we’re adding partner content very quickly and doing a better job of promoting their videos across the site.
These myths are officially busted.
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Associated Bullies
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I must admit that I tend to disagree with a significant percentage of Lichtman’s conclusions on intellectual property, but unlike many copyright maximalists, I tend to believe he’s much more intellectually honest on these issues. His positions don’t seem to come from a “more is absolutely better because it makes me/my clients more money” position, but he honestly tends to believe that greater copyright leads to a greater net outcome, and tends to argue reasonably about it — though, I believe some of that reasoning, and the assumptions that underpin it are faulty.
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No, what’s not fair is claiming that any of that is the AP’s to own. None of it. Not a single part of it was. All of that — the hope, the way he was looking, was simply there. What made him choose it was the look on Obama’s face — which is not Garcia’s creative output, and thus cannot be covered by copyright. In fact, the most frustrating thing of all is that Cendali repeatedly claims that Fairey was ripping off Garcia (and the AP), but misses the obvious problem with that argument: which is that if her argument is correct, then the AP and Garcia also ripped off Obama, since it was his creativity in looking the way he did and making the facial expression he did. Once again, such externalities are apparently only acceptable when the AP benefits. But, Cendali seems to ignore that, and Lichtman lets her get off, noting that he basically agrees with her.
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Anyway, not long after that, I saw that the BBC appears to have a very similar article, and it’s quite clear that all they did was rewrite the AP’s article. At one point, they do credit the AP, but the article is almost a direct paraphrase of the AP’s. So does the AP start calling the BBC a parasite, too? Or does it finally realize that no one owns the news, and lots of publications often rewrite the news and have for ages?
A tour of School Park mashup art and Free Software space in Santo Andre, Brazil 04 (2004)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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