04.05.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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SJVN is, of course, the well-known nickname and abbreviation for Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, who has been covering technology as a journalist since… since longer than he cares to admit… and has been covering Linux and FOSS since the 1990s. This was basically a one-question interview: “How has reporting on Linux changed in the last 10 years?” After that, except for a couple of words requesting clarifications, we just let the webcam roll. (Note: if you know someone who would make a good Slashdot video interview victim, please put us in touch with them. Thanks.)
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Another noteworthy session from this year’s Linux Foundation Summit was two Oracle engineers talking about DTrace on Linux.
Kris Van Hees and Elena Zannoni of Oracle were at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit to promote DTrace on Linux. Last year was when it was reported Oracle was bringing DTrace to Linux. In particular, they wanted to bring this Solaris technology from their Sun Microsystems acquisition over to their RHEL-derived Oracle Enterprise Linux.
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Sievers explained that it will still be possible to install udev independently of systemd. He added that this option will be supported in the long term because separate builds are required to ensure that initrds (initial ramdisks), which don’t include systemd, work correctly. Distributions that don’t use systemd can continue to build udev as before, but will have to use the systemd sources. With the addition of udev, systemd’s version will jump from 45 to 184 to ensure that its version number is higher than that of the last independent version of udev.
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Android is now back in the Linux kernel as of the recent 3.3 release. That doesn’t mean that Android however is a first class Linux citizen, according to developers speaking at the Linux Collaboration Summit this week.
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Once again, it’s time to take stock of the contributions to the Linux kernel. The Linux Foundation has released another report on the speed of Linux kernel development, as well as who’s doing the work and what companies are sponsoring development. Since tracking has began, nearly 8,000 developers from just shy of 800 companies have contributed to the kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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Keith Packard spoke on Wednesday of the 2012 Linux Foundation Collaboration concerning Wayland and its backwards compatibility support for X applications.
Here’s my notes from Keith’s talk concerning X/Wayland. Nothing from the presentation was particularly new or surprising, but largely summarized information from past mailing list discussions (covered in earlier Phoronix Wayland articles) and past conferences like X@FOSDEM 2012.
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Applications
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Xnoise, a simple and fast media player for Linux, has reached version 0.2.0, getting a refreshed layout, support for dockable media sources, a redone application button and more.
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I am not sure how this happened, and the last thing I want to do is criticize an over-worked single developer, but the Linux version was DOA on the announcement page.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In short, “The Linux Command Line” is more than a complete introduction — it’s a full education in 432 pages (not counting the index).
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Games
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Skeltrack is a Free and Open Source Software library by Igalia for tracking the human skeleton joints from depth images.
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While most Linux gamers are currently eager for the imminent news concerning Valve’s Linux client efforts, there’s some more interesting news that I’ve learned this week as well: there exists a native Linux port of CryEngine 3.
CryEngine 3 is the latest version of Crytek’s CryEngine, which was released in H2’2009. I have confirmation from a source this week that a Linux port does exist, which also means an OpenGL renderer. CryEngine 3 under Microsoft Windows uses a DirectX 9/10/11 renderer while this game engine has also been ported to the Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii U, and Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Recently I have spent some time to make our window manager even more elegant. That is I decided to fix a few rough edges in our user experience offerings. All of these issues had actually been reported in our bugtracker as feature requests some time ago and listed as Junior Jobs, on the KWin ideas Wiki page and of course recently been added to the 4.9 milestone plan.
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GNOME Desktop
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Last week Igalia released an important piece of software called Skeltrack which, to put it simple, allows to retrieve the human skeleton joints from depth images. It had a good coverage from many important news websites and blogs and I received good feedback with kind words and even use cases I hadn’t thought of.
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To anticipate the first question: No, the newly released GNOME 3.4 does nothing to change the general structure of GNOME 3. Nor does it install by default with any of the extensions that reproduce GNOME 2, although users can download many of them from the GNOME Extensions page.
Instead, GNOME 3.4 is an incremental release, focusing on polishing the GNOME 3 release series without introducing any major structural or conceptual changes. Specifically, the new release begins the implementation of the design concepts summarized two months ago by Allan Day.
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On Wednesday of the 2012 LF Collaboration Summit, besides the X and Wayland integration talk, there was a second discussion concerning Wayland/Weston during a Tizen track. During this talk were a few tid-bits of interesting information revealed, such as an experimental GNOME 3.x desktop on Wayland.
Keith Packard did the first Wayland talk at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was about X-Wayland and ensuring legacy X applications will be able to run within the Wayland Display Server by having a seamless nested X experience with the modified xorg-server being automatically and transparently started when needed. That talk was covered in full in this article (the Phoronix video is still coming soon).
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Porteus grew out of the fan project that gave us the Slax Community Remix, a continuation of Slax 6.1.2, the last official Slax release for quite a while, dating back to August 2009.
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Surely you have heard of “Anonymous”, a group of hackers and activists that are quiet active in these days and so they have become sort of famous on the net, they have made for fun a customized version of Ubuntu that uses LXDE desktop/OpenBox with Metacity, Cairo-Dock, Tor, and nurtured a series of excellent programs.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia is nearly in its second iteration, and the Mandriva fork has gone a long way to establish its own identity while retaining the best bits
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Anne Nicolas has been chairman of the Mageia.Org Board of Directors since its first election a year ago. From the outside looking in, it appears she has performed professionally and skillfully. Apparent the board agrees, because she was again elected by secret ballot to its highest position.
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Red Hat Family
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With expected expansion of their Littleton Road facility coming soon, Red Hat invited Congresswoman Niki Tsongas (D-Lowell) on Wednesday for a quick tour of the facility and a discussion about the future of the company here in Westford.
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“Red Hat represents a new kind of capitalism,” suggested Google+ blogger Alessandro Ebersol. Specifically, it’s an example of “the company that really helps society and gives back to society, not like the others (M$ and Apple), which only take advantage of society and give nothing back. I wish more companies were like Red Hat.”
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There is a recurring lament that there are no Linux distributions equivalent to Windows Small Business Server, no nicely-integrated Linux LAN server that doesn’t need a lot of tweaking. But there is one that is billed as a drop-in replacement for SBS, and that’s ClearOS.
Linux is a flexible powerhouse in the server room, but is sometimes criticized for not being like Windows Small Business Server. This is a good thing, because making Linux worse doesn’t make sense. But the idea of SBS is a good one, a nicely-integrated LAN server that can be up and running with a minimum of fuss, and Linux does have one of those: ClearOS. Let’s take a look at ClearOS 6.2 beta 3, which is the current release.
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Fedora
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The man page tell us: reduces fragmentation of extent based file. The file targeted by e4defrag is created on ext4 filesystem made with “-O extent” option (see mke2fs(8)). The targeted file gets more contiguous blocks and improves the file access speed.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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If you’re not familiar with Juju, I’d urge you to pay a visit to the Juju website to learn more, but in brief, I’ll explain: Juju is an orchestration service for Ubuntu. Using Juju allows you to deploy services rapidly, scaling up or down as you need. Each service is contained within a Charm, which is at it simplest a set of scripts that ensure that a given Juju unit does what it’s supposed to do at the appointed time (for example: install and config_changed are two of the most common hook scripts for a charm to have). We realised that in order to make our life simpler when testing our parallelisation work we could develop a pair of Buildbot Charms (one for the master, one for the slave) which when deployed through Juju, and given the right set of configuration options, would give us a working Buildbot setup on which to test Launchpad.
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As we move from “tens” to “hundreds” to “thousands” of nodes in a typical data centre we need new tools and practices. This hyperscale story – of hyper-dense racks with wimpy nodes – is the big shift in the physical world which matches the equally big shift to cloud computing in the virtualised world. Ubuntu’s popularity in the cloud comes in part from being leaner, faster, more agile. And MAAS – Metal as a Service – is bringing that agility back to the physical world for hyperscale deployments.
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Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced a new tool called Metal as a Service (MAAS) that is designed to simplify the provisioning of individual server nodes in a cluster. It primarily targets computing environments that have many physical servers.
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Lots of companies, even Microsoft, contribute to the Linux kernel. When you look at the top 20 list of who’s been contributing to Linux’s heart, you’ll find many familiar Linux names such as Novell (now SUSE), Red Hat, and The Linux Foundation. Who you won’t find is Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company. Some people wonder how Microsoft could do more for Linux than Canonical does. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, has a response to such claims: “Our focus is on the user experience, making things ‘Just Work.’”
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Here we are, just a matter of weeks away from the Ubuntu 12.04 release on 26th April 2012, and what a cycle it has been.
Ubuntu 12.04 is a release that has been talked about within the Ubuntu community for quite some time. It marks our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, an important milestone for Ubuntu deployment in business, education and elsewhere, and an important checkpoint in delivering precision and quality in Ubuntu.
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Similar to the mixed boot performance results for Ubuntu 12.04, the power consumption results are also mixed. For some hardware, Ubuntu 12.04 is the most power efficient Ubuntu Linux release in recent history while for some other hardware the Precise Pangolin is continuing in a power binge.
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Previously the shortlisting and the final selection of the Ubuntu 12.04 wallpapers were announced. This selection however was not final and can change a bit. Finally, the official wallpapers for Ubuntu 12.04 have landed in an update today. It includes 14 wallpapers selected by the community and the default purplish wallpaper. Some submissions were replaced by others.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Lubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Precise Pangolin Beta 2 release of lubuntu 12.04 gives a preview of the next LTS version of Lubuntu.
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Bodhi Linux is a fresh, Ubuntu-based, Linux distribution that utilizes the Enlightenment desktop manager and only needs 1.2GB of space for a fresh installation. Bodhi is a semi-rolling release with two primary goals. Bodhi Linux aims to promote user choice and provide a minimal environment. I’ve used it for several weeks now and, although it took some getting used to, I have been impressed by several of the features of Bodhi Linux 1.4.0.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Well, anyway, lesson learned. I don’t think I will buy any DRM digital books ever again. The silver lining here is that the experience has reassured me that my beliefs are not crazy, that digital freedom is a very valid concern and us FLOSS folks aren’t just silly hippies.
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Motorola’s WebTop OS was expected to get some major overhaul with the next version. But if we look at the YouTube video of WebTop 3.0 beta, it leaves a lot to be desired. It is by no means a desktop OS. It seems to be nothing more than Android on a bigger screen.
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Bearing Point Consulting just published a study on the use of open source software in the automotive industry. It shows how open source is on the rise, no surprise.
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Events
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After receiving a briefing from MITA and MARSEC-XL, I hopped over to London followed by a long-haul flight to the west coast, finally arriving in Silicon Valley a day later.
Today, in downtown San Francisco the 6th Linux collaboration summit got off to a great start with an exceptional key note from Jim Zemlin the Executive Director of the Linux foundation. He showcased how Linux and its kernel is dominating all domains, ranging from desktops to enterprise servers, with 850,000 android phones being registered on a daily basis in comparison to the 30,000 windows phones. Since 2005, 8000 developers have contributed to the Linux kernel, resulting in 15 million lines of code, proving that the Linux project is the World’s largest collaboration software project.
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SaaS
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The fifth release of OpenStack, code named “Essex,” debuted today, with enhanced quality, usability and extensibility across enterprise, service provider and high performance computing (HPC) deployments, the project announced. Essex is integrated in Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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In March Rob Weir put up a blog entry entitled “Where did the time go? (A look at the Apache OpenOffice timeline)”, showing the slow progress of Apache OpenOffice through the process of acceptance into the Apache fold. Richard Hillesley looks at the issues…
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You may have heard the rumors already although there is nothing official yet: There is an exciting new idea making the rounds in LibreOffice circles. LibreOffice made and continues to make amazing progress pushing not only the product, but also the project as a whole to new levels. While the development of LibreOffice at the Document Foundation is widely supported by a diverse set of contributors and supporters from all over the world, there is always more we could do, if we had more time and money.
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Education
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Unschooling is an approach to education that follows a child’s innate curiosity and desire to learn. It is not based on the direction of a teacher or a set curriculum. It is self-directed learning.
Unschoolers take a hands-on, community-based, real-world approach to education–everything and everywhere is a learning possibility. Unschoolers may use an open source textbook like those found at CK-12 Flexbooks, take classes online through a program like Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning, or continue on to in-person coursework at a local college.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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Any way you look at it, this month’s Netcraft Web Server Survey has some astounding numbers. The competition between Web servers is always interesting, but more so is the fact that the number of sites surveyed since April 2011 has more than doubled. Netcraft’s April 2012 survey received responses from 676,919,707 sites – more than double the number of sites from 2011, a mere 312,693,296.
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BSD
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Worries over the safety of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” as a method to extract natural gas and oil from the shale bedrock, continues to grow across the world including Australia.
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Finance
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The world’s major central banks — including the Bank of Japan (BOJ), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Federal Reserve — appear to have finally won a major battle in the deflationary war that broke out five years ago in 2007. While the ultimate victor is yet to be determined, it now seems likely that a period of nominal growth could ensue for another two years, perhaps even longer.
This will not be high-quality growth. And little of the growth will be real.
Commodity prices will surely eat away at most, if not all, of any gains that may occur in global GDP. Additionally, while non-OECD growth actually has a chance of achieving some GDP gains in real terms, the prospects for the OECD are not as encouraging.
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When New York-based MF Global collapsed on October 31, 2011, its $41 billion in assets made it the eighth largest bankruptcy in U.S. history and the biggest financial firm to implode since Lehman in September 2008. Then Chairman and CEO Jon Corzine is connected to the head of one of his key regulators, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), through his former protégé at Goldman Sachs, Gary Gensler. He also knows the Fed’s William Dudley, a key member of the Fed’s Open Market Committee, from their days at Goldman Sachs. The Fed approved MF Global’s status as a primary dealer, a participant in the Fed’s Open Market Operations, less than one year after Jon Corzine took its helm. Corzine is also a former New Jersey governor, a former New Jersey U.S. senator and was a major campaign contribution bundler for President Obama.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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According to a statement Coke made to the Washington Examiner, “Our involvement with ALEC was focused on efforts to oppose discriminatory food and beverage taxes, not on issues that have no direct bearing on our business. We have a long-standing policy of only taking positions on issues that impact our Company and industry.”
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Censorship
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WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange has made 75 official complaints over what he describes as the shoddy reporting of his long-running extradition battle, the online activist said Thursday.
Assange itemized the complaints in a submission to Britain’s judge-led inquiry into media ethics, which is examining the standards and practices of the country’s scandal-tarred press.
He said in a statement published by the inquiry Thursday that he had been subjected to “ongoing, widespread inaccurate and negative media coverage” and that Britain’s press watchdog had failed to protect him.
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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What he doesn’t consider is that the IPR lobby is willing to surrender ACTA but not the entire Article 207 TFEU process which is challenged by the ECJ ruling invoked by De Gucht. And finally, the upcoming IPRED+ is more interesting than the dossier which allegedly does not change anything.
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The EU Commission has made public the text of its own referral of ACTA to the EU Court of Justice. This initiative comes a week after the EU Parliament voted not to refer ACTA to the Court, which would have suspended the parliamentarian procedure for at least 18 months. The Parliament is expected to vote on ACTA this summer, and must continue to resist the Commission’s shameless technocratic tricks to save ACTA.
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04.04.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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You’ve heard of Linux, but haven’t had a chance to see what all the fuss is about. After all, your computer runs Windows. But what if you could plug in your USB drive and temporarily turn your PC into a Linux system? Even better, when you’re done, your machine will go back to its regular Windows-powered self, with no trace of Linux left behind?
You can work this bit of OS prestidigitation with UNetbootin, a free Windows utility that downloads and installs any version of Linux to your flash drive, then makes that drive bootable. It’s an easy, hassle-free way to test-drive the OS, which runs entirely from the drive, making no changes whatsoever to your
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Server
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Ramirez, a manager with the center, is in the midst of building a new supercomputer, called Mont-Blanc, that will use the same kind of low-power chips that you can find in tablets and smartphones today. Starting next month, his team will start assembling the first Mont-Blanc prototype using Nvidia’s Tegra 3 processors instead of the RISC or Intel x86-compatible processors that are used on virtually all of today’s supercomputers. The Tegra 3 will handle communications between different parts of the system while the actual number crunching will be done by yet-to-be-determined low-power multicore Nvidia graphics processors similar to the GeForce 520MX.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman was asked today during a panel he was moderating at the 6th annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit about Google’s Android on the mainline Linux kernel.
For those that haven’t been paying attention, since last year there’s been a concerted effort to mainline more of Google’s Android changes into the mainline Linux kernel. Android patches that went into the mainline Linux kernel previous suffered some rot, but this latest effort has the backing of several companies and is finally coming to fruition within stable kernel releases.
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There are a lot of different people that contribute code to the Linux kernel. In fact, according to the 2012 Linux Kernel Development report from the Linux Foundation, more than 7,800 developers from nearly 800 different companies have participated in Linux kernel development.
Not all of those companies and developers participate in every kernel release. According to the report, for the recent Linux 3.2 kernel release, some 1,316 developers contributed, representing 226 different companies. While there is lots of participation, over the last five years the top 30 developers have contributed 20 percent of the total code.
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When you work for the Linux Foundation you get a lot of questions on just how Linux is built. Given the massive scale of the development and ubiquity of Linux today, some of us in the community might think everyone understands how the largest collaborative project in computing works. How you submit a patch. How maintainers work with Linux creator Linus Torvalds. But because of Linux’s unprecedented growth in mobile, embedded and cloud computing, among other areas, new companies and developers are looking to participate. More than ever before, actually.
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“We want to continue our trajectory in every corner of the industry,” Zemlin told The Register. “We’re seeing Linux as the primary platform for greenfield sites in large enterprises, the primary operating system for cloud computing build outs, and we’re seeing tremendous growth in mobile and the embedded markets.”
While some in Redmond might point to the fact that Linux is still not king of the corporate desktop, Zemlin said that that battle isn’t particularly relevant anymore. People use a wider variety of computing devices to use computers, and the browser is the becoming the most common interface for most users.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced on April 2nd the immediate available for download of the first maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.3 kernel series.
Linux kernel 3.3.1 incorporates ARM fixes, updated drivers (wireless, Radeon), USB updates, as well as some improvements to various filesystem, such as CIFS, EXT4, XFS and NFS.
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If you pay much attention to the futurists on the Web these days, no doubt you’re familiar with the term “Internet Of Things.” It may be yet-another-buzzword, but the central concept is quite real: the spread of low power, Internet-connected devices that use wireless networks to communicate with our PCs and servers. After all, you don’t need a computer in your water heater or electric meter: you just need a sensor, and way to read it remotely. Linux will be a major player in this space, but most developers still aren’t familiar with the network standards that make it work, like IEEE 802.15.4.
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Graphics Stack
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While Intel has a lot of interesting work going on right now within their Linux kernel DRM driver and elsewhere within their open-source graphics stack, operating systems like OpenIndiana/Illumos and FreeBSD are still catching up, but they’re still a ways off.
Pushed out yesterday was an updated Intel graphics driver for the OpenSolaris-derived OpenIndiana. This new Intel X.Org driver is derived from xf86-video-intel 2.9.1… Yes, what was released as upstream in October 2009 while the latest Linux users are now running xf86-video-intel 2.18.0 with many, many features and changes since that point.
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The director of Intel’s Open Source Technology Center Imad Sousou outlined the chip giant’s plans to invest in the open source community and provided an update on two key projects, speaking at the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco.
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New versions of the Linux kernel fix a bug in Intel graphics drivers which could cause memory corruption. AMD has released X.Org drivers for its new Trinity processors. In September there will be a conference for X developers in Nuremberg. Progress has been made on GPGPU support in Mesa 3D.
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Applications
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Recoll is a powerful yet simple-to-use full-text desktop search tool that indexes the contents of many file formats. You can perform simple searches as well as advanced operations like searching for the author, file size, file format as well as operators like “AND” or “OR.” And setup is a breeze.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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One of our reader has emailed us a link to a working test build of a popular game client. This client is long awaited by Linux gamers and the company behind it is undoubtedly the leader in computer game distribution industry.
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Dear Linux gamers, the wait is over, as Frozenbyte unleashed a few days ago the Linux version for its award winning Trine 2 cross-platform game.
Trine 2 is a side-scrolling puzzle adventure/action game developed by the Finnish studio Frozenbyte, will be ported to Linux and officially launched sometime during 2012.
There’s no official announcement from Frozenbyte about the Linux client but it is available for download if you purchase it from here.
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Bryan Lunduke, software developer and host of the Linux Action Show podcast, has announced the beta release of his game, Linux Tycoon. The game lets players manage the daily tasks involved in creating a popular Linux distribution. Players assign people and resources to development tasks and their distribution is rated by the number of users compared to its competitors.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Krita is a very powerful image editing tools similar to GIMP and Photoshop. KDE’s own Photoshop Krita will soon be seeing a major upgrade with the upcoming version 2.4.
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GNOME Desktop
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After the successful release of the GNOME 3.4 desktop environment on March 28th, the GNOME Project are once again proud to announce that a Live CD Linux distribution with GNOME 3.4, based on Fedora, is now available for download.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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I may be (half) joking sometime, but it happens to be serious too: encountered an old laptop (in bad shape, lot of dead pixels and such, it was a workhorse back in its time) which refuses to play along with Windows: bluescreen at startup, bluescreen at fresh install, hardware problems. The first thought: memory problems but memtest96 running from a Fedora live CD disagrees… but if I booted the device from that CD, just for the kicks I booted the distro (F14): works correctly, no lock-up, even WiFi is supported OOTB (so I suspect the hardware problem lies with the video card and is triggered by real use, not by the VESA driver).
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The Linux Foundation’s exec director saluted Linux distribution leader Red Hat for reaching $1 billion in revenues but pointed out that the overall Linux industry is worth many, many billions today.
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Margins matter. The more Red Hat (NYS: RHT) keeps of each buck it earns in revenue, the more money it has to invest in growth, fund new strategic plans, or (gasp!) distribute to shareholders. Healthy margins often separate pretenders from the best stocks in the market. That’s why we check up on margins at least once a quarter in this series. I’m looking for the absolute numbers, so I can compare them to current and potential competitors, and any trend that may tell me how strong Red Hat’s competitive position could be.
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Porticor®, the leading cloud data security company delivering the only cloud-based data encryption solution that infuses trust into the cloud by ensuring customer keys are never exposed, today announced it has joined the Red Hat Innovate™ program, enabling Porticor to leverage the power, openness and collaborative nature of open source communities, including enhanced access to Red Hat collaboration initiatives and software programs.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In the run-up to the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Linux later this month, Canonical is offering its new “Metal-as-a-Service” provisioning and management tool for customers who want to test it out with the new Ubuntu beta.
The MaaS tool, a component of Ubuntu Server 12.04, helps IT administrators configure and manage large-scale server farms — including those used to provide cloud computing services.
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Flavours and Variants
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Mentor Graphics Corporation has released its next generation Mentor Embedded Linux platform that includes support for the Yocto Project, an open source collaborative project established by The Linux Foundation. The Mentor Embedded Linux platform helps developers build Linux-based embedded systems, independent of hardware architecture. With the new Mentor Embedded Linux platform, developers also gain the ability to easily select the best Linux kernel for their needs, irrespective of the kernel developed by Mentor Graphics or by a semiconductor company or by any third party.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Motorola has cleverly followed in the footsteps of the upcoming ASUS Padfone. Previously, the Motorola Lapdock will connect to a Linux desktop OS once a compatible Motorola smartphone is plugged in, as seen in our Motorola Atrix review. However, the new WebTop 3.0 software update will instead display an ICS tablet mode when connected to one of their Android 4.0 devices.
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Adobe Systems has released a malware classification tool in order to help security incident first responders, malware analysts and security researchers more easily identify malicious binary files.
The Adobe Malware Classifier tool uses machine learning algorithms to classify Windows executable and dynamic link library (DLL) files as clean, malicious or unknown, Adobe security engineer Karthik Raman said in a recent blog post.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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The organization announced the landmark download count this morning, also saying that its CMS is used to 2.7 per cent of the Web. The downloads of Joomla grew from 22 million in March 2011, and the actual number of downloads is higher than the count since the organization started counting in 2007, and the software has been available since 2005.
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Education
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Business
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Funding
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BSD
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My DragonFlyBSD 3.0.1 review is finished. (Finally!!) It will appear here in Click in six daily parts starting the morning of April 4, 2012. A new part will appear at 3 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time each day until all six are exhausted on April 9. Read them all and I bet you’ll be exhausted, too.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Please fill out our form, so that we can contact you about future events in and around Paris, Avignon, Marseille, Braga, Lisbon, Madrid, which RMS visited while he was in Europe on this last trip.
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Licensing
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The non-profit Creative Commons (CC) organisation has released the first draft of version 4.0 of its suite of Creative Commons licences and is asking for feedback from the community. Diane Peters, CC General Counsel, writes in a blog post that the draft focuses on three overarching design goals: consideration of the needs of users who cannot use the current version 3.0 of the CC licences because of conflicts with national laws; maximum interoperability with other “copyleft” licences; and longevity and ease of use.
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Openness/Sharing
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Many cities have acknowledged this problem and offer open APIs with real-time bus data. This is crucial, as any bus rider knows that buses rarely arrive on time, because, unlike subways, buses are dependent on traffic and delays caused by riders. But it’s also a hindrance to taking the bus: who wants to wait at a lonely bus stop, which is subject to the elements and may not be safe? Not to mention boring.
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Japan’s Takeda has become the latest pharma company to join the open-source Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), which determines the three-dimensional structure of biomedically-relevant proteins.
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The Qbo robot may be open-source, but open-casing is what creators TheCorpora have been showing recently, stripping the sensor-studded ‘bot down and then reconstructing it in a new timelapse video. Intended to be straightforward for robotics tinkerers to put together themselves, the footage shows the 168 minute build from the basic Qbo frame up to the various ultrasonic sensors, PC mainboard, camera-toting head and more.
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Open Data
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Last Monday I had the pleasure of being in Mexico City for the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) High Level Meeting on e-Government. CIO’s from a number of countries were present – including Australia, Canada, the UK and Mexico (among others). But what really got me going was a presentation by Chris Vein, the Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation.
In his presentation he referenced work around the Blue Button and the Green Button – both efforts I was previously familiar with. But my conversation with Chris sparked several new ideas and reminded me of just how revolutionary these initiatives are.
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Programming
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Security
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The Anonymous hacking collective has landed in China, home of some of the most tightly controlled internet access in the world, and defaced hundreds of government websites in what appears to be a massive online operation against Beijing.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has generated widespread media attention this year. The process, which injects water and chemicals into the ground to release “natural” gas and oil from shale bedrock, has been shown to contribute significantly to air and water pollution and has even been linked to earthquakes. But little has been reported on the ways in which fracking may have unique impacts on women. Chemicals used in fracking have been linked to breast cancer and reproductive health problems and there have been reports of rises in crimes against women in some fracking “boom” towns, which have attracted itinerant workers with few ties to the community.
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Finance
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The Securities and Exchange Commission is likely to bring charges soon against Goldman Sachs (GS) for a 2006 mortgage investment deal. The agency hasn’t said which one yet, but Fortune has learned there’s a good chance the SEC’s case will focus on Fremont Home Loan Trust 2006-E, a bundle of more than 5,000 mortgages that has cost investors, including mortgage guarantor Freddie Mac and by extension U.S. taxpayers, an estimated $545 million.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The field of copyright is associated with important cultural, social, and technological aspects, all of which have to be taken into account when formulating policy in this field. In the last 20 years, copyright and patent holders in different fields of industry and art have entered into a period of redefinition. Today, the copyright that served to protect the interest of creators in the last centuries is a barrier of invention and knowledge-sharing.
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Megaupload wants the servers back to help with its defense, but with most of its assets seized by the federal government, it can’t pay for them. Carpathia would normally wipe the servers and lease them to new clients, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation is demanding that legitimate users of the site be allowed to retrieve their personal data first. The Motion Picture Association of America doesn’t want this to happen without assurances that its copyrighted content won’t be retrieved and distributed again; besides, it might want the servers for a future lawsuit of its own. And the federal government yesterday announced that the servers “may contain child pornography,” which would render them “contraband” and limit Carpathia’s options for dealing with them.
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Send this to a friend
04.03.12
Posted in News Roundup at 4:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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At the same time that GNU/Linux was holding share of Wikipedia, traffic was increasing and the mobile share of traffic was increasing. Despite all that, GNU/Linux held share. Examining only non-mobile traffic, GNU/Linux share rose 18% while that other OS declined several percent.
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Hundreds of Linux distributions have been created trying to make that ideal mashup of Linux into a single user like OS.
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EVERY year, some bozo comes up with a prediction that Linux on the desktop is dead.
These people really ought to know better, but it’s fun to get a rise out of Linux users, and a provocative headline does wonders for page views.
I’ve decided not to play their game, so I’m not even going to name the fathead columnist who raised this issue again, and focus instead on why he’s wrong. That way, the truth gets out without benefiting the cynical purveyor of the lie.
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Server
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Warren Luebkemen of Resara, LLC recently joined the Greater Dover Chamber of Commerce and celebrated with a Ribbon Cutting Ceremony.
Resara, LLC is an innovative, passionate software company that was founded in 2005 to develop Linux based server products. Resara has extensive experience and expertise in thin client computing, which was the first product developed by the company.
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If you saw my article on DIY Linux Routers, then you might have already taken the plunge and gotten yourself up and running with one. One of the primary reasons I made the switch to a dedicated machine running a Linux router distro was to have a router that would not lock up on me regularly, but what I found was that the additional features that these distros come with became a large part of why I love my Linux router.
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Kernel Space
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According to the report more than 7,800 developers from almost 800 different companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since tracking began in 2005. Just since the last report, more than 1,000 developers representing nearly 200 companies have contributed to the kernel.
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Two weeks after Linux 3.3 was released, Linus Torvalds has announced the availability of the first release candidate for Linux 3.4. As usual, this step signals the end of the merge window at the beginning of the development cycle; during the merge window, Torvalds integrates the major changes for a new Linux version and about seven-eighths of all changes. Apart from a few stragglers, mainly minor and low-risk changes will be made in the stabilising phase that has now begun.
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With the help of its embedded farm, set up in November 2010, the Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) has tested and analysed Linux’s experimental real-time (RT) capabilities. The OSADL analysed a total of 73 billion automated test cycles recorded over the last 12 months on more than 50 computers running mainline RT kernels on a range of CPUs.
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Patches for an x86 disassembler for the Linux kernel have been proposed. An in-kernel disassembler could prove useful for developers in cases of kernel panics and other happenings.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Today I decided to look at the current versions of three well-known games on Linux: Supertuxkart, Supertux, and Secret Maryo Chronicles. All of them detected and let me use my Logitech wireless controller, which made playing them a lot easier than if I’d needed to use the keyboard. Each of these games let you set the window resolution or else play the game in fullscreen mode. All three of these have versions for Windows, and will provide many hours of fun. Check your repositories for them, and if you are running Linux Mint or Ubuntu, you will probably need to enable the “getdeb games” additional repository in order to have the most recent version.
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- $5.69 Average Windows Price
- $7.07 Average Mac OS X Price
- $9.97 Average Linux Price
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Last week at the Chicago Flourish conference, well known Linux game porter/developer Ryan “Icculus” Gordon shared some of his recommended open-source tools and libraries for Linux game development.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Jonathan Thomas has announced the release of Muon Suite 1.3. The Muon Suite is a set of package management utilities for Debian-based Linux distributions built on KDE technologies.
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In early February news came out that Canonical would be dropping support for Kubuntu following the 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin release. This Ubuntu derivative that employs the KDE desktop no longer has the business interest of Canonical and so it’s set to become another community-based spin, similar to Xubuntu or Lubuntu. Jonathan Riddell, the lead Kubuntu developer at Canonical, is set to be tasked with non-Kubuntu work following the Precise Pangolin release.
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Today we released the Alpha of Qt 5, the first major release since the Qt Project went live. A lot of people have worked hard to make this release happen. A large amount of work and features that went into this alpha have been coming from people not working for Nokia. It’s great to see that the project has become a place where many people meet and together push Qt forward.
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GNOME Desktop
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New Releases
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The Fuduntu team has announced the release and availability of Fuduntu 2012.2. With this release Fuduntu is shifting from SourceForge as a package host to a new mirrorable infrastructure. Several open source mirror providers have begun replicating the repositories. This change improves speed and availability of software available for installation, as well as package updates.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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A post by one of the developers on March 8 said, again in keeping with the best cryptic traditions, “Yes, quick very fresh news: Mandriva still have to solve some complicated problems, but the situation is far more better since yesterday, the main problem is cleared 
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Red Hat Family
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The donation will be split between four projects which do not benefit, normally, from Red hat’s work: Creative Commons (CC), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and UNICEF Innovation Labs. The $100,000 award is 0.7 per cent of the company’s annual net profit of $146.6 million. Much of Red Hat’s development work is available as open source anyway though, a contribution potentially worth millions of dollars to the community.
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Stock-picking wunderkind Jim Cramer spoke with Red Hat’s (NYSE: RHT) CEO Jim Whithurst on Monday’s Mad Money.
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Red Hat’s strong earnings report won the company some upbeat reviews from analysts who see the maker of the Linux OS gaining in the industry-wide push toward cloud computing. Red Hat’s momentum has accelerated as companies try to save money and gain more flexibility by keeping their technology in far-flung data centers instead of PCs.
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Fedora
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Fedora 18 is expected to use tmpfs for mounting the /tmp directory, which sees that the temporary directory is stored in RAM/SWAP volatile memory. Tmpfs tends to generate less disk reads/writes, potentially saves power while inreasing performance, sees that the temporary directory data isn’t stored across reboots, and other advantages. System administrators installing new Fedora installations are still expected to be able to opt-out of using tmpfs.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It’s all too common to hear Linux portrayed by detractors as an operating system suitable only for longtime hackers and “hobbyists,” as it was put in one recent example.
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Flavours and Variants
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For the last few years, there has been something of a popularity contest between two well-known Linux distros: Linux Mint and Ubuntu. Both of these distributions share the same code base, as Ubuntu is based on Debian and Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu.
In both instances, the distributions took the foundation that Debian built, then added their own flavor to make it more user friendly. The similarities between the two distributions go even further, in that Ubuntu packages work flawlessly on Linux Mint, just as Ubuntu PPAs work well on Linux Mint.
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The Kubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Precise Pangolin Beta 2 release of Kubuntu 12.04 gives a preview of the next LTS version of Ubuntu.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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We had expected to be able to pull the lever on orders for Vivaldi by a couple of days ago. Last month there were some developments that have consequently pushed back the project by about a month. I’ll be sending out emails tomorrow to individuals catching them up with this, but thought I’d let people know via my blog as well.
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Tweet
After a temporary hitch with trademark issues, KDE Active Plasma tablet has hit another road-block. There will be delays in the orders.
Aaron Seigo has blogged about this delay, “We had expected to be able to pull the lever on orders for Vivaldi by a couple of days ago. Last month there were some developments that have consequently pushed back the project by about a month.”
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Dubbed OpenGamma Platform 1.0, the open-source software gives users the ability to customize and integrate the platform into existing legacy systems. It features a real-time calculation engine, a built-in library of analytics, market data support and trade data management capabilities.
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Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) has offered its Mojito application framework to the open source community under the BSD license.
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OpenGamma has announced version 1.0 of its open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. OpenGamma is the first company in this area to open source its software. The OpenGamma platform is designed to be a completely open and transparent architecture to help deliver high quality, real-time available trading and risk analytics used by front-office traders, quantitative analysts (“quants”) and risk managers. According to the OpenGamma site, the platform, which has been downloaded over 4000 times, has 750,000 lines of code, 9,000 developer days of work and 10,694 test cases. It also apparently involved the consumption of over 37,000 cans of Dr Pepper Zero.
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US-based Ruby on Rails Platform-as-a-Service specialist Engine Yard has introduced a new Ruby web server called Puma. According to its developers, Puma, created as an alternative to WEBrick and Mongrel, is “built for speed and concurrency”.
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Events
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SaaS
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If you want to live at the Rainbow Mansion, says one former resident, you have to want to change the world. That’s an easy thing to say. But the Mansionites have already changed the world, bringing their communal ethos to the most important open source project of the decade: OpenStack, the Linux of cloud computing.
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Open source business intelligence software developer Jaspersoft has added new tools for accessing “big data” sets through Jaspersoft ETL, the extract, transform, and load (ETL) software that it OEMs from Talend. The latest release of the company’s tools includes better support for the Apache Hadoop big data framework.
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The open source project unveils its first commercial product, claiming to give the flexibility with extra security measures.
ownCloud today moved into the commercial market with the launch of its file sync and share project for businesses.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle announced yesterday, April 2nd, the immediate availability for download of the popular VirtualBox 4.1.12 virtualization software.
Even if it is not mentioned in the official changelog, VirtualBox 4.1.12 is now distributed as 32-bit and 64-bit .deb packages for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system from Canonical.
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Education
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Business
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Explaining open source software can be tricky. Those on the proprietary and business side of the fence find it hard to understand why anyone would want to make software for free. On the other side, open source developers visibly pale at the talk of money and profit, says Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems.
It’s an awkward relationship but one that can and does work, thanks to the professional open source provider.
Perhaps the best explanation of this complex relationship between developers not motivated by profit and businesses focused almost exclusively on profit is James Dixon’s beekeeper model.
Professional Open Source Software (POSS) companies exist, says Dixon, as exchange systems between two distinct groups: the open source community, which is motivated by mutual contribution and community, and the business marketplace, which is motivated by economic reward.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of Wikimedia, has announced the launch of a new project called Wikidata. According to the non-profit organisation, Wikidata – the first new Wikimedia project since 2006 – will “provide a collaboratively edited database of the world’s knowledge” and, once completed, will be used by its other projects including the free Wikipedia online encyclopaedia.
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“The democratic nature of wikis online really spoke to me,” said Schmabb. “Student Life’s primary goal is to serve the needs of the Washington University student body, and we hope that our new website will allow us to better accomplish that goal.”
Schmabb predicts that the quality of all stories will be increased now that eyewitnesses will be able to add their accounts of important news stories directly to the online story.
Senior Online Editor David Seigle says that other elements of Wikipedia might be incorporated into the website in the coming months. Such features include talk pages and administrative powers to undo inaccurate edits.
“[Schmabb] and I trust that members of the Wash. U. community will not abuse these new online capabilities until everything is fully implemented,” said Seigle, a senior.
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Open Data
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The open database of the corporate world, OpenCorporates, has announced that it has passed the milestone of having 40 million companies in its database. It also noted that the fifty-second jurisdiction, Mauritius, has been added, and that it is moving from alpha to beta, though it admits it should have done that “some time ago”.
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This is what the wind over the United States looked like on March 27th, 5:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time. It’s beautiful. And it’s even better if you go to the project page, where you can watch real-time wind currents move around the map.
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Open Hardware
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 3:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I have been quite absent from Unixmen for almost 2 weeks now. I do apologize, but have been very busy with other work tasks and projects.
I actually started this article during my absence, but there was a reason it has taken me so long to finish. Read on and see why.
There’s an ugly side to Linux. Or to be more specific, Ubuntu Linux. It has suffered from the evil grips of what I describe as ‘Commercialism’.
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A very short time after both my brother and I migrated to Linux, we began experiencing the frustration of seeing the reality of the computer world: lazy technicians that charge to destroy your data, incompetent tech support staff who think that Linux is an anti-virus, unscrupulous companies that avoid their responsibilities and blame their helpless users by chanting their eternal mantra: “Your computer must be infected”…
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Desktop
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The article which I am referring to is titled: “Difference engine: free is too expensive.” The blog in which the entry is made is titled Babbage. That, of course, gives it respectability – Charles Babbage is a man whom every computer science student knows about. But the entry itself is mostly specious.
The author first tries to get the Linux crowd on-side – he/she/it has used Linux, and the software (oh, how condescending can you be?) has several good points. Why it can even run on an old Pentium!
But then we get to the meat of the confused reasoning – the large number of distributions and the fact that one distribution may have a different file layout to another is a big minus, and unless Linux conforms to the same pattern that Mac OSX and Windows do, it will not succeed in business. We all need to march to the same tune; monoculture will save the earth.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Ryan “Icculus” Gordon, the famed Linux game developer, in the past has sharply criticized open-source Linux graphics drivers as not being mature and putting the Linux desktop into a dangerous position. In speaking to Ryan this weekend, his views on the open-source graphics drivers have changed.
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Applications
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Monitorix is an free and open source system monitoring tool that allows users to monitor via web browser. Monitorix also monitoring services including CPU temp and load, Active processes, Allocated memory, Hard disk temp, Kernel usage, Network activity,Graphic Card temp and usage, and More.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Quake2World, a standalone game built atop the id Tech 2 engine but with sharply better graphics and other improvements, has finally reached a beta state. There’s a number of features to this latest open-source first person shooter.
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Reaction 1.0, a game derived from Quake III, has been released in beta form after being in development for the past decade.
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There’s some more Linux gaming news this weekend: the Linux client of Trine 2 has finally been released.
Trine 2 is the side-scrolling game of action, puzzles and platforming and the successor to the original Trine game that also had a native Linux client.
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Dear Linux gamers, the wait is over, as Frozenbyte unleashed a few days ago the Linux version for its award winning Trine 2 cross-platform game.
Trine 2 is a side-scrolling puzzle adventure/action game developed by the Finnish studio Frozenbyte, will be ported to Linux and officially launched sometime during 2012.
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Desktop Environments
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I just wanted to take a moment to clarify the state of compositing with the Enlightenment desktop. In two recent reviews of Bodhi Linux the authors mucked up a few of the details concerning compositing and E17. I can’t really fault them for their misinformation (as a whole both are really good write ups) because the details about compositing and E17 aren’t very well documented. Today I would like to clarify a few things about using compositing with Enlightenment DR17.
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For those unsatisfied with the state of GNOME 3.x Shell, Ubuntu’s Unity interface, and other Linux desktop options, Xfce 4.10 is approaching with an official release planned for later this month.
As the first major Xfce update in more than one year, Xfce 4.10 Preview 1 is now available. “The Xfce development team is proud to announce the first preview release for Xfce 4.10. Together with this preview release, the Xfce project announces the feature freeze for the final 4.10 release which is set to be pushed out to the world on April 28th, 2012.”
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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GNOME Desktop
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The developers behind the GNOME project have announced GNOME 3.4, a new version of the desktop environment. The update brings several significant new features and a number of design and usability improvements.
GNOME is an open source software stack that provides a desktop shell, applications, and development frameworks that are commonly used on the Linux platform. It is the default desktop environment in Fedora and several other Linux distributions. It’s released every six months on a time-based development cycle.
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I want to revisit this article for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I think enough has changed in the last 6 months to invite some commentary. Journalism is sometimes just the ability to speculate widly and then put those crazy, wide-eyed presumptions onto paper. That said, not everything in this piece came true, and at the same time some of this things are still developing.
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It is my hypothesis that there is a very real lack of knowledge of Linux basics even by many long time Linux users and especially by many members of the Linux press. This knowledge gap is exhibited by the fact that a large number of Linux users actually believe there are huge differences between Linux distributions. The media especially is rife with comparisons of different distributions (distros), reviews of distros and stories about each distro.
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First and foremost, RapidDisk 2.1b is now released and available. Second, the RapidDisk LX project is now listed as part of the Open Invention Network. Third, I just uploaded an initial RapidDisk LX 1.0 alpha release image to the project website.
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New Releases
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The second Fuduntu quarterly ISO, Fuduntu 2012.2 is now available for immediate download. As with all Fuduntu releases, this release continues our tradition of small incremental improvements. It is important to note that existing Fuduntu users have already rolled up to this version through the normal update process, and do not need to download or reinstall from this media to benefit from this release.
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Gentoo Family
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Coming out of the Gentoo camp is the Gentoo Linux 12.1 LiveDVD release with several new features.
Packages at the heart of this updated Gentoo LiveDVD include the Linux 3.3 kernel, X.Org Server 1.12, KDE SC 4.8.1, GNOME 3.2.1, Xfce 4.8, Fluxbox 1.3.2, Mozilla Firefox 11, LibreOffice 3.5.1, Blender 2.60, Amarok 2.5, VLC 2.0.1, and others.
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Gentoo released 12.1 on April Fool’s Day. I included it in my jokes roundup. But the Gentoo announcement has added a message to users and jokesters today: The installer is real.
I said in that post that the best jokes are the ones you almost believe. But perhaps that wasn’t quite accurate. Maybe the most crafty of all are those that are real but seem like a joke. That’s the sum of the Gentoo installer. A Gentoo installer is a difficult beast to construct, I understand that. At one time the very nature of Gentoo conflicted with the traditional binary installer. However, the Gentoo team has been promoting Stage 3 installs for quite some time. What is a Stage 3 install? It’s the nearly complete install of a binary system from a tarball that needs to be rebuilt before adding all your goodies. So, why not have an install wizard like Sabayon?
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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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We can exclusively share with you the official disc artwork for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS CD and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server releases.
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Having recently converted to Android from my iPhone 4, I have been very happy with the range of apps to replace what I had on iOS. In many cases, I’m finding the apps better. The Android ethos seems to be more about function, rather than design and aesthetics. However, one area where I’ve found the Android to be lacking is in respect of the “todo” category.
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Phones
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Android
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Sony says its customers should avoid upgrading their Android devices to Ice Cream Sandwich, adding that many of them won’t get the option anyway.
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London’s claim to being the hub for tech startups in Europe got a boost last week, when Google opened the doors of its latest effort, Google Campus, a seven-story centre for startups, which it has launched in partnership with several existing organizations, and big ambitions to galvanize some of the tech activity that has already marked out London to take it to the next level.
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Events
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At the end of last year, Computerworld’s Eric Knoor had this to say about the state of cloud computing: “If I had to sum up in one word the most exciting thing that happened to cloud computing in 2011, I’d have to say it’s OpenStack. This open source project, launched by Rackspace and NASA in late 2010, is assembling a private cloud ‘operating system’ for the data center that promises vast increases in operational efficiency.”
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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With the evolution of HTML5 standards gathering pace, and developers increasingly looking to produce apps for multiple platforms, Mozilla’s plans to deliver an HTML5-based operating system for smartphones could have a major impact.
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SaaS
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Wondering what comes after the cloud? Literally, usually sunshine — haha. But metaphorically speaking, the next great frontier may well be big-data. And Hadoop, an open-source project enjoying ever-increasing buzz as of late, will likely be at the fore as that niche evolves. If you don’t know much about Hadoop, it’s time to learn. Here are the basics.
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Semi-Open Source
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Just got back to Buenos Aires after a 10 days in the United States and El Salvador, and finally got some time to write about the award, what it means to GNU Solidario and to the community at large.
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(You can check the original post at http://www.meanmicio.org/2012/04/gnu-health-wins-fsf-project-of-social.html )
Just got back to Buenos Aires after a 10 days in the United States and El Salvador, and finally got some time to write about the award, what it means to GNU Solidario and to the community at large.
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OpenMRS began as a research project spanning Indiana University and Eldoret, Kenya’s Moi University.
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Public Services/Government
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The Indian government launched an ‘Open Government Platform (OGPL)’—an open source software platform which aims to provide enhanced public access to government data and documents.
The OGPL, a joint effort from India and the United States, will make government data, documents, applications, tools and services publicly available. “By making data available through OGPL developers, analysts, media, and academia can develop new applications and insights that will help give citizens more knowledge for better decisions,” the government officials said in the press release.
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Open Hardware
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Standards/Consortia
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This magic comes about by the use of “virtualisation” – which simply refers to the creation of a virtual (rather than an actual) version of something. With the right software and a reasonably powerful PC, you can build virtual “compartments” inside your computer that look and act like a whole separate machine. That allows you, for example, to run Linux and Mac on Windows, try out a new web server or run an old operating system such as DOS or OS/2, all without disturbing your current system – or having to reboot. “Guest” systems can communicate with the underlying (or “host” operating system) via shared folders, networking or the clipboard, and you can install and run as many VMs (virtual machines) as you like, with disk space and memory the only real limitation. More amazingly, the extremely clever software is open source. And that means it’s free.
VirtualBox, from virtualbox.org, is available for Linux, Mac and Windows and requires 40-90MB of disk space depending on your operating system. There’s also an Extension Pack containing some extra goodies and an extremely detailed manual on the site.
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Finance
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Prof. William K. Black, you are the pre-eminent Hero of We the People in our time. You are the Man of Light, Truth, and Justice for the century. May your name ring forever in the pages of history, on a par with that of your namesake, William the Conquerer (“Johnny the Concaloo” in early R&B, you may recall), but with a higher purpose. William K. Black, you are our pre-eminent *Leader of Light*.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.01.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Last night I shared a preview of the best and worst case examples of power consumption on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. In a good case, for newer PC hardware, an Intel notebook was going through nearly 40% less power while idling on Ubuntu 12.04 compared to Ubuntu 11.10 and earlier releases. However, for older PC hardware, Precise Pangolin’s power consumption was up sharply — 30% higher than when the Intel “Dothan” was in its prime.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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As I reported earlier this week, Cairo 1.12 was released earlier this week after being in development for the past year and a half. Besides other new features, the performance of Cairo 1.12 should be better than previous releases.
As mentioned in the earlier Cairo 1.12 article, “For bringing the Cairo performance improvements, the library’s rasterization pipeline was overhauled and now allows for the different Cairo back-ends the ability to implement their own specific pipeline while being able to leverage a library of common routines. Clipping was also overhauled, stroking was made faster, and there’s also four new anti-aliasing hints.”
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GNOME Desktop
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GNOME 3.4 is the second release aiming at countering some of the complaints that greeted the release of the version last year.
Users were unhappy with the mobile phone-like interface, which seemed to mimic the Unity interface used by Canonical for its Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.
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From some time that I’ve been working on ‘Moniz’ after Martim Moniz. Moniz is meant to be a Linux remix which defaults to European Portuguese, and will be based on GNOME 3 with Cinnamon by default (GNOME Shell is also available). There’s also some intention to make this more ‘Iberian’ compatible, which means that the languages spoken in Spain should be supported in the Future.
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I decided to try something else, which I had been hearing about a lot, Mint. I decided to try with the LXDE interface, because I like my desktop to take little memory and be responsive.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the OpenBox Special Edition of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. It is available only as a PDF since all the articles have already appeared in the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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CentOS 6 is arguably one of the least expected best distributions for your desktop. While it is intended for servers, it does a splendid job at home, too. It’s fast, light, stable, robust, and supported unto eternity. And with some medium-hard work, you can significantly improve the overall look & feel and productivity. I have elaborate on these so-called pimping efforts in a series of three articles, all of which introduce a new range of programs and tools that are not included by default. To name a few, Java, Flash, LibreOffice, Chrome, newer versions of Firefox.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Over the past few years, competitive debate has moved toward a digital, paperless workflow, but that creates problems for school debate programs that don’t have the extra dough to shell out for laptops and software licenses. Chris McCool, a debate coach at Ballard High School in Seattle, Washington, decided to create a free, open source solution that would work on older, used laptops. On the project’s Kickstarter page, McCool explained:
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xpected to be unleashed in autumn of 2012, Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest gamble in the desktop market is making millions of eyes turn even before its release. Loaded with a brand new yet somewhat contentious Metro interface, the touch-friendly desktop will not only be seen on laptops and PCs, but will also find its place in the swanky upcoming tablet computers.
That said, the main target group for Redmond would be the desktop, a field that they’ve been dominating for decades. Windows 8 will aim to obliterate all the competition by giving users an interface that will look and behave the same way across all devices. Sadly for them, and quite obviously too, Metro isn’t the first to try out this unified concept. Our very own Ubuntu has been busy for a couple of years trying to polish Unity, its unified interface for computers, tablets, smartphones (see: Ubuntu For Android: Do We Really Need it?), and even TVs (see: Ubuntu TV vs. Google TV: Battle of the Linux-based Smart TV). Some even go as far as to say that Microsoft might have actually ‘borrowed’ that idea from its old penguinian buddy.
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Flavours and Variants
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After months of developing and testing, on March 23 David T has finally released Comice OS 4, the last version of Pear OS, a Linux distro that is based on Ubuntu and has the look and feel of Mac OS. Although I’ve tried the former versions of Pear OS and found them not very usable then, Comice OS 4 is totally different and it really impresses me this time. I downloaded Comice OS yesterday and tried it on my laptop, and here is my review for Comice OS 4.
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Phones
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Android
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Android 4.0 code named Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) was released more than three months ago. Google’s own Galaxy Nexus is perhaps the only device that ships with it at the moment. And because of that, there are only a handful of Android apps available whose design has been updated for Android 4.0+. That will change as time goes by. But which all are the Android apps whose design has been updated for Android 4.0 ICS at the moment? Let’s find out.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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2011 was great for tablets, Apple’s tablets. 2012 will be different. Google, realizing Android/Linux tablets have respectable but not great share of the market, is gearing up to actively promote Android/Linux tablets. All the pieces needed for great competition will soon be in place:
* great products,
* great and numerous combatants, and
* great prices.
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This Q&A is part of a biweekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 80+ Q&A sites.
Lord Torgamus asks: I want to join an open source project for the same reasons as anyone else: I want to help create something useful and become a better coder.
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Revolutionary movements require revolutionary progress. However, at the start of a Movement, such progress may not be immediately evident to those whose views of progress have been tainted by commercial software, where progress is measured by feature enhancements, quality improvements and user satisfaction. These are false idols and the shallow view of progress they support are irrelevant for true free software.
Rejecting the repressive capitalist view of progress-as-production and production-as-consumption, and the doctrinaire emphasis on results-oriented metrics, we instead adopt the dialectic of progress-as-being and being-as-becoming, with metrics illustrating not what is produced, but what is willed. Rather than galley slaves, prodded by whip lashes to “row harder!”, our motto shall be: “row louder!”
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AUSTIN, TX, March 28 — The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin has released a new open-source software package called DisplayCluster that is used to drive large-scale tiled displays and allows scientists to interact and view high-resolution imagery and video up to gigapixels in size.
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It’s been an open secret all month, but two new members have joined the Affiliate scheme at OSI – Spain’s CENATIC (the national open source competency centre that’s been so important to the government adoption of open source in Spain’s regions) and the venerable Debian Project. Both bring a much-needed international flavour to OSI, along with a wealth of hard-won experience.
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Web Browsers
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Education
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Blackboard has just announced its acquisition of Moodlerooms and Netspot, two companies that help provide support and deployment services for schools that use the open-source LMS Moodle.
“Wait. What?” is an acceptable, albeit mild response.
This is, after all, the LMS giant — one that once claimed the patent on e-learning technology and sued other companies who provided competing software. Blackboard now says it is embracing open source — “Ours is no mere dalliance with open source, but a very committed plunge into the pool,” says the company’s Ray Henderson. To that end, Blackboard has also announced it’s creating an Open Source Services Group that will help institutions manage their open source LMSes, including Moodle and Sakai.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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With cross platform development comes some important questions of software freedom. There would be no true software freedom if we said we would permit our software to compile and run only on specific platforms, that is after all what proprietary software vendors often do. However in GNU Telephony we do principally develop and test our software on GNU systems specifically and do not have expertise in or interest in supporting proprietary ones.
If people wish to work on or support other platforms also, they are certainly free to do so. As one of our goals in GNU Telephony is ubiquity, this is essential. However, unlike some groups who choose such goals, or distributions who choose “popularity” as their essential goal, we will never do so if it means also compromising the freedom of our contributors and users. Given this, if people want to submit patches for building and running on other platforms, we are happy to take such patches in, so long as they do not break features or functionality on free software platforms, and do not impose any additional restrictions on how we convey software to others.
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GNUtrition is a diet and nutrition analysis program for the GNU Operating System. The US Department of Agriculture Nutrient Database of Standard Reference is used as the source of food nutrient information.
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The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is celebrating open standards today in an annual event called Document Freedom Day. The event, which was first held in 2008, is observed on the last Wednesday of March. The purpose of the celebration is to raise awareness of the critical role unencumbered interoperability and open standards play in protecting data from vendor lock-in.
According to the FSFE, 34 organizations are hosting 48 events in 17 countries to honor the occasion. The FSFE’s list of Document Freedom Day partners includes The Document Foundation, the KDE eV, the Pirate Party of Baden-Württemberg, and many regional Linux user groups.
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Public Services/Government
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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Thanks to our friends the Millers, I learn that yesterday was World Backup Day. I don’t know why it was especially important to be backed up on March 31st, unless because of worries that Anonymous was going to carry out their threat to bring down the Internet. If that had happened, and you use the “cloud,” you’d want a local copy.
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Hardware
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Evidently tired of smooth running graphics, lightning fast processing and bags and bags of available memory, programmer Dmitry Grinberg decided to go back to computing basics. And then some. As Linux was developed on a 32-bit machine with 1MB of RAM, this has always been considered the minimum system requirements to run the open source OS.
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Finance
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A U.S. appeals court was asked on Friday to decide whether Goldman Sachs Group Inc and TCW Asset Management Co should have foreseen the housing market implosion that caused a $37 million loss for German state-owned Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg.
A three-judge panel on Friday did not make an immediate ruling on a trial judge’s decision last September to dismiss the German bank’s lawsuit claiming fraud against Goldman and TCW, an investment advisor.
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Privacy
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So now we start getting some of the actual facts and not the bold headlines or the wishy-washy text from the BBC. So it appears, no, your actual data activity will not be monitored in real time, just your affiliations whilst in cyberspace. So the requirement of a warrant still is in place for anything more and I’d suggest that if an intelligence agency has a level of interest in you which would have your affiliates logged, then there would be a warrant on the cards anyway. A lot of fuss from the average user about nothing and a good way for the UK to look as if its not completely lost on its tech vision. Remember “digital Britain”? And how about your digital contract with your ISP? If I interpret mine correctly, I’ve already agreed for them to give my particulars away to any law enforcement agency if so requested – without warrant. In respect of my ISP, no new law or even warrant is required to get this information. More likely this is a good chance for the UK Government to pretend they are doing something.
In the UK we’ve seen the expertise the courts and the criminal/civil justice system operate under – dealing with a chap who recorded a movie on his phone in a cinema in order to post it on the net for nothing but having an “image”, blundering through a circus like the ACS:Law case, where in the end, it was the law firm itself (not the alleged File-sharers) that ended up with big problems.
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03.31.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Qualcomm has clarified their views today regarding the presentation of two of their Atheros developers proposing that all proprietary drivers be killed for good across all platforms and replaced with open-source drivers.
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As the latest work queued up for merging in the Linux 3.4 kernel is the Btrfs file-system pull, which Chris Mason describes as “pretty big, picking up patches that have been under development for some time.”
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This board is certainly capable of single digit power draw, at least with certain specific setups. With Linux, running the latest kernel (at least 3.3.0) is recommended to achieve lower power consumption. MeeGo with it’s included proprietary xorg driver for CedarView Atoms shows that Linux can achieve similarly low power draw as Windows 7 with an optimized graphics driver. What remains to be seen is if the Linux kernel developers will have access to enough information about the PowerVR SGX 545 GPU core to enable them to incorporate all power saving features of this GPU into the Linux kernel DRM driver.
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Applications
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Want to learn the art of writing a screenplay? Check out Trelby, open source screenwriting software you can try right now if you’re a Linux or Windows user.
Whether you’re an aspiring writer or a planning on becoming a YouTube star, knowing how to write a script is an essential skill. It’s possible, of course, to write a screenplay using Microsoft Word, but using software built for screenplays saves a lot of time. Formatting for screenplays is very specific, so why waste time imitating it? It will just frustrate you, distracting you from your writing.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Do you want to play a game with extreme violence in a background populated with characters that are American Caricatures ?
Welcome to Postal 2.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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A few months ago I took a look at KDE-Telepathy from within Fedora Rawhide. I said I would check it out after upgrading to Fedora 16 and then I got busy getting ready for the arrival of my daughter. (my first kid) So I just kept using Kopete for my multi-protocol IM needs. It’s the only way I keep up with anyone on Gchat or Facebook chat because I refuse to have to keep any specific tab open on my web browser for chatting. Also, it tends to be more annoying to chat – instead of chatting in a small window that I can put off to the corner of whatever virtual desktop or activity I’m in, I’d need my entire web browser.
But recently I came across this blog post in planet KDE that talks about what’s coming in KDE-Telepathy 0.4. I really like logging for my chats because it can be very useful to go back and look for a reference or a URL that someone mentions. So, even though there isn’t an easy way to view the logs right now, the fact that the logs are being saved was enough to allow me to over to KDE-Telepathy. I’m also really excited for the Gchat-like interface coming in 0.4. It’s mentioned in that previous link as well as here.
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GNOME Desktop
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There’s a new simulation game in town and this one is aimed straight for the Linux user. With Linux Tycoon, you can design, build, and manage your very own Linux distribution and compete with other distros for users. “Basically take all the fun parts of building your own Linux Distro… and take out all the work. Bam! Instant entertainment!”
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. (RHT) jumped 15 percent after the software maker forecast earnings that beat analysts’ estimates.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project is pleased to announce that it is joining the Open Source Initiative (“OSI”) as an affiliate. The OSI was founded in 1998 by Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens, with the aim of explaining, advocating, and protecting the term “open source”. Debian shares the OSI’s desire to encourage Free Software. Debian’s Social Contract commits it to producing a system which is 100% free.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A quick update: we’ve uploaded digital versions of the latest issue and our previous issue to Ubuntu’s Software Centre, and we’ll try to do the same for future issues as well.
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Depending upon your hardware, the power consumption when running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can either be at its best or worst. Here’s a look at the two power consumption extremes of the Precise Pangolin.
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I’ve been an Xfce user since 2004, this post from last year documents my UI adventures. It’s been my Desktop Environment of choice for my whole professional career as a systems administrator and I’m very set in my ways configuration-wise at work. These days I help out with the Xubuntu team on marketing, website, release notes and testing. I really love Xfce and I’ll continue to use it and contribute to Xubuntu (we had our beta2 today too, and formal release of our new branding!).
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Almost there! Day by day we are getting closer to the final stable release of Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin the long term support release. Today the second beta release is available to download for the testing purposes. So, let’s check the recent changes to Ubuntu Precise Pangolin highlights.
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The Ninja Block not only runs on open software, but it itself is open hardware, with designs available under Creative Commons. It also includes a 3D printed case. Prices start at $155 AUD ($160 USD, £100 GBP) for the basic device, with external sensors costing more. You can pre-order from the Ninja Blocks website.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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According to a report in The Wall Street Journal citing “people familiar with the matter,” Google intends to go head-to-head with Apple’s iPad by selling co-branded Android tablets. Google, of course, has its hands tied with regard to its lofty goals to become a big player on the hardware scene, as it waits for its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility to be approved. Is Google biting off more than it can chew with its smartphone and tablet plans?
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced that Apache Rave, the organization’s open-source mashup platform, has graduated from the incubator to become a top-level project.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced that Apache Rave, the organization’s open-source mashup engine, has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top-level project (TLP).
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Ever wonder where the phrase “jump the shark” came from? It’s dates back to the once wildly popular TV show Happy Days. It’s widely accepted that the show lost its way, and its audience, in an episode where the lovable hero “Fonzie” jumps a shark on water skis in a pathetic attempt to keep the audience’s attention. I wonder how if Firefox jumped the shark when its parent company Mozilla decided to put Firefox on a hyper-accelerated release schedule last summer. Today, five releases later, Firefox keeps falling farther behind Google’s Chrome in popularity, it’s not very stable, and it can’t keep up with Chrome in speed.
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Public Services/Government
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The United States and India jointly launched a new Web portal to distribute an open source software applications to help governments manage and release their data to the public, according to an announcement on March 30.
The “Open Government Platform” website will make available code, tools and processes to government agencies and to developers, analysts, media, academia and the public to make government data more transparent and useful, officials said in the news releases.
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Openness/Sharing
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03.30.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The current impact on the budget for the LiMux project amounts to a total of €11.7 million,” (US$15.6 million) Ude wrote in a reply to questions asked by Marian Offman of the Christian Socialist Union on March 19. The questions were asked because the party was concerned about a failed migration from Windows to Linux in Vienna.
The city of Munich started the LiMux project in 2004 and began migrating from Windows NT to a fully open source desktop infrastructure in 2006.
The CSU does not have to be worried that the Vienna scenario is going to happen in Munich, Ude assured the city council. If the city had maintained the Windows infrastructure as it was in 2005, the associated costs would have amounted to €11.8 million. However, since then the number of computers increased significantly, and Munich would have spent an additional €1.65 million on new software alone, Ude said.
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Kernel Space
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It seems to be a bad time to be a Linux website. After a September 2011 breach on kernel.org and several other Linux Foundation web sites, it appears that community site Linux.org has been down for quite a while as well.
The reason for Linux.org’s removal is not completely known, though it does not seem to be the result of an attack, but rather a planned renovation of the popular site. The renovation plans are not outlined publicly, nor is any timeline, but signs of life are indicating that Linux.org is about to come back to life eventually.
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Graphics Stack
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Here are some updated benchmarks of the AMD Radeon HD 7950 “Southern Islands” graphics card under Linux with the proprietary Catalyst driver.
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The DRM render-nodes work has been revived. This DRM branch originally started out when working on support for enabling two X.Org Servers to run off of a single graphics card.
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Applications
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The long-awaited and much anticipated 2.8 release of GIMP is right around the corner! Wait, I know, you’ve heard this before. You were expecting it at the end of 2010, and then in 2011, and so on… Well, fear not because it’s really coming in less than 45 days! Want proof? Nothing could be more clear than this infographic.
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Proprietary
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Update: I’ve now been able to attain independent confirmation with Valve (here). This isn’t an April Fools’ Joke or anything else. They’re in need of more Linux folks; will try to get more information to share after the first of the month, since many Phoronix Forums users remain unconvinced about any Valve Linux interests.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)/Qt
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From the mailing list message describing these iOS-porting problems, “As this is a bit of a show-stopper as far as I’m concerned (as a widget-only version of Qt5 doesn’t add any value over a widget and QML version of Qt4.8), I’m not seeing any point in doing a Qt5 port to iOS if V8 is a hard requirement (unless the above issues can be resolved somehow)…There’s no platform plugin yet either, so no way to even test V8 on iOS AFAIK. If anyone knows a way to test V8 without GUI, Declarative or OpenGL, then that may be a starting point at least, because IMHO there’s no point in starting a platform plugin until this issue is resolved.”
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Red Hat Family
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Open source software company Red Hat Inc., believes that companies like VMware Inc., and Microsoft Corp., are skewing the definition of open cloud by claiming that their virtualization products are open when in fact they are closed.
Speaking at a round table conference in London this week, Scott Crenshaw, head of Red Hat’s Cloud Business Unit, said that several virtualization vendors have started to claim they are open as a marketing gimmick.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Time for a personal confession: I hate using Windows. I think Android and Linux go together like peas and carrots, or whatever that famous movie said. Because Android is so Linux-based, with similar file structures and terminal commands, it is worth any Android enthusiast’s time to learn some basic Linux tools. One of the most commonly used Linux distributions is Ubuntu; it’s extremely user-friendly, and you might actually be surprised how easy doing work involving ADB on your phone can become once you invest a brief amount of time in Ubuntu. The biggest complaint I usually hear regarding ADB is that it’s an enormous pain to get it installed and set up properly, and then there are those dreaded driver issues. One RootzWiki developer and script writer, Tahl, has written a script for use in Ubuntu that can make your life a lot easier.
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The ambitious Raspberry Pi is in troubled waters again. After recovering from the manufacturing hiccup when the factory soldered in non-magnetic jacks. Now, it is facing a new challenge. The distributors of Raspberry Pi, both RS Components and element14/Premier Farnell have refused to distribute the Raspberry Pi until it has received the CE mark.
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So far, everyone scrambling to get their hands on the much sought after Raspberry Pi seem to be hoping to use it as a media player. The cheap Linux computer is capable of decoding 1080p video, and its low profile makes it ideal for the living room. Clearly, everyone needs to think a little bigger. One enterprising user has managed to port a ZX Spectrum emulator to the computer for some retrotastic gaming.
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Phones
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Android
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A report from the Guardian that Google only generated $543 million in revenue from Android is based on bad information, says a source close to Google.
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Android/Linux is a global product made from the Linux kernel globally and Android developed by Google. It mostly runs on ARM (UK) but is invading the x86 space as well. Retail shelves around the world usually display Android/Linux devices prominently and in many regions, consumers and businesses can buy GNU/Linux PCs sometimes locally produced but also supplied by global OEMs.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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OSI is very pleased to welcome two important new members to the Affiliate scheme for community groups. They are CENATIC and Debian.
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The Kubatana initiated open source project, Freedom Fone, won an award for Innovation in Media technology at a ceremony organized by the Index on Censorship. The award category recognized Kubatana for innovation and original use of new technology to circumvent censorship and foster debate, argument or dissent. The category is supported by popular web giant, Google.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has launched an online game that runs completely inside a web browser. Which means, the game doesn’t use any plugins to run in your web browser as it is fully developed using HTML 5 and JavaScript.
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SaaS
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Today, the Obama Administration is announcing the “Big Data Research and Development Initiative.” By improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promises to help accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and transform teaching and learning.
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Education
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Sakai CLE, a learning management system, is open source software. This makes Sakai different from its competitors because it is engineered by a community of developers, rather than being developed solely by The Sakai Foundation.
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FSF Events
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Public Services/Government
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“Data belongs to all of us. Sooner we realise as government… better it is for all of us because then government and citizen will collaborate with each other. This project tells us what data can be shared and can be put in public domain,” Telecom and IT Minister Kapil Sibal said while launching the Open Government Platform (OGPL).
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Openness/Sharing
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The team behind the device began taking advance orders this week, and the first Ninja Blocks and sensor packs started shipping from home nation Australia this morning to folk who backed the endeavour on Kickstarter.
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Open Data
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Azavea’s OpenDataPhilly.org open source code has popped up in an open data catalog at Open San Diego, which launched in beta last week.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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Karlsruhe, 28 March 2012 – 1&1, GMX and WEB.DE receive the German Document Freedom Award for the use of Open Standards. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII). 1&1 is awarded for automatically adding XMPP for all customers of their mail services. The Document Freedom Award is awarded annually on the occasion of Document Freedom Day – the international day for Open Standards. Last years winners include tagesschau.de, Deutschland Radio, and the German Foreign Office.
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The other day when I was trying out Haiku, I had a sudden brain wave. How many operating systems – old or otherwise can I really name? And how many of these have I actually used? To tell you honestly, I could name only a few including the ones I have used. Of course, I lumped all Linux distributions as one entity.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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EIA Washington recently published data revisions to global oil production, going back at least twenty years. Here, I update annual average oil production for Non-OPEC, which used to account for 60% of total global supply but has had trouble sustaining increases–even in a high-priced oil environment. As of 2011, Non-OPEC supply fell to 57% of total global share, the difference being made up of course by OPEC.
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Finance
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The unemployment rate in the United States fell from 9.1 percent in the summer of 2011 to 8.3 percent in February. This decline, the largest six-month drop in the unemployment rate since 1984, has surprised many economic forecasters. The decline is even more surprising because recent real GDP growth appears to have been around trend at best, whereas in early 1984, growth was more than 7 percent. Our next six posts in Liberty Street Economics will discuss prospects for the U.S. labor market given this surprisingly quick decline in the unemployment rate. In this opening post, we outline some of the themes examined in this series and provide a brief summary of our conclusions. But first we develop a simple framework to place the unemployment rate in context with the rest of the labor market.
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In an earlier article, EU’s selective Lessons from Greece, we saw that EU Parliament’s investigation of the financial crisis (CRIS), and the hearing Lessons from Greece (ECON/7/02578), lacked the resolve to address the Greece/Goldman secret loan that was allegedly improper and exacerbated Greece’s ills.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Federal authorities are investigating two Wisconsin nonprofits associated with Wisconsin political veteran Mark Block, former campaign manager for presidential candidate Herman Cain and former director of the state chapter of the Koch-founded-and-funded Americans for Prosperity. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a letter with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requesting such an investigation last November.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The poster child for the government adoption of Linux, the City of Munich, is reporting that it has saved more than a third of its IT budget in making the move.
According to Golem magazine, which we get for the advanced pottery projects, the city experienced the minimum disruption in shifting to things more open saucy.
The city said that it saved 4 million euro in licensing costs.
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For the past five years, Peter Jansen, a Canadian scientist whose PhD is in neural computation and cognitive modelling, has been developing a series of open source hardware “tricorders” — handheld sensor packages running GNU/Linux that can be used by everyday people to make and record observations about the world around them. There are several versions of the tricorder, some with sensors attached (atmospheric, electromagnetic, spatial), others that are “blank,” with places to mount your own sensors. The latest version, the Mark IV, is still in development, and is intended to be mass-produced at low cost.
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Desktop
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The Raspberry Pi folks have been getting a lot of attention for their $35 PC with an ARM-based processor and support for some open source software. But as the cost of computer components continues to drop, the Raspberry Pi is hardly the only inexpensive PC capable of running Linux.
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Kernel Space
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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” can boot faster… sometimes. If you are not lucky, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can boot more than twice as slow as Ubuntu 10.04, the previous LTS release. Here are boot performance results of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS running on six distinct notebooks and comparing the Bootchart results upon clean installations of Ubuntu Linux going back as far as six years from the days of the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS “Dapper Drake” release.
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Graphics Stack
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Shinpei Kato, the developer that last year at XDC2011 Chicago presented TimeGraph as an open-source GPU Linux command scheduler and PathScale’s GPGPU run-time, has something new to share. Shinpei’s latest project is Gdev, which comes down to being an open-source CUDA implementation that’s competitive to NVIDIA’s proprietary stack.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Looking for a tablet that can serve as an eReader and possibly more while not wanting to support the corporate giants in the business such as Apple, Samsung or Nokia? Then MakePlayLive might have the solution for you.
The company has started to take orders for its 7-inch form factor Vivaldi tablet, one of the first tablets that is available using an open source operating system rather than iOS, Android or any of the other operating systems currently on the market.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) soared up 16.19% to $59.69.
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Red Hat Inc. RHT-N is red hot. The software maker’s shares were up 19 per cent Thursday, hitting a 12-year high, after an earnings report that highlighted how much Red Hat is benefiting from a shift in the way big companies meet their technological needs.
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It’s not that it’s sour grapes or anything… for me, the sense that Red Hat would make this milestone was a bit inevitable, and I never really saw any real chance that they would fail to make this goal. Seriously, it would have taken a disaster to stop Red Hat’s strong growth.
While I can see the value of celebrating milestones like these, I really wonder if this whole notion of basking in the reflected glory of Red hat as proof that an open source based company can Make It Big is a good idea.
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Red Hat has been a public company since 1999, but according to its CEO the company still has a lot of opportunities left to capture. Red Hat reported its fiscal 2012 earnings late Wednesday, passing the $1 billion mark in revenues for the first time.
Red Hat is the first pure play open source and Linux vendor to achieve the $1 billion milestone. For the year, Red Hat’s revenues were reported at $1.13 billion for a 25 percent year-over-year gain. GAAP Net Income for the full year was reported at $146.6 million or $0.75 per diluted share, which is a dramatic gain over the $107.3 million or $0.55 per diluted share reported for fiscal 2011.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Everyone always talks about making their computer faster and faster, but what about if you wanted to make it slower? It’s not as easy as you might think. Using the standard assortment of compatible components means that there is a point where your computer can’t really get any slower, because the old parts just won’t work with the software. For example, you can’t load Windows 8 CP on that 486 you keep in the deepest, darkest corner of the basement. While that might be true, there are ways to work around it if you are really intent on building yourself the worst computer ever.
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Flavours and Variants
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I wrote a few weeks ago about the approaching Update Pack 4 for Linux Mint Debian Edition. According to a new Mint Blog post, the release is getting near, and there is lots of good news about it:
- Lots of updates, of course. Pretty much along the lines of what I wrote previously about this. Linux kernel 3.0.2, Firefox and Thunderbird 11.x, Opera 11.62, MATE 1.2, Cinnamon 1.4, X.org server 1.11.4, and much more.
- It sounds like they realized the same thing that I suspected and wrote about last time, that LMDE has become a sort of haven for Gnome 2 users. So there are a number of options for those users, including of course the latest MATE and Cinnamon releases. But on top of that, they are creating a special repository which will remain with Gnome 2. This is important – when Update Pack 4 is released, it will automatically install Gnome 3 (and remove Gnome 2). So if you want to stay with Gnome 2, make sure that you update your repository list as described in the blog post referenced above before installing Update Pack 4.
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Operating system vendor Enea AB (Stockholm, Sweden) announced at the DESIGN West exhibition that it is now supplying Enea Linux together with some complementary technologies.
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Phones
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Nokia CEO Stephen Elop had several tough decisions to make when he came on board and replaced former chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. Of course the biggest shift for Elop’s Nokia came in mid-February last year when the company confirmed that the burning platform had scorched MeeGo, and Nokia planned to dump its Linux-based mobile operating system for Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS. Nokia still went on to launch the N9, and it was widely believed that the handset would be the only MeeGo device from Nokia to ever see the light of day. According to a recent report, however, the Finnish vendor may have new MeeGo devices works.
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Android
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With the news that the Linux kernel is going to see Android compatibility, there has been a growing sense that Android apps will be finding themselves at home on the Linux desktop.
In this article, I will dive into how Android compatibility might affect the desktop Linux and what we might see happening in the near future as well. While the news of Android compatibility might seem unimportant to the casual Linux user, it could potentially mean big opportunities for Android developers.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Internet Solutions is to expand its unified cloud messaging offering to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with fewer than 1 000 users and to the public sector – using Zimbra, VMware’s next-generation, open source, Linux-based e-mail and calendar groupware platform.
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There is a false assumption that open source is less secure. Pingdom, which claims to be big fans of the Apache HTTP web server, recently published an interview with William A. Rowe Jr., who until just recently, was the Vice President of the HTTP Server Project.
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Adobe has announced the launch of version 2.0 of its Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), an open software framework for building media players and applications, based on the company’s closed source Flash platform. Kelash Kumar, Adobe Video Solutions Group Product Manager, says that the new version of OSMF includes a number of improvements aimed at helping developers “create even more engaging experiences” and notes that the developers have “reworked the inner workings of OSMF”.
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Equalis, the leading provider of open source numerical analysis, visualization and simulation solutions for engineers and scientists, today announced that it has appointed THiRA Solution and Consulting as its partner for Korea. THiRA is a specialist Korean manufacturing operations and optimization software and services provider. It is headed by industry veterans and with extensive experience working with major Korean manufacturing companies and education institutions. The Equalis solution is based on the world’s leading open source numerical computation platform, Scilab. Through this partnership, THiRA and Equalis will drive the adoption of the Scilab application by providing customers direct access to a local, dedicated team of application specialists to quickly solve challenges.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Amazon Web Services has upgraded the Linux image that runs in its cloud to include newer versions of Tomcat, MySQL and Python, while at the same time allowing enterprises to stay on older versions, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Business
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Openness/Sharing
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It’s true that, in practice, a pure democracy seems untenable. What the US, or America, political system is to give citizens the ability to vote for a local representative who will then represent their interests — indirect democracy.
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All around the world, open source robotics efforts are maturing, to the point where an open source robot surgeon might even save your life, and commercial companies are taking shape around open source robot platforms. In the past week, there have been some high-profile debates about whether open source robotics software platforms are necessarily better to pursue than proprietary ones. There is a high level of disagreement on the issue.
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Open Data
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Later this year, Raleigh residents could have access to city information and data in an accessible and usable format.
As part of its plan to become an “open-source” city, staff presented information Tuesday to the Council’s Technology Committee about plans to publish more data on the city’s website.
The first step will be to create a website where the information can live. The site will link from the city’s website and provide a “one-stop shop for how the public can engage in conversation,” according to Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Minter. He said that step will be complete in April.
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Open Hardware
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IP lawyer Andrew Katz has announced a new open source hardware licence. The Solderpad Hardware License is based on and compatible with the Apache 2.0 License and has the same goals, but is aimed specifically at hardware.
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Programming
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Downloadable at the Go website, the open source Go has been positioned as a general-purpose language suitable for uses ranging from application development to systems programming and offering such features as garbage collection and concurrency. It also is intended to be easy to program.
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Google Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) member Carol Smith has announced that the student application period for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event is now open. Students have until 19:00 UTC on Friday 6 April to submit their proposals to one of the 180 accepted 2012 mentoring organisations.
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Finance
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A review of 15 investment banks released on Thursday by Britain’s financial regulator showed that a majority lacked adequate anticorruption and bribery checks.
The Financial Services Authority said its review of the banks, including eight major global investment banks, had found that about half had an inadequate bribery risk assessment. The review, conducted during the second half of 2011, also found that managers were not sufficiently knowledgeable about anticorruption and bribery laws.
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A divided House approved a $3.6 trillion Republican budget on Thursday recasting Medicare and imposing sweeping cuts in domestic programs, capping a battle that gave both political parties a campaign-season stage to spotlight their warring deficit-cutting priorities.
But the partisan divisions over the measure, which is dead on arrival in the Democratic-led Senate, also underscores how tough it will be for lawmakers to achieve the cooperation needed to contend with a tsunami of tax and spending decisions that will engulf Congress right after this fall’s elections.
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An annual report from a regional Federal Reserve bank is typically a collection of banalities and clichés with some pictures of local worthies who serve on the board.
And so it is with this year’s annual report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, whose pages are graced by the smiling, stolid portraits of board members who run local companies like Whataburger Restaurants.
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When it comes to Wall Street, liberals and conservatives can agree on at least one thing: The government should avoid bailing out big banks on the taxpayers’ dime. Dodd-Frank was supposed to make that less likely to happen. But it’s uncertain whether that will actually happen, as the new regulation has no explicit prohibition on bailouts.
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With oil prices still in the stratosphere, the rumblings are getting louder that the world’s nations may release some of the crude they have saved up in their strategic reserves. On Thursday, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said there was a “good chance” that the United States and Europe will tap those reserves.
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Spanish workers enraged by austerity-driven labor reforms to prevent the nation from becoming Europe’s next bailout victim slowed down the country’s economy in a general strike Thursday, closing factories and clashing with police as the new-center right government tried to convince investors the nation isn’t headed for a financial meltdown.
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After a four-month lobbying blitz led by firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN), U.S. regulators and lawmakers are signaling they’re receptive to delaying and revising their plan to stop banks from making speculative trades on their own accounts.
Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and co-author of the 2010 law mandating the ban, urged regulators last week to simplify their first draft, while a bipartisan group of senators proposed pushing back its effective date.
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