• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux In the Movies– Thumbs Up!

YouTube videos are tiny and blurry, and sometimes so herky-jerky they cause motion sickness. But where else can you find thousands of Linux videos on every subject imaginable? Here is a collection of short videos starring Linux: from IBM, Novell, and random creative people doing random creative acts like taking Tux skydiving, running 165 Linux applications at once, and making movies with Blender.

Linux Box: Open Source On The Grow

Ann Arbor’s Linux Box, which has spent the last 10 years writing custom open-source software applications for a long list of clients, says its business is growing rapidly enough that it’s likely to boost staff by 50 percent to 20 within the next year or two.

“The future is really positive,” said Linux Box co-founder Elizabeth Ziph.

Research and Markets: 2008-2009 Annual Report on China’s Open-Source Software Market

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/379dcc/20082009_annual_r) has announced the addition of the “2008-2009 Annual Report on China’s Open-Source Software Market” report to their offering.

Vendors Involved: Red Flag Software Co., Ltd., Novell, China Standard Software, Red Hat, Turolinux, Redflag Chinese 2000, etc.

Shutting the window and grabbing my hat…

As you may already know, I’ve been at war with a few computers. They all have one common trait, they run a Windows OS. Well, for my desk top I chose the nuclear option. I wiped it’s brains out and installed a Linux OS. I should have done this a long time ago. What a difference.

Point-For-Point With Keir Thomas About Google Chrome OS

3. “Google is big, ergo Google is evil.”

This deserves its own post and may get one later, but briefly:

No, being rich and big does not make you evil. Let’s take a big, fat example: If they only would quit their illegal anti-competitive monopolistic practices, even Microsoft would not be evil. Yes, I said it. I said it in its own post here. My whole beef with Microsoft is that I’d just like them to leave us all alone. Knock off that antitrust violation and associated nasty business – the stuff that’s gotten them in trouble in the US, UK, and all over the world – and I’d be indifferent to them like any random company. Don’t forget Bill Gates’ ‘Open Letter to Hobbyists’ here. The free community does not have a problem with Microsoft; Microsoft is the one with the problem with the free community.

Linux Against Poverty Needs More Computers Now

Linux Against Poverty, in Austin, Texas, USA, needs more computers right away. They’re doing the hard part, all you need to do is give a little…

Audio

• FLOSS Weekly 77: Jaunty Jackalope

  Ubuntu, the free, community developed, Debian-based Linux operating system.

  Guests: Jono Bacon, community manager for Ubuntu

• FLOSS Weekly 78: BZFlag

• LB – Episode 40 – SELF Recap by Linux Basement

• The Software Freedom Law Show – Episode 0×12: Bradley and Karen Go to OSCON

  Bradley mentioned that you can hear a follow up to the C#/Mono and patented language issue, which Bradley and Karen discussed on SFLS 0×11 in an interview with Bradley on Linux Outlaws 102.

Desktop

• Getting your Microsoft Tax Refunded: 10/10 for Amazon UK! [Updated]

  Yesterday I received a great prize from the people at Miserware for helping with the Beta trial of their power saving software for Linux computers; a new and very shiny Asus 1008HA netbook PC.

• How Does Ubuntu 9.04 Measure Up to Mac OS X?

  Over all, Ubuntu 9.04 averages a B+ in this comparison against Mac OS X usability.

• VirtualBox 3.0.0 Compiz slideshow

  Last week, I reviewed the newly released VirtualBox 3. The experience was simply phenomenal. VirtualBox 3 brings in a host of new features and improvements, most notable among them the revamped network stack and 3D effects for guest machines.

• The wrong reasons to use Linux

  1. Compiz. You might read that and feel like you just got hit in the face with a glass of cold water. After all, Compiz is way cool. It’s smooth, clever, innovative, years ahead of the competition and best of all, free-as-in-beer. What’s to dislike?

• The Reason Why I Loved Knoppix More Than Windows!

  I’ve been a Windows user since fourteen years ago, where the Window 95 was my first computer operating system. Honestly, I was overexcited, as I owned my first computer for the first time in life! I spent over 6 hours daily to learn how to use the computer. Well, in less than three days, I’ve mastered all the basic skills of the computer, including the Windows operating system as well!

  Time flies by, and the Microsoft Windows have been rapidly changed in the past fourteen years. Honestly, I tried every Windows version, from the Windows 1.01 to the latest Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Frankly, Window Vista is the most terrible that ever released in all the Window versions! I’ve encountered many difficulties and I really losing my temper on this version.

• Life is about choice, computing should be too.

  Having a choice of Linux distributions to choose from is a good thing. It means that people have a chance to find a distribution which best suits their wanted computing experience. Having only a single operating system to choose from means that everybody is forced into that systems framework. Not unlike the ancient times when all ladies were forced into a constricting corset.

Server

• Open source mainframe software: Two perspectives

  IBM sought to ameliorate the situation with the reviled Object Code Only (OCO) policy. However, in exchange for yanking the source, IBM added many more exit points with structured, well-documented interfaces. In addition to the exits, IBM provided programming interfaces for changing and gathering system information without resorting to actually touching control blocks.

Kernel Space

• LPC: Kernel/Userspace/User Interfaces Microconference

  One of the biggest secrets of FOSS’s success is a well-crafted set of interfaces amongst the various components. Although famously not set in stone, these interfaces permit different FOSS projects to work for the most part separately, while still coming together as a coherent system. Such interfaces are clearly a key topic for the Linux Plumbers Conference.

• I Like My File Systems Chunky: UnionsFS and ChunkFS

  Given the size of today’s hard drives, a question often asked is how to create and manage large file systems. Many times, this question is asked around ext3 which can be fairly limiting in size. The corollary to this question is how one manages large file systems. In this article, an approach to creating file systems using the concepts of ChunkFS will be presented. In particular, UnionFS will be used to create a large file system from “chunks” using UnionFS and at the same time helps with check and repair times.

• Do Linux Benchmarks Have A Leg To Stand On?

  Different distros typically run different versions of key software, and this case was typical. While three of the distros installed the EXT4 file system by default, for example, a fourth — Mandriva — uses EXT3. To some extent, these differences make exact comparisons very difficult, although benchmarking can still provide useful information about general performance trends.

  Or can they? Perhaps that’s a debatable point.

Applications

• 10 outstanding Linux backup utilities

  A dependable backup tool is not a luxury – everyone needs to have one. But that doesn’t mean you need to spend a fortune to get the feature set that meets your needs. Jack Wallen introduces some great Linux backup solutions, including a few that are cross platform.

• Using open-source data backup software

  Many people who use open-source data backup software become quite attached to a program, whether it’s Amanda, BackupPC or Bacula. Administrators responsible for protecting data at SMBs or at the departmental level typically gravitate to these free programs because they’re comfortable writing custom scripts and working with Unix and Linux. Also, they can use open-source backup tools such as rsync, which synchronizes files and directories between different locations, and tar, an archiving program.

• Reviewed: AVG Anti-virus 8.5 for Linux

  Our verdict: Powerful, feature-rich scanner that’s completely lost on its target audience. 3/10.

• Review: Claws Mail 3.7.2

  Quality wise, I think Claws Mail is a little on the light side and offers a few stumbling blocks for new users. Speed wise. Solid gold. Same with stability. Other than the import feature issue, I found it to be excellent. And I do mean excellent. Not a hitch or glitch or hickup. It’s an email program that’s well worth looking at, especially if you have an older machine, or just want a mail app that’s very light weight and reliable.

Audio

• The LiVES Video Editor and VJ Tool Turns 1.0

  Plans for the future include: subtitle support, effect masks, simplified task support, more plugins, instant opening for more file types, audio streaming, more audio effects, support for more “plugable” frame sources, such as gstreamer and MLT, an on screen display, and much more.

  And of course, now that 1.0 is here, I might start looking at other video editors and VJ tools – with the aim of emulating what they do, only better!

• Amarok 2.1 Review

  The enhanced plasmoid feature in the 2.1 version shows the favorite and current track ad unlike the earlier versions the plasmoids are united into a single folder and lets you choose or switch with the new taskbar provided in the lower central window.

  A new services plasmoid is another addition.
  Both manual and automatic bookmarking is enabled in the amarok 2.1 version. The player automatically bookmarks a track played continuously for more than 10 minutes and resumes playing from the position when back.

• Songbird vs. Amarok: How not to design a GUI

  In Songbird the playlist dominates the window by default. This is good because seeing a list of music is what I want. It’s the whole point of a music player.

Games

• Hack and Slash and lose your computer while you’re at it!

• John Carmack on Linux ports

  LG reader Tweet wrote id Software’s John Carmack about the status of Linux ports for the first-person shooter developer’s upcoming titles (minus QuakeLive, which has a Linux port in active development already)…

• Frictional Sale Successful

• Come Play This New Linux-Native Game With Us!

  S2 Games may not be as well known as id Software or Epic Games, but what distinguishes them from most of the other game companies is that they actually support Linux. With S2 Games’ Savage 2, for example they provide a Linux-native game client. S2 Games is hard at work on another title, Heroes of Newerth, and that too will be supported on Linux. In fact, it’s already running on Linux and Linux gamers will likely find a native client binary around the time of the game’s release on Windows (read: it won’t be released months or years later, like what we frequently find with Linux ported titles). Sound pretty great, but too impatient to wait for the game’s release? Well, come play it with us right now! And for free!

Desktop Environments

• Xfce: New Life For Old Hardware

  Not all that long ago I wrote about KDE4 and how impressed I was. I’m not retracting those thoughts. I still feel the same way, and think KDE4 represents a solid step forward for the desktop environment running on X.

• KDE

  • Akademy 2009 Technical Papers Published: Research And Innovation In The KDE Community

    Over the last few years KDE has seen increased involvement of students and university researchers. While many universities still feel uneasy about working with Free Software, the open and welcoming attitude in the KDE community has already brought several scientific research projects to life. A prime example is of course the Nepomuk project, officially finished but still very much alive within the Free Software- and scientific communities. Furthermore, many involved contributors make use of scientific research papers while looking for inspiration to solve the more complex problems involved in writing software. The Free Software community also contributes in a practical way to science: the Avogadro project, grown out of the KDE educational application Kalzium develops an advanced molecular editor designed for use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. Last Akademy, an initiative was developed by Celeste Lyn Paul to bring KDE and science even closer.

  • Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009 – The Nepomuk Perspective

    Now I can look back and say: “I have been there. I have witnessed the first joint conference of the two biggest players in open-source desktop software: KDE and Gnome.” And I can tell you: it was good. I personally think it makes a lot of sense to have the conference together.

  • Lancelot 1.7 screencast (KDE 4.3)

    I’ve realized that the one and only screencast of Lancelot I made was even before the 1.0 was released. So, I’ve decided to make a new one. This cast is meant as an introduction to Lancelot, rather than to show the new features.

  • Akademy 2009 Group Photo

  • New “Usability” Group in Review Board

    KDE’s Review Board is a useful way for contributors inside and outside a project to submit patches and have them reviewed and approved by core developers. However, sometimes these patches specifically address design issues, or may introduce new design issues that a designer might need to review. If they are subscribed to the project mailing list or they regularly check Review Board, a designer might be able to notice requests they should comment on.

  • A lightweight heavyweight

    Of course mentioning LXDE in the same breath as KDE and Gnome will make some people bristle. Obviously a project with more than 430 contributors and one with 26 are in different leagues, even if the statistics show them in close succession.

Distributions

• SliTaz 2.0: Simple, Speedy, and Secure

  It has been more than a year since my last look at SliTaz (Simple Light Incredible Temporary Autonomous Zone) GNU/Linux so I kind of miss it already. That’s why I decided to grab its second distribution release.

• sidux

  • sidux 2009.02, waiting for antiX M8.2

    I was going to wait for both sidux 2009.02 and antiX M8.2 to come out, since there were test versions of both out earlier this month. antiX has been in public testing longer, but anticapitalista wants to get a few things just right before releasing. Meanwhile, the public test versions, including the Pre Final 1 for antiX M8.2 look very good.

  • sidux 2009-02: A Playground For The Adventurous

    KIDS these days have amazing play facilities filled with intricate log-and-cable structures designed to test their nerve and athleticism.

• Mandriva

  • Samsung NC20 – A Brief Encounter

    That was about all the time that I had with it. We installed a few more optional packages, and Mandriva certainly seemed to work just fine. Oh, also, as my friend has experience with Ubuntu and Linux Mint, I chose to install the Mandriva Gnome version, rather than KDE. Obviously there were no problems as a result of that, either.

  • Pardus 2009

    But something must have gone horribly wrong during the install, because the stability is simply atrocious. Applications keep crashing. One time, I could move the mouse but I couldn’t open a single program because I couldn’t click anything. I booted into 5 minutes ago and Firefox wouldn’t start. I don’t know what happened, but I don’t feel like installing it again.

  • Interesting things I saw at GCDS: Pardus Linux

    This year at GCDS I had the pleasure of meeting Gökmen and Gökçen (pronounced “Gerkman” and “Gerkchan” with hard Gees not Jays). They are part of a relatively small team of around 15 developers who are sponsored by the Turkish government work on a Turkish Linux distribution called Pardus. It is a KDE focused distribution which has been around since the end of 2005. What makes this distribution so interesting is the system tools and configuration tools which they’ve developed based heavily on Python, PyQt and PyKDE.

    Here is a run down on the custom tools that I’m aware of and my impression thereof. I’m getting most of this information from the document “Python in Pardus” [1], my discussions with G & G, and what I’ve seen from playing a bit with the current RC2 inside Virtual Box.

• Gentoo

  • Open Source Watershed

    Ran across the Open Source Watershed this morning and found it very interesting/illuminating. One of the touted virtues of running a distribution like Gentoo always seemed to be that you had the latest greatest available when it was released, instead of waiting on a binary compatible build for your distro.

  • Gentoo Celebrates 10 Years: 2009/10/04

    Gentoo is turning 10 years old. For the last ten years, Gentoo has been committed to bringing the cutting edge source based distro to users that need more flexibility than binary packages can give them. With a vibrant community and over 300 developers, much has been accomplished since the beginning, Gentoo remains true to its origin.

• Red Hat

  • Red Hat ups its support for system integrators

    Government policy change prompts vendor to set up global team to boost awareness of open source

  • Mouse with Red Hat

    Any ways so whats interesting with this mouse… look closely it has a official Red Hat logo saying compatible with Red Hat..

  • Fedora 11, Meet The RPM Fusion Website

    SO, there I was, having installed Fedora 11 on a dusty old Compaq Presario – 700MHz AMD Duron processor, 10GB HDD! – and things had gone relatively smoothly, if glacially slowly.

• Ubuntu

  • Review: The Official Ubuntu Book, 4th Edition

  • Ubuntu Christian Edition 5.0 (Beta)

    Back in 2006, when I was writing for ExtremeTech, I reviewed a version of Ubuntu with a religious theme: Ubuntu Christian Edition. At one point it seemed as though Ubuntu CE had been discontinued but I was pleased to note today that it has apparently been brought to life again:

    Great news!! Ubuntu CE is alive again! A huge thanks goes out to David Kuntadi who has taken on the task of developing the debs for the Dansguardiane-Sword Installer, Bible Trivia, OpenSong, linBread, etc. He is also keeping our new repository organized and updated.

    [...]

    Clearly anybody who is a faithful Christian that is in the market for a faith-based distribution should check out Ubuntu CE. I regard this release as a new beginning for this distribution and, hopefully, a harbinger of even better things to come. I’d like to see more aesthetically pleasing additions to this distribution in future releases including more Christian wallpaper as well as some Christian-themed music and perhaps even an original Christian theme.

  • Glassbuntu: design a dark crystal Gnome theme for Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

    To allow you to easily design a kick-ass theme for your Gnome, Ubuntu or Mint desktop I started this series of posts. in each I will suggest various windows decorations, widgets icons and background that follow one unique theme and blend well together. I will then suggest a few ways to combine them to make an aesthetically pleasing desktop. This weeks them is Glassbuntu: design a dark crystal theme.

  • Usbuntu Live Creator Makes Bootable Linux USB Drives

    Windows only: Free application uSbuntu Live Creator installs a Live CD from an ISO image onto your USB flash drive—much more useful, portable, and easy to deal with than carrying around a CD.

  • Adventures With Ubuntu

    The other day I was bored. What does one do when bored? Well, generally it’s a good idea to install some variant of Linux. Why? Because Linux is supposed to be hard to install. You’re supposed to struggle in order to get it running smoothly on your machine. It should take hours. It’s supposed to earn you some mad geek cred.

  • Back with a CrunchBang #!

    WHAT happened to the “p-y-e-o-w-w-w”?

    I’ve lost count of the number of times the sci-fi blaster sound that CrunchBang Linux makes when it starts up has made me – or someone in the room with me – jump.

    Now, it makes an equally sci-fi “boop-bleep-bup” sound which is nice, but doesn’t have the same dramatic effect of making people duck if your speaker volume is maxed-out.

  • CrunchBang Linux 9.04.01 Review and Screenshot Tour

    All in all, I admit I had a lot of fun testing Crunchbang. Although some people can find the Openbox Desktop and the grey-black color scheme (the window borders are a bit too dark, people may have problems seeing the buttons) a bit intimidating, Crunchbang’s main strength is that it does not make you watch, but explore.

  • Ubuntu on Pilot Light: wattOS Beta 3

    The goal of wattOS is simple and useful: to build a Linux distro that uses little energy.

  • Asus 1008HA with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha2

    So here’s the Asus Eee 1008HA PC running the regular Desktop version of Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Alpha 2 (I’ve removed several stickers from the area below the keyboard. These were telling me about some proprietary OS that I didn’t want in the first place)…

  • Icon Theme Hacking Progress

    Quick update on my icon hacking. I have now figured out a way to get most of my notification icons to have broadly the right color.

  • Desktop Theming and Icons

    For some time now there has been a general move over to darker themes in GNOME-land. I have tried a bunch of themes here and there but I have always moved back to the default Ubuntu theme: I always found the dark theme less usable and harder to look at in my day to day work. Last night though, I decided to give it a decent shot and customized the bejesus out of my desktop.

  • Make Ubuntu complete with these additional installations!

    Since Canonical created Ubuntu for the masses, it has encouraged many users to try linux and eventually switch over to linux completely.

  • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 151

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #151 for the week July 12th – July 18th, 2009. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu 8.04.3 released, Kubuntu Council, Kubuntu Wiki, Technical Board: Nominations, Karmic Translations are now Open, New Ubuntu Members, Ubuntu Zimbabwe, Empathy is now in Karmic, AppArmor now available in Karmic: Testing Needed, Ubuntu IRC Council News, OpenJDK 6 Certification for Ubuntu 9.04, Ubuntu Podcast Quickie #9, Ubuntu-based distro touted for power management, and much, much more!

  • Ubuntu App Store: Open for Business?

    Is this the start of something big? Too soon to say.

Devices/Embedded

• GP2X Wiz

  Granted, it’s a truly blatant clone, but it’s incredibly addictive, and makes excellent use of the Wiz’s touchscreen – a feature that has been borrowed from the GP2X F200.

  Like the GP2X before it – and practically every single open source ‘media player’ released so far – the Wiz is also capable of handling music and video. Sadly, like so many of the machines that attempt to be all things to all men, it does neither particularly well.

  In fact, video playback is noticeably worse on the Wiz than it was on the GP2X – but, as always, there’s a chance that coders will release their own media player programs that eclipse the performance of those that come pre-loaded with the console.

• Phones

  • Sony Ericsson Xperia drops Windows for Android

    An Android-based version of Sony Ericsson’s first Windows Mobile smartphone, the Xperia, has appeared online, prompting speculation that an official unveiling could be just around the corner.

  • Palm’s Linux secret makes the Pre

    You’re lucky that you missed the review I had written of Palm’s Pre after working with it for six weeks. I couldn’t see the attraction. The $299 that Sprint charges to let you out of the store with the Pre isn’t justified by the phone’s out-of-the-box features, and the anemic App Catalog presents few opportunities to elevate the device to the capabilities of others in its lofty price range. The Pre isn’t a bad phone, but it’s simply not worth the $200 to $250 premium over the BlackBerry Curve, the T-Mobile G1, and the iPhone 3G.

  • Open Source Solution for Multiple Mobile Platforms

    I cannot finish without making a comment about the fact that Palm has concluded the super-secret early access SDK program and made the Palm WebOS SDK available to all registered developers. This is an important milestone and will begin to reveal the story about how well WebOS will be received by the developer community at large. What I find interesting is how similar WebOS’s approach is to PhoneGap’s approach.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Vietnamese netbook runs on bilingual Linux distro

    Vietnamese Linux technology firm Hacao has released a netbook, along with a new bilingual (English/Vietnamese) release of its Hacao Linux 2009 CE distro. The Hacao Netbook is based on an Intel Atom-based MSI Wind, and offers a 10-inch screen and 160GB of storage.

  • Bargain Acer Extensa 15″ Linux Notebook Released

    It seems that current economic hard times are really favouring the adoption of Linux as a pre-installed OS by mainstream PC vendors.
    Acer has just released a new Notebook model (5235-571G16N) part of it’s Extensa line, with a full sized 15.6 inch matte LCD screen (LED backlight, 1366 x 768 resolution), 2GHz Intel Celeron cpu, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard disk, a DVD writer drive for a low price that is more typical of an average Netbook. It ships with Linux pre-installed, which avoids the Microsoft ‘tax’ that Linux users have to needlessly pay with most laptops and therefore helps to keep the price low.

  • Kubuntu Netbook Edition starts to take shape

    One of our goals for Kubuntu in this development cycle is to introduce a new sub-flavor of Kubuntu for netbooks (thus Kubuntu Netbook Edition).

  • Linux on Netbooks – ALIVE and WELL!

    Doing my part to bring out the truth about Linux on the Netbook.

    There’s been a lot of buzz lately about netbooks, and many sources out there have not done their due diligence to debunk the myth of “Linux is Dead on the Netbook”. C’mon people, don’t just jump on the bandwagon and repeat the marketing spew, do some research and tell the truth!

Open Source is Infiltrating the Enterprise

James Turner: This is breaking news today, so I’ll understand if you don’t feel like you can comment on it at this point. But I’ve seen reports that the London Stock Exchange which was, I believe, one of Microsoft’s Get the Truth poster children, is pulling back from their Windows deployment. Does that say anything to you?

Jeffrey Hammond: Well, it’s difficult for me to comment on the reasons or what’s going on there. But we’re going to see these sorts of switches back and forth. And you could argue that running open source on Microsoft platforms is also a very interesting way to go. I wrote recently about what Microsoft’s done with their Web PI products that take PHP and make it and PHP-based applications very simple to install on the Windows platform. And so there are both good and bad from Microsoft’s perspective in terms of open source.

Apollo 11 command module is released to open source

The software that helped take humans to the moon has been released to the developer open source community to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.

New Apache board elected

During its annual members meeting, the Apache Software Foundation (FSF) elected a new board of directors.

Charity, open source, and happiness

A few months back Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, delivered an address (audio here) at my alma mater, Brigham Young University, titled “Why Giving Matters.” While focused on charitable giving and its multiplicative value on a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), it also tells us a lot about why developers contribute to open-source projects.

Identi.ca: How free software can drive a social networking revolution

Social networking, micro-blogging and other such buzzwords abound across web development these days, and the “public” is a fickle as ever. The darling of the media-driven, web-based section of the public is dropped as soon as it gets popular or as soon as somebody figures out a way to make money out of it — money usually involves advertising, which usually ends up bombarding users with spurious post-mercials. How can free software make an impact in such an environment? Enter Identi.ca

Copyright Consultation Running On Open Source Software

Joseph Potvin, an economist at the Chief Information Officer Branch, Treasury Board Secretariat, writes to note that the Government’s copyright consultation is running on open source software. The consultation is using a Mongrel server built in Ruby-On-Rails on a GNU/Linux machine. Sometimes actions speak louder than words.

College helps businesses to improve their performance

More than 30 small and medium sized businesses have saved money and improved their business performance since the launch of Southern Regional College’s Open Source Solution Centre in October, the college has announced.

Delivered through funding provided by the Connected Project and the Innovation Fund, the centre introduces firms to the benefits of open source software packages — software which is in the public domain and can be modified and improved without paying costly licensing fees.

Sun

• The MySQL Librarian Initiative

  The MySQL Librarian initiative is very young, at the moment there are about 200 items, 130 of them are presentations, 30 videos plus pictures and books. Six months from now I’ll ping Giuseppe to know how it goes.

• OpenOffice Renaissance prototyping phase drawing to close

  The Renaissance Project team, part of the User Experience Project (UX) at OpenOffice.org, have announced that the Renaissance prototyping phase that began on the 12nd of June, will end on the 24th of July. The goal of the prototyping is to build “a flexible framework for mid-fidelity prototyping to test promising UI designs with real users”.

GIMP

• New brushes for your GIMP!

  For painters and designers they are a must have – custom brushes! They save lots of time and it is fun to work with new ones of course

• Lightning Brushes

  Then, Open Gimp, select the brush tool, scroll down the brush tool menu and select a lighting bolt. Adjust the color and size and click the mouse on your canvass. You’ve just created a lighting bolt!

• Gimp Tip : Isolate image from background

Web Browsers

• Mozilla: Making it Easier, Doing it Right

  Intriguing stuff, and it’s great to see Mozilla working on these areas. As Raskin noted, almost uniquely his team is under no pressure to deliver something soon, unlike most startups; instead he and they can concentrate on getting it right, even if takes longer.

  Against a background where the recent experience of the Twitter team has shown that the browser-based, cloud computing model has not just weaknesses, but a domino-like interlinked set of weaknesses that can lead to catastrophic security failures, it’s comforting to hear that someone is trying to do things properly.

• 5 Awesome Mozilla Labs Projects for Firefox 3.5

  Throughout the five years, Mozilla has dramatically improved the Internet browsing experience by producing stable, open-source applications that bring simplicity to our virtual lives. The latest version of Firefox is a prime example of how Mozilla integrates practical features into its products, like the inclusion of private browsing, tear away tabs and location awareness, while still maintaining a strong user base and delivering a stable browser.

• Firefox 3.5 vs. Chromium on Ubuntu 9.04

  With the recent release of Firefox 3.5 the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine is really available for the ‘normal’ user (ie. not the alpha/beta users). It gives you a major speed increase in JavaScript intensive webapps. But how does it compare to Google’s Chromium?

• Firefox 3.5 makes browsing a delight … and much faster

  Firefox 3.5 is a major improvement over its predecessor (Firefox 3). If you’re not currently a Firefox user, you’ll want to give it a try. If you are, upgrading is a no brainer. 3.5 offers faster Web browsing, better tab handling, a host of interface tweaks – and is noticeably faster than Firefox 3.

• Tech Review: New FireFox burns the competition

  Six years ago, Internet Explorer was the bully on the playground. Explorer showed up in 1995, punched poor Netscape Navigator in the stomach, shoved it in its locker and by 2002 – 2003 Explorer had a 95 percent usage share for web browsers. The janitor let Netscape out of the locker but it was never the same again. Today Navigator has less than 1 percent usage share, down from more than 90 percent and AOL has discontinued development of the browser.

• Shiretoko, Harry Potter, championing users, community building, litmus, jetpack, xulrunner, ubiquity, and more…

  In this issue…

  * Spread Firefox affiliate rewards
  * Mozilla introduces Harry Potter personas
  * Discover Shiretoko and interFORest
  * Does Mozilla champion Firefox users?
  * Community building with Markos Moulitsas
  * John Lilly: Lessons from Mozilla
  * Open Web style lectures
  * Lawyers as a community?
  * Help wanted: Mochitest test cases for docshell
  * Litmus project needs owners

• Add-on contributions, Firefox update, Firebug, Jetpack, Foundation, TraceMonkey, and more…

  In this issue…

  * Add-ons contributions pilot
  * Firefox 3.5.1 update
  * Firebug 1.4 now available
  * Jetpack 0.4 release
  * Mozilla Foundation: July update
  * Billion downloads campaign
  * Building communities with Tyler Bleszinski
  * Poetry + Pragmatics: the Weave version

• thirty million downloads of firefox 3.5

  In less than three weeks, more than 30 million people have taken the initiative and downloaded a copy of Firefox 3.5.

• First Look: Firefox 3.7’s New Design

  It hasn’t even been a month since Firefox 3.5 was released to the masses, but Mozilla is already hard at work on FirefoxFirefoxFirefox 3.7. We gave you a sneak peek at what features are coming in 2010, but now we know what Firefox 3.7 may look like when it’s released.

Business

• TomatoCart.com – A New Open Source eCommerce Solution

  Tomato Cart’s application mimics the user experience of desktop Operating System, offering features and applications similar to a PC environment. As such, it is fairly easy for both beginners and professionals to get acquainted with it, and even master it. Additionally, it supports multi-window operations and that enables users to work with several modules simultaneously.

• Open Source Business Award 2010 – accepting entries

  Although OSBF is based in Germany, the competition is open to businesses throughout Europe.

FSF/GNU

• Taking a Principled Position on Software Freedom

  Those of us in the free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) community know the routine by now. Despite the fact that “free software” and “open source” refer to the same software and the same communities, supporters of “free software” like the FSF would have us advocate for FLOSS by talking about users’ rights to use, modify, share, and cooperate; open source supporters like the Open Source Initiative would have us advocate for software by talking about how securing these rights produces software with “better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost.”

Government

• Open Source for Britain?

  There’s no doubt that the state of open source in government is even more parlous here than in the US, and so the need for such an organisation is even more pressing. But I wonder whether there’s quite the critical mass here: are there enough companies basing their business around open source to fund such an organisation? And, even more critically, could they come up with a better name than Open Source for Britain?

• Building on Open Data

  One of the great things about openness is that it lets people do incredible things by adding to it in a multiplicity of ways. The beatuy is that those releasing material don’t need to try to anticipate future uses: it’s enough that they make it as open as possible Indeed, the more open they make it, the more exciting the re-uses will be.

• Red Hat, Oracle, Sun, others join to pitch open source to feds

  More than 50 companies, academic institutions, and other organizations, including vendors such as Red Hat and Oracle, are banding together to promote use of open source by the federal government via an organization called Open Source for America.

• Linux Paves Way for New “Open Source in America” Coalition

  Some may see this as a victory, but I see it as not good enough. The members of the organization announced today, Open Source for America, agree. We see it as an opportunity to educate government on open source software while effecting change in policy and coordinating collaboration on requirements specific to government.

• A New Voice for Open Source in Government

  I’m pleased to report this morning on the formation of a new advocacy group for the use of free and open source software in the U.S. Government. I’m also pleased to have been asked to serve on its Board of Advisors, along other proponents of free and open source software, such as Roger Burkhard, Dawn Meyerriecks, Eben Moglen, Tim O’Reilly, Simon Phipps, Mark Shuttleworth, Michael Tiemann, Bill Vass, and Jim Zemlin.

• Open Source For America coalition formed

• Red Hat, NCSU join movement to get feds to embrace Open Source

• Open Source Leaders Team Up to Seek More Clout in Government

• Group will push open source in US gov’t

  Open-source software needs a higher profile in Washington, D.C., according to a group of about 50 organizations and companies that launched a new campaign to educate U.S. government agencies about the benefits of open source.

  Members of the Open Source For America coalition, which launched Wednesday, include Google, The Linux Foundation, the Mozilla and Debian projects, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

• KRudd to have PM TV on new open source website

  Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s refurbished website will eventually have message boards and online chat features to facilitate discussion with the public.

  The new portal was unveiled with a completely new layout and several new functions geared towards an interactive experience. It mirrors US President, Barack Obama’s pre-election efforts as he used his official website to garner support from technology savvy voters.

• What open source government data gets you

  What makes the difference is the transit system’s attitude toward its route data. When you take a proprietary attitude, as MARTA does, riders are left in the dark. An open source attitude, like TriMet’s empowers riders.

Openness

• Free the Patents and Laws, Activist Tells Feds

  What’s worse than being a government agency targeted by a gadfly who wants data to be free and is willing to plead, sue, reverse-engineer, grandstand and shame his way into freeing government data?

  Well, try being a government agency on the receiving end of that in an administration that has pledged allegiance to transparency and openness.

  And that’s exactly where nation’s pre-eminent open-government data fighter Carl Malamud has got the Patent and Trademark Office and the National Archives and Records Administration, which controls — among other things — the Federal Register System.

• The Crucible Effect and the Scarcity of Collective Attention

• Douglas Rushkoff’s Open Source Economy: A ReadWriteWeb Interview

  Douglas Rushkoff — author, documentarian, and teacher — is a man on a mission. As a step towards getting “people to see the software-like code lying underneath how they interact,” his latest book, Life, Inc., explores the nature of money, our economic system, and how a corporate mindset has shaped who we are as people in modern society.

Programming

• REVIEW: NetBeans IDE 6.7 Provides Effective Integration with Project Kenai

  One of the biggest improvements in the NetBeans IDE 6.7 is integration with Project Kenai, Sun’s open-source collaboration site. This allows developers to easily collaborate with each other on Kenai right from within the NetBeans IDE, not through a Web browser inside the IDE. The Project Kenai site itself includes full support for source code repositories, enabling developers to connect through any of several source code version control systems.

• Chris DiBona on the (Computational) Value of Sharing

  I’ve been a programmer since I was 12 years old, so I always knew I would get into computers, computer science, or information technology. I started using Linux when I was in college back in 1995. Then as my professional career developed I realized I really liked Linux and the ideas behind it, and I liked the ideals behind open source and free software. That lead me to where I am today. Right now I’m Google’s open source program manager. What that means is that I monitor open source compliance for all the open source software that we use with the company. I also make sure that stuff that we release is under a proper open source license and, in the case of content, is under a proper Creative Commons license.

• Ross Turk on the SourceForge Community Awards

  OSCON 2009 is in full swing, which means you can’t walk more than 10 feet without tripping over a well-known geek. We’ve just spoken to Ross Turk, Director of Community at SourceForge, ahead of the Community Choice Awards on Thursday night. Here’s what he had to say on who he’d have chosen, had it not been completely unethical and against all his better principles…

Healthcare

• Open source to power Connecticut HIE

  Hartford Healthcare, which provides rehabilitation, long term care, and hospice facilities in central Connecticut, said today it will combine Misys’ open source connectivity technology with Allscripts EHR systems, a health record built on software as a service, to create Transforming Healthcare In Connecticut Communities (THICC), a regional system linking hospitals, clinics and facilities statewide.

• Carpenter Builds Open Source Imaging Software

  Anne Carpenter trained as a traditional cell biologist specializing in microscopy with no intention of writing image analysis software. “It wasn’t until I needed software to do something that existing commercial software couldn’t do that I became interested in writing software myself,” says Carpenter. The genesis of CellProfiler was “completely out of necessity.”

  [...]

  The software Carpenter built—CellProfiler—made its free open source debut in December 2005, and was detailed in Genome Biology in 2006. In January 2007, Jones and Carpenter established the Imaging Platform group at the Broad Institute, focusing on new algorithms and data analysis methods. From here, Carpenter can help dozens of researchers working on clinically relevant projects. “Everything we develop becomes open source, and the easiest way to get that out to the public is to put it into the CellProfiler interface.”

• Open Source Meets Health Care

  Changing from paper charts to electronic medical records sounds like a relatively easy sales pitch. It improves patient care, decreases the risk of error and adds enormous efficiency into the system.

  [...]

  We’re using Hewlett-Packard servers, Red Hat Linux, the InterSystems Cache database management system, which is the only proprietary component in the stack. On top of that runs OpenVista.

Standards/Consortia

• Cloud providers pressured to open APIs

  Rackspace’s (NYSE: RAX) announcement last week that it would release open application programming interfaces (APIs) for its cloud computing services and open-source API specs in the coming weeks is another example of cloud providers gaining advantage in the market by doing what more established players in the telecom world won’t do.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Amazon ate my homework, or why DRM stinks for education

  The phrase “Amazon ate my homework” may certainly have been uttered on more than one occasion since the New York Times reported on Amazon’s deletion of specific editions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 from Kindle e-book readers (and no, the irony wasn’t lost on anybody). Unless you live under a rock, you know that this has been a bit of a discussion topic in the blogosphere. However, the first time I’d heard it put that way was in an email exchange on which I was lurking today, when Daniel Dern, an independent technology writer, made specific reference to the notes/annotations lost by a particular student.

Intellectual Monopolies

• British Library Turns Traitor

  This once-great institution used to be about opening up the world’s knowledge for the benefit and enjoyment of all: today, it’s about closing it down so that only those who can afford to pay get to see it.

  What an utter disgrace.

• Asus Uses BitTorrent to Boost Software Downloads

  Asus, one of the leading computer product manufacturers, has recently started to offer BitTorrent powered downloads to its customers. With BitTorrent the company says it can speed up downloads and get software to its customers in less time.

• 3 Strikes To Be Administered By Post Office Subsidiary

  The now infamous 3 strikes model championed by France’s Nicholas Sarkozy was recently rejected by the country’s highest legal authority. With amendments the plan is back and the latest news is that a subsidiary of the post office will administer the scheme. Lawmakers will today start debating the modified bill.

• How Copyright Can Be Viewed As Anti-Property

  While I have no doubt that this will upset and anger the folks who believe that copyright is absolutely 100% property, it’s a rather compelling explanation of how copyright isn’t just not like property, but in many ways is anti-property in that it violates some of the basic tenets of true property and true property rights.

• Plug pulled on unlimited-download site Zookz

  That didn’t take long. Friday evening I blogged that the government of Antigua had issued a terse press release claiming that it had nothing to do with unlimited-download site Zookz. The Zookz legal team responded with an equally terse note saying that it didn’t need the government’s approval, and that its service was perfectly legal under its interpretation of a recent World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling.

• DRM is ****, RIAA Says

  For years the RIAA has defended the use of DRM, much to the dislike of millions of honest customers who actually paid for their music. Now, in a shocking turnaround, the outfit seems to have come to the realization that DRM does more harm than good and has officially declared its death.

• Spotify to take online jukebox to the States

  Founded by two Swedish entrepreneurs, Spotify provides an online jukebox allowing users to listen to a library of more than six million tracks, funded either by regular advertising breaks or by a monthly subscription for uninterrupted listening. The model has proved phenomenally popular since its launch in October and has been hailed as a viable alternative to Apple’s iTunes.

• The customer is the scarcity

  Not all artificial scarcities have been termed illegal as yet: the most glaring example is that of “intellectual property rights”, where something is made artificially scarce using the power of the state; no other rights depend exclusively on state intervention. Strange, that.

• Copyright Lobbyists Celebrate Latest Bogus Stats With Willing Gov’t Officials

  They don’t actually look at the real research on these things. Instead, they accept as gospel the ridiculous debunked research that comes out of the industry lobbyists who benefit the most from such protectionism that limits real and meaningful competition. And no one calls them on it. Take, for example, this Internet News report on how lobbyists for the music, movie and software industries all got together with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, and talked up a new and misleading study from the International Intellectual Property Association that talks up the importance of copyright.

• John McCain settles Jackson Browne lawsuit, apologizes for use of song

  We can finally close the book on the 2008 presidential election now.

  Singer Jackson Browne has announced he’s settled a lawsuit against John McCain.

• Sussex cops try to suppress publication of damning traffic-cam photos by claiming copyright

  The Sussex, England police are trying to suppress publication of images from speed cameras — images that show technical shortcomings in the cameras — by claiming that they are copyrighted. Copyright is meant to protect creativity; I’m not sure who the aggrieved artist is meant to be here. Is there some tortured constable who spent hours on a ladder getting the composition of the camera’s shots just right?

• This Is Wrong: ‘Without The Content Industries, The Internet Would Be Empty’

  Oh really? Why not try it, and let’s see. The quote, by the way, was brought to us by Andrew Dubber, who properly calls Healey the “Wrongest Man on the Internet, July 2009.” However, this really is how some of these guys think. They don’t think that the internet really existed before they discovered it, and they think that everyone logs onto YouTube just to catch the latest TV clips. They don’t realize that people use it to communicate and share and collaborate — and that’s a lot more useful than using it to get fed some mass market entertainment junk.

• Why information is its own reward – same neurons signal thirst for water, knowledge

  To me, and I suspect many readers, the quest for information can be an intensely rewarding experience. Discovering a previously elusive fact or soaking up a finely crafted argument can be as pleasurable as eating a fine meal when hungry or dousing a thirst with drink. This isn’t just a fanciful analogy – a new study suggests that the same neurons that process the primitive physical rewards of food and water also signal the more abstract mental rewards of information.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

the home desktop, the the work station and the school desktop, oh my!

The Linux home desktop. This is the coveted property that untold numbers go home to play video and music on. Create home made birthday cards and print their digital photos from.

[...]

So, start the schools using OpenSource software and Linux. The students will be trained and proficient on it. Workplaces will buy into it to accommodate to meet the capabilities and experience of the incoming generations of skilled new workers.

Linux Format wallpapers

Updated: We’ve had a number of reader requests to make available some of the imagery we use in Linux Format magazine. Naturally we’re happy to share with you all, so we’ve put this page online where we’ll upload artwork as it’s requested.

Linux Against Poverty Installfest – August 1st

What’s even better than recycling your old computer? Donate it to a good cause!

Desktop

• Quick Guide to Installing Ubuntu on a Mac OSX PC

  Can Linux co-exist peacefully with Mac OSX? Of course it can, and it’s my opinion there are some real advantages to having both available on your Mac system. So, with this beginner article it is my hope that others will be open to trying out the power of Linux on their Mac.

• Life with Linux: More apps

  I’ve been working on tuning the Linux installation I have on my work Lenovo Thinkpad T400, and it’s time to add a few more applications. I’ll break them down by category.

• Ubuntu 9.04 Snaps Desktop Visaster

  I finally had my fill of Visaster on my office desktop. The final kick in the teeth delivered by Visaster was a document that flat out disappeared while I was attempting to move it to a remote shared drive. Explorer did its typical “white-out” and then locked up the desktop and the system had to be power cycled to get responses from the keyboard or mouse.

• Dude I Got a Dell!

  Mighty impressive effort here on the part of Dell and Canonical.

Server

• eBox Releases Version 1.2

  eBox is a server management platform that handles some really advanced configurations and makes them easy to set up. I reported about eBox a couple of weeks ago and told you that there were some cool new features in the pipeline.

Kernel Space

• Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Nears Final Release

  Head on over to Phoronix-Test-Suite.com to give 2.0 Sandtorg a try, which introduces a horde of new features. More on some of the new features and capabilities to be found in Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 are described in Driving Linux-based Benchmarking With Sandtorg and Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Enters Alpha. In this release there are more than 100 test profiles! Share your feedback on this testing software of ours within the Phoronix PTS Forum.

• Intel Releases Version 2.8 X.Org Driver

  It’s been an interesting past few months in the Linux graphics world, but to mark the end of four months of development, Carl Worth on the behalf of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center has announced the release of an updated DDX driver. This new Intel driver is, of course, xf86-video-intel 2.8.0.

• Linux’s Thickening Waist Line

  Microsoft’s operating systems have exploded in size during the past 20 years or so as their functionality increased to include thousands of features that weren’t considered necessary in DOS. Nowhere is this more true than Microsoft’s Vista — a classic case of an OS so bloated and unwieldy it barely crawled along on machines that could run Linux like a bat out of hell.

• Linux driver problems? What driver problems?

  For ages people have complained about how there’s no drivers for certain products in Linux (or insufficient drivers), despite Linux having the largest driver database in the entire world, easily twice as large as Microsoft’s largest collection.

  However, the problem doesn’t lie in what’s supported, but rather when it’s supported. Too many products are released on the market with Windows drivers, but nothing for Linux.

Applications

• Chromium in Linux is advancing nicely

  I’ve installed “chromium-snapshot” from Arch’s AUR yesterday (means user contributed, unofficial packages), and I must say it’s come a long way. In the very beginning, this was described by the devs as a 500MB binary that displayed a window. I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the idea. Then it developed into something browserlike, but without tabs, or flash, or stability. Now it has all those things, plus it actually follows your GTK theme. Flash works, albeit a bit buggy. It’s the only thing that has been able to crash a page at this point. The browser itself hasn’t died on me yet.

• Promises Plated in Chrome

  With the recent announcement of Google’s Chrome OS, open source zealots everywhere have been licking their lips raw and playing their trumpets loud. But is another big corporation going to be a good thing for OSS? We take a trip down memory lane and look for whether Google can (or wants to) buck the old trends.

• 15 Email Applications for Linux

  Email clients are becoming less and less of a frequently used program, now people can go to Yahoo, GMX or Gmail and just put some few details down for registration and they have some few gigs of email space and an online client. And with the popularity such as the Mozilla prism project, web clients can be turned into normal looking programs and be used even off-line, making normal clients less of a necessity. But for some, email applications are still their first choice, one main advantage is the multiple use of accounts at the same time. Since awareness in email applications is decreasing, here is a list of email applications for Linux that shows many of the email clients available.

• Top 3 Linux Burning Applications

  1. K3b
  Not many can argue against this one. K3b is the most popular burning application for Linux, and although it uses KDE3 libraries, many GNOME users prefer it too over native GTK burners.

KDE

• KDE Reaches 1,000,000 Commits in its Subversion Repository

  KDE announced today that the one millionth commit has been made to its Subversion-based revision control system.

• Draco loves KDE3

  For some unknown reason, Ole Andre Rodlie seems to have decided that KDE3 is more interesting than XFCE for a desktop OS, and — unannounced! — he is building beta versions of «Draco K3 Desktop Enviroment 1.0», which is otherwise based on Draco GNU/Linux 0.3.1.

• looking to the future

  So what of 4.5? Well, we won’t have an army of gsoc students; a lot of us will be in school. But if we’re on git, and the branch layout is what i hope it’ll be, then perhaps i can focus on bugfixing while the rest of kde is doing features, then start my features when they’re in feature freeze – because that’s when i’ll have *time* for features. Of course, that means any feature i write over xmas break will be in 4.5…

Distributions

• WattOS – A Fast Energy-Saving Linux Based on Ubuntu – Review & Screenshots

  WattOS Beta 3 is a lightweight Linux Distro geared towards running on less energy and for recycled or low power computers without compromising on features or performance that you’d expect from a full power system.

  Their motto “Light, Fast, Now” seeks to provide a low-energy full featured Linux distro.

• Sidux 2009-02 (KDE)

  The excellent distribution suggestions keep coming from Brian Masinick and here’s yet another one, Sidux 2009-2. Sidux is based on Debian and you can download a version that uses the XFCE or KDE desktop environments. You can also opt to download the lite version that weighs in at about 600MB or the full version that weighs in at around 2.1GB. Being the greedy app pig that I am, I opted to download the full KDE version.

• Apperi.com enters public beta

  We are proud to announce the launch of the public beta of apperi.com. A new linux app store for Debian and Ubuntu users. Apperi.com currently supports users of Debian 4 & 5 as well as Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, and 9.04 with a total of 119,295 packages.

• Mepis 8.0 Linux – Review and Screenshots

  Mepis 8.0 Linux is a Linux distro designed for ease of use and suitable even for beginners.

  Mepis is built on Debian 5.0 stable core with the 2.6.27 Linux kernel and comes in a 32bit and 64bit version.

  You can download from the Mepis mirror sites here.

• Mandriva

  • Mandriva unveils its very latest Mandriva Flash 2009 Spring

    Mandriva Flash 2009 Spring brings all the extras you wanted. You will find the Mandriva Linux 3D workstation and the complete Linux gamut, such as Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Skype, Google Toolbar, and the OpenOffice suite…

  • Distro Hoppin`: Pardus Linux 2009

    The fact that Pardus made me actually enjoy using KDE 4 is by itself an indication of the overall quality of this operating system. It’s easy to install, easy to configure, 100% up-to-date and more importantly, very stable. I’ve used many distributions that shipped with ages-old software “for improved stability” that performed much worse than Pardus. Hopefully, the future will bring a bigger software repository and maybe support for other desktop environments.

    Turkey, you’ve got yourself one of the finest OSes out there!

• Red Hat

  • Who Is the Next Red Hat?

    The open source world is cheering as Red Hat joins the S&P 500. It’s a huge vote of confidence in Red Hat. But is it a vote of confidence in the open source business model? Or more of a sign that Red Hat is miles ahead of its open source rivals on Wall Street and in the channel? Some clues from The VAR Guy…

  • Red Hat’s Open Source Cloud Forum–Free Online, Top Speakers

    The schedule for the forum is below, and note that all sessions will start at Eastern Standard Time, so if you’re on the West Coast in the U.S. and you want to participate live, sessions kick off at 6:30 a.m. The citation below for the 12 p.m. session with Eucalyptus Systems says “Mitch Wolski,” but that’s actually Rich Wolski, who we’ve talked with a number of times. Eucalyptus Systems has strong venture capital backing, and has several innovative open source efforts focused on the cloud. The session with Mike Olson, CTO of Cloudera–focused on Hadoop–also looks excellent. Cloudera provides support and services for Hadoop’s clustered speed-queries across large data sets.

    Here’s the complete agenda…

  • CentOS Pulse #0903 – 16th July 2009

    1. Foreword
    2. Announcements
    1. Break-In Attempt on www.CentOS.org
    3. Featured Articles
    1. The Definitive Guide to CentOS
    4. Community Threads
    1. Web Environment
    2. OS Protection
    3. Is there an openssh security problem?
    4. Better CentOS hardware support
    5. Interview
    6. Jokes and Funny Stuff
    1. How could he ?
    2. Comment your code
    7. CentOS Errata
    1. CentOS-3
    2. CentOS-4
    3. CentOS-5
    8. CentOS in the Spotlight
    9. Upcoming Events
    10. Contributing to this newsletter

  • Fedora

    • That FUDCon poster is catching on.

      There’s a nice entry on the Red Hat press blog about some of the interesting items that went on at FUDCon Berlin 2009.

    • Fedora 11 vs. Ubuntu 9.04

      Put Fedora 11 on my laptop just out of boredom, some notes:

      * Fedora 11 SELinux by default: Cool but confusing
      * Fedora 11 repositories: Better selection than previous releases, still not as many choices as Ubuntu
      * Ubuntu still wins on the default menu organization for new users (just a bit easier to navigate)
      * Fedora bootup vs. Ubuntu bootup is about a wash, they both look good and are fast
      * Default themes: Neither will win a competition on looks, Linux Mint is much better looking than both

• Ubuntu

  • CrunchBang Linux 8.10.02: A review

    As I become more knowledgable about Linux, the thought has crossed my mind to create my own distribution. However, I’ll readily admit I’m not the most technical user, but at least I’m getting to a point where I could give it a try. Using Ubuntu as the base would probably be easiest, starting from a minimal install, and using my favoruite window manager: Openbox. It wouldn’t be a minimalist or leightweight distribution, just one that provided almost all of the functionality and none of the bloat.

  • Migrating From WUBI to Full Ubuntu Install

    Note: This blog post could also be titled “Reinstalling Ubuntu and Keeping Your Applications and Data” or “Migrating Ubuntu Data and Applications from One Machine to Another”.

  • Review: Linux Mint 7 Is Glorious

    Linux Mint 7 “Gloria” was released a little while ago, so before it became too old of news, I thought I’d take a whack at experimenting with it for the sake of netbookers everywhere (and for myself, naturally). As I type this on gedit after about two weeks’ use, let’s just say that the system on my EeePC 1000 HE is, for the most part, rather glorious– pun intended. As a bonus, I also got Google’s Chromium browser to run on it, so keep on reading to find the section on that.

  • Ultimate Edition – A free overdose

    Don’t like the fact your Ubuntu does not have everything you want or need? No Flash Player installed? No MP3 codecs? Where’s Google Earth? Worry not. That’s what Ultimate Edition is for.

  • A First Look at Kubuntu-Jaunty (v9.04)

    Are you looking for a Linux distribution with an ultramodern look with plenty of eye candy? One that will run on older desktop computers or current netbooks? Does the well-known stability and security of Linux interest you? Does a high level of user customization( without having to edit configuration files manually) sound like something you’d like? Are you an experienced KDE user who has heard the (accurate) horror stories about early versions of KDE4? A. Lizard thinks that Kubuntu-Jaunty just might be the distribution you are looking for.

Devices/Embedded

• LiMo Foundation quietly gaining mobile Linux converts

  I spoke with Andrew Shikiar, director of Global Marketing for LiMo Foundation, on Tuesday to get a status report on LiMo, as well as to uncover what makes the foundation tick.

• Android vs. webOS

  So far we’ve heard quite a bit of comparisons between the webOS platform and OSX (for the iPhone), as well as Android vs. OSX. But so far, comparisons between both Android and webOS have been nonexistent. What makes this lack of coverage quite interesting is the fact that both operating systems are built off similar frameworks and use similar languages for programming. So I think it’s only fair that both systems get compared side to side and see who wins.

• Another Reason I Don’t Like Apple

  Those of you who read my blog regularly know by now my computer operating system of choice is Linux with Simply Mepis being the particular distribution. A quick look through my Computer Category will show you several posts written on the subject. Several of those posts have been published in a various internet computer magazines, for which I’m grateful.

• Ubuntu Netbook Remix in AA1

  But finally, it appeared that the Ubuntu Netbook Remix project had managed to produce a version of Ubuntu that would be running smoothly on weak systems, plus it would support almost all of the AA1 hardware out of the box. Trying it out now for couple of days, I am pretty happy. It is not a speed demon, but I am amazed at the scope and quality of functions they have managed to pack into a lowly 512 MB netbook machine. Reason to be happy for a while!

Launchpad is now open source.

This is a post I’ve been looking forward to for a long time:

Launchpad is now open source!

We released it today under the GNU Affero General Public license, version 3. Note that although we had previously announced that we’d be holding back two components (codehosting and soyuz), we changed our minds: they are included — all the code is open.

Take Open Source Software For a Test Drive With Click2Try

It’s easy for people who are skeptical of open source software to come up with a dozen reasons — some perfectly valid — to not give it a chance. Chief among them are uncertainty about which applications to try and an unwillingness to alter their computers in any way. Click2Try is a great way to try open source software in a virtual environment without the hassle of downloads and installation.

Adobe Open Sources 2 Flash Frameworks

Adobe has announced two new Flash Platform open source initiatives: Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) and the Text Layout Framework (TLF). The former is part of the project previously known as Strobe.

PacketFence 1.8.4 released

The Inverse Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 1.8.4. This is a maintenance release of PacketFence which focuses on stability and includes many bug fixes and several small enhancements.

Why are people attacking RMS?

I don’t think Stallman’s remarks are particularly tasteful, especially in an era of political correctness such as the one we live in. However, to accuse him of sexism, when he has clearly explained what he meant to convey, is a bit of a stretch.

ReactOS 0.3.9 Review and Screenshot Tour

As the new version of Microsoft Windows 7 is nearing completion, many users are gearing up for the big upgrade. Since it is the most popular operating system, many people who use an alternative OS miss out on some good software made for Windows, such as Photoshop, many new games et cetera. Even though we have partial solutions like Wine, they are not perfect and remain the main obstacle for wider adoption of open source operating systems.

Diversity in open source

Understanding gender or race diversity can be hard since we’re all born into one group or another. But all of us might find ourselves an uncomfortable outsider in some stereotypical situation or other. A nerd on a sports team. A jock on the chess team. An atheist at a church function. A 30-something in a college class.

Cloud Interoperability: Haven’t We Danced Before?

You would think that with our long and growing history, we in IT could be realistic about the prospects of any early implementers putting interoperability high on the list above functionality, wouldn’t you?

Firefox/Mozilla

• Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Project Codenamed Namoroka

  Mozilla has announced it’s new Project – Mozilla Firefox 3.6 which is codenamed “Namoroka“, with an intended release target of early-to-mid 2010

• What I Like About Firefox

  There are camps of people who use different browsers and have long-winded, heated arguments over which one is best. I have no strong feelings about browsers. They’re tools that help get the job done. That being said, if a tool can make my life simpler, more efficient, and fun, I’m more likely to use it. Firefox 3 fits the bill and gives me a lot of gadgets and options that make me smile. Here are a few reasons why I like it.

• mozilla foundation is 6 years old today

  Of course our project and technologies go back much further, but it was on this day in 2003 that the Mozilla Foundation was launched.

• It Can Now be Cheaper to Shop Using Firefox

  London, United Kingdom (PRWEB) July 17, 2009 — It can now be cheaper to shop using Firefox. Vouchers.Im Indicator for Firefox is a new add-on which will keep consumers aware of all promotions and discount voucher codes available on the websites they visit.

Business

• Career advice: Preparing for life after the recession

  One other area to consider: open-source solutions. Having a strong knowledge of open-source alternatives to commercial products can give you an edge over competitors that are only using purchased package solutions. Giving your customers options, especially a lower-cost option, should help you get work from companies that can’t afford a purchased package solution. Open-source solutions are going to be more and more viable in the future.

• Emmys using Drupal

  Glamour, glitter, and champagne all around because Drupal has gone Hollywood. The Emmys website has just switched to Drupal in preparation for the announcement of nominees tomorrow, and the subsequent annual Emmy award ceremony later this year. The Emmys are annual awards to outstanding television programs and performers.

Licensing

• Reports on the Death of the GPL …

  … are greatly exaggerated.

  It’s funny, from my small corner of the world it seems like the GPL is under attack of late. First, back in March, esr questioned the usefulness of the license. And now a lot of discussion has built up around a post by Benjamin Black comparing the GPL to DRM. Since I am nothing if not fashionable, I felt I should throw my opinion into the mix.

  I have to disagree with Mr. Black’s premise that

  it [the GPL] acts as a virus to force the release of ever more source. the gpl serves to rigidly control what you can and cannot do with software covered by it, and is thus the license equivalent of digital rights management

  The GPL is a rather simple license, and I don’t view its requirement that changes to GPL’d code must also be GPL’d as “rigidly controlling” what one does with it. I can run GPL’d code on any device I want. I can modify GPL’d code any way I want. I am free to do whatever I want with GPL’d code as long as any changes I make are given to whomever I share the code. Heck, if I don’t share the code the license doesn’t apply, since it is based on the making of copies (copyright) and not possession.

• Integration Watch: The need to expand open-source licensing

  It’s fair to say that while OSI certification is meaningful, the absence of it means very little. To avoid this, the OSI needs to change its licensing procedure.

Programming

• Get Ready for PHP 6

  PHP 6, the next major revision of the popular Web application development language, looms on the horizon and promises many changes. Learn what’s new and what’s obsolete and how to prepare your code for tomorrow.

Standards/Consortia

• ODFDOM 0.7 Released

  I’m pleased to report that the 0.7 release of the ODF Toolkit Union’s ODFDOM library has just been released. This is an open source (Apache 2.0 license) Java toolkit for programmatically reading, writing and manipulating ODF documents. The code is 100% Java and does not require that you have OpenOffice or any other ODF editor installed. It operates directly on the document itself.

• Gallery for danger signs

  This extension add one theme to your gallery with more than 100 signs dealing with security, not as bitmap but as vector graphic in ODF format : you may modify them or retrieve some parts to build your own signs. It contains :

  * 9 new official signs for chemical products and other danger (http://www.inrs.fr)

  [...]

Middle East Blackberry Update Spies on Users

A BlackBerry update that a United Arab Emirates service provider pushed out to its customers contains U.S.-made spyware that would allow the company or others to siphon and read their e-mail and text messages, according to a researcher who examined it.

Internet filter sparks outrage

The Government is spending $150,000 on website “filtering” software, outraging some bloggers who say the move amounts to censorship of the internet.

Since 2007 the Department of Internal Affairs’ Censorship Compliance Unit has worked with a small group of internet service providers on a “trial” project to block access to websites distributing child pornography.

Iranian consumers boycott Nokia for ‘collaboration’

The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime.