• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• If desktop Linux is dead, someone had better tell all those users

  First and foremost, what does it even mean to say desktop Linux is “dead” if it’s being embraced and used by growing numbers of individuals and corporations around the world?

• Mystery Solved

  So, the mystery is solved. From this data we can clearly understand how NetApplications gives such a huge share to that other OS and very little to GNU/Linux (0.62%) compared to Wikipedia (1.54%), for instance. We don’t know what the numbers would be without the bias but Wikipedia has no motivation for bias except to English language. We can assume the global usage is much higher because GNU/Linux is much more popular in non-English countries like BRIC (India is English speaking but also has many other languages) where governments promote GNU/Linux.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel Looks To Be Working On Open-Source GPGPU

    A mailing list message this morning raises the possibility that Intel’s open-source graphics developers could soon be working on GPGPU/OpenCL support.

  • XWayland Updated Against X.Org Server 1.12

    Kristian Høgsberg has pushed updated patches this morning for XWayland in the X.Org Server that re-base this work to the X.Org Server 1.12 series. He’s also updated the XWayland support for the xf86-video-intel graphics driver. XWayland is the effort for allowing an X.Org Server to run as a Wayland client.

  • AMD R600 LLVM Back-End Called For Inclusion

    Tom Stellard of AMD has called upon the LLVM developers to include the R600 GPU back-end into the LLVM project, which is the code for generating compute and graphics shaders inside the LLVM compiler infrastructure for targeting Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics processors.

  • KDrive, Xnest, Xvfb Called For Removal From X.Org

Applications

• Roaming Media

  The central piece to this project is a server-based music player. I am using the Music Player Dæmon (MPD), a wonderful server-based system released under the GNU General Public License and available from the repositories of most Linux distributions. Install the software with your favorite package management system. In addition to this player, you need to set up a streaming system. Icecast fulfills this requirement and also is widely available. Install it as well.

• 3 Must-Have Apps for Any Linux OS, And My Preferences

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Make it so! How to master the Linux command line

  • Virtualization With KVM On An OpenSUSE 12.1 Server

  • Compile the mainline Linux kernel for Ubuntu

  • XBMC Media Center 11.0 Released, Install It In Ubuntu

  • How to install oracle java 7 in ubuntu 12.04

  • 16 ultimate SSH hacks

• Games

  • The Latest Humble Bundle Grows In Size

  • Overgrowth For Linux Is Almost Ready

    Overgrowth is the game developed by Wolfire that was announced nearly four years ago as a third-person action game that is still considered to be in an alpha/preview state. Overgrowth was announced for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms. The Linux port of this game began last year by a Wolfire contractor (Edward Rudd), but finally there’s some good news to report on the Linux progress.

    According to a Phoronix reader, Seon-Wook Park, those that have pre-ordered Overgrowth were informed through their private forums yesterday that the Overgrowth Linux port is nearly ready. Besides the native port, Overgrowth is now working under Wine too, per this WineHQ.org AppDB entry. Pre-ordering comes at a cost of $29.95 USD but includes DRM-free alpha access to the game.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • What Users Say About Gnome 3 Shell

    We were astonished by the response we received on our Google + page. The overwhelming response in favour of Gnome 3 Shell was incredible. You can read it yourself, here are some comments that we liked.

  • Why Gnome 3 Shell Is A Smashing Success!

    Tweet

    We are running a poll on Muktware to see which desktop environments are popular among Muktware readers. To everyone’s surprise KDE is leading the poll with a huge margin, whereas Unity and Gnome Shell are neck-to-neck with each other.

  • GTK+ 3.4.0 released

Distributions

• Snapshot: Which Linux is hot

  After delving into where in the world people seem most keen on Linux, I couldn’t resist taking the research into Google Insights a bit further and seeing what trends were visible on the questions of which Linux distribution seemed to be most popular over time.

• New Releases

  • Webconverger 12.0

  • Legacy OS 4 Mini Screenshots

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat to Sponsor Open Cloud Conference and Host Developer Workshop on April 30

  • Red Hat: $1B Is Nearly Official, But Will Storage Shine?

  • Red Hat (RHT) April volatility bid up into Q4 results and demand trends

  • Fedora

    • ARM as a primary architecture

• Debian Family

  • Knoppix 7.0 Linux OS on the way

    These days there are hundreds of Linux-based operating systems that you can boot from a CD, DVD, or USB flash drive without installing anything to your hard drive. This lets you try out an operating system without replacing your current one — and it may also help you repair a broken operating system by booting from removable storage to run a disk scan, repartition a drive, or make other changes.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Running Ubuntu 12.04 With The Liquorix Kernel

        After performing a fresh Linux installation, most users are concerned with customizing their desktop or application set for their needs, but an increasing number of enthusiasts tend to be looking at their kernel. The Zen kernel was once very popular, but of increasing popularity amongst die-hard Linux enthusiasts is the Zen-related Liquorix kernel. While it claims to offer superior performance for common workloads, is this really the case? Here are some benchmarks of the stock Ubuntu 12.04 kernel versus the 3.2 kernel offered by Liquorix.

      • Ubuntu: “We’re not Linux”

        Lest you wonder whether this was an intentional naming decision, it does seem to be that Canonical is deliberately avoiding using the L word. The release notes were imported by Canonical’s Kate Stewart (release manager) with the “Ubuntu kernel” language. From skimming the rest of the release notes brings up only one mention of “Linux.” This is to mention that on PowerPC if Ubuntu is installed “along side linux, the system does not automatically boot into the newly installed system.” So Canonical clearly seems to be trying to distance itself from Linux, here.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Beta Frustrations

      • Ubuntu Builder Updated with Improved Interface, Wizard Feature and QEMU Support

      • New Kernel Vulnerabilities Affect Ubuntu 11.10

        Canonical announced a few minutes ago (March 27th), in a security notice, that a new kernel upgrade for its Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system is available.

      • Mark Shuttleworth Explains Smarter Notifications for Ubuntu

      • XBMC 11.0 released, includes new Ubuntu-based live CD

        The development team behind the hugely popular open source media player and entertainment hub, XBMC, has announced immediate availability of the newest XBMC 11.0 “Eden” release as well as XBMCbuntu, a new Ubuntu-based live CD.

        There have been a number of changes since the previous version was announced over a year ago. The default skin, Confluence, has been vastly improved and received some performance increases thanks to features like Dirty-region rendering and a new JPEG decoder, among others.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Pear Linux Comice OS 4 review

Devices/Embedded

• Mentor Embedded Continues to Simplify Linux and Open Source Development with Support of the Yocto Project

• Enea AB: Enea adds Enea Linux to its leading operating system solutions

• Raspberry Pi consumer purchases start tomorrow morning in EU

  Raspberry Pi will be on sale to consumers from Wednesday morning according to Premier Farnell and element14, who also released an update to the pricing

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google “Play” Is Becoming One-Stop Shop for Android Apps and Much More

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Amazon now rumored to be prepping three tablets for 2012

Skype Open-Source Back In Action, Breaks v5.5

After a several month hiatus, the individual(s) working to reverse-engineer Skype’s binary client have successfully “deobfuscated” the Skype 5.5 release.

“We got deobfuscated skype v5.5!!! I can’t belive in this. But its fucking true. Great thanks and congratulations going to Vilko,” begins a new post on the skype-open-source blog.

Roll Your Own Wiki With Open Source MoinMoin

WalmartLabs is building big data tools — and will then open source them

The benefits of open source

Free and open source software has touched all our lives whether we know it or not. Often misunderstood and treated with suspicion, many businesses take advantage of the benefits of it without acknowledging the community that powers it.

Sirius CTO: UK businesses must start tapping SME talent

The time has come for small and medium businesses to get the recognition they deserve, according to Andrew Savory, newly-appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at open source systems integrator Sirius, with a new generation of smart British technology companies proving that they can deliver services just as well, sometimes cheaper, and sometimes better than their large entrenched counterparts.

Savory, an active member of The Apache Software Foundation, joins Sirius from the LiMo Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium dedicated to creating the first Linux-based mobile operating system for smartphone devices. Coming from an open source, small business background himself, Savory is excited to see a step-change in the way that SMEs are being viewed, thanks to initiatives like the government’s G-Cloud.

The Peek Email Device Goes Open Source

f at first you don’t succeed, open source the sucker. Peek has released an open source version of their Peek Mobile operating system, allowing hackers to use the all-but-obsolete little email device as a hacker platform. The Linux release is available the PeekLinux wiki and hackers are already adding new apps and functionality to the tiny device.

Building a GSM network with open source

Over the last few years open source technology has enabled mobile phone networks to be set up on a shoestring budget at hacker conferences, on a tiny Pacific island and at a festival in the Nevada desert. Andrew Back takes a look at how this has been made possible and at what’s involved in building a GSM network using OpenBTS and OpenBSC.

Events

• Sydneysider to give keynote at Wikimania

  Gardiner is a long-time member of the Sydney Linux User Group, an office-bearer of Linux Australia, and a regular member of the technical panel that chooses talks for the annual Australian national Linux conference.

  Last year Gardiner, along with Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora, set up The Ada Initiative, a project to help increase the participation of women in technology. The project was born after several incidents of sexist behaviour towards women at FOSS events.

• High-tech titans coming to Columbia

  Next week’s Palmetto Open Source Software Conference — or POSSCON — is starting to bring some serious high-tech street cred to Columbia.

  The conference – which grew substantially in each of its past four years — focuses on the communal development of software like Open Office and Firefox that developers share with the world, often for free.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chromium OS adds automatic Google Docs sync

  • Guidance for Getting Going with the Chromium Browser

  • Chrome OS May Be Heading to ARM After All

    Google’s upcoming “Daisy” Chromebook will reportedly use Samsung’s ARM-based Exynos 5250 SoC.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla at Work on Mobile Do Not Track

    You can opt out of being tracked online by using a Web browser with support for Do Not Track, a privacy feature that lets you tell supporting websites that you don’t want to be tracked by third parties (advertisers, marketing firms, and the like). It’s like putting yourself on an online version of the Do Not Call list.

    Now Mozilla is developing an open-source operating system for smartphones and tablets that supports Do Not Track from the ground up. Code-named Boot to Gecko (B2G), this Linux-based mobile OS is designed to bring the (comparatively) rigorous privacy standards of the World Wide Web to smartphones and tablets.

  • Mozilla launches multiplayer browser adventure to showcase HTML5 gaming

    Mozilla has teamed up with Web design studio Little Workshop to develop a Web-based multiplayer adventure game called BrowserQuest. The game is built with standards-based Web technologies and is designed to be played within a Web browser.

    With the technical capabilities offered by the latest standards, Web developers no longer have to rely on plugins to create interactive multimedia experiences and application-like user interfaces. As we reported earlier this month, modern standards are making the Web an increasingly viable platform for game development.

  • Asa Dotzler Recommends Opera For Firefox 3.6 Users Who Don’t Want To Upgrade

    If you are a Firefox 3.6 user you know by now that support for that branch of the web browser will end on April 24, 2012. As it stands now, Firefox 3.6.28, released on March 14, is likely the last version of Firefox 3.6. Mozilla will not update the version of the browser again unless a major security or stability issue forces them to.

    With Firefox 3.6 out of the picture, Firefox users still using the branch are asked by Mozilla to either update to the current stable version of the browser, which is Firefox 11 at the time of writing, or the Firefox Extended Support Release. The latter has been specifically designed for organizations as a way to lessen the impact of Mozilla’s new rapid release process on the company’s IT department.

  • Firefox 3.6.x approaches end of life

  • Mozilla BrowserQuest The Future of Open Source HTML5 Gaming?

  • Jeff Klein, I hate you

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice developers demo collaborative editing prototype

  A group of LibreOffice developers have added experimental collaborative editing capabilities to the open source office suite. The feature allows multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously over the Internet. The collaborative editing functionality was implemented by grafting Telepathy to LibreOffice.

CMS

• Privacy agency taps open source CMS for new website

• Acquia Launches New Cloud API for Drupal Content Management

Business

• Opscode gets more venture dough for its Chef

  Opscode, the maker of the open source Chef tool that the company says can help system administrators “rule the cloud”, has lured more big backers as momentum builds for that tool’s open source, hosted, and licensed versions.

• Digium Asterisk & VMware: Simplifying IP PBX Virtualization

Funding

• Kickstarter to fund development of Arduino-based, browser-controlled open source hardware automated gardening dome

• Google Summer of Code: Contribute to Open Source, Make Money

  If you’re a post-secondary student, 18 years or older, you have a golden opportunity this Summer. Contribute to an open source project that you care about, and get paid to do it. Once again, it’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) time, and open source organizations are beating the bushes to find the best ideas and applicants.

  The GSoC has been an annual tradition since 2005. Google partners with mentoring organizations and offers students stipends for successful completion of open source projects. Students get a stipend of $5,000 USD and the mentoring organization receives $500. Students get a $500 stipend after coding begins on May 1st, a $2,250 payment after a successful mid-term evaluation, and $2,250 after the final program evaluation. Oh, and don’t forget the t-shirt.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Telephony begins public meetings

• The GNU C Library Steering Committee disbands

  Roland McGrath has announced that the GNU C Library (glibc) Steering Committee is dissolving. The direction of the project will now be governed more informally by a team led by the current maintainers.

Project Releases

• Cairo 1.12 Released With Major New Features

Public Services/Government

• Iceland’s public administrations moving towards open source

• Iceland government to switch to open source platforms

• Iceland makes open source push

Openness/Sharing

• How open is too open?

  Last month, we posted a survey asking, “If you could open one of the following data sets tomorrow, which one would you open and why?” We got a great response–279 people voted and there were several comments.

Programming

• Eclipse readies browser-based IDE

  The Eclipse Foundation for open source development tools is eyeing July as the release date for the 1.0 version of its Orion browser-based IDE for building Web applications, which will be discussed at this week’s EclipseCon 2012 conference in Reston, Va.

• ‘Hello, world’: Programming languages quiz

Standards/Consortia

• Tizen pops up as HTML5 winner

  No one has seen the Tizen mobile platform in action yet, but whatever browser the in-development platform is using has blown away the competition for HTML5 performance.

  Listed only as “Tizen 1″ on The HTML5 Test (THT) site, the development version of the Tizen browser scored 387 points out of a possible total of 475 points within the mobile phone browser category.

• 1&1 Internet AG receives German Document Freedom Award

  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.

Security

• Executable Code Injection in Linux

Finance

• Anger at Goldman Still Simmers

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Shocker! FOX asks Tough Questions and Paul Ryan Flubs

  In an uncharacteristic move for a Fox News anchor, Wallace asks some tough questions of the Chair of the House Budget Committee. Since the Ryan plan would lose 10 trillion dollars of revenue over ten years, Wallace asked exactly which tax loopholes would be closed to raise the revenue that would be lost from reducing the tax rate. But Ryan could not name specific loopholes that he would close as part of his plan because “that’s not the job of the budget committee.”

• The Corporations Bankrolling ALEC, which Has Promoted “Stand Your Ground” as a “Model” Bill

  The gun lobby has come under the spotlight for its role in the so-called “Stand Your Ground” or “Shoot First” law that may protect the man who shot and killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida –- but many other special interests, including household names like Kraft Foods and Wal-Mart, also helped facilitate the spread of these and other laws by funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

ACTA

• Spinning ACTA “prolongation” strategies – noise in the cable

  LQDN demonstrates that their voting expectations do not depend upon the ECJ rerferral but their procedural input is quite a bit confusing. I had some strange artefacts in my DSL connection and then found out the ethernet cable between the router and the splitter was broken. You could argue that LQDN add some fog of war and inserted confusion in the process. I just wonder if MEPs would switch to a different cable. If you dismiss the current proposed procedures of the rapporteur David Martin as “delay” tactics what’s the actual alternative for Parliament?

• EU Parliament Will Vote on ACTA Without Delay!

  The EU Parliament has refused to freeze the ACTA debate, and will not refer the agreement to the EU Court of Justice. In a 21 to 5 vote, the Parliament decided to stick to its calendar and will vote on ACTA in June, as originally planned. The Commission’s technocratic manoeuvres have not stopped the Parliament, and the door remains open to a swift rejection of ACTA.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Arista 10G switch: Fast and flexible

On top of its impressive performance stats, the 7508 also showed off multiple redundancy and load-balancing mechanisms and recovered quickly from failures. And it did all this running on Linux, with all the extensibility that comes with Unix-like operating systems.

Chuckle. No One Wants Small Expensive Computers.

The fallout from all this will be that Android/Linux tablets will become the norm in 2012 and ARMed devices will be abundant to take Android/Linux. Intel tablets will need huge batteries to last more than a few hours, also raising the costs. GNU/Linux will be available to offset their higher hardware costs… Love it. Wintel is feeding the fire of */Linux. Using the opponent’s weight to the opponent’s disadvantage is a winning strategy. The cloud will slurp up a huge market from Wintel this year and next.

Desktop

• The Linux Setup – Philip Newborough, CrunchBang Linux

  I am Philip Newborough. I am a web developer and GNU/Linux enthusiast. I produce an unofficial Debian derivative known as CrunchBang. At the moment, I am working full time on CrunchBang, trying to improve its quality and purpose. I love working on the project and I love learning more about the Debian system.

• CrunchBang Linux: a good system for the devoted to Linux

  This Linux OS distribution is one of the most famous in the world. There are almost no people who are acquainted with Linux, but never heard of this OS. At this moment of time, it is on the 29th place in the Distrowatch rating, somewhere between Xubuntu and GhostBSD.

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel 3.2.13 Is Available for Download

Applications

• The Best File Archive Utility for Linux

• APTonCD – another reason to use Linux

  How many reasons do you need to use Linux? Free, stable, inordinately fashionable. And now, a way of automatically backing up every single application you’ve installed.

  For those that know, APT is Debian’s incredibly easy and useful package manager. You want some software? Use the command line sudo apt-get, or the Synaptic Package Manager or the Software Manager of the Debian distro of your choice, find the software, click install, and there we go.

  When I upgrade to a new version of a Linux distribution, whether it’s Ubuntu or Linux Mint, I always do a clean install, as I find it far less troublesome.

• Top 5 Linux Monitoring Tools. Web Based.

• Proprietary

  • Life without Netflix, streaming on Linux can be awesome!

    For all the hype around Netflix it is easy for us Linux users to forget there are alternatives. Its not that Netflix is (debateably) the best, but rather its the most widely used that causes us to neglect the numerous options that are actually available to us. In this article I want to present some of those alternatives, and how they hold up against Netflix. One caveat however is that I cannot fairly compare the variety and quality of the programming selections of each service seeing as the former is too large to parse, and the latter is inherently subjective.

  • Disorganized? Get Tracks on Linux

    Feeling a bit disorganized? Looking to take control of your projects? Take a look at Tracks, an open source Web-based application built with Ruby on Rails. Tracks can help you get organized and Get Things Done (GTD) in no time.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Configure PureFTPd To Accept TLS Sessions On CentOS 6.2

  • What Every Linux User Needs to Know to Secure Their Network Using Iptables

  • Linux IP Commands

  • Running LinOTP On CentOS 6.2

  • Learning to Program the Arduino

• Wine

  • First look at CrossOver XI from CodeWeavers

    For many people out there one of the biggest challenges of moving from one operating system to another is finding applications to do all the things a person did with their first operating system. After all, the majority of the population isn’t as interested in what operating system they have, rather they focus on which applications they can run. With this in mind CodeWeavers has a product called CrossOver. The CrossOver suite allows a user to install and run Windows applications on Linux distributions or Mac OS X. If the mission of CrossOver sounds similar to WINE that is because CrossOver is based on the WINE project, but with additional effort put into polishing the user experience and testing compatibility. With the recent release of CrossOver XI the folks over at CodeWeavers offered a free trial and, as many of our readers are new to Linux and will likely benefit from the ability to run Windows applications on their new OS, I gladly accepted.

• Games

  • “Wasteland 2″ Kickstarter Hits $1.5 Million, Which Means It’s Heading To Mac And Linux

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Enhances Mirroring Network

    KDE deployed a new mirror network this weekend. The mirror network is used to spread released software to users. In the old system, users had to select a mirror server manually. The new system selects a mirror automatically, based on the country where the user is located. If there is no mirror for that country, a mirror is selected based on continent. In either case, mirrors that are geographically closer are preferred. If there is an even better mirror—such as one in the same network as the user, it is preferred over all others. Here is the current list of the official KDE mirrors.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3.3.92 Release Candidate released!

  • Interesting Features Of GNOME 3.4

    GNOME 3.4, the latest major update to the GNOME3 desktop, is set to be officially released on Wednesday. Here’s a look at some of the most interesting features of this biannual GNOME update.

    The release notes coming out on Wednesday when GNOME 3.4 is to be officially announced will exhaustively cover the changes to GNOME 3.4 since the 3.2 release last September. However, in looking over the change-logs for the GNOME 3.4 packages being checked-in and with testing of GNOME 3.3 development releases, here’s some of the most interesting GNOME 3.4 features that go on my list.

  • I have found my MATE and I am happy.

    As the three followers of my blog may have noticed, I am unhappy with the direction both Gnome and KDE have taken. The tablet is a great portable media consumption tool, and minimal productivity tool, also a game machine, but really limiting for all around computing.

    Moving desktop interfaces in the direction of the pinch/swipe/poke/prod tablet interface LIMITS their usability. Point Of Fact. Limit is the key word here. The major desktops have fewer customization options, far fewer gadgets, so to speak.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Linux Mint Debian Edition gets fresh updates

  • Open Xange 2012.04

  • Parted Magic 2012_3_24 Has Linux Kernel 3.2.13

  • Parted Magic update fixes bugs, upgrades packages

    A new version, simply labelled “2012_3_24″, of the Parted Magic open source, multi-platform partitioning tool has been released. According to lead developer Patrick Verner, the update fixes a number of issues related to interaction between the BusyBox tool collection and Clonezilla, and upgrades a number of the included applications.

• Red Hat Family

  • Oracle Database Certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Oracle 6

  • Forbes Earnings Preview: Red Hat

    Shares of Red Hat (RHT) have climbed 23.8% over the last three months to close at $51.54 on March 22, 2012. The company is looking to keep that trend going when it releases its fourth quarter results on Wednesday, March 28, 2012.

  • 5 Things to Watch This Week: Red Hat, Houses, Drugs, TVs and Window Dressing

  • Can Red Hat Stay Red Hot?

• Debian Family

  • A Year Into Linux Mint Debian Edition

    I have always been a Debian fan and had planned on just installing a vanilla Debian desktop on this machine with my own customizations. I recalled then that Mint was getting their direct Debian based version going. I have really liked the “Mint treatment” in terms of user interface and end experience functionality, I just can’t stand ubuntu because of the horrible things they do to security in the name of “user friendliness”.

  • Linux Mint Debian Edition Gets Gnome Shell, Cinnamon

    Clement Lefebvre, the creator of Linux Mint, has announced the updates to the Linux Mint Debian Edition. With this update, for the fist time, Linux Mint Debian users will get access to Gnome Shell, MATE and Cinnamon. This update brings Linux 3.2 kernel, MATE 1.2 (with mintMenu and mintDesktop now fully ported to MATE), Cinnamon 1.4, KDE 4.7.4, Gnome Shell 3.2.2 and Xfce 4.8.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Recoll-Lens: Full Text Search Unity Lens For Ubuntu 11.10 And 12.04 [Updated]

        Recoll is a full text search desktop tool which indexes the contents of many file formats including OpenOffice, MS Office, PostScript, MP3 and other audio files, JPEG and more. Besides regular searches, Recoll also lets you perform some advanced operations like searching for the author, file size, file format as well as operators like “AND” or “OR”.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Beta: Canonical’s New Linux Desktop

      • MyUnity 4.0: Taking Ubuntu Customization To New Level

      • Canonical’s Ubuntu System Management Service Landscape become default in Ubuntu 12.04

      • Dell, Ubuntu Team for Updated Linux Cloud Platform

      • Dell, Canonical Deliver OpenStack Cloud Abroad

        With an eye toward easing the deployment of private clouds, Dell said this week at the WorldHostingDays conference in Germany that it had partnered with Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical to deliver its Cloud Solution product in Britain, Germany and China.

      • Interview with Ding Zhou of Ubuntu Tweak

      • Integrating Your App Into Unity

      • seccomp filter now in Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Bodhi 1.4.0 Screenshots

        • Pear Comice OS 4 re-released after further Beta testing

        • Pear Linux Comice OS 4 screen shot preview

        • Pear Linux Comice OS 4 Netbook screen shot preview

        • Zorin OS 6 Lite Screen Shots

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Motorola XT760 and MT680 smartphones appear in leaked images, to come with mid-range specs

    • Ice Cream Sandwich for the AT&T Galaxy S II Skyrocket leaks out

    • Yet Another Motorola Android device leaked, looks familiar

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Wishtel Ira Tablets – Cheap, Android/Linux Powered & Support Indian Languages

    Wishtel, a company based out of Mumbai, India has come up with its own series of Android-powered tablets under the brand name ‘IRA’. The 3 tablets are called IRA Thing E, IRA E and IRA Icon E. All of these tablets have a 7.0 inch screen and are running on either Android 2.2 Froyo/ 2.3 Gingerbread OS or Linux OS.

  • Vivaldi tablet with KDE Plasma Active dissected

    The Vivaldi tablet is a 7 inch tablet and open source KDE Plasma Active software. The €200 tablet is expected to start shipping in May, but the folks behind the official Vivaldi user forum at OpenTablets.org got their hands on an early unit — and they’ve ripped it apart to see what makes it tick.

Zipline Games launches open source dev platform Moai

ZeroMQ forked to create Crossroads I/O

Sustrick and Lucina, along with some members of the ZeroMQ community, have created the Crossroads I/O fork, which, like ZeroMQ, is licensed under the LGPLv3. The project’s goals are to serve as a user-space implementation of messaging, educate developers about distributed messaging, design for global, 20-year use cases, and encourage a commercial ecosystem to grow around the project. Specifically, they wish to be vendor neutral and implement a “liberal (e.g. Linux-style) trademark policy” that allows use of the trademark by third parties.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google’s Chrome Browser Still Needs to Crack the Business Market

    According to data from StatCounter, Google’s Chrome browser has about 30 percent market share at this point, and it may be on track to challenge Internet Explorer’s share, which has been dwindling for years. A close look at market share data for the leading browsers, though, shows that Chrome’s usage is highest on weekends, and its share numbers tend to drop during the week, suggesting that users favor it at home, but may favor Internet Explorer when at work. That’s a challenge Google needs to overcome.

SaaS

• The (bumpy) road to Free Software SaaS

  Free Software advocates quickly demonize SaaS as the ultimate way to take your freedom away. A lot of them dismiss the advantages of having data online highlighting (and rightly so) the fact that you may be locked out of your own data anytime. My question is: what if SaaS is in fact the way to go, the future, and just need to hurry the hell up and make sure that it’s easy to install, and use, the great SaaS available under a free software license?

• Amazon Web Services and Eucalyptus Form Cloud Partnership

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Chakra Gets LibreOffice 3.5.1 In Stable Repos

  Chakra, the KDE-centric distribution, has moved the latest LibreOffice to the stable repo’s. Thie means “it is no longer needed to install the complete office suite, it is split up in different components, and you can choose which parts to install,” says the project page.

CMS

• Eighteen Open Source Content Management Systems (Part 3)

Business

• 71 Top Commercial Open Source Projects

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• March 2012 GNU Toolchain Update

• Our goals and LibrePlanet 2012

  Today is a good day. I am back from presenting at LibrePlanet 2012 this weekend.

• coreutils-8.16 released [stable]

Project Releases

• XBMC 11.0 Eden Multimedia Center Released | What’s New | Screenshots

• XBMC Eden Finally Ready for Prime Time

• XBMC 11.0 released with new Ubuntu-based live CD and iOS support

Public Services/Government

• Iceland Has the Hots for FOSS

  Iceland has kicked off a migration project to put its public institutions on a strict diet of free and open source software. The move will affect a wide variety of institutions, and it could result in savings for the country’s cash-strapped government. However, just because software is free as in beer and free as in freedom doesn’t mean maintenance will come at no cost.

• Iceland’s government pushes for open source

Openness/Sharing

• Inspiring the future of work by unlocking innovation through chaos, creativity, and collaboration

  Gangplank was created by two entrpreneurs in Chandler, AZ who loved their city, but felt that it lacked the culture to make creative ventures successful. It was started just before the recession 4 years ago. It started by trying to help technical entrepeneurs through seed funding and incubation, but quickly found the community needed so much more. In the last four years the space has increased from 2,500sqft to 14,000sqft and has opened three new locations. It has partnered with two cities (Avondale, AZ and Chandler, AZ) and is activating creatives to get involved in government and their community. Bringing fresh ideas and the concept of iterating through ideas to find success. Gangplank has started a collaborative workspace movement that was highlight this year as one of Entrepreneur Magazines 100 Most Innovative Companies.

• Open Hardware

  • Notebook makers gross margins dip below 5% for 4Q11

    Quanta’s gross margin in the fourth quarter of 2011 is expected to have dropped to 3.3% from 3.7% in the third, while Compal is expected to see its percentage dropped from 5% in the third quarter to 4.8% in the fourth.

Programming

• Git PHP. RIP Subversion

Standards/Consortia

• Celebrate Document Freedom Day

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Does VMware have a real future?

Though VMware provides its low-end offerings for free, it can’t stay in the game by relying on those alone; it makes its money exclusively from selling high-end virtualization and virtualization management software. Unlike its competitors, VMware doesn’t have much of a revenue stream from operating systems and other products. And when it attempted to overcome that weakness, it was blindsided. More on that in a bit.

Dr. Jill Stein: Green Party Candidate for President

Jill Stein, a doctor and activist from Massachusetts, is running for the Green Party nomination for President of the United States. Stein is the frontrunner for the party’s nomination, running against comedian Roseanne Barr and veteran Green Party activists Kent Mesplay and Harley Mikkelson. Stein’s campaign, headed up by Wisconsin native Ben Manski, is focusing on getting enough delegates in each state to win the party’s nomination at the July 2012 Green Party convention in Baltimore and on securing November ballot lines in all 50 states.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Death by Delay: Obama Team Stalls on Chemical Regulation

  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has drafted a “chemicals of concern” list to restrict the use of certain chemicals and alert the public to their possible dangers. But the list remains secret and dormant because it’s stuck at the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review.

DRM

• Lib-Ray Video Standard: Moving to SDHC Flash Media

  In Spring 2011, I started a project to attempt to create a free-culture compatible / non-DRM alternative to Blu-Ray for high-definition video releases on fixed-media, and after about a year hiatus, I’m getting back to it with some new ideas. The first is that I’ve concluded that optical discs are a bust for this kind of application, and that the time has come to move on to Flash media, specifically SDHC/SDXC as the hardware medium. This is a more expensive choice of medium, and still not perfect, but it has enough advantages to make it a clear choice now.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • ACTA: The EU Parliament Must Face Its Political Responsibility

      Brussels, March 26th 2012 – Today is the beginning of a decisive week for the future of the ACTA procedure in the EU Parliament. Tomorrow, Members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) may decide whether to vote on ACTA in the next few months as originally planned, or to follow the rapporteur David Martin in buying time and defusing the ongoing debate through technocratic manoeuvres. Citizens must call their MEPs now and urge them to face their political responsibility by rejecting ACTA.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux and Open-source news overview for week 12-2012

Unity 5.8 Released with New Features and Performance Improvements

Evolution of IT at a Global Business

Sabre did look at that other OS but decided they did not want the lock-in. Having decided to move to Intel processors, they did not want to have to change software again if they moved to another CPU and GNU/Linux runs on everything…

Desktop

• Observations on the growth of Linux use

  Ah, statistics! How we love to deceive ourselves with them! Sometimes we tend to forget they are numbers applied to measure a reality, but they are affected by many variables. Therefore, statistics become a useful prediction, but a prediction is, ultimately, a guess nonetheless.

  I am saying this because, since I migrated to Linux in 2009, I have been listening to Windows fanboys chanting that “according to Netmarketshare and StatCounter, Linux accounts for a skimpy 1% of the total market”. And the funny thing is that they believe it!

Kernel Space

• Intel Core i7 AVX GCC Compiler Tuning Results

  For those owners of Intel’s latest-generation Core i3/i5/i7 “Sandy Bridge” processors, here’s a quick look at the impact of some GCC tuning options specific to these latest AVX-enabled Intel processors.

• Btrfs & Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

• Intel Remains Confident In Fixed-Up RC6

• A New BFS “Smoking” Scheduler For Linux 3.3

  Con Kolivas announced this weekend the release of an updated BFS scheduler for the recently-released Linux 3.3 kernel. The new BFS scheduler is at version 0.420 and is codenamed “Smoking”, with “a fairly large architectural change” since earlier versions of this out-of-tree kernel scheduler.

• Testing Out The Btrfs Mount Options On Linux 3.2

• Android “Comes Home” to Linux Kernel

  If Android is Linux’s prodigal son, the two parties came a little closer to reconciliation recently with the release of the Linux 3.3 kernel, which merges Android back into the Linux mainline. Despite all this geeky jargon, this is a change that could actually matter even to people who aren’t programmers. Here are the details in plainer English, and why they’re worth noting.

• Graphics Stack

  • New Nvidia Video Driver Supports Linux Kernel 3.3

  • Early AMD Catalyst 12.3 Linux Drivers Seep Out

    As Phoronix Forums readers have been quick to discover, early “beta” builds of AMD’s Catalyst 12.3 proprietary Linux driver have begun to appear publicly.

    First pointed out earlier this morning was an “OpenCL1.2betadriversLinux.tgz” package from AMD’s web-site. This OpenCL 1.2 beta driver Linux package was joined by an updated Windows driver too with improved OpenCL support. The beta Linux driver is from the fglrx 8.96 release stream, which is what will be Catalyst 12.3.

  • Trying Out Wayland With Rebecca Black

  • Suldal, GeForce GTX 680, NVIDIA Tegra 3 On Linux

    There’s a few updates concerning Linux benchmarks of NVIDIA’s brand new GeForce GTX 680 “Kepler” graphics card, the ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra 3 platform, and other Linux performance topics.

Applications

• 6 Essential Free Linux Guitar Tools

• Lightweight Music Player ‘DeaDBeeF’ Updated

• Proprietary

  • Opera TV Browser For Linux and Android Based TV Sets

    Opera web browser is almost available for every device we have these days such as desktop, tablet, mobile devices and it’s available for the major platforms. Now, Opera software ASA will provide a new web browsing experience called “Opera TV Browser”, which will allow you to have a full browsing experience through Linux and Android based TVs.

  • Install Steam on Linux easily

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On CentOS 6.2

  • Addendum to fifth installment: prescience?; more on xmodmap

  • Tips on Setting UP a Slave Server for DNS

  • How to dual-boot BackTrack 5 R2 and Ubuntu 12.04

  • Secure your Privacy with Ad Network Detector

  • How to enable command autocomplete by searching history in Linux

  • Smart Access Control with Apache

  • Tips on Setting UP a Slave Server for DNS

  • The Perfect Server – Debian Squeeze (Debian 6.0) With BIND, Dovecot & Nginx [ISPConfig 3]

• Games

  • Confirmed, Wasteland 2 Coming to Linux – Hits $1.5 Million Target

  • NEW RIJN UPDATES AND RELEASES

  • Open Source Tools for Game Development

    Ryan “Icculus” Gordon will be talking about using open-source tools for game development next weekend at the 2012 Flourish conference.

    As written about last week, Ryan Gordon will be talking once again at the Flourish conference in Chicago at month’s end. Last week his topic wasn’t disclosed for this open-source conference, but it’s since come to light: Open Source Tools for Game Development.

  • Wasteland 2 for Linux confirmed

Desktop Environments

• New Enlightenment EFL Package Releases

  There’s new releases of some key EFL — Enlightenment Foundation Libraries — packages. This round of Enlightenment package updates has also introduced some new components.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE e.V. Report for Q42011

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3.4 Release Candidate Is Available for Download

    The GNOME Project announced a few minutes ago, March 23rd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Release Candidate version of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which brings more fixes to the existing bugs.

Distributions

• Watching Distrowatch

• New Releases

  • Comice OS 4 Final Officially Released

  • Parted Magic 2012_3_24

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • The OpenBox Special Edition of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

• Red Hat Family

  • Technology Sector Review: $1.2M Apple Fine, HP Works with Red Hat

    Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT): HP (NYSE:HPQ) plans to work with Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) to develop Linux code for mission critical operations, according to The Inquirer. Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows and Linux will begin gaining market share in mission critical computer, HP believes, the publication stated.

  • Red Hat Powers More Than 50% Of Global Trading Volume

    Red Hat is an undisputed leader of the Linux world. The company has broken all records by registering a whooping $909 million in revenues for 2011. The company is a great example of profitability from open source. Red Hat now powers more than 50% of the global trading volume. The company claims that 100% of the Top 5 Asia Pacific stock exchanges, run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Audio Spin: Creating Music With Fedora [Exclusive Interview]

      Swapnil: Can you tell us more about the Fedora Audio Spin, what is the goal of the project?

      Brendan: Traditionally Fedora has been known to walk the leading edge in free and open source software development but for some reason this has never been realised in the realms of pro-audio/music creation.

      We see the Fedora Audio spin as a great way to encourage people to use Linux audio and strengthen and invigorate the community surrounding Fedora Audio. We are aiming at producing a spin which allows Linux audio enthusiasts to quickly setup up and configure their audio workstations for audio and music production.

• Debian Family

  • People behind Debian: Jörg Jaspert, FTPmaster, Debian Account Manager, and more

    Jörg is a very active contributor within Debian, and has been for a long time. This explains why he holds so many roles (FTPmaster and Debian Account Manager being the 2 most important ones)… Better known as Ganneff (his IRC nick), he’s not exactly the typical hacker. He has no beard and used to drink milk instead of beers.

  • Three in race for post of Debian leader

    After a year when there was just a single candidate, the incumbent, standing for the post, 2012 will see three developers slug it out for the post of leader of the Debian GNU/Linux Project.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Wallpapers Finalized

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Development Update 19

      • Unity 5.8 Released with New Features and Performance Improvements

        Unity 5.8 has landed into Ubuntu 12.04 with new features and fixes. It seems lots of work has gone under the hood as I have never seen Unity interface so fast.

        Its just flying and for a moment I really thought that its Unity 2D as after Unity 5.8 update, the dash menu got lots of UI tweaks and it now looks very much like Unity 2D’s dash.

      • Dell, Ubuntu Team for Updated Linux Cloud Platform

        Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS (long-term support) is being built with the latest Linux kernel and OpenStack IT and is currently undergoing integration and quality assurance testing with Dell’s version of OpenStack.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Multimonitor Fixes Land

      • Unity 5.8 Brings More Polish & Precision To Ubuntu 12.04

        Ubuntu Unity get bumped to version 5.8 bringing with it many bug fixes improving its polish and perfection. Most of the bug fixes are barely major but improves the overall Unity interface. Lets go through them one by one.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 has been released! | Screeshots tour

          Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 has been released, in this quarter update, Enlightenment has been built from a fresh SVN pull from March 20th and the default Midori browser has been updated to the latest version, a more current build of Linux Kernel ( 3.2.0-19 ), software in repositories were updated to the latest version (Firefox11, chromium 17, LibreOffice3.5…) , also this release comes with some minor improvement, this include include resolving an issue that had prevented PCManFM’s application menu from working, E17′s everything module calculator feature now works out of the box and more.

        • Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 Review

          Bodhi Linux is a lightweight Ubuntu based distribution that uses Englightenment as its desktop manager. It is geared for those who have older hardware or who prefer lighter desktops compared to the heavier GNOME or KDE.

          Bodhi comes as an installable LiveCD which when first started, is quite similar to that of Ubuntu’s startup so if you’ve used Ubuntu before, you’ll feel well at home.

          The amount of diskspace needed is very low at a whopping 1.2 GB for those who want to install it instead of using it in a Live environment. Installation was quite simple with going through a few configuration steps and then from there and not too long after it’s installed. Installation times will vary depending on your hardware specifications.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Kindle for Android Gets Comics, Graphic Novels

      Amazon has updated its Kindle for Android app, brining support for Kindle Format 8 and a larger assortment of illustrated children’s books, comic books, and graphic novels to Android devices. It’s great news for comics fans as you can now read your favorite comics or graphic novels in stunning visuals on your Android devices.

    • AT&T promises Android 4.0 updates for ten more devices

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • KDE Tablet Vivaldi To Get 10-inch Version, First Tablet Received 3000 Orders

  • Meet Vivaldi: It’s Got A Real “Spark” For Open-Source!

    Meet Vivaldi, the new opensource tablet from the gang over at MakePlayLive. You might already know a thing or two about the Vivaldi, because it used to be called the KDE ‘Spark’ Tablet. What you should really know is that at heart, it is just a giant Google Nexus S. But what makes it so special?

  • Acer Announces Quad Core Iconia Tab A510 Tablet

  • New Kindle Fire months from production?

Exploring the Free world of numerical computation tools

Numerical computation tools that run on GNU/Linux platform such as Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora are a huge blessing for all mathematical computation ‘freaks’, be it students or researchers. The expensive proprietary utility, Matlab, may be a leader in terms of introducing newer applications, but the Free (as in ‘freedom’) Software alternatives available are not lagging in any way.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Chromebook May Get Cheaper, To Run On ARM Chips

    Tweet

    One of the major gripes about Google’s ambitious Chromebooks is its price. It is quite expensive given the limitations it has. If reports are to be believed Chromebook may become extremely cheap.

  • Sony Also Gets On Chromebook Bandwagon, VAIO Chromebook Coming

    One may wonder what future holds for Google’s Gentoo Linux based ChromeOS. The initial sales of Samsung and Acer Chromebook was not impressive. There were many reasons for the slow sales of the Chromebooks, but the future is bright as we move towards cloud-based computing.

    The ChromesOS is gaining popularity among hardware players, after Samsung and Acer now Sony is also joining the elite Chromebook club. Sony has reportedly submitted a filing for its first Chromebook to FCC. FCC E-filing is showing a Sony device which fits the bill of a Chromebook. Any doubt over it being a Chromebook is removed on the ‘manual’ page which specifically points at ChromOS:

  • Chrome OS Makes it Mainstream

  • Sony to launch the first ARM Powered Chromebook?

    According to some FCC leak and rumoring, it looks like Sony is about to release a new Chromebook and the FCC info may point towards it running on an ARM Processor! T25 is the leaked processor info, that sound like the Tegra 250 T25. I think the thinking was T25 is intermediary between T20 and T30, in between Tegra2 and Tegra3. Basically, I think, the hope should be that if it’s a Tegra2, that it has a new faster memory bandwidth and a higher clock speed compared to the “first generation” Tegra2 devices that were released back since the end of 2010!

SaaS

• OpenStack vs. Amazon and Eucalyptus Clouds

  When Amazon and Eucalyptus finally announced plans to partner on cloud computing, the big winners were cloud integrators seeking to move workloads between on-premise IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and Amazon Web Services. But ultimately, Talkin’ Cloud believes Amazon and Eucalyptus were reacting to OpenStack — which is available as both an on-premise or public cloud platform.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Forget About Google Docs, LibreOffice Cloud Coming Soon

• LibreOffice Cloud version releasing in April, Android version soon

CMS

• A Simple Image Gallery Plugin for Drupal 7

  Drupal is a hugely popular content management system, but for all of its flexibility and power it’s missing a key component: an easy way to manage image galleries. If you need to create and manage image galleries in Drupal, here’s an easy approach that won’t cost too much of your sanity.

• Dries Buytaert’s Software Powers A Million Important Websites — And He Built It From His Couch

  Dries Buytaert is programming wunderkind. He learned to program when he was six years old — even before he could read.

  Today he is internationally famous as the creator of Drupal, one of the world’s most successful open source projects.

BSD

• DragonFly 3.0.2

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GCC 4.7 Released, Supports More Architectures

Project Releases

• XBMC 11.0 Eden Brings Many Multimedia Changes

  XBMC, the very well known open-source multimedia / HTPC project, has finally reached its XBMC 11.0 (codenamed “Eden”) milestone.

Openness/Sharing

• Culture Freedom Day, the friendly companion to Software Freedom Day

Finance

• The Shadow Bailout: How Big Banks Bilk US Towns and Taxpayers

  The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again last week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times. In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates—the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps—were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt.

• TBTF Sheriff Bill Black on MF Global cover-up

• Food Stamp Use in L.A. Pauses At the Million Mark, Awaiting Oil’s Next Move

  For the first time in several years, the rate of growth in Los Angeles County food stamp use has slowed. That’s little consolation however given that total participation zoomed from just above 600,000 to over 1,000,000 people since the onset of the financial crisis. As longtime readers know, I’ve tracked the series as a backdoor view on rising energy costs–and in the case of LA County–gasoline costs in particular. | see: Los Angeles County SNAP Users vs. Price of Oil 2007-2012.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• CMD Asks Wisconsin Ethics Board to Examine Corporate-Funded Gifts to ALEC Legislators

  The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a complaint today with the Government Accountability Board (GAB) based on newly discovered documents revealing that numerous Wisconsin legislators have received corporate-funded gifts through their connections to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Although ALEC describes itself as the largest membership group for legislators, over 98% of its $7 million budget is from corporations and sources other than legislative dues. Documents obtained via Wisconsin open records law and other sources show that ALEC corporations are funding lawmakers’ out-of-state travel expenses to posh resorts for ALEC meetings with corporate lobbyists, in addition to gifts of entertainment and exclusive parties.