06.16.11
Posted in News Roundup at 8:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Software updates are one of the main areas of IT, mainly because of continuous security and enhancement updates. Microsoft usually releases a huge number of security updates each month, and even though they get criticised for this, GNU/Linux has a high number of updates as well, particularly Fedora which is treated as beta or cutting edge versions of free and open source software.
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Also, the RPM system can provide a complete list of packages installed with the command “rpm -qa”. And, logs of the RPM installation process are always logged to /var/log/messages. Reporting could be set up to pull this data, however to date I have not discovered a central system for producing these types of reports. This is where the Kace/Dell Kbox steps in and uses a running agent on each client to gather data into a central SQL database.
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While Dell seems confused about tablets they seem less confused about notebooks.
“Built For Businesses
With Linux Operating System”
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Alexander Swen is a true Linux evangelist. Since 1996, when he started using Linux-Mandrake on his home computers, he’s been happily converting friends and family to the OS—even getting his parents on board. “I think everyone should use Linux,” he says. “And I want to help promote it any way I can.”
But Alexander wasn’t always a Linux man. In fact, even as he built up his Linux empire at home, he continued to work as a Windows admin up until 2004, when he finally realized he had to make a change. “I had become more and more frustrated by the instability,” he says. “And when a surprise update ended up ruining a working system, I decided that I had to move away from my Windows career—and start working as a Linux admin.”
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Chrome OS
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Under the hood, a Chromebook is a Linux system, customized by Google that runs the Chrome browser as its interface. That’s your desktop–a browser. It’s efficient and I use Chrome exclusively as my browser anyway. So, it’s a natural fit for someone who uses Linux, the Chrome browser and has a keen interest in the Cloud.
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IHS iSuppli published the results of a teardown of the 3G version of Samsung’s Chrome OS-based Series 5 Chromebook — which began shipping today for $500 — and estimates the solidly-built notebook cost $334.32 to build. Meanwhile, an eWEEK review of the Wi-Fi only Series 5 was similarly impressed with the hardware, but questioned whether Chrome OS would find many takers.
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If you want a Windows laptop, get a Windows laptop. But, if you want an easy-to-use, Web-based laptop, consider getting a Chromebook. So long as you realize that the Samsung Series 5 and its brother from another company, the Acer Chromebook, is not a full-featured Windows or Linux notebook computer you’ll be fine.
So it is that I’m pretty happy with my brand new Samsung Series 5 3G even though CNET gave it a just “ok” rating pending software improvements. While neither Chromebook will be generally available until June 15th, I was able to get my hands on one a week early. I’ve been working with mine for several days now and this is what I’ve found.
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The first few Chromebooks from Acer and Samsung feature a clean, clutter free design. Solid black, or black with a white top, and no stickers. A refreshing change from “Intel Inside” and “Made for Windows” stickers that accompany most PC laptops. The Chromebooks look good. The Chromebooks are small and light, and claim battery life between six and eight and a half hours of continual use. They come with standard ports and a webcam, but what is most interesting about the machines is what not listed. Google doesn’t draw attention to the tiny, and extremely fast, SSD hard drive, or the the amount of RAM in the machine, an intentional dismissal of their importance. Plainly said, it doesn’t matter, Chromebooks have speed where it matters, and are meant for only one thing.
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Server
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With Intel’s top brass bad-mouthing ARM-based servers, upstart server chip maker Calxeda can’t let Intel do all the talking. It has to put together an ecosystem of hardware and software partners who believe there’s a place for a low-power, 32-bit ARM-based server platform in the data center.
To that end, Calxeda, formerly known as Smooth-Stone, is launching the “trailblazer initiative” – a team of 10 software companies that will support upcoming servers based on Calxeda’s impending ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC) designs
The Calxeda ARM super friends include Autonomic Resources, Canonical, Caringo, Couchbase, Datastax, Eucalyptus Systems, Gluster, Momentum SI, Opscode, and Pervasive.
Canonical is of course, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, which is now first in line as the server operating system of choice for Calxeda ARM-based servers.
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Officials with Calxeda, the startup that’s building ARM-based chips for low-power data center servers, announced a “Trailblazer” program designed to create an ecosystem around its technology. But, while Calxeda touted support from Ubuntu Linux sponsor Canonical, among other companies, there’s been no hint from Microsoft that it will create a server edition of its ARM-based “Windows 8.”
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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We’re proud to announce the second version of the Native Linux KVM tool! We’re now officially aiming for merging to mainline in 3.1.
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Has it really been twenty years? Yes, yes, it has been twenty years since Linus Torvalds announced that he was working on “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.” Twenty years of Linux later, The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating Linux’s growth, has announced the program for this year’s LinuxCon North America taking place in Vancouver, B.C. August 17-19, 2011.
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The Linux Foundation has announced its program and schedule for this year’s LinuxCon North America event taking place in Vancouver, B.C. August 17-19, 2011.
LinuxCon is the world’s leading conference addressing all matters Linux for the global business and technical communities. LinuxCon includes in-depth technical content for developers and operations personnel, as well as business and legal insight from the industry’s leaders.
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What do we have in it? More than in -rc2. I’m clearly not the only one who was in Japan for LinuxCon, or something else just made people wake
up.
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Graphics Stack
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The Catalyst 11.6 for Linux build isn’t particularly exciting. Release notes for the 11.6 driver haven’t been made publicly available yet, but if they do emerge, they’ll basically say there’s installer/uninstaller improvements, support for reading the highest available memory clock from AMDCCCLE, and some other minor changes / bug-fixes. That’s about it.
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Applications
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The Boxee development team has announced that it will be bringing the open source version of the Boxee media centre back in line with the version of the software that it has been developing for the Boxee Box by D-Link. For the past eight months, the “downloadable” version of the software – which can run on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Apple TV – has languished at version 0.92 with no updates, while the developers concentrated on the Boxee Box development where the firmware version has seen new features added and bugs fixed.
In May, the company delivered version 1.1 of the firmware version of Boxee, and now, in a post on the Boxee blog, CEO & Co-founder Avner Ronen says that the team hope to have new builds of the open source software available “this fall”. These new builds will include the features that current Boxee Box owners already have, including an updated browser, improved audio and video playback and support for even more content providers.
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I didn’t include here applications like GIMP or Krita since they are full-fledged image manipulation applications, not just simple painting programs, nor Scribus or Inkscape since they serve different purposes. This article overviews 7 8 simple drawing applications for both KDE and GNOME.
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Oftentimes reminder applications live as add-on apps to much more complex software programs. Email-Reminder is a standalone app that does one thing and does it well. Its way of reminding you of your tasks is by sending you an email at the appointed time. That’s rendered even more effective if you happen to carry email access at all times via a smartphone.
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Apache Traffic Server, the high performance caching HTTP/1.1 proxy server, has been updated to version 3.0.0 and is now a 64 bit application. In benchmarks, Apache Traffic Server 3.0.0 has been able to handle 200,000 requests per second, which the developers say is a 277% improvement over version 2.0.
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Proprietary
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The worst part? Adobe doesn’t even have the gall to respond to their users about the lack of updates.
Flash isn’t the only thing Adobe plans to screw it’s desktop Linux users on though. As of version 2.7 Adobe’s Air technology will no longer support desktop Linux. At least the developers at Adobe labs have the spine to tell us the are dropping support for the Linux desktop with Air instead of just leaving us wondering.
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Given the recent popularity of standards-driven HTML5 applications on a variety of platforms, including Windows, iOS, and Linux distributions, it seems pretty silly for Adobe, makers of Flash, to tick off even one set of platform users.
Yet, as Caitlyn Martin pointed out last week, that’s exactly what they may have done. It seems that Abobe’s Flash Player is still not available for 64-bit Linux users, despite promises in 2010 to serve this particular platform.
To Adobe’s credit, Martin’s initial column did illicit a promise from Adobe that they would indeed be getting out a 64-bit Linux product “later this year.” But, really, are we still living in an age where platforms like this have to cajole proprietary vendors to get with the program?
Apparently so. In terms of 64-bit Linux specifically, it used to be a small minority of a small-to-begin-with platform base. But now, as users buy new machines, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to get 32-bit machines. Most new users of any OS want that 64-bit functionality they paid for.
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Danger’s fate casts a long shadow today as Microsoft prepares to consummate its $8 billion purchase of the new hotness, Skype, a Luxembourg-based Internet phone service. Although Danger and Skype are decidedly different companies, there are parallels. Both are hyper focused on consumers, and both have a strong startup culture. The similarities make Microsoft’s experience with Danger all the more relevant to its pending assimilation of Skype.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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OpenClonk is free and open source successor of German shareware game series Clonk. Clonk, which dates back to 1994 with its first game on MS DOS has quite a dedicated fan following and an extremely popular game modding/extension system.
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Maybe I’m discovering boiled water here, but today I stumbled upon a little game. I downloaded it because it was very small, so even if it was bad, I wouldn’t have wasted too much time and space with the download. Its name is Gravitation, and it was released in 2008 (wow! that says how much into gaming I am these days!
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DEs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager: cross platform, available as portable and installable software for Windows (9x, 2k, XP, Vista) and Linux x86 and x86-64.
PeaZip is a desktop neutral application.
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GNOME Desktop
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Here are some more extensions designed to provide a classic style GNOME desktop for GNOME Shell (for the previous GNOME2-like desktop extensions, see this post). The first two extensions are called Reflection and Window List and are created for a Linux distribution called Guadalinex:
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New Releases
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After more than 5 months of daily development following the release of 4.2 AV Linux 5.0 is here. This release balances the rock-solid reliability of Debian’s stable ‘Squeeze’ release and fortifies it with some carefully selected Sid and Custom packages to make it a state-of-the-art Multimedia Content Creation Powerhouse. This release will usher in a less frequent annual release cycle and shift the focus from Linux Audio/Video software testing to reliable Linux Audio/Video PRODUCTION. If you are someone who’d rather create content than experiment with alpha/beta software then this release is for you.
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It’s that time of the month again. The most noticeable change is Rox now handles the desktop icons and feh displays the desktop wallpaper. These seemed like the best light weight choices in preparation for the new PCManFM when it’s released as stable. Parted was upgraded to 3.0, but GParted is still linked against LibParted 2.4 for now. All fonts should look good in Firefox if you use a language other than US English. A few other useful programs were added like ZFS Fuse, Lilo Setup, Rox Filer, and FixParts.
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The theme for v3.7 is improved integrity and interoperability. Tiny Core remains true to size. Currently at 10.3MB! Yet now adds NTFS read support. And seamless NTFS read-write support via extension or installation options. Improved integrity is achieved by better warning messages to prevent misuse of unsupported file systems. Also new are Starter Packs. As installation is typically a one time event. Therefore the GUI installation program and all necessary support extensions are now conviently packaged into a starter pack, install.gz. Same is offered with grub4dos.gz. This has the option to install inside an existing NTFS partition. Our network.gz starter pack, provides all the tools typically needed to get connected, including a tiny wifi manager. And, finally, combining multiple boot images together with starter packs, we offer multicore.iso. This bootable CD image, provides the easiest way yet to install, get connected, and get online.
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Red Hat Family
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By most accounts, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss middleware are both solid successes. But can two newer initiatives — namely, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and OpenShift — also gain critical mass, particularly among cloud computing partners? Here are The VAR Guy’s early educated guesses.
For those who are late to the Red Hat story, the company is on track to become the first $1 billion open source specialist within the next year or so. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has successfully pushed beyond traditional servers and is gaining momentum on cloud-centric servers, while JBoss middleware has caught on with sophisticated IT consultants.
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Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated support at $41.30 with current price action closing at just $42.26 places the stock price near levels where traders will start paying attention.
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Fedora
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Dear Fedora fans, we are sorry to announced today that the Fedora 13 (Goddard) Linux distribution will reach end of life (EOL) next Friday, on June 24th, 2011.
Dubbed Goddard, the Fedora 13 operating system was released on May 25th, 2010. It was powered by Linux kernel 2.6.32 and it introduced features such as enhanced init system, topology awareness, color management, SystemTap static probes, Mozilla Firefox 3.6, Nvidia 3D support, and KDE SC 4.4.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, last month in Hungary, I was leading a session on application containing and gathered ideas on how to improve the safety of our user’s desktop while still making it easy for app developers.
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News on Ubuntu is getting better by the day. The first half of May saw Canonical joining GENIVI Alliance, the reference platform for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) for opensource products. Canonical will also introduce a new GENIVI compliant Ubuntu IVI Remix.
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Flavours and Variants
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Other options include Pinguy OS 11.04 and Linux Mint 11 “Katya” GNOME, which I know work well with Hulu and AV by AIM but which won’t be supported for as long.
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Imagination Technologies announced it is licensing a new version of its Meta core IP for Linux- and Android-based mobile devices. The Metaflow family of processors combines the Linux-ready Meta Series2 processor IP with the company’s Ensigma UCCP IP for Wi-Fi, mobile TV, and analog and digital TV and radio, says the company.
Known primarily for its Powervr graphics processor intellectual property (IP), Imagination Technologies has been steadily advancing its long-time, Linux-ready, programmable RISC Meta core IP. In November 2009, the U.K.-based firm announced it had begun licensing a Meta Series2 core IP, adding digital signal processor (DSP) functions, support for hardware multi-threaded execution, and hard real-time capabilities.
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TiVo Inc. announced a new version of its Linux-based DVR/IP set-top box (STB) called the TiVo Premiere Q — said to enable recording four streams at once while simultaneously transmitting three HD streams to other devices via a LAN. The company also announced its first non-DVR STB, the TiVo Preview, which can be used as a thin client multi-room extension for other TiVo devices.
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Kontron announced a machine-to-machine (M2M) development kit that ships with Wind River Linux 4.1. The Kontron M2M Smart Services Developer Kit incorporates Kontron’s nanoETXexpress-TT computer-on-module — which includes a 1GHz Intel Atom E640T — and offers not only gigabit Ethernet but also wireless interfaces including Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and optional 3G/4G cellular.
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Sonos is well known for its broad family of high-quality devices capable of playing audio streamed from a variety of Internet and local sources wirelessly — and synchronously — throughout the home. Sonos’s Linux-powered “ZonePlayers” represent the core of its wireless home audio entertainment architecture, as illustrated in the drawing below.
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Phones
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Android
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androidquestions.org [is launched by LinuxQuestions people]
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Wireless carrier T-Mobile has entered the group buying market with its own daily deal offering. Called “More for Me,” the nationwide service aggregates deals from such originators as Living Social and Groupon.
The service is available to anyone who owns an Android handset, T-Mobile spokesperson Anna Friedges told the E-Commerce Times — not just T-Mobile subscribers.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Huawei tipped a “MediaPad” tablet running Android 3.x, said to be due June 20 and to be the company’s smallest and lightest offering. Meanwhile, rival Chinese manufacturer Lenovo will release both consumer and enterprise 10-inch Android tablets, under the IdeaPad and ThinkPad brands respectively, says an industry report.
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Samsung and American Airlines announced they will deploy 6,000 Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets for premium class, in-flight entertainment on select flights later this year. The roll-out is designed to help promote Samsung’s Android 3.1 tablet in the enterprise market, according to the company.
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Riverbed is known in the market as a leading vendor of WAN optimization hardware solutions. Riverbed is also a leading sponsor of one of the most popular open source network applications, the Wireshark packet and network analyzer.
Riverbed’s involvement with Wireshark comes by way of its acquisition of CACE, a technology vendor whose executive team includes the founder of Wireshark, Gerald Combs. Riverbed’s open source networking credibility however goes back even further than the CACE acquisition. Steve McCanne, the CTO of Riverbed is the co-creator of the tcpdump command line packet analyzer.
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The ability to support the myriad of mobile devices in a coherent way is a bugbear for mobilising enterprise applications, but one local start up has leveraged open source components to make it all happen without the need for an on-premise server or native app.
Blink Mobile Interactive, based in Kariong on the NSW Central Coast (north of Sydney), has developed a Cloud service that integrates enterprise applications and presents them in the best form-factor for the user’s device – be it an iOS, Android, Symbian or Windows-based handset.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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On the eve of the Chromebooks being released to the public, Google has rolled out the next version of its Chrome Web browser: Chrome 12.
“Wait,” you say, “Didn’t Google just release a new edition of Chrome last month?” Yes, yes they did: Chrome 11 and now they’re back with another one. If you’re a cynic like me, your first thought might have been: “Is there anything new here besides the number? Is there really anything here that demands it be called a major new release?” The answer to those questions is: Yes. Yes, there are sufficient new features in this model for it to be worth given a new number.
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Mozilla
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As part of Mozilla’s new rapid release development process the beta development channel has been updated with a Firefox release candidate. For detailed information about the changes please visit:
* Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/5.0beta/releasenotes/
* Firefox mobile: http://www.mozilla.com/mobile/5.0beta/releasenotes/
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Mozilla is–and deservedly so–widely recognized for defending open web policies and standards, and now, in conjunction with The Barbarian Group, the company is calling for users everywhere to make their “marks” on the open web concept. Mozilla Mark Up is an online project that asks users everywhere to sign their names and contribute their “marks” to an interactive, graphical collection of yes votes in favor of the open web. It’s a small but nicely executed gesture backing important concepts.
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Databases
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In Part One of Scale Fail, I discussed some of the major issues which prevent web sites and applications from scaling. As was said there, most scalability issues are really management issues. The first article covered a few of the chronic bad decisions — or “anti-patterns” — which companies suffer from, including compulsive trendiness, lack of metrics, “barn door troubleshooting”, and single-process programming. In Part Two, we’ll explore some more general failures of technology management which lead to downtime.
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After six months in a public beta, Xeround is declaring its MySQL in the cloud database generally available.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation today announced new advisory board members saying it’s a demonstration of wide corporate support. Florian Effenberger said, “its composition shows that LibreOffice is a vendor-neutral, truly-free office suite, and confirms that The Document Foundation has created a solid base to build upon, for the community, for corporations and enterprises, and for adopters and end-users.”
Members include ” Google, SUSE, Red Hat, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest, and the Free Software Foundation.” Representatives from each will serve for one year providing advice and guidance on future
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The much-criticized JCP (Java Community Process), which maps out procedures for amending officially sanctioned Java technologies, is set for a face-lift that includes greater transparency and the possible loss of voting privileges for JCP members who disregard their responsibilities.
New procedures are part of the recently introduced Java Specification Request 348. “This JCR — nicknamed JCP.next — proposes a variety of changes to do with transparency, participation, agility, and governance,” JCP said in a document posted on its website on June 8. The document states that JCP chairman Patrick Curran views full transparency of a JCP expert group operations as the most important change introduced by JSR 348. “Many expert groups carry out their business openly over public mailing lists and publicly viewable issue-trackers, and they make public responses to all comments. JCP.next will elevate those recommended practices to mandatory status. The process of recruiting Expert Group members will also be documented for the public eye, ensuring that all applications are considered in a fair way,” JCP said.
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Computer maker Hewlett-Packard (HP) has settled a lawsuit brought against former boss Mark Hurd as it tried to stop him joining rival Oracle.
Under the deal, Mr Hurd will give up about $30m (£19.3m) in HP shares he was given in his severance package.
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If Executive Committee members of the Java Community Process don’t like how Oracle is handling Java and the JCP, then why don’t they just vote no when big Java issues come up? Business reasons are key, but a recent olive branch from Oracle may have helped turn the tide in Oracle’s favor.
First, let’s look at 13-1 vote that approved the release of Java SE 7 this week and see how each member of the 16-member committee voted.
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CMS
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The WordPress team has announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 3.2.
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Web, social, search, mobile, and CMS in a single composite platform
Open source CMS company Jahia has unveiled the commercial release of its Jahia 6.5 CMS. The company is hoping to differentiate the new product on the basis of its ability to bridge web, portal, social, search, mobile user experience, and content management with a single composite platform.
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Project Releases
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Come and get ‘em! GlusterFS 3.2.1 has just been released – it’s a maintenance release with performance enhancements and bug fixes. Packages are available for RHEL, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CentOS and source tarball.
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After more than two years of development to Horde open source project has released version 4.0 of its integrated groupware and webmail suites.
Back in April the project announced version 4 of the groupware components, but a further two months of development was done to prepare the integrated groupware suite, which also includes a Webmail Edition.
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The first public version of the Wakanda open source platform for developing web applications using just JavaScript has now been made available to software developers by global software group 4D.
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If you want to make a website go faster, you’ve got a number of options. One of the best and easiest is to place a proxy caching server in front of a website, that accelerates content delivery.
The open source Varnish Cache is one such technology and is deployed on big name websites, including Facebook and Twitter. Varnish Cache 3.0 was officially released today, expanding the technology with the promise of new modularity for the next generation of web acceleration needs.
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Public Services/Government
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Mark Taylor, CEO at Sirius, accused Computacenter of skewing an open source proof-of-concept pilot to favour Microsoft, with which the systems integrator (SI) has a commercial relationship.
“My opinion is that the large systems integrators would not survive a transition to open source in the public sector, for the simple reason that the savings would be enormous,” Mark Taylor told Computer Weekly. “The loss to their revenue would be massive. Their survival depends on there being no successful open source trials.”
A Computacenter spokesman said Taylor’s statement was “factually incorrect and potentially libellous”. Matt Kenny, client director at Computacenter, said: “If it’s right for the council then we’ll use open source software, if it’s not then we won’t.”
Computacenter later claimed the pilot had not been concluded. “Our commitment to Bristol City Council includes maximising the use of open source if it meets their defined business requirements.”.
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Licensing
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When you release code under the GNU General Public License (GPL), you undertake a specific set of obligations. Many of these obligations, such as providing a copyright notice and a copy of the GPL version you are using, are relatively simple. However, the obligation to provide source code with the object code is more complex, because you have several choices about how to fulfill it – and the choice you make can cause ongoing problems, especially if you are not set up to administer it.
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Programming
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Python logo As expected, Python 2.7.2 and Python 3.1.4 have been released by the Python developers. Both releases contain the security fixes to stop redirection errors that were included in May’s Python 2.5.6 and last week’s Python 2.6.7 “security fixes only” releases, but these are general maintenance releases and therefore contain many more fixes and corrections – although only Python 2.7.2 is a current production version.
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Recently, we covered some of the extensive results from the Eclipse Community Survey and Open Source Developer Report, which contains lots of data about open source trends. In this year’s survey, as has been seen in similar surveys recently, mobile applications and cloud computing are clearly on users’ and developers’ minds. Another set of results from this year’s survey is generating discussion online, though, and raising questions about whether the many new organizations and businesses adopting open source software are also giving back to the projects they benefit from. In many cases, it appears that they are not giving back.
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Google has made changes to its search engine as it strives to get consumers the information they want faster.
Its new Instant Pages system will shave between two to five seconds off the time it takes for a web page to load, the company said.
It is also planning to offer voice-activated and enhanced image searching.
Google, which processes one billion requests every day, said search remained its core focus.
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Health/Nutrition
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Ever wonder what happens to the premiums you pay for your health insurance?
You might be surprised to learn that more and more of the dollars you pay for coverage are being sucked into a kind of black hole.
It doesn’t really disappear, of course. It just doesn’t do you a bit of good — unless, of course, you believe it is to your advantage that it ultimately winds up in the bank accounts of a few investors and insurance company executives, including those who have to power to deny coverage for potentially life-saving care.
If you’ve been paying attention to what health insurance company CEOs have been saying to Wall Street over the past several months, you will know that they are spending more and more of their firms’ cash — which comes from you, of course — to “repurchase” their firms’ stock. And Wall Street absolutely loves that.
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The transfer of Medicaid policymaking authority in the committee’s budget bill raises serious constitutional concerns, just as the similar provisions in the budget repair did. By giving so much authority to an unelected official, both versions of this unprecedented transfer of lawmaking authority limit the ability of Wisconsin citizens to have a role in the process. However, in contrast to Act 10, the new bill goes much further in eliminating public involvement since it allows the sweeping grant of authority to be exercised by the DHS Secretary without so much as a single public hearing.
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Cablegate
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WikiLeaks has released a statement marking six months since Julian Assange was put under house arrest, setting out his defence against sexual assault claims.
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“The last thing Haiti needs now is an earthquake,” said a May 25, 2005, cable, written two weeks after a 4.3 magnitude tremor shook Port-au-Prince. No injuries were reported, and damage was minor. But the cable warned that “a more severe earthquake would be catastrophic, as the government of Haiti is unprepared to handle a natural disaster of any magnitude,” adding that such an event would compound problems of political instability, poverty and environmental degradation.
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In December 2010 Sweden issued two international warrants for Julian Assange’s arrest. He has been detained without charge since. This is a guide to the events, investigations and court proceedings that are connected with his extradition.
This guide is the first to map out the legal aspects of the UK extradition cases, the controversies surrounding the Swedish investigation, and societal and political reactions in Sweden.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The June 8 – June 10 episodes of MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show featured a three-part series titled “Firewater?” It pondered whether drilling for methane gas is a path toward a prosperous “clean energy” future for the United States, or if, to the contrary, the harms of methane gas drilling, caused by a process called fracking, nullify these oft-repeated industry claims.
While three recent scientific reports — one by Duke University, one by Cornell University, and one by the Post Carbon Institute — point to the latter, Ratigan’s series portrayed the issue as still up for debate, with both sides’ claims having equal merit.
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Back in 2005 it was clear to a number of observers that China’s trailing rate of coal consumption was so strong, that its demand was on course to double by the end of the decade. As of 2010, this is precisely what’s happened. From a jump between 2002-2003, around 850 Mtoe (million tonnes oil equivalent), China is now consuming 1713.5 Mtoe as of last year, according to the BP Statistical Review. | see: China Coal Consumption in Mtoe 2000-2010.
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The above chart shows the latest proportions of primary energy sources, as reported by the BP Statistical Review. You can see that Renewables now appear in the data, and account for 1.32% of total world supply of energy.
There are two big stories in the 2010 data from BP Statistical Review. The first I have already addressed: the colossal growth in coal consumption–predictably in non-OECD–but also the surprising strength in OECD coal demand.
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CRUDE-OIL prices shot up on June 8th—Brent crude to a one-month high of $118.59 per barrel—after OPEC representatives meeting in Vienna were unable to reach an agreement on production quotas. Many had expected an increase in quotas as members with spare production capacity, led by Saudi Arabia, pushed to avoid a price spike that may dampen long-term demand. As figures released in BP’s “Statistical Review of World Energy” show, global oil production has struggled to keep up with increased demand recently, particularly from Asia. In China alone consumption has risen by over 4m barrels per day in the past decade, accounting for two-fifths of the global rise. In 2010 consumption exceeded production by over 5m barrels per day for the first year ever, as world oil stocks were run down.
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Finance
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June 13 (Bloomberg) — William Cohan, author of “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World” and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor, talks about Goldman Sachs’s position on mortgage securities before the market’s collapse. Cohan speaks with Erik Schatzker and Deirdre Bolton on Bloomberg Television’s “InsideTrack.” (William D. Cohan is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. Source: Bloomberg)
You didn’t really think Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) would go down without a fight now did you? Of course not. So it should come as little surprise that recently Goldman has started to push back hard against its nemesis, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and his narrative that the firm is the lead villain of the financial crisis.
In its new mission, Goldman has been very careful not to take on Levin directly — after all he remains a very powerful figure in Congress and incurring his further wrath would be plain silly. Instead, the firm has taken its case to the court of public opinion, through a series of orchestrated presentations with members of the mainstream business press and to at least one Wall Street research analyst.
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How many bankers, mortgage brokers, and the rest of the well-renumerated hooligans who brought the economy to its knees have been investigated or prosecuted for what appears to be some highly questionable activities? Very few.
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Kathleen Gallagher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote a good article on the subject earlier this week. As she reported, James Buchen, vice president of government relations for Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, called the amendment “the icing on the cake for us be able to go out and sell Wisconsin as manufacturing heaven.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Among them: first-ever head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Bush Administration from 2003-2005, former Governor of Pennsylvania from 1995-2001, and former Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from from 1983-1995.
Upon leaving the DHS in 2005, Ridge started his career as a lobbyist, opening a lobby shop known as Ridge Global, located in Washington, D.C, which he still currently heads. Beyond this stint, though, Ridge is also a paid “consultant” (a.k.a. lobbyist) for the Marcellus Shale Coaltion, a “trade association” in disguise that in reality is a methane gas industry-funded lobbying group.
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During the Wisconsin protests against Walker’s collective bargaining bill, Walker received an email from a Republican activist and Indiana prosecutor urging him to employ a “false flag operation” — to pretend that he was injured or attacked by a “union thug” — to discredit the unions. The prosecutor lost his job for recommending such a partisan stunt, but the Wisconsin GOP has apparently not learned its lesson.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Spotify could finally be closing in on a U.S. launch, with three of the major record labels having signed up to provide the service with content, and the fourth and last rumored to be close to doing so. And about time too.
I’ve been writing about Spotify wanting to launch in the U.S. for over two years now. Only six months after I, resident in the U.K., was able to start using the service. Spotify and its CEO Daniel Ek’s stance has been that it’s definitely coming, just when the time is right. And the time hasn’t been right so far. Mainly because the major record labels in the U.S. haven’t been willing to soften their stance on licensing agreements. Until now, possibly.
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06.15.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is currently revamping its technology strategy to bring it up to date with the needs of customers, but Mac and Linux users hoping to use this year’s DIY E-tax software will be once again left out in the cold.
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* The OpenSUSE Conference Heats Up
* FreeNAS 8: The FreeBSD Spin on Network Storage
* The Ubuntu Software Center: The Apps Concept for Ubuntu
* Fedora to Switch to BTRFS
* Mageia 2.0 Is Already in the Works
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I care about software freedom as much as I care about software usability.
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Desktop
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Google’s Chrome OS has been highly anticipated by people all over since its announcement. Manufacturers such as Samsung and Acer are trying their best to be the one company that gets the honor to first release a laptop or a netbook to the market that runs Chrome operating system.
Things are pretty much looking good for the two companies when out of nowhere, Kogan broke the news that they already released a laptop with Chromium OS as its operating system. Kogan is an Australian manufacturer that has been shipping the notebook in Australia and the United Kingdom since June 7 leaving Samsung and Acer to eat its dust.
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Kernel Space
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It was just over 100 days ago that OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland launched from the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in Los Angeles. Now that these major releases have been available to the public for over three months, and Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad will be released in just a couple of days, here’s some overview statistics of where our open and collaborative testing platform is at today.
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Powertop, a tool for detecting power wasters under Linux, is about to make a generational jump: version 2.0 provides improved diagnostic options and a redesigned user interface. It also offers a simple, manual way of enabling numerous power-saving features that can noticeably extend the battery life of notebooks.
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The Linux Foundation announced the final program for LinuxCon North America in Vancouver, B.C. August 17-19, 2011. Events include the 20th anniversary of Linux gala celebration, a discussion between Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman, a keynote by IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger, and a “20 Years of Linux” panel featuring Jon “maddog” Hall and Eben Moglen.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Boxee swung its focus back to the desktop on Monday with a promise of a major update for the Mac, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows versions of its media front-end app. The new version will bring the reworked browser and content options that have been present on the Boxee Box in recent months. The code would also be more closely in step with the dedicated box in the future.
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Last week, we announced that Tux Paint was our Project of the Month for June 2011. Geared at encouraging children to use the computer to create drawings, this project is a fantastic tool for educators and parents for fostering creativity.
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i haven’t been making much music in the last week. mostly been coding, hacking, and working on things that will allow me to create music and strange new sounds.
for example, i got madrona labs’ aalto software synthesizer working in linux. they just released the windows port a few days ago, and have already expressed interest in creating a linux port, so i pointed them to the cross-platform, open-source juce framework. meanwhile, i set out to get the windows version running in linux.
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Proprietary
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As Adobe faces increasingly stiff competition on different fronts, one might think the company would be eager to reach the broadest base of end-users possible. Yet its record of engagement within the open source channel remains lackluster at best. Let’s take a look at Adobe’s trends on this front, and what they might mean over the long-term.
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Driver code for the graphics chip of AMD’s Llano APUs has just made it into Linux 3.0, which could be given version number 3.0.0 after all. Meanwhile, there have been further discussions about the best approach for overlay, aka union, filesystems.
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Instructionals/Technical
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etckeeper is a collection of tools to let /etc be stored in a git, mercurial, darcs, or bzr repository. It hooks into apt (and other package managers including yum and pacman-g2) to automatically commit changes made to /etc during package upgrades. It tracks file metadata that revison control systems do not normally support, but that is important for /etc, such as the permissions of /etc/shadow. It’s quite modular and configurable, while also being simple to use if you understand the basics of working with revision control.
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Games
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One of the areas where GNU/Linux lacks, is the number of game available on the platform, number of games is limited compared to popular proprietary operating system, however, there are still some pretty interesting and fun games available on the platform like for instance, I had immense fun playing xBill or Tux Racer.
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Instead it aims to be a 2D tag-team-fighting game something similar to the online game “Kongai“.
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Pioneer is a space adventure game set in the milkyway galaxy at the turn of the 31st century.
The game is open-ended, and you are free to explore the millions of star systems in the game. You can land on planets, slingshot past gas giants, and burn yourself to a crisp flying between binary star systems.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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After the overview of 20 best KDE applications, it’s time to have a look at what GNOME has to offer, right? This article overviews 20 of the GNOME applications which are, in my opinion, the best in their category. Only a single application from each category is included, and screenshots are attached. The list is put up in no particular order and at the end of the article I put noteworthy alternatives for each category (only GTK alternative applications).
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I was going to tell you good readers about ImagineOS, but it didn’t seem to like my video card. So instead I decided to try out the new ClearOS alpha. ClearOS used to be a server system, but the upcoming 6.1 release will also provide a suitable desktop environment. It’s based on Red Hat Enterprise, so I thought it might be interesting.
However, it was and it wasn’t.
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In Linux World, formatting a Usb Flash Disk is not an easy operation for end-user; in Pardus we always use one sentence: “Make it easy !“. So, we have to find an easy way to formatting a removable disk !
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GStreamer maintainer and code god Wim Taymans just posted an update on the the progress of GStreamer 0.11 to the GStreamer development mailing list. For those interested in learning about the new features coming in GStreamer 1.0 this email (along with the previous update) is must read material.
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The big reason that NetworkManager 0.9 is slower to connect than NM 0.8 is that we flipped IPv6 addressing on by default. That means that when you connect to a new network and that network supports IPv6 autoconfiguration via router advertisements you’ll get IPv6 connectivity. But if that network doesn’t support IPv6 then you’ll spin for 60 seconds or so waiting for a router advertisement because there’s nothing on the network that listens to the IPv6 autoconf solicitations that the kernel puts out when the link comes up. You can fix that but changing the IPv6 addressing method to “Ignore” in nm-connection-editor if you know your network doesn’t support IPv6.
Why don’t we bring up IPv4 and just wait for IPv6 to happen in the background? That’s a great question; I’m glad I asked it. First, it requires some small changes in NetworkManager’s D-Bus interface to add connected states for both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously so that applications can listen for when each stack’s connectivity is available. That’s trivial. It could be done tomorrow. It’s not a technical problem at all.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Since it is a fork and uses Mandriva 2010 as its base, the system will be very familiar to users. And since Mandriva is very user-friendly, it and Mageia would be easy for users of other distributions to adapt to using. But Mageia’s primary philosophy is rooted in the community. When the founders began the early stages of forking, they invited the community to participate. When they began packaging, they recruited community and even inexperienced maintainers. These “new guys” were giving mentors and taught the “business.” Today Mageia proudly proclaims, “Mageia is about people – the people who make and the people who use Mageia the Linux distribution. We’re completely community based, with everything that implies.” The main thing that implies is that Magiea is “not dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company.”
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Gentoo Family
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In order to have the best results one should update their system about once a week or so. If you wait too long, sometimes issues can crop up. I’d be disingenuous if I said that updating often didn’t rarely cause breakage as well. Which is precisely why the periodic releases are welcome. It’s been my good fortune that a couple of times in the past the new releases came just about the time I really needed a fresh install.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Evolution Systems, a Sydney, Australia-based full service IT support business, has built its cloud service offering, The Evolution Cloud, on a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
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Technology markets go through a predictable pattern. First there is discovery, then development of a product, the creation of a market with multiple products, and finally consolidation around a market leader.
Clouds are the first enterprise computing platform to be delivered in the age of open source, so as we enter the third phase (multiplicity), open source bonafides become a selling point.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Santos, a leading supplier of oil and gas for Australia and Asia, has achieved cost savings of $2.5 million with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition, the energy pioneer has gained greater stability and faster performance, helping the company reduce its global carbon footprint.
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A funny thing happened to Red Hat–the poweful purveyor of support and services surrounding Linux–over the past couple of years as large open source-focused companies such as Novell and Sun Microsystems became acquisition targets for big software companies: It became the only viable, U.S. publicly traded company focused on open source. While many people understand Red Hat’s business in parts, a really big part of the company’s strong performance over the past several years comes from poor economic times, and the cost savings that Red Hat can offer businesses. Now, the company is out with a useful case study illustrating how the savings work.
Santos, a leading supplier of oil and gas for Australia and Asia, has announced that it has achieved cost savings of $2.5 million with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It’s not alone. Gap Inc. has standardized on Red Hat’s Linux software and support, as have many other big companies.
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The release about Santos was put up on the Red Hat site nearly a month ago. Then, presumably, someone realised that the media should know about it. Perhaps because Santos sales last year were in the region of $2.2 billion.
The funny thing is, there are other companies – Lonely Planet and Specsavers, for example – which have done similar or bigger deals (one can only judge by the details provided) with Red Hat. Presumably again, these deals were finalised after the Santos transaction as they were detailed on Red Hat’s site at a later date.
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Fedora
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Votes | Candidate
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1120 | Kevin Fenzi (nirik)
1020 | Bill Nottingham (notting)
764 | Tomáš Mráz (t8m)
699 | Peter Jones (pjones)
567 | Stephen Gallagher (sgallagh)
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535 | Kyle McMartin (kylem)
480 | Justin Forbes (jforbes)
398 | Iain Arnell (iarnell)
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Debian Family
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This is a simple tip but an important one: when you’re installing Debian, take the time required to ensure the machine is connected to the Internet with a wired connection. If you have DHCP available, the debian-installer will use it to configure the network.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The latest version of Ubuntu, 11.04, has a different look to previous versions. We demonstrate the basics
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KDE is arguably the best-known alternative to the GNOME desktop, and it’s what you’re already used to if you run Kubuntu instead of the standard desktop Ubuntu.
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With Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu underwent a major transformation. Gone was the plain and simple GNOME UI, and in came the shell interface with shiny new features. Though Canonical had high hopes from this release, the response Natty received was hugely disappointing. Many users felt that the release was a half-baked one with too many confusing features. However, a few good features did shine through leaving some users thoroughly impressed by Unity. Good or bad, Unity in its current avatar has plenty of room left for improvement. So, here are a few things we think can make Unity a better interface.
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I was traveling into San Francisco the other day, and I had an idea I wanted to share. This is very much just an idea, and given I don’t have the time to work on it, I just wanted to share it so if someone else wants to run with it, they can.
Every Wednesday at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern, I do a live Ubuntu Q+A videocast. In pretty much every show someone always asks me about gaming on Ubuntu, and if it is going to be a focus for us. I think gaming is really important for Ubuntu and something we should certainly focus on more in the future. My idea is linked to the importance of gaming, but with a slightly different tack.
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Here at SCW, we donate to open source software, created a political demonstration website against Canadian Usage Based Billing, and constantly try to balance the needs of security with our beliefs in freedom and the openness of information. So, we are going to take a break from talking about security, to talk about ubuntu, linux, wine and FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).
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Flavours and Variants
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It’s been a little over a year since I reviewed the first Peppermint OS, and while I liked the first effort on this new project, I’ve been really looking forward to Peppermint Two. Well, my wait was over as of last week, so I was able to kick the tires and get a good feel for it after installing and using it for a few days.
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I took some time to contact Jeff Hoogland, lead developer for Bodhi Linux, and asked him a few questions about the distribution he is in charge with.
TuxArena: Hello there, Jeff. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us about Bodhi Linux.
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Luxoft and Elektrobit Corp. (EB) announced a jointly developed, Linux-based reference platform for a DLNA-ready in-car media server, and also demonstrated Luxoft’s Linux-based DashCore and Android-based DroidBuzz IVI software. The “wallet sized” In-Car Media Server and Internet Hotspot is based on a 456MHz ARM9 processor, and offers 64MB SDRAM and 128MB flash, plus Ethernet, USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 3G connectivity, says Luxoft.
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Canonical announced recently that is joining the GENIVI Alliance and that it will create a GENIVI-compliant Ubuntu IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) Remix operating system based on the Ubuntu Core sub-set.
Announced by Canonical a couple of days ago, Ubuntu IVI Remix will be an In-Vehicle Infotainment operating system, supporting Intel and ARM processors.
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Linux Mint 11 Katya is an excellent release. It has a few issues, but overall, it’s very good. Why, you may ask? What makes it special? Functionality wise, it’s about the same as Julia and comparable to most other popular distributions, more or less, with emphasis on more. It’s a bunch of small things, the attention to details, which make all the difference.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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It has been a long time coming, but we can now tell you that the Sakshat Indian tablet has now got the go ahead. We first assumed that the device would cost $35, but that has been increased to $50. However, once you take into consideration the government subsidy the tablet will cost just $24, which makes it Rs. 1,100.
Taking that price into consideration you are now looking at the world’s cheapest tablet – so would make it the Tata Nano of the consumer electronics world. It does seem fitting that India is able to corner both these markets, and it is no surprise. India is an emerging market, and to make things more affordable to all Indian’s these could be just the start.
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The Canonical design team are currently hard at work designing, testing, evaluating new layouts for the Ubuntu Software Centre version 5.0.
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These are impressive news, because it clearly shows the big players are aware of and watching what goes on the OpenSource/OpenMovie community. It is a very delightful piece of news and I am happy for Colin and the blender project seeing them getting this kind of recognition!
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Events
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On May 7 and 8 I attended the Linux Audio Conference for 2011 held in Maynooth, Ireland. Due to a temporary mental malfeasance – for some reason I assumed the Earth rotated in the opposite direction – I booked my flight for the wrong departure date and was unable to change its itinerary without paying out a hefty sum to the airline. So, on Saturday morning I arrived at NUI in Maynooth, completely out of sync with the local time zone and ready to pack four days worth of activity into two.
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Monday morning after a great conference can be a downer, but the conference can keep rolling right here. This past weekend’s Southeast Linuxfest was full of great technical talks, as well as more community-focused ones, many by opensource.com authors.
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Once again the SouthEast LinuxFest was a success. Now in its third year, this is a well organized FOSS conference held in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I went for the first time last year when we were a sponsor and had a blast. It was just as good this year.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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LINUX DISTRIBUTION Ubuntu will continue to use Firefox as its default web browser at least until version 12.04 is released next year.
Canonical, the vendor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution told The INQUIRER that Firefox will continue to be the default web browser it ships with Ubuntu until at least its 12.04 release. The comments come after Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder said that Google’s Chrome came close to replacing Firefox as the default browser in Ubuntu.
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Google’s Chrome browser could replace Firefox in Ubuntu, according to Mark Shuttleworth.
The founder of Ubuntu-backer Canonical said “it’s a real possibility” Chrome could become the default browser in a future iteration of the open-source OS, according to an interview in Network World.
“We looked at it closely in the last cycle and the decision was to stick with Firefox in 11.10,” he said. That version, called Oneiric Ocelot, is due out in October.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Forking is possible because of the licence under which the code is released; anyone who thinks he/she or a collective can do a better job or wants to introduce customisations that the mainline project is unable or unwilling to, can take a copy of the code and run with it.
When the number one FOSS office suite, OpenOffice.org, was inherited by Oracle as part of its purchase of Sun Microsystems, interested coders and those who had been involved prior to the purchase waited for a while before they realised that things were going nowhere.
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As you’ve probably heard, the proposal to move OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation was approved by a wide margin. Volunteers interested in helping with this project continued to sign up, even during the 72-hour ballot, giving the project 87 members, as well as 8 experienced Apache mentors, at the end of the vote. The volunteers signed up included an impressive number of programmers from OpenOffice.org, RedOffice and Symphony, as well as QA engineers, translators, education project experts, OOo user forum moderators and admins, marketing project members, documentation leads, etc. The broad range of support for this new project, from volunteers as well as voters, was very encouraging.
Of course, this is not the end of our recruitment effort. In some sense it marks only the beginning. What I wrote about in my previous notes, about the Apache meritocracy remains true. However, now that the proposal has advanced and an Apache “Podling” (a probationary project) has been created, the way to sign up has changed. You should now sign up to the project’s mailing lists directly. For example, an email to ooo-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org will get you onto the project’s main dev mailing list. Anyone interested in participating needs to get onto this list, including those who already earlier expressed interest as “proposed committers” as well as new volunteers.
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It’s been several weeks I hadn’t updated this blog. I was quite busy but I really avoided to comment on the latest developments at Apache and OpenOffice.org. Now that the OpenOffice.org project has formally been voted as an Apache project in incubation phase, I feel I can more easily comment on this latest move.
To start with the straight question; what do I think about this? I do have mixed feelings about Oracle moving the OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation. As explained in the Document Foundation’s official press release, this is a missed opportunity to reunite OpenOffice.org to the Document Foundation. By reuniting the two Oracle wouldn’t have accomplished a reconciliation, as there was no real need for this (whatever reconciliation would happen on a personal level) , but it would have brought order and coherence to the free and open source software office suites. Instead, Oracle chose -in a move where resentment and vengeance were not absent- to dump the OpenOffice.org code and trademark to the Apache Foundation without the Oracle engineers who had been working on it since fifteen years.
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CMS
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Two recent blog posts explained what I think the Drupal development cycle is like; see the Gartner hype cycle and Drupal and the Drupal mood cycle. These thoughts came from living through many major Drupal releases and noticing patterns of developer and user mood as release dates approached and receded. Make sure to read these posts first, before reading this one.
Developers like to release code. “Release early, release often” wrote Eric S. Raymond in his famed essay on open source, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and that philosophy has facilitated the rise of many open-source projects — including Drupal. At the same time, many end users dislike change: they would prefer that software versions stay stable as long as possible, because change means work or cost.
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Education
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School’s out for summer, but that doesn’t mean the learning ends for teachers or students. Open source education applications offer a great option for students who are looking to get ahead or catch up over the summer. And summer is an ideal time for educators to find out more about some of the free open source tools available to help them in the classroom.
There are several good reasons why educators should try open source software, most notably financial savings. Many, many schools are facing budget cuts in the coming year, and those schools could realize significant savings by switching from proprietary to open source software. In addition, schools with knowledgeable IT staff can adapt open source software so that it meets their needs exactly –something that’s all but impossible with closed source software.
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The only reason anyone would want to run a Nightly build of a Mozilla product like Firefox is because they want to help provide a test environment for providing that vital early feedback on a product that’s so fresh it’s completely untested. This early exposure provides the basis on which Firefox, Thunderbird and its brethren migrate towards the first major milestone in a program’s life, the alpha build.
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Programming
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Meet Daniil Kulchenko. He was an HTML programmer at age six. He was a freelance Linux systems administrator at 11. And at 15, he founded his first business: Phenona, a platform-as-a-service for building and hosting Perl applications.
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The results from the Eclipse Foundation’s annual Community Survey were published last week, with the output in report form available here (PDF warning).
The survey, completed by 624 individuals, was a voluntary response as opposed to a random sample, and therefore from a statistical perspective the results cannot be considered representative. It is, nonetheless, an interesting observational study.
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For example, yesterday, after I finished using it, I shut down Microsoft Windows. As usual, it needed to install more updates, so it decided to do so between clicking “Shut Down” and actually shutting down. I figured it shouldn’t take that long, so I closed my laptop lid and went to eat dinner. This wouldn’t be news, except that when I came back, I found that it had gone to sleep in the middle (i.e. it hadn’t actually finished installing updates). That was one annoying thing. Anyway, I woke it up, and it finished installing updates and then properly shut down with no apparent errors.
Today, when I booted back into Microsoft Windows, I got a message saying that Microsoft Windows didn’t shut down properly the last time. WHAT? It’s telling me that it’s my fault that it took so long to install updates that the laptop went to sleep before it could finish, and that what looked to be a fine shutdown process was actually faulty in some magical way, and I’m supposed to blindly believe all that?
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Finance
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Last summer I wrote about Arianna Huffington’s latest book, Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream and talked about the Great Recession, the Great Bailout, and the Great Cover-Up of financial crimes.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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If you want a vision of the world of global repression and bullying that copyright maximalists are striving to create, try this:
A Sheffield student is facing up to five years in jail if convicted in America for a website which provided links to movie clips.
Let’s just look at the component parts of this story.
First, the website was run by a UK national, and hosted in the UK. As the student’s lawyer points out:
“The essential contention is that the correct forum for this trial is in fact here in Britain, where he was at all times.”
So what would the situation be here in the UK? Well, a very similar case involving alleged unauthorised links to copyright material played out a few years ago – the famous OiNK trial. Here’s what happened:
Lawyers have presented their final arguments in the trial of Alan Ellis. The prosecution slammed the ex-OiNK admin, saying that the site was set up with dishonest and profiteering intentions right from the start. The defense tore into IFPI and countered by calling Ellis an innovator with talents to be nurtured. Today the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty, and Ellis walked free.
Aside from the unanimous verdict, what was notable about the trial was that Ellis was accused of “Conspiracy to Defraud the music industry” – not with linking to copyright material. That is probably because the latter seems not to be a criminal offence, and so it was necessary to find some other charge.
Asterisk 1.8 and Asterisk SCF
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.14.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Ultimately the best solution for getting Linux into the hands of someone new and having it provide a positive experience is the proper setup and configuration of the operating system by someone that knows what they are doing. Ninety percent of Linux distributions that exist can be easily used by just about anyone when properly configured and presented with a couple minutes of explanation to the new user. Just like Windows or OSX anyone can use Linux in 2011, but not everyone can install Linux.
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No. This FUD doesn’t wash. GNU/Linux is quite a reasonable OS for ordinary users. I have introduced thousands of all ages to GNU/Linux and few of them had any such problems with GNU/Linux. They use PCs. They don’t try to destructively test an OS. Even grandmothers and little kids can use GNU/Linux.
see Linux Desktop Experience Killing Linux on the Desktop if you want to see a logical train-wreck of an essay.
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What’s in a name? Acronyms, in-jokes and lots of capital letters, if free software is anything to go by.
We look at some unfortunate choices that have been made at this critical stage of development.
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What about silly names? Ubuntu nicknames come to mind.
While I’m not a big fan of Ubuntu’s release nicknames, I don’t see any problem with them, either. Developers name or nickname their releases at their will. Don’t like it? Then help develop and earn your right to change those names! 
But what about Kaffeine, K3B, GNOME, and so on? Some people will tell me “C’mon! They are indeed SILLY!”
Sillier than Windows Vista and Vista/7 mega-killer “new” feature, the one that goes by the name of “POWERSHELL”?
What’s that? What does that tell you? Power Rangers meet Ninja Turtles?? See? Subjectivity is not a problem of the name, but of the audience.
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Linux-based plug computers such as the Sheevaplug have been drawing fresh attention for some time already, but on Monday MimoMonitors launched the new MimoPlug, a tiny, cube-shaped contender that’s designed as a desktop PC alternative for cloud computing applications.
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MimoMonitors.com announced a Debian Linux-based, Marvell SheevaPlug mini-PC bundled with its USB touchscreen displays for desktop-PC use. The compact, 1.2GHz MimoPlug features SD storage, gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, and optional eSATA ports, and is available with 7-10-inch touchscreens in bundling deals ranging from $380 to $500.
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I believe that the human mind is capable of learning when the subject is willing to participate in the process of knowledge acquisition. That being said, let me review some of the arguments that I have encountered against Linux, which, in my humble opinion, manifest some subjective reasoning that is used as an over-generalization.
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It has taken Australian open-source conference linux.conf.au several years, quite a lot of negotiation and the use of alternatives to finally secure the rights to its own domain name.
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Desktop
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Rather than just reading the ad, I went to the site and did a search for “linux”. An ASUS eeeBox for $229 was second on the list! A bit further down the list was a USB GNU/Linux installer… followed by an over-priced HP thin client running GNU/Linux on board, and a mess of Linux-compatible devices and NAS devices. I went to the site’s search box again and entered “android”. 10 products came up from five different OEMs.
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“Bachelors are not the only ones who can use GNU/Linux desktops,” blogger Robert Pogson pointed out. “I have had students from grade 1 to 12 use it just fine. None of them needed to configure the clock…” Trenholme’s article, in fact, “is an example of the trolls who visit my blog with some obscure problem never seen by other humans.”
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Server
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Sitting at the core of the NX-10K is a Linux operating system on the appliance.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The Linux kernel power regressions in the Linux 2.6.38 where I was the first to largely document and prove would cause major power problems in Ubuntu 11.04 and other Linux distributions, continues to bite plenty of mobile users.
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PathScale is announcing that they are open-sourcing their EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite. For those not familiar, EKOPath is a high-performance Intel 64 / AMD64 compiler for C99, C++ 2003, and partial support for Fortran 2003. Up to this point in development, PathScale’s compiler has been proprietary and has carried a rather high price-tag with the licensing starting out at $1795 USD and going up from there. Of course, that’s a small price to a large organization seeking to build their software for maximum performance, but is out of the price range for nearly any independent enthusiast or non-commercially-backed free software project. This code compiler is especially popular in super-computing environments. The open-source EKOPath 4 will be available to Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris users free of charge. PathScale will also continue to offer commercial support for this compiler suite.
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Increasing disquiet in the kernel community as ARM tree grows out of control. Linux User’s Rory MacDonald investigates…
Linux kernel contributor and LWN editor Jonathan Corbet has spoken out about the current state of the codebase supporting the ARM architecture within Linux. “In short, it’s a bit of a mess,” said Corbet on his Linux Foundation Blog.
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Applications
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Gnac is a graphical audio converter for GNOME with support for encoding/decoding to and from various formats, including the free formats FLAC and Ogg, WAV, MP3, M4A or SPX.
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It’s easy to get angry at software and hardware companies that don’t provide support for Linux, but have you ever taken time to thank those that do?
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Proprietary
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Yet despite all this success, it seems like adoption of proprietary software on the desktop Linux platform remains spotty at best.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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Climate change should not be included in the national curriculum, the government adviser in charge of overhauling the school syllabus in England has said.
Tim Oates, whose wide-ranging review of the curriculum for five- to 16-year-olds will be published later this year, said it should be up to schools to decide whether – and how – to teach climate change, and other topics about the effect scientific processes have on our lives.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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LightDM is a cross-desktop display manager (think KDM). It’s designed to be fast and lightweight, it is written to replace GDM Gnome’s display manager.
What makes LightDM interesting for KDE is it is designed to to have multiple ‘greeters’. This is the front end that sits on top of the daemon and does the displaying to the user asking them for login details. This means we can have our own KDE interfaces, whilst the Gnome people do their different UIs all whilst sharing the same daemon that handles all the hard parts.
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It’s not easy to put up a list of “best” applications which do something, however there are some highlights in each category which really deserve to be mentioned. In this article I will overview 20 KDE applications which I believe are best in their niche, one application from each important category, in no particular order.
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GNOME Desktop
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Yesterday we shared a new Gnome Shell theme Adwaita-White that matches perfectly with default GTK3 theme in Gnome 3. Black Glass theme is another cool Gnome Shell theme made by deviantARTist shule1987 .
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Although normally I am a fan of xfce or {open,flux}box, curiosity got the best of me and I decided to take gnome 3 for a spin.
One annoyance was the need to click a window to change the focus. I prefer to have the focus of my windows to follow the mouse and find it bothersome to have to click a window to get it’s attention.
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Recently Phoronix did an article about performance under different compositing and non-compositing window managers. GNOME Shell didn’t do that well, so lots of people pointed it out to me. Clearly there was a lot of work put into making measurements for the article, but what is measured is a wide range of 3D fullscreen games across different graphics drivers, graphics hardware, and environments.
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Gentoo Family
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This will probably be my last summer in Gentoo. I have to be around to make sure my packages work until I migrate my systems to Arch Linux and Debian ( highly unlikely since most of them are managed by ssh. No physical access 
). Even before I join Gentoo, I knew that policies were the reason that so many developers decided to leave Gentoo. And yet, nobody learned anything from past experiences. You already know that Gentoo is short on manpower. Yet, leaders feel comfortable to remove cvs access and demotivate people without carrying about the project progress at all.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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What do you do when it’s time to port the most popular Linux distribution to a completely different architecture? Canonical employee [David Mandalla] works on their ARM development team and recently shared the answer to that question with his fellow Dallas Makerspace members.
Canonical needed a way to compile about 20,000+ packages for the ARM platform, however they did not want to cross-compile, which is quite time consuming. Instead, they opted to build a native solution that could handle the load while ensuring that all packages were compiled securely. To tackle this immense task, [David] and his team constructed a 4U server that runs 20 fully-independent ARM development platforms simultaneously.
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With the purchase of Ubuntu Earrings, $6 per pair will go directly to Partimus’ operating costs, helping them to expand into more schools.
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Canonical has pushed Ubuntu along, and teased us with potential tablet offerings. In the server space, where things are more serious, Ubuntu now deploys more quickly and sensibly into a variety of virtualized instances and joins one of two prominent cloud organizational camps. Ubuntu wants to be taken seriously for cloud use, but also for desktop use.
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I have been a Compiz fan ever since I started using Linux. Compiz is also a very integral part of Ubuntu, more so with the introduction of new Unity desktop for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. There are many Compiz effects that are not enabled by default and some of them are really good IMO. Useful Compiz tweaks for Ubuntu 11.04. Note: Post not meant for advanced users.
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At $5000 a pop Nagy’s mechanistic marvels are not going to become an overnight impulse buy, but they will catch the eye – whether it it bionic, glass or another Victorian material – of Steampunk fans the world over.
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Unix was ostensibly forged on the philosophy that every entity be designed to do only one thing, and do it well. Has Canonical, which develops one of the most popular Unix-like OS’s around today, thrown this philosophy out the window when it comes to business strategy? Former Canonical COO Matt Asay thinks so. Here’s why he may be wrong about Canonical and Ubuntu Linux.
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I still, however, do not like Ubuntu Unity. That’s okay because, at the moment, you can still enjoy Classic GNOME on Ubuntu 11.04. Or you can opt to install KDE (by installing Kubuntu Desktop). Right now I’m enjoying a close a representation of the desktop I had before the upgrade occurred (sadly, minus Compiz).
After this upgrade experience, I started thinking, “It’s time I look for a new desktop distribution.” Although I do enjoy Ubuntu, there are aspects about my GNOME/Compiz desktop I don’t like working without. I could, of course, wait until 11.10 which will include GNOME 3 (instead of Classic GNOME), which is a pretty good desktop. But what about openSUSE (with either GNOME 3 or KDE — no Classic GNOME). Or, I could migrate to Fedora 15, which already uses GNOME 3 and does a bang-up job with it. Or, there are a couple of projects attempting to bring GNOME 3 to Ubuntu…but the current state of the GNOME libraries on Ubuntu makes this a huge challenge. Or…what about Bodhi Linux (which I’ve covered here and really like); it’s Ubuntu combined with E17 and Ecomorph…
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Flavours and Variants
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In my opinion Mint has been consistent in putting out solid, polished releases and version 11 continues that trend. There’s nothing really ground-shaking in this version and I believe that was a good way for the developers to go. There have been some minor tweaks to Software Manager, a swap out of OpenOffice.org for LibreOffice and the thin scrollbars for GNOME applications were introduced, but this is a tame release. And I think that’s a good thing given the status of some of the other big-name desktop distributions right now. With Ubuntu and Fedora adopting new desktop environments, Mageia/Mandriva having forked and the openSUSE project changing hands I think Mint is gaining users for its apparent stability as a project as much as for its ease of use.
There were a few minor things I would have liked to have seen done differently in Mint 11. The blank start-up screen, while done for efficiency, might put off inexperienced users who will wonder why their screen doesn’t appear to be working. Though Software Manager and Package Manager do similar things, I think these could stand to be renamed along the lines of “Software Manager (basic)” and “Software Manager (advanced)” to make the distinction more apparent. And, while I’m wishing, I’d like to see a screen added to the installer dedicated to GRUB settings, similar to the way the Fedora and Mageia installers let users configure their bootloader.
All-in-all Mint 11 was a very good experience for me and I think it’s one of the better desktop distributions available at the moment. There’s a good selection of pre-installed software, all of my hardware was supported properly, performance was good and everything ran smoothly for me. Mint is well worth looking into whether you’re a newcomer to Linux or an experienced user looking for a distro you can install quickly and use without configuring.
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Although Ubuntu 11.04 comes with tons of new features, it simply fails to impress as much as Linux Mint 11 does. Mint is fast, easy to use and just fresh. Ubuntu Natty though, has a lot to work upon. Earlier, Mint was always a step behind Ubuntu, but by sticking with GNOME classic, it has proven itself as a superior distribution. Only time will tell whether it can retain the top spot as Ubuntu is readying itself for bigger challenges.
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In the end we were somewhat underwhelmed by the end user though. Bodhi can be very pretty to look at, and you can make it even prettier if you take the time, but these days I find myself longing for super-minimalist desktops with a focus on staying out of the way (of course, Bodhi can be made to be this as well, if you are interested in learning the ins and outs of Enlightenment). The simplicity of the default installation is great — I don’t like being overloaded with apps. But there was just not enough there to hold my interest — I’d rather install CrunchBang and customise Openbox.
On the flipside: If you want to play with Enlightenment (and who doesn’t like playing with new desktop environments) then by all means check it out. The Bodhi team has done a great job of creating a relatively friendly vehicle for playing with Enlightenment — it’s just not for me.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Dell will launch its highly anticipated 10-inch tablet in the Chinese market first, based on a emerging belief that the U.S. market isn’t mature enough for a successful Android launch, Dell executives told CNET today.
Dell’s Streak 10 Pro (see specifications below) will launch in China this summer and in the U.S. market probably sometime next year, John Thode, a Dell vice president and manager of Dell’s mobility business, told CNET. The U.S. market simply doesn’t offer a viable 10-inch tablet strategy for Dell, he said.
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A couple of years ago I wrote about the IT culture of Europe and the market opportunity it presents for vendors of open source software. If you’re ready to take advantage of that information, here are some points American open source software vendors should consider when developing a plan to open new markets in Europe.
Before you make the decision to expand into a major new market, you need to do some serious prep work. Research regulations at the local, regional, national, and EU levels; a discussion with a local lawyer in every country you plan to enter can save hundreds of hours of time you might have to spend if you run afoul of the authorities.
[...]
All of these tactics increase the chance that your efforts to conquer Europe will succeed. Open source software is uniquely suited to the challenge of expanding to new and different markets. Proprietary software companies have to pay a large up-front cost to get involved in a new market. Open source software companies have an advantage due to the cost-effectiveness of community-building and viral marketing. This allows open source companies to feel out new markets and invest significant resources only if demand is confirmed by innovators and early adopters.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is changing the interface of Firefox and is discussing its ideas with its users. Here is another round of mockups how Firefox X could look like.
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Browser makers appear to paying special attention to the improved use of open connection to speed up your browser. Following Google’s SPDY, Mozilla has a fresh idea: Sort available connections.
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As I write this, I have no fewer than 11 tabs open on my browser linked to reference information I might need to consult if an editor has a question on a story, data for the story I’m currently working on, and ancillary sites that remind me of things I need to do before the end of my shift.
One feature I like about my browser, Mozilla Firefox, is that when I’m done for the day and I’m ready to close down the browser, it asks if I want to reopen those tabs the next time Firefox starts.
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Mozilla will try to plug more memory leaks in Firefox with a new, aggressive approach that relies on weekly bug triage meetings, the company said last week.
“It’s become increasingly clear over the last several months that we have a pretty pressing need to deal with increases in memory usage in Firefox,” said Johnny Stenback, a Finnish developer who works for Mozilla, in a message on a company mailing list last Thursday. “Since we released [Firefox] 4 (and before, too), we’ve seen lots of reports about Firefox memory usage being higher than in older versions, and that Firefox memory usage is growing over time.”
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The best thing end-users can do is ignore OpenOffice.org at Apache until the dust settles, and switch to LibreOffice instead.
As expected, the Apache Software Foundation took the first steps to admitting the OpenOffice.org project to the Apache community, following Oracle’s IBM-designed proposal. It now faces a time of maturing and proving in Apache’s Incubator, a period when most likely user-facing development will grind to a halt.
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Education
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Business
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Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform company, now offers a Digital Signature add-on for its flagship Open Source Document Management software, Nuxeo DM. Based on the X.509 standard, the new component provides a secure electronic method for signing PDF files in Nuxeo DM and verifying the signatures with a digital certificate in a PDF reader.
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I have a question for you. To what extent does the “commercial release” of a piece of open source software represent its “success”..?
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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As with the FSF and GNU, the GPL stands as a bulwark against this kind of encroachment. It is not a matter of percentages, but of absolutes. And that’s why I believe the FSF, GNU and GPL will always be necessary – whatever their residual ‘market shares’ – because they will offer fixed points by which actions and options can be judged without losing sight of the core values of freedom and sharing.
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While we have no specific reason to doubt Black Duck’s figures, Bradley M Kuhn, in particular, suggested that Black Duck’s data should be “ignored by serious researchers” since the company doesn’t disclose enough detail about its data collection methods.
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Public Services/Government
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Then there are the glimmers of what appears to be a darker truth about how open source is really handled in the UK. Glimmers like Minister of Parliament (MP) John Pugh’s 2007 statement at the launch of the National Open Centre (NOC): “Open source has enemies, and its enemies are very, very close to government.” (The story of NOC and its ultimately fizzled launch was detailed last summer.)
More recently, the CEO of an open source vendor out and out accused one of the systems integrators tasked with implementing the Bristol City Council’s latest open source project of deliberately fumbling the project in order to keep the integrators’ connections with Microsoft secure and their own wallets fat.
“‘My opinion is that the large systems integrators would not survive a transition to open source in the public sector, for the simple reason that the savings would be enormous,’ Mark Taylor [CEO of Sirius] told Computer Weekly. ‘The loss to their revenue would be massive. Their survival depends on there being no successful open source trials.’”
Taylor’s statements, if true, would seem to explain an old gaping wound in the history of open source. In 2004, it was the Bristol City Council that announced an initial push to deploy open source software on up to 5,500 desktops. That initial plan was greeted with much enthusiasm, and one year after the project was launched in 2005, Bristol seemed well on its way, touting a potential savings of £1 million in 2006.
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Licensing
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Recently Oracle has decided to give OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Foundation. That’s going to mean a huge license change for OpenOffice.org that I don’t really appreciate. Because of that, I will no longer be supporting OpenOffice.org. I can’t support something that in my opinion causes a regression in freedoms, which in this case the Apache License would be.
Does that mean I’ll start using LibreOffice? No. I am perfectly happy using lighter, individual alternatives such as AbiWord and Gnumeric.
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Openness/Sharing
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What can we learn from them? How can lessons from the Spanish Revolution contribute to the transition to a post capitalist , commons-based society?
“The Commons is the social and political space where things get done and where people have a sense of belonging and have an element of control over their lives, providing sustenance, security and independence. Commons are organised around resources that are collectively owned or shared between or among populations. It gives voice to civil society and helps us to learn new social practices, imagine a political, economic and social system beyond capitalism or communism. It is beyond party politics or other sectarian beliefs and practices.” (Wikipedia)
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Standards/Consortia
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Open Document Format (ODF) advances in Russia, approved as national standard, migration plans starting. http://bit.ly/l0lfue
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IBM reaffirmed its dedication to open source development by recommitting support to the development of OpenOffice.org, the alternative productivity suite to Microsoft’s Office and Google Apps. What IBM is really looking to cultivate is the further development of the Open Document Format, which it sees as a potential standard for collaboration across multiple platforms.
“Open source and standards are key to making our planet smarter and improving the way we live and work,” said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president, IBM Collaboration Solutions. “As IBM celebrates its centennial, we’re actively investing in projects that will help our clients to collaborate in an open manner over the next 100 years.”
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Cablegate
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It may be a first in the annals of government secrecy: Declassifying documents to mark the anniversary of their leak to the press. But that is what will happen Monday, when the federal government plans to finally release the secret government study of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers 40 years after it was first published by The New York Times.
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He is the subject of a documentary about his life, “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” nominated for a 2010 Academy Award, which took its title from the words former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger used to describe Ellsberg in 1971.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Austria, Bosnia, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Lithuania, fmr Yugoslav Rep of Macedonia, Maldives, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Palestine, Peru, Poland, Senegal, South Africa, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, the United States, Uruguay
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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iCloud Communications, a Phoenix-based voice over IP provider, alleges that the name of Apple’s recently announced online storage service copies its name and causes confusion over competing products:
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Copyrights
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Access Copyright has issued a response to the AUCC complaint over its decision to stop issuing pay-per-use or transactional licences. The complaint arises from requests from universities to license individual works so that they can be used with payment and without risk of copyright infringement. Access Copyright is refusing to issue such licences, offering only a more expensive blanket licence that requires universities to license use of the entire repertoire. The Access Copyright response bizarrely claims that pay-per-use licences actually create incentives to infringe and that blanket licences are more appropriate in the digital economy. Never mind that Access Copyright offers transactional licences to corporate customers. Never mind that millions of cultural products are licensed individually and that the Internet and new technologies make it easier to do so.
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Earlier this week, I posted on how the Canadian IP Council, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s IP lobby arm, floated false claims about the scope of counterfeiting in Canada in an attempt to bolster claims for increased border measures. That was followed by a post yesterday on Professor Edward Iacobucci’s debunking of the Chamber’s report on Canadian patent law, which he found to be deeply flawed. In response to my first post, the IP Council’s Chris Gray tweeted responses that the Chamber does not want individual travellers searched and that its claim of $30 billion in losses from counterfeiting in Canada comes from a recent International Chamber of Commerce report.
Interview with Linus Torvalds at LinuxCon Japan
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.12.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Pogo Linux today announced that it has launched a separate storage division, Pogo Storage. Pogo Storage expands the company’s storage offerings with cost-efficient, entry-level to mid-range enterprise solutions. The new division is dedicated to helping small- & mid-sized organizations implement emerging storage technologies and get the most from their storage budget.
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Desktop
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As June 15th nears, the folks at Google must be busy biting their nails off. This is the big G’s first step into the world of operating systems, and they want everything to go just right. With the release of Chromebook, they will be competing with 3 operating systems which have been around for a very long time. Whether Google will manage to topple them or not, only time can tell; however, there are a few reasons that this might work out pretty well for them. Here are ten such reasons why Chromebooks will be a huge hit.
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Been waiting for Google Cloud Print to finally come to linux?
The wait is over!
For now, Google has only released the ability to serve up a printer to the Google cloud via Windows while explicitly noting that the capability to do so in Linux is on the way. However, the entire ‘Cloud Aware’ printer scheme has seemed to always been referred to as coming-soon and that is probably a ways off yet. So I remain skeptical as to when we will actually see this ability. [update: There are some out there now and reviews are trickling in.]
Luckily, Armooo posted a python script that you can run on Linux (and I assume *BSD, but haven’t tested just yet) to serve up your local CUPS printer to the Google Cloud.
The script can be found here at his Github page and uses Python and PyCups to serve up your CUPS-enabled printer to the Google Cloud.
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And since it runs on Linux software instead of the standard Windows or Mac OS, it’s a virus-free computer too.
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Server
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Orange Business Solo – 450 mins, 250 texts, 50MB email and a new phone
Twenty years ago open systems was the battle cry that shook the absurdly profitable proprietary mainframe and minicomputer markets.
The proliferation of powerful and less costly x64-based systems that can run Solaris, Linux or Windows is making more than a few Unix shops think the unthinkable: migrating away from Unix for their mission-critical workloads.
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Kernel Space
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After running the 3.0-rc2 for a few days I can say that I notice a higher responsiveness.
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Applications
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If you are looking for a fast, effective, and powerful file manager that is loaded with features, Krusader might be the right choice for you. Krusader is a twin panel file manager that will work on most Linux desktops, Krusader will also help you preform many daily tasks. You can also create your own customized user menu for functions you use most often. Krusader can even function with an optional terminal emulator below the main window. You can connect to remote file systems, work with archives, and much more.
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mplayer is a light weight, full featured media player. In fact it’s so light weight, it doesn’t even bother with a gui. Just run it from a terminal, and up pops a simple window showing the video and the video only. Manipulating the video (fast forward, pause, toggling subtitles, volume controls etc) is done through keyboard commands, which quickly become second nature. Mplayer plays any video or audio codec/container you can name and supports a number of display drivers, including displaying video on a terminal using ascii.
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I spend most of my time in Embedded Systems and Wireless Sensor Network lab of the university where I am studying, there are many research engineers as well as Phd students there who work there, as well as assistant, it is a collaborative environment and frequently I move in and out of the lab and for privacy I keep my screen locked when I leave desk. This sometimes gets very irritating, having to lock screen, type in password to unlock as you come back to terminal, I often thought tool like the ones we use to change presentation could be very useful to lock/unlock screen remotely as you leave Desk.
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Chemistry is the study of matter and the changes it undergoes. It is an extremely vivacious science which deals with a molecular scale and atomic interpretation of the world we live in, helping us to understand that world. Chemistry is regarded as the central science, given its close links with physics and engineering, with biology and medicine, and with geology and earth science.
There are a number of different branches of chemistry. These include organic chemistry which studies the structure, properties, reactions, and composition of carbon-based compounds, and inorganic chemistry which deals with non-carbon compounds. Another important subdiscipline is physical chemistry which deals with the relations between the physical properties of substances and their chemical formations studying, in particular, atomic, subatomic, macroscopic, and particulate phenomena in chemical systems.
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Proprietary
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Access launched a new Android- and Linux-ready version of its mobile browser, based for the first time on the open source WebKit engine.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Just in time for the weekend, the Russian developers at Unigine Corp have released a new (and impressive) trailer of their OilRush game with native clients for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
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Charlie, an Indie game developer from UK, makes fun score oriented arcade shooters. Under the name of Charlie’s Games, he has released some nice games for Linux, two of them are now available in software center – Irukandji and Bullet Candy Perfect.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Those of you who are using Kubuntu are already familiar with Dolphin, the default file manager shipped in most KDE distributions. There are several very good file managers for KDE, and I must include here Konqueror or Krusader, however Dolphin’s goal is to offer as much as possible functionality while also keeping lightweight and fast. And yes, it does it perfectly well, offering powerful features and a clean interface at the same time.
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New Releases
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Macpup 525 is the latest and is based on Puppy Linux 5.2.5 ,”Lucid Puppy”, An official woof build of puppy Linux that is binary-compatible with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx packages. This contains all the apps from Lucid puppy with the addition of Firefox 4.0.1. Extra apps like Opera or Gimp are available for easy download from the Quickpet App on the ibar or the Puppy Package Manager. This version also includes the Enlightenment E17 window manager. The EFL libraries version 1.0.999 and E17 version 59456 where compiled and installed from source.
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Gentoo Family
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Pardus has been around for years, and occupies a luxury-car niche in the Linux world: easy to install and configure, extremely stable, very friendly, and very KDE-centric. I would say it’s comparable to Mepis in some ways. There are differences, of course. Pardus is a government-sponsored project, and it exists for the benefit of Turkish universities and research centers. The main support board is in Turkish, and the independent international one is hosted in Germany.
Most of the current code has been developed from the ground up, and it is considered an independent distribution. As far as I know, it has no derivatives, either, and no spins. In the Linux family tree, it is the sharp-dressed uncle you saw at funerals and liked, but whenever you suggested visiting him your parents suggested that he was probably out of town.
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Debian Family
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Stefano: I use the GNOME Desktop Environment with Awesome as a window manager.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Yep it is not a dream, now you can boot your computer in one-third the time it normally takes and connect to web in less than 7 seconds.
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C Data Solutions announced a carrier board for its tiny CompactFlash-based Compact Computer (CoCo) that enables expansion via third party USB devices. The CoCo carrier board adds dual USB host ports to the uClinux-based CoCo, which offers a 500MHz Blackfin processor with 32MB SDRAM, 8MB flash, and an FPGA, and enables rapid prototyping of devices with a mix of CompactFlash peripherals.
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MontaVista and Finland’s Rightware Oy are developing a GENIVI-compliant in-car infotainment platform that uses the Linux operating system.
The two companies said in a press release that the product uses Rightware’s 3d user interface product, which is called Kanzi, on top of a GENIVI compliant MontaVista Linux.
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Phones
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Android
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Google upgraded its Android Market Webstore to inform users whether a given app is compatible with their Android devices. Meanwhile Google Maps has been updated with live tracking of public transportation in six cities in the U.S. and Europe, and Microsoft is trying to lure Android developers with new resources including an “Android to Windows Phone 7 API mapping tool” website.
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Samsung’s Infuse 4G on AT&T is a speedy Android 2.2 “Froyo” smartphone that offers a lot for its $200 price, including a 1.2GHz Hummingbird processor, an eight-megapixel camera, and a big 4.5-inch screen with Super AMOLED Plus display technology. The Infuse 4G’s delights make it clear why Samsung is quickly dominating the Android smartphone market, this eWEEK review says.
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Motorola Mobility and Sprint announced a Photon 4G smartphone that runs Android 2.3 on a 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, offers a 4.3-inch qHD display, and has an optional, Atrix-like “laptop dock.” Motorola also announced that its 4.1-inch Triumph, running Android 2.2 on a 1GHz processor, will be exclusively available from Sprint’s Virgin Mobile USA prepaid service.
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A fabless startup called ICube announced a new multicore processor architecture aimed at Android tablets, claimed to be the first to handle both CPU logic and graphics processing in a “truly integrated” single core. The Harmony Unified Processor Technology architecture offers up to four processing threads per core, and will first appear later this year in a 65nm, dual-core IC1 SoC, says ICube.
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On May 24th and 25th, the Wikimedia Foundation hosted a CiviCRM coding sprint in our San Francisco office. CiviCRM is the premier open source constituent relationship manager; WMF uses it to store donor and contribution information. Our CiviCRM database contains more than a million contact records and a million contribution records.
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NetRexx, a variant of the Rexx script language, developed by IBM, has been made open source software under the aegis of the Rexx Language Association (RexxLA). The first indication that the language was to be made open source came in February, but now the process has been completed.
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Events
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The Linux Foundation is hosting a “Linux Learners’ Student Day” on August 16, the day before the full convention gets under way. It’s partnering with the Oregon State University Open Source Lab to host the student day, and is chartering a bus to take students from Corvallis and Portland up to Vancouver.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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-Creating an interface that is unique to Firefox in a browser market headed towards commoditization (back+ forward+fast!)
-Ambient application-level notification
-Introducing the concept of tab browsing to users of the home button
-Building up the user’s mental model of the features that will also be available on other platforms, like the iOS application Firefox Home
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Firefox 5 started without any issues this time. First of all, it checked compatibility of installed plugins. Unsurprisingly, nothing was found. I did not install any plugins in Firefox, because I do not use this browser.
Once started, I could measure memory usage for cold-started Firefox 5 and Chrome 12. I closed all additional processes opened by installed Chrome Extensions via Chrome Task Manager for clearness of experiment .
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Mozilla and the SeaMonkey Project developers have released version 2.1 of their “all-in-one internet application suite”. SeaMonkey, formerly known as the Mozilla Application Suite, is the successor to Netscape Communicator and includes a web browser with advanced email and newsgroup support, an IRC chat client and HTML editing support.
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CMS
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According to BuiltWith, of the top million websites using content management systems (or CMSes), three systems own more than 75 percent of the total market share: WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. (All of which are open source, by the way.) Many are likely most familiar with WordPress, which TechCrunch has covered quite a bit (and uses to power most its sites, for full disclosure). WordPress is the most popular CMS on the Web, running 62 percent of the top million websites that use a CMS, according to BuiltWith, with Joomla now ranking second at 10 percent.
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Project Releases
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The Pidgin development team has announced the release of version 2.8.0 of its open source instant messenger application. Pidgin 2.8.0 implements basic silence suppression for voice calls to prevent wasting bandwidth for silent periods during a call, and adds the DigiCert High Assurance CA-3 intermediate CA certificate which is needed for validation of the Facebook XMPP interface’s certificate.
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Licensing
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Now, Having explained so much about Free Software will Mr Mike Isaac of Wired explain how Google’s banning an app violates the ‘license’ or philosophy of Open Source or Free Software?
Isaac wrote, “The word open speaks directly to the hacker ethos — open source software is made to be shared, pored over and freely distributed. Open networks were made to be entered, explored and (occasionally) exploited. Open markets, self-governed. For better or for worse, it’s pure libertarianism at its finest.”
The word ‘Open’ has been exploited by greedy corporates more than ever which leads to confusion and FUD. That’s why we recommend using the word Free Software to be clear of what you are talking about when you refer to THE open-source movement. You can see what kind of confusion is there even among writers. Greg Crowe of GCN writes,
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Openness/Sharing
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In 2009, the live-action sequences were shot for “almost nothing” by Hubert and executive producers Ian and Phil McCoy. Thousands of hours of postproduction followed and, as the film developed, so did the Blender Community. Artists gained skills and their portfolios grew — one used his Project London work to get a job with the US government creating 3D military models. “It’s really what we want, that the volunteers will be able to get something out of it too,” says Hubert. As the team hit the software’s limitations, they simply amended its code. “Nathan Vegdahl [a key contributor] made something that would auto matically scan a folder for new submissions, start the render, and organise all the resulting frames,” says the director. “It saved us a ton of time.”
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Open Hardware
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The HexBright Flex, which is slightly longer than the Prime model at 5.25 inches, offers a light intensity of up to 500 lumens which is five times greater than that of conventional LED flashlights. It is fully rechargeable through its micro-USB port thanks to its 18650 lithium-ion battery which is easily replaced. The Flex will ship with four default modes including hi, medium, low and flash, but one thing that differentiates it from other flashlights, besides its brightness, is that it can be re-programmed via USB. This allows the flashlight’s microprocessor firmware to be re-flashed when connected to a PC.
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Programming
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And while new languages have since been born, C++ has endured. Java is the only one to have outpaced it in popularity, according to the TIOBE Index. PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript? Sure, some might claim that they are the future, but C++ is the past, the present, and the future.
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The uberSVN application lifecycle management (ALM) platform, part of WANdisco’s Apache Subversion-based software and services, now incorporates the latest certified Subversion 1.6.17 binaries.
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Standards/Consortia
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In a previous column, I mentioned that I was invited to talk at a meeting at the European Parliament about innovation prizes last week. That’s not something that often happens, and I frequently get to hear about meetings only after the event, when it’s too late, which is very frustrating. But happily here’s one on the 16th June entitled “Interoperability and standards: making it happen“ that I’ve come across in time…
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Rupert Murdoch’s influence is so strong that even in parliament the phone-hacking scandal has been barely talked about
Bloopers en casamientos
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Second surprise: copying 13000 files (4 GB) from a DVD to the hard-disk is extremely slow in Windows 7: 10 hours! Well, estimated. I lost patience after 2 hours and rebooted. Doing the same operation on Linux: 7 minutes. Amazing.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Alexander Zubov from Kot-in-Action Creative Artel the developers of Steel Storm: Burning Retribution announced a GNU/Linux weekend special !
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The KDE team has just announced a few minutes ago (June 10th) the fourth maintenance release for KDE Software Compilation 4.6. This is a minor update, focusing on bug fixing and translation updates.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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So, as of today, I am proud to announce that Mandriva 2011 is powered by the latest, shiniest and greatest X.org server 1.10.2 and Mesa 7.10.2, with all the awesomeness which comes with that. I had to write some small patches to fix some Intel Sandy Bridge crashes here and there, but I think that Mandriva today has probably the most up-to-date X.org stack out there.
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Gentoo Family
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Sabayon, despite being in the top ten on Distrowatch, isn’t as publicized as other popular distributions. Xfce is my desktop of choice, so I thought that I would review the Xfce version of Sabayon 5.5, the newest edition.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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I suspect this won’t be my last post like this. I use to just package them up myself but I’m finding that the amount of packages I maintain is increasing and the time I have to actually maintain them is decreasing and I know there’s people that are likely better suited to some of these packages than I am.
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Debian Family
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Philipp is a Debian developer since 2005 and a member of the release team since 2008. Since he took the responsibility of Stable Release Manager, the process has evolved for the best. I asked him to explain how the release team decides what’s fit for stable or not.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Upon the advice of a commenter in one of my previous posts, I am reviewing Pinguy OS 11.04 Mini today. That commenter asked that I test Pinguy OS 11.04, and mentioned the existence of a Mini edition, so I became intrigued, because Pinguy OS is more known for being an “everything-and-the-kitchen-sink” distribution than anything else, so I thought it would be cool to see what the Mini edition would have in store.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice (LO) was forked from the LGPL’ed version of OpenOffice.org some 8 months ago, while also creating a new organization for this: the Document Foundation (TDF). During this time the LibreOffice community has worked on cleaning up the source code, integrating features from another fork, (Go-oo, which was used in most Linux distributions), merging features from subsequent versions of OpenOffice.org and also creating new features themselves. They have a healthy community going with a number of core developers (mostly employed) and a large number of volunteers. There is also work on creating a real foundation much like the KDE e.V in Germany, and they received substantial donations to this goal.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Richard Matthew Stallman started the GNU’s Not Unix project in 1983 to create a totally free operating system, and later the General Public License to guarantee its freedom. By 1991 much of GNU was finished, although it was lacking a kernel – that’s where Linus Torvalds and his Linux kernel come in.
Despite the success of GNU/Linux, Stallman hasn’t opted for an easy life: he campaigns tirelessly to protect our software freedoms, alerting us to potential threats that new technologies bring.
Reader’s Picks
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Cablegate
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The specific rule that Whitfield is working to repeal involves standards that would require utilities to install devices to capture as much CO2 as possible from industrial boilers and waste incinerators, a move the EPA estimates would prevent thousands of premature deaths from heart attacks and respiratory illnesses every year.
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Censorship
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Whitehall sources have revealed that British intelligence officers successfully sabotaged the launch of the first English language website set up by an al-Qaida affiliate… A pdf file containing fairy cake recipes was inserted into Inspire to garble most of the 67 pages of the online magazine, including instructions on how to “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” [becomes mom's cupcakes]
Because they altered the site, we can’t be sure what it originally contained and so Whitehall only manages to discredit itself and terrorize political opposition.
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the question of whether Computacenter has a Microsoft bias. It’s like asking if the Pope is a Catholic.
Other small firms have given up, and Microsoft can ruin those who complain. Now we see that libel law is use to threaten firms that realize they are hopelessly locked out.
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RMS adds, “If you watch videos in YouTube, don’t use Flash. Use the new Webm format. Adding &html5=True to the URL should get you this, without need to identify yourself.”
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It would be better to completely deregulate the spectrum than to bring back this fig leaf. The fairness doctrine was never particularly effective and fake balance is a cornerstone of manufactured consent.
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… government cannot order Google, Apple, or others to ban such apps providing legal information, Congress is trying to apply pressure through the “chokepoints” of major Internet firms … Anecdotal evidence suggests that when many persons know that there are DUI checkpoints on their route, they either don’t drink or find a designated driver who isn’t drinking … Given the realities of this situation, it is difficult to view the Congressional pressures being asserted as much more in the end than political posturing,
People who want to avoid the delay and humiliation of arbitrary roadside searches will have to turn to the countless websites and other services offering the same information.
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Privacy
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users could not reasonably have known that Facebook would use their photos to build a biometric database in order to implement a facial recognition technology under the control of Facebook… Facebook’s constant changes to the privacy settings of users, which they alleged had made it virtually impossible for users to control who gained access to their personal information.
Read EPIC’s complaint here, it’s much better than FT’s summary.
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Facebook has turned on automatic face recognition on photos. Facebook says that it only suggests identifications for faces in photos for people who are the user’s friends. However, it might run the algorithm over every photo posted and not publicly announce the results.
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Cameras in the toilets; CCTV in the classroom; pupils’ fingerprints kept in a database … the surveillance state is quietly invading our schools
As the Philadelphia laptop camera spy scandal illustrates, students have no privacy with school issued computers. I give my kids their own computers with free software and full drive encryption for real research and self expression.
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Civil Rights
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“I campaigned for the toughest immigration laws, and I’m proud of the legislature for working tirelessly to create the strongest immigration bill in the country.” – Govenor Robert Bentley.
The legislation also makes it a criminal offense to provide transport or housing to an illegal immigrant. The state will have to check the citizenship of students, and any business that knowingly employs an illegal immigrant will be penalized.
This will be a pain for everyone but especially for people with brown skin who want a place to live, work for a living, send their kids to school or take the city bus. Papers, please. Because Alabama schools require vaccination, excluding immigrant children from schools will immediately impact public health. Conditions for actual immigrants will be worse.
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maybe all those tourists who boycotted Arizona for the last year will avoid spending their money in Alabama, and come back and rent our vacation rental guest cottages down here in Tubac. Then again, I doubt if the tourists from New York and Massachusetts who come to Arizona in the winter ever thought about going to the Redneck Riviera.
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unionization is associated with a decrease of anywhere from 17 to 33 percent in traumatic injuries, and a drop of 33 to 72 percent in fatal injuries.
Burning coal is a bad idea due to global warming no matter how safe mining is but those who work in it suffer most.
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Intellectual Monopolies
Miami Beach Memorial Day Shooting May 30th 2011, cellphone video
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.11.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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SELinux labels are placed on disk during the installation by a combination of Anaconda and rpm. Anaconda actually includes the latest /etc/selinux/targeted/files/file_context and /etc/selinux/targeted/policy/policy.26 in its initrd. When anaconda starts rpm, rpm reads this file and proceeds to place the labels on disk. RPM has SELinux awareness built into it and asks the kernel to place the default label on the disk for every object that it creates from its payload. If an rpm post install script runs during the install, the labels are created using the standard process labelling described below. Any file system objects created by Anaconda before loading the policy into the kernel will be relabelled by Anaconda using restorecon.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has announced Linux kernel 3.0-rc1, this marks the end of 2.6.x series line which has 40 releases since late 2003.
To mark this event, Con Kolivas has made a tarball archive (163MB) of all 2.6.x releases available for download. The archive uses lrzip compression which can be installed from the standard Ubuntu apt-get repository.
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Remember KQ Infotech? KQ Infotech was the Indian company that ported the ZFS file-system to Linux as an out-of-tree kernel module (after deriving the code from the LLNL ZFS Linux work) and KQ’s interesting methods of engagement in our forums. The company was successful in delivering an open-source ZFS module for Linux that performed semi-well and didn’t depend upon FUSE (the file-systems for user-space module) like other implementations. However, this ZFS Linux code appears to no longer be worked on by KQ Infotech.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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An infinite Avant Window Navigator AWN dock themes collections looks amazing with different styles ” Lucido, Floaty, Edgy, Curved, 3D, and Flat style”. Also you might want to check Part 1 and Part 2 AWN themes.
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This is a question often asked by new users of Linux. (See here.) The short answer often given is no, but that answer often stirs controversy. (See here.)
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GIMP from SVN (2.7.x) comes with a built-in single-window mode (can be disabled) but I find it unstable sometimes so I prefer to use the stable GIMP 2.6.x, especially since there are so many goodies you can use to enhance it, like GIMP Painter and GIMP Paint Studio, G’MIC or the GIMP Plugin Registry package.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The latest installement of Gaming On Linux interview time has been well spent with Troy the founder of MyGameCompany.com
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Desktop Environments
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Enlightenment – This is the original name of the project. Today when it is referenced it should refer to the project as a whole – not just one particular part.
DR17 – Also often called E17. This refers to the next major revision of the Enlightenment desktop/window manager. It is under heavy development (and has been for some time). The current stable revision of the desktop is DR16.
EFLs – Stands for “Enlightenment Foundation Libraries”. These are the core of the Enlightenment desktop, but not the desktop itself. In simplest terms the EFLs are to the Enlightenment desktop as GTK is to Gnome and QT is to KDE.
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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It looks like we are doing something right because we are most popular Fedora Remix. Just click on Smolt Stats and then on OS tab to see for yourself.
Of course we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for great Fedora community, thank you all. Fedora has an amazing community and amazing tools that make the job of creating Fedora Remix quite easy.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 11.04 Unity brought in many important UI improvements and Ubuntu Lens has been one of the highlights. Finding and launching applications and files in Ubuntu have never been easier. But Unity Lens concept is not confined to just applications and files search, it is much bigger than that. A slew of really cool Lenses are in development and some of them are even available for installation already. Interesting list of Unity Lenses you can install right now.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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In other words, LibreOffice will be both months ahead of OpenOffice.org, and able to borrow OpenOffice.org code, and OpenOffice.org behind and unable to borrow LibreOffice code.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In a recent interview the the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Richard Stallman says that the public should disobey Spain’s new anti-piracy law.
“It is as unfair as Sarkozy and Berlusconi, and should be disobeyed by users,” Stallman says referring to The Sinde Act.
“How many authors writing earn money to pay his expenses? A hundred, five hundred? Is that enough to restrict freedom of all? Collecting user’s private data should only be legal with a court order when there is suspicion that someone is preparing a crime. Non-commercial file-sharing should be legalized. It is a fundamental freedom.”
Stallman further commented on his hair (“my long hair was a political decision”, and his baby (the Free Software Foundation), which he says accomplished more than most real kids.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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In Silicon Valley, where the latest tech innovations are celebrated, a group of hackers is creating new purposes for old technology.
The nascent movement, Random Hacks of Kindness, has, like many smart things born in the region, quickly spread around the globe. The idea sprang from a community of hackers — unlike criminals who aim to disrupt governments or steal data, these engineers work on code for the good of humanity — who met for a weekend hackathon two years ago to work on various projects. The concept is to deploy existing technology in new ways that address various challenges facing the world, such as locating missing people during a natural disaster.
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Cablegate
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THE nominations for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize have been released – now it’s about time they released some of the previous winners.
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Finance
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One more thing I wanted to point about about Andrew Ross Sorkin’s story defending Goldman Sachs and Lloyd Blankfein the other day, in which it was posited that Goldman did not, in fact, have a “Big Short” in 2007. Sorkin says that according to Goldman, the firm’s net short position that summer may have been as low as $5 billion, and not $16 billion as claimed, therefore Lloyd Blankfein was not lying when he told the Senate, “We did not have a massive short bet.”
Given that Sorkin was apparently given access to a large trove of documents allowing him to make the case that Goldman didn’t have that “Big Short” on, I thought it would be instructive for readers to see what kind of answers the Senate got when it asked Goldman executives the same questions about the size of the banks’ short bet. They gave Sorkin the whole store, but Levin’s committee basically got name, rank, serial number, and a big legalese “eat me.”
See if you can notice some consistencies in the following statements.
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Privacy
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Facebook Inc. will be probed by European Union data-protection regulators over a feature that uses face-recognition software to suggest people’s names to tag in pictures without their permission.
A group of privacy watchdogs drawn from the EU’s 27 nations will study the measure for possible rule violations, said Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. Authorities in the U.K. and Ireland said they are also looking into the photo-tagging function on the world’s most popular social-networking service.
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You may remember that back in March at the LibrePlanet 2011 conference, we presented the 2010 Award for Projects of Social Benefit to the Tor Project — by using free software, Tor has enabled roughly 36 million people around the world to experience freedom of access and expression on the Internet while keeping them in control of their privacy and anonymity.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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We recently noted that a judge in one of the biggest mass copyright infringement lawsuits ever filed, representing 23,322 potential infringers of the movie The Expendables, had allowed the lawyers at US Copyright Group to issue subpoenas on those people in order to properly serve them with the lawsuit. However, it appears the judge is reconsidering — perhaps because lots of people have since raised the point that these efforts often appear more like a shakedown than any legitimate lawsuit, and the judge has taken notice. After saying that “several issues… have recently come to light regarding this case”, he goes on to berate US Copyright Group lawyers for failing to have served a single person out of the 23,322.
Police Abuse In Puerto Rico
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Anyone who has read my work over the last decade knows where I stand with Linux and open source. If you haven’t taken read my words, know that I am a huge advocate of Linux and open source software. I use it, I promote it, I mentor new users, I do everything I can to help the cause move forward.
But no matter how much I believe in the cause, I know some of the ideals the Linux and open source community hold so tightly to need to be reevaluated. Why? The landscape of business and home computing has changed drastically since the beginnings of the GPL and the Linux operating system. Many of you might look at the following list and say, “Are you crazy?” But I would ask that it be examined merely as suggestions for where the foundations of open source software can improve and help the public at large fully embrace open source and Linux.
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Apropos Linux in Exile losing his Linux System to a Predatory Windows Install the other day (see Windows killed my laptop, again) I’ve been thinking about and beginning to do something about cleaning house.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Applications
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One of the gripes that Linux-haters trumpet is that one needs to use typed commands and text files to do some things on the system. [...] After decades of telling people “GUI good, CLI bad“….
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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BackTrack 5 is a good specialized distribution, a great tool worth keeping around. I personally find it very interesting and want to keep using it to learn more about the whole security side of things, which I find fascinating, but I believe experts will certainly get a kick out of this latest BackTrack release.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Overall, our opinion is that this first release of Mageia does what the team set out to do. Namely to build a clean and attractive derivative of Mandriva. Now, if the developers will revisit their decision not to distribute proprietary video software drivers on the installation media for those users who need them, we’d say that Mageia seems to have bright future ahead of it.
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Red Hat Family
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So value Red Hat based on its execution, its products, and its ability to make its business model work.
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Fedora
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Yesterday we shared that Fedora 16 may use the Btrfs file-system by default on new installations. Beyond switching from EXT4 to Btrfs, there are also many other changes planned for this next release of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.
Development on Fedora 16 has only just begun with Fedora 15 having not been released for even a month yet. So far the officially accepted Fedora 16 features include:
[...]
…Linux 3.0/3.1 kernel, X.Org Server 1.11, Mesa 7.12-devel, GNOME 3.2, and KDE SC 4.7.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) has arrived, and we have the scoop on everything you need to know about Canonical’s latest Linux, along with the usual review and benchmarks. Is this the change we’ve been waiting for, or is the Natty Narwhal a fail whale?
[...]
Unity as a solution is really close, but not close enough. It needs a little bit more time in the oven. But what Canonical accomplished in a short development window is pretty astounding. At the very worst, Unity is worth taking the time to explore.
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Flavours and Variants
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And unlike some Linux distros, Bodhi can easily be configured into anything you want it to be.
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Version 11.04 Natty Narwhal is fast, smart, elegant, polished, with a very decent performance, blazing desktop effects, good stability, and only a tiny bunch of bugs and issues.
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And Linux Mint 11 feels decided less stable than Linux Mint 10. If the trend holds, Linux Mint 12 will be a lot more stable than this release.
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Rating: 4.5/5
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There have been many changes in the market and technology since Citrix (Nasdaq: CTXS) acquired XenSource and a major stewardship stake in the Xen open source hypervisor four years ago.
Red Hat’s (NYSE: RHT) 2008 Qumranet acquisition and subsequent push behind the Linux-integrated Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor has added to the disruption. One thing, though, remains the same: the intense competition among these open source hypervisors in the enterprise market.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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1- Chrome will support hardware accelerated 3D CSS. What does that mean? That means you will be able to see some classic webpages that implement 3D effects. You will be able to have a better experience with web apps that implement 3D effects. This enhancement will also open a new era of browser-based gaming. Web developers will have libretti to create amazing 3D effects by placing images text and other content in 3D space.
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 recently passed 200 million downloads about 2 months after launch.
The Firefox 4 download counter stood at about 208 million this morning. The first version of Firefox required about 1 year to hit 100 million downloads and 200 million in about 22 months (by that time, Mozilla had already released Firefox 1.5.)
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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For those that might be interested in such a detail as the source code of this endavour, the filter is developped as two elements, a shared library living here and an import filter based on this library living in the LibreOffice’s writerperfect module.
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Programming
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Health/Nutrition
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While I’m happy for the policyholders who might get a few bucks back from their insurer, the timing of the Blue Shield campaign is, to me at least, a tad suspicious. A few things have been going on in
California in recent weeks that undoubtedly have been keeping Bodaken up at night, making me think that this announcement just might be more PR than substance.
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Security
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Police said Friday they had arrested the top three suspected leaders in Spain of the international computer hacker network called Anonymous, which is suspected of numerous cyber-attacks on Sony’s PlayStation network and government and business websites.
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Privacy
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Yesterday I posted on how the Canadian IP Council, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s IP lobby arm, floated false claims about the scope of counterfeiting in Canada in an attempt to bolster claims for increased border measures. The Chamber placed Canadian countefeiting costs at $30 billion per year, a figure that has no basis in fact and that even RCMP no longer supports.
The Chamber’s false claims on counterfeiting are not the only intellectual property issue where their arguments have been debunked as inaccurate. My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) focuses on the proposed trade agreement between Canada and the European Union, which could have big implications for the costs of pharmaceutical drugs, on which Canadians spend $22 billion annually.
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Copyrights
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Howard Knopf reports that the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) has filed an application to amend the Access Copyright interim tariff requiring it grant transactional or pay-per-use licences upon request. As I reported last month, Access Copyright has been denying requests by universities for transactional licences in an effort to pressure universities to force them to licence all digital materials for a far higher price. This results in a remarkable situation where universities attempt to pay to use works and Access Copyright says it won’t take their money (though it does offer pay-per-use for corporate customers).
Instalar flash para ver videos Ubuntu tutorial
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.10.11
Posted in News Roundup at 3:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This past week, I found myself on the road and away from my studio. It was just for the day, but I needed to get some work done on my comic features.
Luckily, I’m running Linux on all my computer systems. I run it on my studio desktop, my notebook, and my large (and slightly older) 17-inch laptop.
Now, here’s the neat thing. Because all three systems are hooked into the same Linux repository, I download and install identical software programs. (Note: I’m running the same Linux distribution on all computers.)
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode: Mageia 1.0 has been released while ASUS promises three new netbooks running Linux. Meanwhile, back in California, Oracle tries to give OpenOffice.org to the Apache Foundation and you can hear some of our best discoveries, our worst challenge results, and your own opinions in our Open Ballot.
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Kernel Space
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If “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” as the great Bard wrote all those many years ago, shouldn’t the same be true of our beloved Linux kernel?
That, indeed, is the question of the day, thanks to Linux creator Linus Torvalds’ recent decision to christen the next version of the Linux kernel “3.0″ rather than “2.6.40,” which would otherwise have been the next step on its longtime 2.6 path.
[...]
“Numbering does not matter,” blogger Robert Pogson offered, but “3.0 is a fine number — it’s prime, odd and short.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Disclamer: Yes I am fully aware that the following two game do not have libre media, and that one of them will never have unless they get away from the copyrighted IP!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE is proud to announce the release of KDE’s next generation Kontact Suite based on the Akonadi framework. In addition to these we are also proud to announce the June maintenance update of the KDE Software Compilation 4.6. The KDE PIM hackers are happy to have beaten Duke Nukem Forever, if by only a small margin.
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Muktware: What is the statues of Qt post Nokia’s deal with Microsoft? What is the sentiment within the Qt/KDE community?
Shantanu: I’d like to say that first of all, Nokia is still contributing heavily to Qt’s development. Secondly, Qt has been moving to a fully community driven development process under the Qt Open Governance initiative, so it has a very bright future, irrespective of whether there is official support from a company or not. About the second question, the KDE community is not affected much with what happened, we are working with the same enthusiasm to make KDE even more better each day.
[...]
Shantanu: Calligra has seen lot of improvements since the beginning of this year. Our base platform is improved, the community has grown stronger and bigger with lots of new contributors joining in, which by the way, includes a lot of Indians. Then, we have added two new applications – Flow which is a flowcharting application and Braindump, a notes taking application which uses the Open Document standard and Calligra’s core. With help of our contributors, Calligra has undergone usability tests, and we have improved our UI according to the test findings.
And as far as LibreOffice is concerned, Calligra has a better foundation codebase and structure. Coupled with the flexibility Qt provides us, we are sure Calligra is not just an Office Suite, its also a framework for others to build related applications. A simple example would be the Calligra Active project which I will describe shortly. If it wasn’t for the flexible and modular Calligra code, it wouldn’t have been possible to get Calligra Active up and running in just couple of months.
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KDE Project has announced the release of the Kontact Suite, based on the Akonadi framework. The project has also announced the June maintenance update of the KDE Software Compilation 4.6. Unsurprisingly, the port of Kontact to Akonadi is finally being released the same day as Duke Nukem Forever, making it relatively timely.
KDE’s Kontact Suite – a set of Personal Information Management applications – is receiving a major architectural boost. The team has invested years of development in its new infrastructure layer, Akonadi, and in porting Kontact to the new foundation while keeping the familiar user experience.
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME Contacts is a new feature that is planned for GNOME 3.2. It includes both a GNOME-wide contacts framework that can be used by different applications as well as a dedicated contacts application. I’ve been working hard on the design of the application part for a while now and thought it was about time I showed the work off.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Alexandre Lissy, R&D Engineer at Mandriva and PhD at Université de Tours introduces his work at the Linux Symposium to be held next week in Ottawa.
The goal of the Linux Symposium is to bring together Linux developers, enthusiasts, and systems administrators to improving communication, strengthen the personal connections within the Linux Community and to promote the open and free dissemination of new ideas.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Looks like Ubuntu 11.04 has its share of fans as well. We featured Natty Narwhal inspired Android skins few days ago. Now, here is another theme, this time for Nokia smartphones, again inspired by Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. Theme is called Natty Ubuntu.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Nearly six years after the idea of low cost laptop was conceived for Indian students, the much awaited $35 tablet-PC for Indian students is all set be launched this june ending. The first lot of 10,000 laptops would be delivered to IIT-Rajasthan. Once it is launced it will be the world’s chepest tablet in the world.The HRD Ministry officials confirmed each Indian state would be given 3,000 devices once the supply of 1,00,000 devices is made. The Central government would contribute about 50 per cent of the cost and a student would need to pay Rs. 1,000 for the device. The device is basically targetted at students for educational content. It is perhaps the cheapest innovation of all time. The government of India would contribute about 50 per cent of the cost and a student would need to pay Rs. 1,000 for the device.
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I came across an analogy for Free versus non-FREE software on Italo Vignoli’s blog today. The blog is in Italian which Google translates passibly but the analogy is an image of people under an umbrella, a dependence on some supplier of non-free software, and a bowl, filled with people sharing.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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SRWare Iron originated as a German project. You can get it for Windows, the Mac OS, or Linux. You can find out more about the browser and get it here (note that you have to close an annoying ad to see the page). This page takes you directly to download links.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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I don’t think much of this is really relevant. I’m not sure IBM care too much about who develops the code, and I don’t think an LGPL’d code base would fundamentally stop them from shipping a proprietary product if that is what they wanted to do (it makes it harder, of course). I actually think this is all about OpenDocument Format, which is a subject virtually no-one has raised.
If you look at the OASIS TC, you can see it’s pretty obviously dominated by Oracle (was: Sun) and IBM. There are a few representatives of various other companies and open-source projects, but fundamentally this is a closed shop with a pay-to-play rule which means you have to pony up to join. The v1.2 spec – which has been used by OpenOffice.org since 2008 – has only just managed to crawl out as a committee specification, incredibly late. What this means for OpenDocument v1.2 documents as read/written by OpenOffice.org 3.0, who knows. But with Oracle fading into the sunset (sorry), large chunks like OpenFormula finally done, maybe v1.3 will actually show up on time.
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THE DOCUMENT FOUNDATION (TDF) has said the final bugs in Libreoffice 3.4 are being worked out, and the open source application suite should be ready for corporate use in two months.
Version 3.4.1 of Libreoffice will come out next month, and will deal with the final bugs created, in part, by a reorganising of software modules. In August TDF would release version 3.4.2, which would be stable enough for widespread deployment in business, co-founder and steering committee member Italo Vignoli told The Inq.
“LibreOffice is going to become a completely different product in time,” he said.
“For example we’ve completely changed the way icons are handed from Openoffice. That had duplication of icons, not a single, central icon repository. Our developers completely changed this.”
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When OpenOffice.org moves to a non-copyleft license, there’s a ready replacement for people who want a productivity suite that does more to protect their freedom: LibreOffice.
Oracle, IBM, and the Apache Software Foundation jointly announced last week that OpenOffice.org would become an official Apache project. OpenOffice.org is an important piece of free software, and many of its supporters suggest that this change will give them more control over the project’s future direction. However, users and contributors should be aware that, as part of this transition, it will become easier for proprietary software developers to distribute OpenOffice.org as nonfree software.
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When Oracle, IBM, and the Apache Software Foundation jointly announced last week that OpenOffice.org would become an official Apache project, some open-source developers were not happy. The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice programmers were really not pleased. Now, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is coming out against the deal.
In a statement that will be released later today, June 10th, 2011, the FSF states that the “OpenOffice.org is an important piece of free software, and many of its supporters suggest that this change will give them more control over the project’s future direction. However, users and contributors should be aware that, as part of this transition, it will become easier for proprietary software developers to distribute OpenOffice.org as non-free software.”
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CMS
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Programming
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Android is the most popular platform (85.3 percent)… Finally, the Eclipse Foundation noted in this year’s survey that it is the first survey ever that shows an increase in Windows usage among respondents and a decrease in Linux usage. Linux users dropped from 32.7 percent a year ago to 28 percent this year. That’s an incremental reduction, but notable since many of the Eclipse respondents come from the open source community.
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Security
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Finance
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When U.S. Senator Carl Levin declared that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) “clearly misled their clients and misled the Congress,” few analysts predicted his allegations would still be reverberating two months later.
The firm’s shares have fallen 16 percent in New York trading since April 13, when Levin’s investigative panel released an exhaustive report on the roots of the 2008 economic meltdown. The Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission are examining the findings. The Manhattan District Attorney last week joined in with a subpoena to Goldman Sachs.
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It was hard not to be amused to see this story by CNBC’s John Carney the other day with the following provocative headline: “Goldman Dodges a Bullet.”
In the story an unnamed Goldman banker told Carney that there was a widespread feeling of relief within the walls of the bank after news broke that Goldman a few years ago offered to sell Moammar Qaddafi a $3.7 billion equity stake in their company. The relief, it seems, stemmed from the fact that the deal was never struck – and therefore Goldman doesn’t have to answer charges now of having funded repression in the Middle East. From the Carney piece:
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When Goldman Sachs (GS) bought Litton Loan Servicing, a firm that collects mortgage payments from homeowners, in 2007 for an unannounced price, it seemed like a simple way to get an on-the-ground view of the subprime market. The insight would help Goldman Sachs figure out how much to pay for loans, and Litton would work with borrowers to get them back on track. Other sophisticated investors, including billionaire Wilbur L. Ross and private equity firm Centerbridge Capital Partners, bought mortgage servicers with a similar strategy in mind.
It didn’t work out as planned. While there were plenty of distressed mortgages and lots of eager buyers, the loan holders had little incentive to mark down prices because that would mean taking a big loss on their books. “The distressed-asset market never got as hot as people were hoping it would,” says Dean H. DeMeritte, an executive vice-president at Phoenix Capital, a Denver brokerage for mortgage servicing contracts.
Reader’s Picks
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Anti-trust
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Health/Nutrition
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials… The extent of America’s war in Yemen has been among the Obama administration’s most closely guarded secrets
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U.S. weapons and assistance support regimes actively suppressing democratic uprisings across the Middle East, including Yemen.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Global warming destabilizes food production. Commodities speculation is also part of the problem but either is a disaster that independently kills innocent people around the world.
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a group of besieged residents from the central Appalachian coalfields is holding a press conference in Washington, DC today to deliver a … message of an emergency crisis of unconscionable human suffering, government neglect and coal company lawlessness to the Obama administration and the US Congress:
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Finance
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JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says regulating the banks whose antics caused the recession is stalling the economy’s recovery.
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the officers that raided the home were not a SWAT team, although the [innocent] man who lives there thought they were one [when they broke down his door broke down his door to assault him with special weapons before throwing him to the floor where he was cuffed]. Hamilton declined to elaborate … [but they issue] 30 to 35 search warrants each year [for] bribery, fraud and embezzlement of federal financial aid money.
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Censorship
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Privacy
Mandriva Application Manager – New look & feel
Credit: TinyOgg
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