06.21.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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To see if this is truly a difficult task, or if the challenger is just another anti-Linux FUDster that is too ignorant to know how easy it can be to administer a Linux PC. This person does not really explain what is meant by “all apps”, so I am guessing that to mean usable in Office suites and programs like The GIMP by any user on the PC to set the font for creating documents and text in graphics.
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The Linux user spent the next ten minutes showing the other guy his system. He fielded the “complaint” of needing Windows for certain things by opening VirtualBox and demonstrating his Windows XP install within. He let the other student navigate throughout his laptop and provided instruction when needed.
In the end, the biggest obstacle was convincing him that the entire shootin’ match didn’t cost anything, aside from a Windows and MS Office license for his VirtualBox and even then, it was going to be largely unnecessary.
They then retrograded into a comparison of their classes the first semester, where each was from and other mundane conversation. After a few more minutes, the Linux guy shut down his computer and stood to leave. I glanced up at him and he looked in my direction.
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Desktop
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The answer is simple: Microsoft has a better, more aggressive marketing strategy. Moreover, companies prefer to purchase licenses so that that they can blame somebody when something goes wrong.
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Server
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Eucalyptus was one of the first companies on the cloud computing scene and Mickos is among the most respected open source entrepreneurs in the industry (having been CEO of MySQL AB before its acquisition by Sun Microsystems).
Mickos took a few minutes to share his thoughts on cloud computing and Linux, the new Open Virtualization Alliance, and how Linux has shaped our lives over the last 20 years.
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Mainframes are dead! I was told this when I first started working in the computer industry in 1994. However, in 2010 Mainframe revenue was approximately $2.55 billion. Perhaps Mr. Twain stated it best when he said, “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
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Kernel Space
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Future versions of the Linux Kernel (such as 3.0) will include support for the Xen hypervisor. This means that Linux distributions will typically offer out of the box support for both hosting Xen and running as a guest operating system under Xen.
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Applications
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The power of collaborative development is doing wonders in the world of computing. Open source software is no longer just a cheaper alternative to those premium software tools, but now they are technically superior and user centric too. There are open source alternatives now for all types of software’s in cloud computing, OS, editing tools, office suites and the list just goes on. Today we take a closer look into UM Player (Universal Media player), an Open Source media player which is in fact gaining huge user base in Ubuntu community too.
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Dolphin is the default file manager in KDE and it features an easy to use interface, tabs, previews, three view modes (icons, details, columns), vertical window splitting, file and folder sorting, service menus, tags, two-mode location bar.
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Proprietary
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First of, I never ever been a fan of Adobe Air apps, their lack of integration with the native OS UI (At least on Linux) is a big turn off of me. Hence when Adobe announced that they would be pulling the plugs off adobe air for Linux. My reaction, similar to that of many Linux users, was Meh
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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The Desktop Summit 2011 is a joint conference organized by the GNOME and KDE communities in Berlin, Germany from the 6th August 2011 to the 12th August 2011.
The organizing team is now inviting applications to hold workshop and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions at the Desktop Summit. Read on for more details and how to make a proposal.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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How do I make my debugging with KDE more productive? What steps do I take? How have you debugged KDE-based applications? I know about the KDE wiki page, but is there anything else?
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A desktop is more than just panels and widgets. It’s also an ecosystem of applications specially written to use its resources and to fit its concepts of usability. That means that when you weigh GNOME against KDE, you need to consider their applications as much as the desktops themselves.
Not all software categories vary with the desktop, of course. The time is long gone when KOffice and the only partly realized GNOMEOffice vyed with each other for users — although KOffice is becoming increasingly mature, and GNOMEOffice’s AbiWord, and Gnumeric are all going concerns, most people just use LibreOffice.
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DoudouLinux is a Debian-based distribution targeting young children, with a goal to make computer use as simple and pleasant as possible. The project’s version 1.0, code name “Gondwana”. DoudouLinux provides tens of applications that suit children from 2 to 12 years old and gives them an environment as easy to use as a gaming console. Kids can learn, discover and have fun without dad and mum always watching!”
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Cloud is the next big thing when it comes to desktop computing. There are many big software companies who are busy readying themselves for the cloud in one way or the other. First it was cloud-based or online backup services, and then cloud-based music, and now cloud-based operating systems are here.
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I always keep an eye out for interesting and different Linux distributions. There are quite a few which are very specialized, either for a particular purpose or application, or for particular kinds of hardware. One of those which caught my eye recently was AV Linux, a Debian-based distribution which includes a lot of audio and video creation and editing software. It is described on the AV Linux home page as first and foremost a well-rounded OS suited for most common daily computer tasks and runs on most Windows PC’s and Intel Macs. That’s fair enough, because it is a nice, solid derivative of Debian GNU/Linux – oh, and I should mention here that it is running Linux kernel 2.6.39.1, making it the first full release I have seen running 2.6.39 – but then they go on to describe the operating system optimizations they have made and the packages they have included in the base distribution, and it becomes clear that multimedia creation and editing is where this distribution is really interesting.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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One thing in Ubuntu, which has always hit rock bottom in terms of popularity, is Ubuntu Software Centre. The reason often cited is its weak design and layout. Lot of attempts were made, but none of them brought a wind of change in perception among the user community. The guys at Canonical have been under fire recently to resolve this problem. One more attempt is round the corner, Ubuntu Software Centre 5.0 is expected to launch soon.
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Flavours and Variants
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Last month I did a post detailing Bodhi’s desktop of the week contest. If you spent any time poking around the rest of our spiffy new website you will also notice that several other useful pages have appeared.
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I’ll tell you what, after all of that talk about forks last week, it’ll be nice to turn my attention to something less controversial today. Let me check my Topic O’ the Day board and see what’s next for discussion… Monday… ah, here we go…
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But despite the quiet origins of these forks, the problem has grown to the level where Linux kernel maintainer Linus Torvalds has publicly threatened to stop pulling ARM-related changes into the mainline Linux kernel; a threat that could effect dozens of companies’ livelihoods and the course of embedded Linux development.
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Phones
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Android
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Android operating system’s strong integration with existing Google products and the wide offering of devices and carriers, makes it a strong challenger for Apple’s iPhone and iPad.
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Rumored details have surfaced concerning the Nexus 4G, the upcoming addition to Google’s line of pure-blood, no-nonsense Android phones. The 4G will reportedly feature a dual-core CPU running at up to 1.5 GHz, along with the ability to record 1080p video. Traditionally viewed as a developer phone, the Nexus line may appeal to other sorts of buyers as well.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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anasonic announced it will release a ruggedized, “enterprise-grade” Android tablet in the fourth quarter of this year. The Toughbook-branded device will have a daylight-viewable, 10.1-inch touchscreen with active stylus, a GPS receiver, “full-shift” battery life, and an optional 3G/4G cellular modem, the company says.
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Huawei announced a seven-inch tablet that will apparently be the first to include an upcoming Android 3.2 version of Honeycomb — said to be better optimized for seven-inch designs. The MediaPad offers a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, as well as a WSVGA display with a pixel density of 217 points per inch (ppi), and is set for a global launch in the third quarter.
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It’s been a while since we’ve heard any major news about India’s ambitious $35 tablet, but a new report suggests that it’s finally inching toward reality. According to the Times of India, the controversial project is approaching the finish line with 100,000 units expected to ship this summer, starting this month. The government is expected to deliver 10,000 tablets to IIT Rajasthan in late June, while another 90,000 units will be rolled out over the next four months.
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Zemlin: Yeah. When you have open source components within a product — let me back up — today if you have a dedicated supply chain, you use a product data management product or some sort of supply chain management product to have data about your bill of materials across your supply chain. You get different components from different suppliers, they’re getting integrated into a factory somewhere, and so on and so forth.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Chrome Web Store is all the more important after the arrival of Chromebooks powered by Chrome OS- a radical-re-thinking of Google that assumes all the programs reside on the web. Chrome Web Store has almost anything you can look for! And thankgod, its not just apps related to work you will find some addictive games as well.
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Mozilla
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Ladies and gentlemen, a few minutes ago (June 20th) Mozilla unleashed the stable version of the highly anticipated Mozilla Firefox 5.0 web browser for Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
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As expected, the Mozilla Project has released version 5.0 of Firefox. The update to the open source web browser comes just three months after the project’s last major version, Firefox 4.0, which suffered a number of delays – Mozilla has adopted a version model similar to that used by Google for its Chrome browser.
One of the most important additions in Firefox 5 is support for CSS animation, a feature that browsers such as Safari have offered for some time. When creating a CSS animation, a developer specifies the animation’s duration and name in the CSS rules for the HTML element in question. The @keyframes selector associated with this name is followed by the rules that describe the element’s beginning and end points as well as optional intermediate stages.
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Webian Shell is a full screen web browser that has been designed to replace your current operating system. It can be used with Windows, Linux and OS X. Get the free download here.
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Mozilla today released Firefox 5, three months to the day after Firefox 4 was released. The new Firefox 5 release marks the successful debut of Mozilla’s rapid release process, which iterates new releases every three months.
Firefox 5 includes new performance, standards and privacy improvements as well as improving the overall stability of the browser for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android users.
“Firefox 5 is the fastest Firefox ever, and also the fastest ever to market,” Johnathan Nightingale, Director of Firefox at Mozilla told InternetNews.com. “Our new rapid release cycle means that the improvements get into users hands more quickly. The latest version of Firefox includes more than 1,000 improvements and performance enhancements that make it easier to discover and use all of the innovative features in Firefox. “
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Maybe you were asking yourself what happened in the Google Summer of Code Visio Import filter project since last week.
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LibreOffice gained a fresh burst of momentum last week as the makers of productivity software not only released a new, stable update but also announced the participation of Google and other big-name sponsors in its brand-new advisory board.
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BSD
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It is as easy to use as any other KDE-based Linux. But I don’t see much being done on this route of BSD popularisation.
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Licensing
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Now, we’ve released a freely available new white paper, “A Five-Step Compliance Process for FOSS Identification and Review” that discusses key aspects of two compliance actions: identifying open source in a product’s code baseline, and performing architecture and license reviews on the path to approving FOSS inclusion. The white paper reviews inputs, outputs, and essential process elements involved in five interrelated compliance steps: scanning source code; positively identifying FOSS, its licensing, and its provenance; reviewing licenses and license compatibility issues; reviewing architectural interactions of proprietary and open source components; and achieving final approval for FOSS use. So, download the white paper for some useful information!
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A Germany company that provides DSL modems, using in part the Linux kernel, is trying to deny another company the right to modify GPL’ed software. The company, AVM Computersysteme Vertiebs GmbH (AVM), says that Cybits AG is violating its copyright by distributing Internet filtering software that modifies AVM’s software. Harald Welte, who has spent a great deal of time pursuing GPL violations has intervened in the case.
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Programming
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Version 4.6.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is imminent. A 4.6.1 status report issued this morning signals there are no outstanding P1 regressions and that this point release branch is now frozen. The GCC 4.6.1 release candidate was subsequently issued.
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For a long time I’ve been thinking about just how much Github has revolutionized open source. Yes, it has made managing the code base significantly easier but its real impact has likely been on the social aspects of managing open source. Github has rebooted how the innovation cycle in open source while simultaneously raising the bar for good community management.
The irony may be that it has done this by making it easy to do the one thing many people thought would kill open source, more easy: forking. I remember talking to friends who – before Github launched – felt that forking, while a necessary check on any project, was also its biggest threat and so needed to be managed carefully.
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Standards/Consortia
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This Plugfest is a two day interoperability workshop on open document exchange formats hosted by the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology in Berlin, in collaboration with OpenDoc Society, the OASIS ODF TC, OASIS ODF OIC and the OASIS ODF Adoption TC.
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Adobe simply “is not serious about GNU/Linux,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “They’ve made many of their GNU/Linux releases second-rate and refused to release many products for GNU/Linux.” The longer the company continues on that path, “the more irrelevant they will become. … If Adobe cannot or will not compete in the FLOSS market, to hell with them. The world can cooperate to make the software it needs.”
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So, as The Economist observed in 1100100 [100 in binary] and Counting in its June 9, 2011 issue:
“The firm’s centenary is an occasion to reflect on many things digital, but one question stands out: why is IBM still alive and thriving after so long, in an industry characterised perhaps more than any other by innovation and change? This is not just of interest to business historians. As IBM enters its second century in good health, far younger IT giants, such as Cisco Systems, Intel, Microsoft and Nokia, are grappling with market shifts that threaten to make them much less relevant.”
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The Haiku operating system, which seeks to be free software and implement compatibility with the BeOS platform, has now experienced its third official release in ten years of development. Haiku R1 Alpha 3 is this new official release and it offers a lot of changes.
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Security
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Sony’s unprecedented spree of security breaches in the last two months may be finally cooling off, as profit- and attention-seeking hackers move on to other vulnerable targets. But it’s not quite over yet.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The CRTC’s hearings on vertical integration begin Monday. For the next two weeks, this means that the four major vertically integrated media companies in Canada – Bell, Shaw, Rogers and Quebecor – could face tough questions about whether they have the clout to dominate telecom, media and Internet services across the country and, if so, what should be done to curb that potential?
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ACTA
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Sources say that the European Parliament’s Trade Committee (INTA) will tomorrow consider asking the Parliament’s Legal service to answer questions about ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). Here are some questions the FFII would like to suggest. The questions may resolve uncertainties regarding ACTA.
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Join us for an informative discussion on the effects of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement on music. Known as ACTA, the agreement has been for years under international negotiation and is designed -amongst other issues- to drastically change the policies concerning counterfeiting copyrighted works.
While ACTA has attracted strong support and fierce opposition, this talk brings together trade associations, artists and academics with different views to discuss the effects of the legislation to the creative process. The panel will tackle important questions like: How the proposed ACTA will affect ‘fair use’ and equivalent practice? What will be the effects of the enforcement practices on the creative economy and music creativity? Issues of finance, property and matters of sampling/remixing will also be discussed.
Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ Awesome New Plymouth Theme!
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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As an example, to my knowledge the Android operating system is the most popular one for smart phones right now. Why? Presumably because of it’s ease of use. Android is at it’s heart a Linux distribution. It has simply been configured to provide an easy to use interface between you, the user, and the hardware.
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I was bothered to learn that my customization options for OS X were much more limited than I had anticipated.
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The new Commodores come with Ubuntu Linux installed, but eventually the company promises to offer a copy of ‘Commodore OS 1.0 ‘ which supports all old Commodore compatible software via emulation. Too bad the device doesn’t include a floppy drive or we could all dig out our copies of Lode Runner and Raid on Bungeling Bay and relive the 80′s. Er, assuming the disks are still good after sitting in a damp basement for 25 years. The company does say a “classic game pack” will come with the Commodore OS pack.
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Server
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The K Computer’s success marks the first time Japan has claimed the number one spot on the Supercomputing Top 500 since November 2004, when NEC’s Earth Simulator was dethroned after a two-year reign.
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In a race for new customers web space provider Bitpalast makes additional In addition to its Managed FreeBSD servers, web space provider Bitpalast now also offers Managed Red Hat Linux servers.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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One of the Google Summer of Code projects pertaining to Mesa / X.Org is to bring-up open-source OpenCL support with the Gallium3D driver architecture. There’s long been a branch of Mesa dubbed “Clover” that provides an OpenCL state tracker for the Gallium3D driver architecture, but it hasn’t been usable as there’s a lot of work to be finished. This GSoC project attempts to change that and there’s already been a big milestone achieved.
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Applications
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When people talk about BitTorrent probably thinks to download movies and music, often illegally and without permission of the copyright.But there is also a legitimate and legal torrenting you can do, especially on Linux.Forexample, most Linux distributions are available through the same ISO images via BitTorrent.
Having a good BitTorrent client is imperative if you are a Linux user,what is the right one depends on what you do and how you plan to use the sources.With this in mind let’s look at some of the best BitTorrent client available for Linux.
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Researchers at the PlanetLab global research network have developed a potential replacement for the widely used Unix sudo tool, called Vsys, that will offer administrators far greater control over what end users can and can’t access.
“Vsys is a tool for restricting access to privileged operations,” said Princeton University’s PlanetLab researcher Sapan Bhatia, who introduced the technology at the Usenix conference held last week in Portland, Oregon.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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PlayOnLinux is a gaming framework, based on Wine, designed to help you install and run Microsoft Windows games and programs more easily. Simple enough mission, dire-hard results. Playing Windows games on Linux using Wine is not a new concept, nor an easy one. The success of such endeavors depends on many factors. Some titles will run just fine. Others will plain refuse to even start. In between, there are thousands of games that can be run with varying degrees of luck and compatibility, mainly depending on user skill. PlayOnLinux tries to remove the user from the equation, creating an automated solution that should solve the setup issues so that you can focus on actual games.
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Games
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SpaceChem is one of the most addictive indie puzzle game released this year for Linux. The game has received great reviews from critics as well as users all around the world.
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Spiky Caterpillar with the collaboration of Hanako Games the developers of Date Warp and other visual novels for GNU/Linux are proud to release their next game Magical Diary: Horse Hall out of beta this month.
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There’s a common misconception out there (although I’m guessing a majority of the readers of this blog are aware of it) that software can’t be both libre and commercial (I use libre here instead of free to make it clear that I’m referring to free as in speech and not as in beer). This is a problem that the FOSS community has struggled with since the very beginning. Writing FOSS full time is difficult because, let’s face it, your internet connection costs money (not to mention other minor things like food and rent). As such, a lot of FOSS development, particularly game development, is done as a hobby.
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Desktop Environments
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In a very short while, I have had the opportunity to try three new desktops. KDE 4 (not new but completely unknown to me previously), Unity on Ubuntu Natty (not a new desktop, but a novel shell nevertheless), and GNOME 3. I shall describe my experiences in a big review of each, in three parts.
Part 1 concerned my experience as a KDE newbie and also provided some historical background on my desktop habits. This one is about Unity, Ubuntu’s new desktop shell.
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The system installer is probably the most obvious weak point in SliTaz. It’s brief, which is nice, but it’s missing options. It would also be nice if the installer handled partitioning (or offered to launch GParted) and made setting mount points easier. There are just over 2,700 packages in SliTaz’s repositories and the amount of available software (or the lack of) may be an issue for some users. The basics are in there, but it’s a small selection compared to the big name Linux projects. On the positive side, SliTaz is the smallest distro I’ve used that’s useful as a desktop OS right away. The speed is impressive, especially when running from RAM, and the flexibility shown by the developers, for example providing floppy images, is welcome. This is a good project to look at if you’re in possession of older equipment or plan to perform hardware testing, data recovery or other tasks requiring a live disc. I wouldn’t recommend SliTaz to newcomers to Linux, but for people who don’t mind seeing the command line occasionally and are passingly familiar with device naming, this distribution packs a lot of tools into a small bundle.
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New Releases
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15 June 2011. Out a bit earlier than expected, v2.5 is available. The virtualbox guest stuff seemed to be causing some trouble, so it has been removed. Added dynare 4.2.1 (from source) and some examples for a research paper. If you would like to replicate results from “Indirect Likelihood Inference” by D. Kristensen and myself, see the directory /home/user/Econometrics/MyOctaveFiles/Econometrics/IL. Most PelicanHPC users will have no interest in that, of course!
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DoudouLinux [1] is specially designed for children to make computer use as easy and pleasant as possible for them (and for their parents too! [2]). DoudouLinux provides tens of applications that suit children from 2 to 12 years old and gives them an environment as easy to use as a gaming console. Kids can learn, discover and have fun without Dad and Mum always watching!
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Red Hat Family
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Bulls led the way in Red Hat’s options with the Raleigh, N.C., company due to release quarterly earnings after the close Wednesday. Buyers shopped for July $45 calls. Shares rose 75 cents, or 1.8,% to close at $41.95.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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This is a frequently asked question: “What package manager shall I use?”. And my answer is “the one that suits your needs”. In my case, I even use different package managers depending on what I’m trying to do.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I personally don’t see google buying canonical happening any time soon. (Nor should they) Canonical’s business model is built round the very thing google wants to kill – The Desktop (as we know it)
Google’s business model is built round ads and cloud services, imperative to this model is the need to get everyone to the browser, the cloud and away from the traditional means of using the computer which involves having an OS built around local computer resources Hard drive, CPU, etc.. Ubuntu (Windows and Mac OSX) represent the very thing google is trying the get the world away from.
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A distinguished Website is asking the question: “Is Ubuntu on the way out?” They cite Distrowatch’s Page Hit Rankings as the catalyst for this query. According to said PHR, Ubuntu has fallen to the number three position in the one month tally behind Linux Mint and Fedora.
The the past year Mint has remained in the number two spot with Fedora occupying the third position. For the last six month Ubuntu’s popularity remained stagnant and fell within the last three months. And as said it actually fell down the chart this past month.
Some initial comments seem to indicate that premise is incorrect. Several assert that Ubuntu is probably just finding a new audience. One said, “I think the real question is ‘Is Ubuntu on the way out for new users?’” Another said, “I get the feeling that those of who are more power-users are moving over to other distros such as Fedora and Arch. Another echoed similar thoughts by saying, “Ubuntu is repositioning itself. It obviously is no longer targeted at the new comer. That role has been taken over by Mint.”
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As you well know, I’ve been going off a lot lately on how Canonical and Ubuntu made quite the mistake with Unity. Not only has it seemingly had the opposite effect of its name, it was quite poorly designed. Unity is filled with design flaws (such as the window menu system and the horrible new scroll bars that don’t always work) that make its usage less than ideal.
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Flavours and Variants
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Ubuntu may be the most popular desktop Linux choice, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the total install-base of its derivatives proved to be the more impressive of the two. Out of the box, Ubuntu does a lot right, but it does leave a lot up to the user in terms of installing codec support, tweaking tools that are actually worth using, common proprietary applications and of course, some eye candy. For that reason, distros like Linux Mint have deservedly earned a die-hard fanbase over the years, as it looks good, takes care of many basic post-install chores for you, and is enjoyable to use.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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It’s not just iPads, though. At CES, everyone and his OEM announced tablets, including the BlackBerry PlayBook from RIM, numerous Android tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, HP’s webOS tablets and even some Windows tablets. But, while everyone might want a tablet, or maybe two if they’re small, will these mobile devices find a home in business?
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Samsung announced a netbook with a built-in solar panel and 14.5-hour battery life. The NC215S also offers hybrid fast start technology, the ability to charge portable devices even when it’s turned off, a choice of Atom processors, and a 250GB or 320GB hard disk drive.
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With the open source adoption, the company estimates cost savings of close to ` 5 crore a year. With the deployment, MMFSL has reduced connectivity, power and other recurring costs by almost 90 percent. ROI was seen within three months of implementation.
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Adobe is dropping Linux support for their Adobe AIR development platform. To be honest, I don’t really care. Why? Because I’ve been careful enough to not tie my efforts to a proprietary platform.
I’ve had several groups offer to write applications/activities for OLPC Australia using proprietary tools like AIR. I’ve discouraged them every time. Had we gone with the ‘convenient’ route and acquiesced, we would have been in quite a spot of bother right now. My precious resources would have to be spent on porting or rewriting all of that work, or just leaving it to bit-rot.
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Web Browsers
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We’ve written before about bug bounties–cash prizes offered by open source communities to anyone who finds key software bugs–ranging from FOSS Factory’s bounty programs to the bounties that both Google (for the Chrome browser) and Mozilla offer. Over time, these cash rewards for the identification of software problems have become essential parts of the quality control process for many major open source projects, and not just browsers. Now, some interesting, specific information is emerging about exactly which kinds of bug discovers are capitalizing on this trend. You may be surprised at what some of the big earners in the bug bounty business are paid for their efforts.
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Mozilla
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It’s only three months since Mozilla outed the official Firefox 4 browser, but the fifth generation is already ready to roll.
The Firefox 5 release candidate emerged on Mozilla’s ftp server over the weekend, and barring a few tweaks here and there, the complete version is now available to download.
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Using browser extensions is a lot like tricking out your car with a new air spoiler, tinted windows, chrome rims, and big flame decals. Too much junk, and you bog down your ride and look silly. With thousands of Firefox extensions to choose from, the main challenge is finding the right ones–and avoiding the lame ones.
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The final build of Firefox 5 has been available for a few days from the Mozilla HTTP server and it appears that the company has successfully transitioned to a rapid release process. However, Mozilla will face headwind and criticism that Firefox 5 does not offer anything new over Firefox 4. Such claims aren’t exactly accurate: Firefox matters more than it has ever before, but Mozilla needs to realize that it has problems communicating what Firefox really is.
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Officially, Firefox 5 is scheduled for release tomorrow. However, users of the beta channel have already got their hands on it. One of the promises for Firefox 5 is better performance. We took tested Firefox 5 and benchmarked it against two other browsers – Google Chrome and Opera. We used the latest version of Google Chrome from the beta channel and the latest stable version of Opera – Opera 11.11.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Coding LibreOffice to relax a bit from studying tough mathematical problems? Reed why and how Markus Mohrhard works on LibreOffice!
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Back in September last year, as the LibreOffice announced its separation from OpenOffice.org and Oracle, I published a quick post comparing the relative success of a variety of forks.
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Almost three quarters after the split, LibreOffice (in red) has certainly narrowed the gap on OpenOffice.org (in blue), but not by a significant margin. However, it is too early to draw any conclusions.
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More filings with and orders from the court this past week with respect to the damage claims asserted by Oracle. You may recall that Oracle hired Boston University finance and economics professor Iain Cockburn to serve as its expert witness on damages it is asserting in its patent infringement claims against Google. The report Cockburn prepared has not been made public, but a copy was delivered to Google. Google perceived the report to be inaccurate, grossly overstating the potential damages, and possibly inflammatory. So Google’s next step was to challenge Cockburn as an expert (this is referred to as a Daubert motion) and supporting their motion with a précis (a summary of the Cockburn report) explaining their position. At the same time, Google asked the court’s indulgence in suppressing a good deal of the précis lest it become public and have the exact inflammatory effect Google was seeking to avoid.
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Licensing
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Tomorrow on June 21st a legal case will be heard before the District Court of Berlin which may have enormous consequences for the way that software is developed and distributed. The adversaries in the case are the manufacturer and distributor of DSL routers AVM Computersysteme Vertriebs GmbH (AVM), and Cybits AG (Cybits) which produces children’s web-filtering software. Both companies use the Linux kernel, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GNU GPL); a Free Software license permitting everyone to use, study, share, and improve works which use it.
The case was brought to court by AVM with the aim of preventing Cybits from changing any parts of the firmware used in AVM’s routers, including the Linux kernel. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and gpl-violations.org consider AVM’s action as a broad attack against the principles of Free Software, and thus against the thousands of individuals and companies developing, improving and distributing Free Software.
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I was invited last week to keynote at the Sixth OpenFOAM Conference held at Penn State University in State College, PA. OpenFOAM is a computational fluid dynamics software package released under GPLv3. I was grateful for this opportunity, because rarely do I get the opportunity to meet what I think of as insulated Free Software communities.
By “insulated”, I don’t mean that these communities are naïve in any way. They are, however, insulated from the usual politics of the general software freedom community. While the users of OpenFOAM are all familiar with GNU/Linux and other interesting software freedom packages, OpenFOAM users and developers aren’t generally reading blogs like mine or following the weekly discussions about copyleft and non-copyleft licensing, or debating with Simon Phipps what “Open By Rule” means.
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The key hack that made free software possible was a legal one: using copyright to keep software free. It did that by demanding a quid pro quo: if you use software made available under the GNU GPL, modify it and distribute it, you too must make it available under the GNU GPL.
[...]
Let’s hope the German judges see through this ploy – and realise just what is at stake here. The current case is nothing less than an attempt to remove what is a key guarantee for the sustainability of the free software movement. If AVM win, the danger is that the whole legal underpinnings of free software may be seriously compromised.
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Hardware
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Over the last few years, the Universal Serial Bus (USB) has become the universal interface. Starting in 1995, when USB 1.0 could only transfer 12 Mbps (Megabits per second), the standard started up slowly. But when USB 2.0 came along in 2000, with its 480 Mbps, the days were numbered for PS/2, serial, parallel, and even the FireWire interface. So, why hasn’t USB 3.0, also known as SuperSpeed USB, with its 5 Gigabits per second (Gbps), become the interface of choice since its introduction in 2008? Well, there are several reasons.
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Health/Nutrition
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9News, a local North Carolina news site has posted an unusual story of James Verone, who robbed an RBC bank on Thursday of last week. He had no gun but handed the teller a note that said, “This is a bank robbery, please only give me one dollar.”
Then he said, I’ll be sitting here on the chair waiting for the police. So, why did he do everything he could to get arrested? He says he did it for medical reasons. Verone has a growth on his chest, two ruptured discs and a problem with his left foot. At 59 years old, no job and a depleted bank account, he thought jail was the best place he could go for medical care and a roof over his head. Verone is hoping for a three-year sentence.
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Security
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Cablegate
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Earlier this month, the FBI served a subpoena on David House, one of the founders of the Bradley Manning Support Network who helped publicize the oppressive conditions of Manning’s solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Corps Base. U.S. Army Private Manning has been imprisoned without charges for his alleged role in releasing classified U.S. documents to the online whistleblowing website, WikiLeaks. House testified before a grand jury last week investigating WikiLeaks and invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Political and legal blogger Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com says if House and other witnesses are offered immunity, they will no longer be able to invoke this right and may refuse to cooperate with the grand jury, risking jail time rather than aid the investigation. [includes rush transcript]
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Finance
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An ICE committee that investigated the trades “found no evidence of intentional manipulation of the market; nevertheless it considered the breach to be of a serious nature,” ICE said in a circular on its website dated June 17.
Kelly Loeffler, Atlanta-based spokeswoman for IntercontinentalExchange Inc. (ICE), which owns ICE Futures Europe, said the company doesn’t comment on investigations. Joanna Carss, a London-based spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs, said she couldn’t comment on the matter immediately.
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We spent $700 billion to bail out the too big to fail banks on Wall Street.
And yet, we might have to do it again.
Why?
Because the big banks are still too big to fail.
And next time, we might have to spend $5 trillion.
It ain’t a pretty picture.
As Neil Barofsky knows better than most.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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US games publisher Take 2 has parted company with public relations firm The Redner Group, following Twitter comments concerning Duke Nukem Forever.
Redner’s contract was terminated after it said journalists who gave the game a poor review would be blacklisted.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Thousands of pages from one of the world’s biggest collections of historic books, pamphlets and periodicals are to be made available on the internet.
The British Library has reached a deal with search engine Google about 250,000 texts dating back to the 18th Century.
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A slowdown in the PC market has cast a shadow over the outlook for DRAM memory. However, losses in PC consumption of DRAMs are being offset by rising demand coming from the smartphone and tablet PC sectors. … The market for tablets looks promising for the foreseeable future
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Health/Nutrition
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
GNOME Screencasts – 01. Our first GTK+ application
Nokia N9 UI hands-on demo
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.19.11
Posted in News Roundup at 10:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The UN says three strikes laws violate Human Rights, Fedora wants a Code of Conduct, IBM and Oracle screw LibreOffice, Skype is reverse-engineered, Microsoft screws with their developers and Apple invents cloud computing.
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Kernel Space
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Nailing down the Linux kernel power regressions (see Linux Has Major Power Regression and Another Major Linux Power Regression Spotted) has made a big step forward this weekend. Not only to fix up these major kernel power regressions that are hitting many mobile Linux users, but to look further into the state of Linux power management is now possible and to closely analyze other areas of the Linux stack to find other areas for improvement.
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Applications
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So linux to the rescue. I do all my video editing in kdenlive, so the attempt at using iMovie was a bit of an experiment. With linux, I just connect my camera, and add the .MTS files to the project. From there, they can be dragged on to the time line and away you go. No fuss, no convoluted import process which does a conversion of the file to an intermediate codec causing a loss of quality.
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The default setting in the GIMP has a mouse pointer highlighter active. It makes working in GIMP difficult- to the point that it’s been mistaken for a bug.
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Physics is a natural science concerned with the study of matter and energy applying laws that govern natural phenomena. It encompasses the study of the universe from the largest galaxies to subatomic particles, covering mechanics, radiation, heat, electricity, sound, magnetism and the structure of atoms.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Gaming is becoming a more and more expensive pastime, with many new titles costing around $50 or even more. For console owners, this pretty much delivers a simple choice – either hack your device to allow homebrew titles and lose the benefit of network play, or else pray for an increase to the limit on your credit card.
For PC and Mac owners, however, there are the benefits of cheap re-releases further down the line, possibly bundled up with similar titles. While this isn’t ideal for everyone, it is certainly a popular alternative to splashing a half days wage on the latest gaming titles, but there is an alternative…
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Many GNOME packages have been updated for this 3.1.2 milestone. Some of the notable updates for this GNOME 3.2 development snapshot include a new Clutter release where COGL has been moved out-of-tree, Empathy has a new log viewer and supports CSS variants in Adium themes, a new experimental call channel handler for Empathy, improved SVG decoding with Eye of GNOME, GDM improvements, GNOME Shell enhancements, and much more. There’s also GTK+3 tool-kit improvements.
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Even since before Gnome Shell‘s official release, people have been hard at work creating some interesting themes for the new desktop environment. Changing themes in Gnome Shell isn’t hard thanks to some nice configuration tools you can install. With plenty of people sporting the new desktop environment in Linux thanks to releases such as Fedora 15, which has Gnome Shell by default, applying themes is quickly becoming a more desired action.
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A Live CD is a convenient and easy approach for users to try out an operating system and run pre-configured software, or do virtually everything that you can with an installed system. It’s a bootable CD-ROM disk that loads an operating system without the need to permanently install it on a storage device like a hard drive.
The origin of the Live CD was not a CD at all, but a bootable floppy disk. Usually, hardware manufacturers and anti-virus developers produced bootable floppy disks for various operating systems, to perform certain administrative tasks that were not possible with the OS already running. For example, anti-virus software needed users to boot their system in a known safe condition, so that any virus infections on the machine would not interfere with virus-testing activity. Hardware manufacturers distributed bootable floppy disks to allow the system user to test the hardware products without OS intervention, and to be sure that the firmware was working correctly.
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We selected Ubuntu as our base system, for its manageability, and also because most of our users are new to GNU/Linux. To re-build the distribution we used Remastersys, a useful software that packs your existing system into a ‘live’ disk image. Let’s look at how we did this.
To create a custom GNU/Linux distro, you need to install and customise the base distro first; so we installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu onto a system that was going to be our ‘build’ machine. Next, we applied all our customisation to the system, installed the software we needed, and applied customisations to the desktop.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia is a Linux distribution forked from Mandriva Linux by former contributors and members of Mandriva, As expected, there was a flurry of activities between the announcement of the fork of the distribution (on September 18, 2010) and the first official (stable) release (June 1, 2011). Teams had to be put together, servers and hosting and the required development environments set up, etc.
In the end, what we have is a community-driven and community-sponsored distribution in contrast to its parent distribution, which is controlled by a commercial entity. This article is a review of this new distribution and also marks its listing in the Desktop/Server Category on this website.
[...]
Out of the gate, Mageia packs all the features one would expect from an excellent distribution, and that is due, of course, to its being a fork of Mandriva.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) has a potential upside of 24.6% based on a current price of $41.20 and analysts’ consensus price target of $51.35. The stock should find initial resistance at its 200-day moving average (MA) of $43.25and further resistance at its 50-day MA of $44.73.
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Fedora
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Some folks just aren’t happy with GNOME 3. Some aren’t happy with the whole concept while others think it just really needs more simmering. Regardless of where you might fall in that spectrum, there may be hope yet. Juan “Nushio” Rodriguez, Fedora Ambassador and packager, has been working on bringing the deprecated desktop back to life for Fedora 15.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu 11.10 has received many new updates in last few days. Here is a quick summary of recent changes.
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Phones
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Hmmm… the official Maemo/MeeGo Twitter account just tweeted, “Rumours of my Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” Their previous tweet was from last December! Something is definitely up. This looks like another hint of a MeeGo announcement at the upcoming June 21st Nokia Connection event in Singapore.
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Android
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The news that Android users who have jailbroken their phones will be denied access to the new commercial YouTube pay-per-view service is as neat an example of copyright extremism as you could hope for.
Android, of course, is Google’s wildly popular alternative to Apple’s iOS (the operating system found on iPhones and iPads). Android is free and open – it costs nothing to copy, it can be legally modified and those modifications can be legally distributed. Android products come in varying degrees of lockdown; flagship devices such as the Samsung Nexus S are easy to set up to run competing, unofficial flavours of Android (such as CyanogenMod, which adds lots of useful features and controls to your phone that are missing from the stock Android version). Other phones use various kinds of hardware and software locks that try to get in the way of installing your own OS, and while Google doesn’t prohibit this behaviour from its vendors, it also doesn’t encourage it – until now.
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Google is activating some 400,000 new Android devices every single day now(source) and Android is already the fastest growing and most popular smartphone OS in many parts of the world. In tune with its rising popularity, Android’s applications base is also showing stupendous growth. We have already featured a bunch of must have open source Android applications and now here is a collection of Android apps dedicated to travelers among you.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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By now, most everyone in your circle of friends has played with a Kindle and an iPad. Fewer have picked up a Nook. But I’d urge you to give this dark horse a shot.
I’ve been testing the newest black and white version of Barnes & Noble’s e-reader, and, well, you can color me impressed.
The freshly-updated Nook is smaller and lighter than Amazon’s Kindle, and on those qualities alone it stands a excellent chance of capturing some more market share in the e-ink device game. But the new Nook also embraces social media sharing (and does it well enough), eliminates all buttons save a “Home” key (where’d they get that idea?) and ambidextrous page-turners, and introduces a responsive e-ink touchscreen that controls an intuitive interface.
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To drive that hardware Qi will provide a 6LoWPAN driver for the Nanonote or Linux box, but has also managed to connect it to a Linux Zigbee stack. Zigbee is free for non-commercial use, but that makes it incompatible with the GPL so the hardware isn’t named as being Zigbee compatible.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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From the programming viewpoint, Chromium is a solution consisting of 473 projects. The general size of the source C/C++ code is about 460 Mbytes and the number of lines is difficult to count.
[...]
Chromium had become the most quality and large project I have studied during testing of PVS-Studio. While handling the Chromium project it was not actually clear to us what was checking what: we have found and fixed several errors in PVS-Studio related to C++ file analysis and support of a specific project’s structure.
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Mozilla
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Firefox 4 was another milestone for the Mozilla team. Of course, with the growing popularity of Chrome, Firefox’s admiration seems to have taken a downward trend. However, the record-holding browser isn’t going to back down. In its next version, that is Firefox 5, the veteran browser promises to bring along features that will put Firefox at par with Google Chrome.
Here are 9 such features that will make you reconsider if you’re planning to switch to Chrome. Or, if you’re a Chrome user already, who knows, you might as well go turn back to the fox.
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The introduction of HTML5 and super-fast JavaScript engines to the latest web browsers has brought with it a wealth of new functionality. The focus seems to have been put on the ability to play video in a browser without Flash, or making games. But a project born out of a Music Hackday in Berlin is just as exciting.
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SaaS
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To get the latest from git, set up a LAMP server (sqlite works just as well as mysql). There are 2 options for getting the latest git: In the root of your web directory run: git clone git://anongit.kde.org/owncloud.git. If you use this method and want to help out we have instructions on our wiki on how to modify that slightly for a development setup (keeping your own files out of git and under your user while letting git update the system files). The other option for getting owncloud itself is to download the latest, automatically created snapshot from git: Snapshots are here. These snapshots are created on the fly so whenever you download it you’ll get the most up-to-date version possible at that moment.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation today announced the first members of its Advisory Board: Google, SUSE, Red Hat, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest, and the Free Software Foundation. The new appointees will serve for an initial term of one year.
The body represents The Document Foundation’s sponsors, with each sponsor having the right to one representative. They will provide the future Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals, and will consult regularly on the further development of the Foundation and its associated projects.
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In the Calligra Suite, we have a good separation between the so called Office Engine and the user interface. This engine has the responsibility to load, store, and save the contents of the document. It also renders the document on a canvas that can then be shown in an application for viewing or editing. The separation between the load/store/save parts and the rendering parts are not very strong, but it can nevertheless be seen.
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Project Releases
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced Apache Traffic Server v3.0.0.
Apache Traffic Server is a Cloud Computing “edge” service, able to handle requests in and out of the Cloud, both by serving static content (images, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files), and routing requests for dynamic content to a Web server (such as the Apache HTTP Server).
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Public Services/Government
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The purpose of this dossier is to analyse the most important criteria taken into account by the public administrations of thirty countries when adopting or choosing open source software, within the limitations inherent in this type of study.
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The tech world seems to move in spurts and spasms, and right now we’re in the middle of the “cloud” wave.
Personally, I find the term “in the cloud” pretentious and annoying. Don’t they just mean “online?” Yes, I realize that computer professionals are referring to something much more specific — “data and application software stored on remote servers,” for example — but the world’s marketers and P.R. people seem to think that “the cloud” just means “online.” (“Now you can buy your toiletries in the cloud!!”)
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The first juror to be prosecuted for contempt of court for using the internet has been sentenced to eight months in jail.
Joanne Fraill, 40, admitted at London’s high court using Facebook to exchange messages with Jamie Sewart, 34, a defendant already acquitted in a multimillion-pound drug trial in Manchester last year.
Fraill, from Blackley, Manchester, also admitted conducting an internet search into Sewart’s boyfriend, Gary Knox, a co-defendant, while the jury was still deliberating.
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Oral arguments in US appellate courts tend to be staid affairs, with judges asking probing questions and attorneys politely sparring over the finer points of legal doctrine. So Joseph Kish, attorney for alleged serial spamming firm e360, must have known he was in trouble when Judge Richard A. Posner interrupted him seconds into his opening statement to berate both Kish and his client.
“I have never seen such an incompetent presentation of a damages case,” Posner said. “It’s not only incompetent, it’s grotesque. You’ve got damages jumping around from $11 million to $130 million to $122 million to $33 million. In fact, the damages are probably zero.”
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Security
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- The Pentagon is about to roll out an expanded effort to safeguard its contractors from hackers and is building a virtual firing range in cyberspace to test new technologies, according to officials familiar with the plans, as a recent wave of cyber attacks boosts concerns about U.S. vulnerability to digital warfare.
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Cablegate
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Oliver Stone, the legendary and controversial American film director and screenwriter, recently shared his thoughts on Wikileaks, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning while speaking to students and faculty at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
In a series of rarely viewed YouTube videos brought to our attention by Blogger Maria Technosux, viewers will hear Stone (JFK, Natural Born Killers, Platoon) comment on an array of topics including global politics, war and freedom of speech. However in this post Wikileaks-Movie.com brings your attention to Oliver Stone’s comments on Wikileaks, Julian Assange & Bradley Manning. And while we have transcribed only these comments in this post, we encourage you to view each of these videos in their entirety.
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Finance
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I’ve been traveling a lot in recent weeks and had the pleasure of meeting policymakers in a number of countries. Perhaps the most interesting of those meetings occurred in a small workshop attended by a couple of policymakers who had worked with Timothy Geithner to bail-out Wall Street. Let me just say that these were intelligent guys with their hearts in the right places. While they probably did not think they were doing “God’s work” (as the Vampire Blood Sucking Squid put it), they certainly did think they were operating in the public interest.
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Goldman Sachs appears to be trying to clear its name.
The compelling Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on the financial crisis is wrong, the bank says. Goldman Sachs didn’t have a Big Short against the housing market.
But the size of Goldman’s short is irrelevant.
No one disputes that, by 2007, the firm had pivoted to reduce its exposure from mortgages and mortgage securities and had begun shorting the market on some scale. There’s nothing wrong with that. Don’t we want banks to reduce their risk when they see trouble ahead, as Goldman did in the mortgage markets?
Nor should shorting itself be seen as a bad thing. Putting money behind a bet that a stock (or bond or commodity or derivative) is overpriced is necessary for the efficient functioning of capital markets. Short-sellers can keep prices from getting out of whack and help deflate bubbles.
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One year after the passage of Dodd-Frank’s provisions on swap regulation absolutely nothing has been implemented.
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High food prices are likely to rise even further over the next decade, putting the poor at an increasing risk of malnutrition and hunger, a world food report warned Friday.
The joint report of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said the risk of price volatility that has hurt farmers across the globe remains high. The OECD leader came out to back France’s demand for increased transparency and more regulation and public information in the farm commodities markets as a key measure to stabilize prices.
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The Biden group is readying itself for the final sprint towards a debt deal. “Now we’re getting down to the real hard stuff,” Biden told reporters. “I’ll trade you my bicycle for your golf clubs.” The hope is to get to $4 trillion in deficit reduction eventually, and at least $2 trillion in the deal to raise the debt ceiling. But perhaps the strongest sign that they’re likely to succeed isn’t coming from inside the room, but from outside of it.
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Censorship
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Houston lawyer Jason M. Medley, as next friend to his daughter, has filed a libel suit on her behalf against three middle-school students who allegedly posted a video on the social networking site Facebook.
Medley says the intention in filing the June 14 suit was not for publicity or to “get on a pedestal and make some kind of an example” of cyber-bullying. “It is my goal to protect my daughter, not to make greater publicity over an event that was harmful to her,” Medley says.
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The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
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The U.S. government has created what it is calling an “Internet in a suitcase” to cheat the switches on the filtering regimes of repressive countries. A kit of hardware, the suitcase creates a “shadow Internet” within a country that allows users to communicate with each other and the outside world despite electronic censorship.
The suitcase was funded by a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of State, according to the New York Times.
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DRM
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If you thought that I was being ridiculous in saying that big corporations might want to do something as ridiculous as restrict your ability to use a camera, I give you Exhibit A, which has made the news this week:
Earlier this month, Apple applied to patent a system that could switch off a smartphone’s camera if it senses the user is trying to record a live event.
It’s nice to see that even creators are speaking against this concept. Every now and then, the big media companies like to trot out one of the well-known artists to say that piracy is a huge problem and DRM is vitally important.
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I realize its anathema to some, but one of the things I miss most about the transition from print to digital books is the ability to write on the pages. Oh sure, I can justify my notes and marginalia as being full of intelligent insights. But I think it all stems back from a love of coloring books and from adding my own creative and colorful commentary to printed pages. There’s also a lot of pleasure in that sort of mark-up: coloring in pictures, doodling in the margins, scribbling on pages.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A Utah investment company late Friday dropped its copyright-infringement lawsuit against 5,865 BitTorrent users who allegedly downloaded the movie Nude Nuns with Big Guns between January and March of this year.
Incentive Capital, which is embroiled in litigation with another company called Camelot Distribution over who actually owns the B-rated flick, notified the Los Angeles federal judge presiding over the copyright action that it was dropping the case. (.pdf) An identical Nude Nuns lawsuit brought by Camelot Distribution, a California company, was voluntarily dismissed three weeks ago.
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In this (non-embeddable, natch) video interview from the World Copyright Summit on June 8, Francis Gurry, the Director General of WIPO, the UN agency that creates and oversees global copyright policy, laments the current state of WIPO, saying that the copyright agenda there:
“… tends to be a negative one. It tends to be looking at the exceptions, the limitations, and the other ways of not having intellectual property. I’m very keen to see us coming back with a positive agenda for intellectual property.”
Translation: our job isn’t to figure out how to balance out freedom of speech and access with exclusive rights for authors and investors; more copyright is always good. And the subtext is, “All those public interest groups that have got us looking at rights for blind and disabled people, exemptions for poor countries, rights for educators and archivists, and Creative Commons-style ‘some rights reserved’ issues are distracting us from the real business of WIPO: maximizing copyright’s benefit for a handful of corporate giants.”
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Earlier this month we covered a UN report that argued that “three strikes” laws that deprive alleged copyright infringers of Internet access violate human rights. The report was delivered by an independent UN investigator, and so didn’t represent the view of any UN member governments.
Michael Geist notes that on Friday, Sweden made remarks at the UN Human Rights Council that endorsed many of the report’s findings, including the criticism of “three strikes” rules. The statement was signed by 40 other nations, including the United States and Canada. The United Kingdom and France, two nations that have enacted “three strikes” regimes, did not sign the statement.
“All users should have greatest possible access to Internet-based content, applications and services,” the statement said, adding that “cutting off users from access to the Internet is generally not a proportionate sanction.” It also called network neutrality and Internet openness “important objectives.”
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The saga of controversial copyright-enforcement company Righthaven may be slowly drawing to a close. A judge has dismissed its lawsuit against the Democratic Underground website, saying that the contract Righthaven struck with Stephens Media, owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, doesn’t give it the right to sue anyone. Righthaven has been “disingenuous, if not outright deceitful” in how it described its business dealings with Stephens Media, the judge wrote. It’s a loss that endangers many of the more than 200 copyright lawsuits the Righthaven has filed in the past year.
In his order, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt accepted in full the argument put forward by Democratic Underground’s lawyers that it’s simply not allowed under copyright law for Stephens Media to transfer only the right to sue, while keeping the many other rights that come with a copyright grant. Righthaven and its owner, Steve Gibson, tried to make the argument that Stephens Media really only had a license to use the material, and that Righthaven did indeed own the entire copyright. But that argument has now fallen apart with this order.
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A Las Vegas federal judge threatened to sanction copyright troll Righthaven, calling its litigation efforts Tuesday “disingenuous, if not outright deceitful.”
The blistering decision also places into doubt the litigation factory’s year-old business model, which is also under a Colorado federal judge’s microscope.
U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt of Nevada ordered Righthaven to explain why Hunt should not sanction it for trying to “manufacture standing.” Standing is a legal concept that has enabled Righthaven to bring 200-plus lawsuits on behalf of the copyrights owned by news agency Stephens Media of Las Vegas.
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There are three quick steps to angering a federal judge: first, launch the country’s largest file-sharing lawsuit against 23,322 anonymous defendants, even though most of them don’t live where you filed the suit. Second, request “expedited discovery” in the case, allowing you to quickly secure the subpoenas necessary to go to Internet access providers and turn those 23,322 IP addresses into real names. Third, don’t even bother to serve the subpoenas you just told the court were so essential to your case.
Federal Judge Robert Wilkins of Washington, DC this week blasted the conduct of Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver, the attorneys behind the lawsuit, calling it “inexcusable.” Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver helped kickstart the current frenzy of P2P lawsuits last year after filing cases under the name “US Copyright Group.” The 23,322-person case, their largest to date, involves the film The Expendables.
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Health/Nutrition
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A paper printout of an Electronic Health Record is often huge and unwieldy. If it is printed out or faxed it creates something so huge that it is pretty impossible to be useful in a paper record. This is the reason why need electronic interoperability solutions like the Direct Project.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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BP rejects all illness claims related to their drilling disaster. They dishonestly claim no one filed, though hundreds have surrendered their rights to sue by petitioning for relief and seem to have bullied doctors.
… the Louisiana District Court … ruled in February that Feinberg was acting on behalf of BP and had to cease claiming to be neutral. … [one very sick clean up worker's] denied claim included medical bills from multiple doctor visits, and the results of a test showing his blood contains alarming levels of toxins that are found in BP’s crude oil.
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Finance
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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This is the same state that recently made password sharing a criminal offense.
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Comcast, Road Runner (from Time Warner Cable), and Cox all use downstream shaping—but only Comcast and Cox also use upstream shaping
They could have spent the money expanding bandwith to meet market demand but currently allocate the vast majority of capacity to broadcast TV programs.
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Privacy
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What could possibly go wrong with corporate controlled biometric criminal identification which can be attributed to the wisdom of the crowds? Why does Big Brother need this kind of help when they have made everyone safe with CCTV? If you are F’d, please label all the rioters “Mark Zuckerberg”, “Eduardo Saverin”, “Dustin Moskovitz”, or “Chris Hughes” and quit Facebook.
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Civil Rights
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The branch of the U.S. government that typically deals with border control—Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE)—began seizing U.S. web domains of sites deemed to be involved in online piracy about a year ago. While the appropriateness of that process has been questioned in Congress and elsewhere, but ICE directors have frequently noted that the sites’ owners are free to challenge the seizure in court—but none have. Now, that’s no longer the case. A Spanish sports-streaming site called Rojadirecta filed papers in a New York District Court on Monday demanding that the government give back the domains rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org.
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Major legal issues on her desk relate to, among other things, the fair use doctrine, authors’ rights, and Digital Millennium Copyright Act recommendations.
Bas de Lange interviewing Steve Coast of OpenStreetMap
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.18.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Make no mistake about it. I like my Samsung Series 5 Chromebook a lot. I think it will become a major challenge to Windows on light-duty business desktops… eventually.
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This looks promising for GNU/Linux even in business.
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Server
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The ARM onslaught attack on the datacenter proceeds apace, as ARM server vendor Calxeda (formerly Smooth Stone) announces that it’s teaming up with Canonical and nine other software vendors to form a “Trailblazer Initiative” aimed at creating a full-blown ARM server ecosystem.
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Kernel Space/Compilers
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Yesterday we delivered the news that PathScale was open-sourcing their high-performance EKOPath compiler suite, which in previous days was talked about on Phoronix under the Dirndl codename when showing how fast this compiler was in relation to GCC. The community indeed is excited for EKOPath now being open-source (GPLv3) and in the Phoronix Forums are currently 15+ pages of comments. In this news posting are some more EKOPath details from the forums and some of what Christopher Bergström, PathScale’s CTO, has relayed in our community portal.
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Pekka Enberg has announced the release of the second version of the “Native Linux KVM Tool”. It offers SMP support, Virtio network communication via TAP-based interfaces and access to the host file system via Virtio-9p. Experimental GUI support using SDL and VNC has also been added.
With these additions the KVM tool has, in a short time, acquired many functions that are needed in typical scenarios and were still missing in the first version. Like Qemu-Kvm, the Native Linux KVM Tool handles the emulation of hardware components such as graphics and network chips, because the KVM hypervisor itself doesn’t deal with those tasks.
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Xen made virtualisation a popular issue on Linux servers and seemed for a long time to be the open source virtualisation technology of choice. But the Xen developers lost that advantage by setting the wrong priorities. KVM was able to take over some key positions and, with a large number of promoters, is now in a better position.
Originally created as part of a research project in the late 1990s, the Xen hypervisor was open sourced in 2002; the first official release of Xen 1.0 was made in 2004. From then on, virtualisation on Linux servers quickly moved into the centre of attention. Soon, there were the first serious indications that it would not be long before Xen support became part of the Linux kernel. Virtualisation was considered a important future market.
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Testing storage systems or any aspect of IT systems is definitely not an easy task. It takes careful planning, testing and hardware for proper benchmarks. Even if we are trying to be careful, it can be easy to forget, omit (either by design or as an accident), or misconfigure systems and benchmarks. Hence, the results are, unfortunately, less useful and maybe don’t meet the original requirements. Henry and I often call these Slimy Benchmarking Tricks (SBTs). The end result is that good tests or benchmarks are difficult to do well. Perhaps as a consequence, much of the benchmarking we see today is of very poor quality, to the degree that it is virtually useless and more often than not, entertaining (and sometime frustrating).
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Earlier this week we delivered launch-day Linux benchmarks of the AMD A8-3500M “Llano” Fusion APU. The results for this next-generation, quad-core Fusion chip were impressive with the graphics and compute power being several times faster than the common AMD E-350 Fusion APU. In that article we just had two other systems the A8-3500M performance was being compared to, but here are some more Linux benchmarks comparing Llano to other systems running Ubuntu 11.04.
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Applications
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Free Open FTP Face is a lightweight graphical (GTK+) FTP client written in python. It is multiplatform, emphasizes on simplicity and ease of use, while providing a rich set of convenience features.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The first major release of Oxygen-gtk has been uploaded to kde ftp servers on Wednesday June 15 and is available for download here.
This release comes with many improvements over the 1.0 series, which include:
* animations (smooth glow on mouse-over and focus for virtually all widgets, similar with what exists for the Qt version), controlled using the same configuration options as the Qt version, via oxygen-settings;
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GNOME Desktop
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Actually, Puredyne is not a project grown on the empty space. I would say it has dad and even granddad.
Dad is… dynebolic. Yes, Puredyne project was inspired by Dynebolic. They have lots in common. And most important, both are oriented to creative people.
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Debian Family
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The Debian project is pleased to announce the forthcoming start of a new round of IRC Training Sessions, which will be held on IRC by experienced community members. There will be two different series of sessions:
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Derivatives
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The first concrete outcome from the Debian derivatives census is the creation of Planet Debian Derivatives. For those of you who are interested in the activites of distributions derived from Debian, it aggregates the blogs and planets of all the distributions represented in the derivatives census. The list of feeds will be expanded semi-automatically as more distributions participate in the census and maintainers of census pages add new blog and planet URLs. Many thanks to Joerg Jaspert for doing the nessecary setup procedures for the addition of the new sub-planet to Planet Debian. I’m glad that it was accepted alongside the sole language-based sub-planet (Planet Debian Spanish).
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Arian van Gend is an Ubuntu user who has started a project to gather community ideas for Unity with the intent to present it to the Unity design team. But before doing that, he wants some feedback from you.
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Flavours and Variants
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So yesterday, I wrote a post asking if I should switch away from Linux Mint to a different distribution. Many comments suggested that I stay with Linux Mint, but upgrade to the newest version. A few others suggested Pinguy OS or Ultimate Edition. Still others suggested…Slackware, of all things.
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The Sourcefabric developers have released an update to their open source Airtime radio software that adds a number of improvements which make it easier to install and upgrade to new versions. Airtime is a server application which allows users, from any modern web browser, to upload audio, create playlists with drag and drop, incorporate track transitions, build complete shows and then schedule them for transmission.
[...]
The developers recommend using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a computer with at least 512 MB RAM and a 1 GHz processor.
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BoxeeBoxTips.com is pleased to announce our second “Win a Boxee Box” contest. The contest begins immediately and runs through midnight (PDT) on July 31, 2011.
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Hope this name is not too unfamiliar! Just for those hearing this for the first time, Tomahawk is a cross platform open source media player and it can play music regardless of where the music content is stored. It is gaining popularity as a media player among the Ubuntu community too. Tomahawk recently announced the release of a new version –the Tomahawk Media Player 0.1.
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Software developers on the outskirts of the e-discovery field are working on several open-source projects to make the electronic search-and-analysis process into a cost-free, standards-based proposition.
Independent projects are underway from a contract programmer in Houston, a team of information management experts throughout Europe and Australia, and a search engine consulting firm in Virginia. Their mutual goal: to help companies get respectable e-discovery software and make the technology feasible for every size of lawsuit and budget.
[...]
Starting points for that kind of software stack are Apache-licensed components such as the Lucene indexing and searching program interface, Mahout machine-learning tool, Nutch data crawler, Solr enterprise search package and Tika document filtering utility, he explained.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Over the past seven years, we’ve come to expect Firefox Web browser releases to bring major new interface changes, improved performance, and browsing tools. But since Mozilla decided to follow Google’s frequent release strategy, we’ll have to temper our expectations for new Firefox releases. Version 5 of Mozilla’s volunteer-crafted browser software brings a lot of fixes, but pretty much zilch when it comes to interface advancements or new user tools.
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Databases
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The open source NoSQL Apache CouchDB database is set to get a major performance boost thanks to commercial services vendor Couchbase.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Microsoft seems to have a tough ride ahead, they seem to have lost the patent case for its Office suite. Now open source tools from Open Office.Org and LibreOffice Suites are competing aggressively with MS Office for market share. The main reason is the Open Source tag associated with the first two choices. It is inexpensive and enjoys backing from a large community of developers. Today let us take a look at the latest release from the LibreOffice Suite- the LibreOffice 3.4.
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This week we saw the release of a stable version of LibreOffice with the 3.3.3 release, which in my mind is a big deal. Sure they just put out LibreOffice 3.4 recently, but putting out new releases (in a way) is almost easier than doing the nitty, gritty of maintaining ‘older’ releases.
Keeping two (or more) software tracks on track is no easy task for any open source project, but it seems to be one that the Document Foundation is pulling off with flying colors.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has added another organization — the Evergreen project joins the SFC as the 27th member project. Since we’re halfway through 2011, I took the opportunity to check in with Conservancy executive director Bradley Kuhn to see how things are going with the organization.
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Licensing
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The community edition will be released under the GNU Affero GPL v3 license.
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Programming
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In the end, we are happy to bring Git tooling to the Eclipse community and the Indigo release. I hope by the time this next year, the eclipse.org community has fully migrated to Git. It should be a hard requirement to join the Juno simultaneous release in my opinion.
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Science
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Sarah Palin may now dismiss global warming as a “bunch of snake oil science,” but just a few years ago, back when she was governor of the state melting into the sea, she was inclined to care about the subject. It’s well-known that she established a task force to address climate change in the state, but later flip-flopped on the issue. Yet as one exchange in the trove of emails released by the state of Alaska last week shows, Palin at one point actually took climate science quite seriously.
In an email exchange from July 2007, Palin discussed global warming with her brother, Chuck Heath Jr., who was taking part in a climate change study program for science teachers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the state’s environment commissioner. Heath wrote:
Sarah, I’m just about done with my 80 hour course on global climate change. Most of it has been focused on coastal erosion which is probably a bigger deal than you’re aware of … I have met some of the top scientists in the world on the subject and if you’d like, I can organize another advisory task force (which would include scientists, economists, citizens who live in these areas) who can give recommendations to the state. The problem is accelerating quickly so it would be good to get a handle on it now.
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Security
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Bitcoin, the decentralized virtual currency whose value has skyrocketed in recent weeks, faced a key test Monday as a veteran user reported that Bitcoins worth hundreds of thousands of dollars had been stolen from his computer.
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Cablegate
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The government’s recent declassification of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers corrects a 40-year mistake. But the motive may have had more to do with defending a current wrong than righting an old one.
Several months ago, the White House directed federal agencies to warn employees and contractors that viewing classified documents made public via WikiLeaks violated “applicable laws and…policies.”
After it was pointed out that this notice could be equally applied to the Pentagon Papers – long available on public bookshelves and a staple of modern history courses despite their continued “secret” status – the government announced that they would be declassified.
(Most Americans probably didn’t even realize the Pentagon Papers still were officially secret. Until that announcement, people familiar with the case expressed surprise to me that this was so.)
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.
Japan’s 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.
Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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It always amazes me how large corporations can never get enough money and constantly surpass the line between good business sense to complete corporate greed. For over a decade, Internet Service Providers have been providing unlimited Internet usage at a relatively reasonable price. Today, these same corporations no longer provide unlimited Internet usage and have imposed draconian data caps. They have moved from unlimited data transfer to a mere 80 gigabyte limit for $65 per month and an additional 1 gigabyte will cost you $1.50, even though it only costs $0.03 for the ISP to transfer it over their networks.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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In a major breakthrough on the WIPO negotiations on copyright exceptions for persons with disabilities, at around 1pm today, a non-paper “resulting from informal discussions among Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, the European Union and its Member States, Mexico, Paraguay and the United States of America” was distributed at the WIPO SCCR 22.
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Copyrights
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The League of Canadian Poets has lined up in support of the recent Writers’ Union of Canada resolution recognizing the lack of control over how licensing revenue is managed and the inability of Access Copyright to represent creator interests. As a result, the TWUC plans to investigate operational separation of creators’ and publishers’ interests in collective licensing. The LCP passed a resolution expressing support for the TWUC motion with plans to send a representative to the joint signatory committee investigating creator copyright.
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The battle over competing visions of educational copyright licensing in Canada is coming to a conclusion. One on side, there is Access Copyright, which argues that a comprehensive collective licence is an essential part of an institutional copyright policy. On the other, are the Canadian education institutions, who believe that a more flexible, cost-effective alternative lies in relying on the combination of purchasing works, site licences, open access, fair dealing, and transactional licensing. Having first faced a proposal for a massive increase in Access Copyright licensing fees and later weeks of costly, unnecessary Copyright Board interrogatories, the educational institutions are clearly ready to break away from the Access Copyright comprehensive licence.
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ACTA
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As Canada and the European Union continue their negotiations on a trade deal, a source has provided a copy of the EU proposal for the criminal intellectual property provisions. The IP criminal provisions was the one aspect left out of early drafts (the CETA leak from last year is available here). The initial EU proposal uses the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’s criminal provisions as the model. This includes ACTA Article 23 on Criminal Offences (criminal provisions for wilful trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy on a commercial scale), ACTA Article 24 on Penalties (including imprisonment), ACTA Article 25 on Seizure, Forfeiture, and Destruction, and ACTA Article 26 on Ex Officio Criminal Enforcement. Several of these provisions would require domestic legislative change in Canada that were not found in Bill C-32 (suggesting that an IP enforcement bill will be introduced sometime in the near future).
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We’re now a few weeks into “open season” on the final final version of ACTA, so expect to see random stories planted by certain folks about how “important” it is to sign the document and “live up to our international obligations.”
IBM 80′s ad
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.17.11
Posted in News Roundup at 8:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Cybernet announced a “zero footprint” computer built into a keyboard, featuring a dual-core Atom processor and a multi-touch trackpad. The Linux-ready ZPC-D45 is under one inch thick, but it provides features such as a CD/DVD drive, both VGA and HDMI outputs, stereo speakers, and dual Mini PCI Express slots, the company says.
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Until recently, it was a commonly held belief in the mainstream computing world that Macs are more secure than Windows PCs are.
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Whether you are a fanatic Windows user or another Apple fan boy hypnotized by Uncle Steve’s charm, there is no excuse for you to not try Linux. Contrary to what you may believe, you don’t have to go through all those complex command-line acrobatics in order to get a glimpse of the penguin. In fact, you don’t even have to install that blasted thing on your computer. In this article, we’ll show you how you can get a taste of the most-talked about operating system in town (yeah, we fanboys do tend to exaggerate sometimes), without the fear of crashing your computer.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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On this release of KDEMU! Pawly and I chat with Volker Krause and many other KDABians. Enjoy this beer filled episode.
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Kernel Space
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What happened, and where is Linux going? LinuxInsider sat down with Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin for an exclusive interview to get to the bottom of things.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Our Download of the Day today is Pidgin 2.8.0.
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Adobe/Proprietary
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Apparently, Adobe sees the future as Android/Linux and we can run Android on GNU/Linux so it may not be a huge issue, just a change in programming language. That must be much more expensive than building for GNU/Linux. That means a re-write.
HTML5, here we come.
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In fact, I think that the Linux community will actually benefit from this decision. Here’s how.
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Adobe Flash has always been a disappointment on Linux. Poorly ported , poorly programmed, a confusion that loads the processor and, often, makes the machine hang.
But this is the way that certain companies provide support to Linux. Very dubious quality.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Noble Master the developers of the medieval Risk-like turn-based strategy game Age Of Conquest are working on a new unnamed Real Time Strategy game.
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Prey lets you keep track of your phone or laptop at all times, and will help you find it if it ever gets lost or stolen. It’s lightweight, open source software, and free for anyone to use. And it just works.
Basically you install a tiny agent in your PC or phone, which silently waits for a remote signal to wake up and work its magic.
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Don’t get left in the dust Mac and Linux users, play rFactor today with CrossOver Games! Arguably, one of the best computer racing simulators, rFactor aims at being one of the most accurate simulator of its time. Play with a computer steering wheel, joystick or even a keyboard. To learn more about rFactor, visit the rFactor website.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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The latest incarnation of the GNOME desktop, version 3. has been out for a while. I’m one of those who is late to the party, one at which there have been very few compliments and loads and loads of complaints. At times, when you get something free, you tend not to value it.
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Hardware compatibility, ease of use, the size of a software repository. These three attributes are unique to each Linux distribution. But at the same time, each Linux distribution is at liberty to take and mix whatever it wants from any other.
This creates a rather unique situation, where good ideas quickly spread, and bad ones fail. And as a result, there are dozens of distribution updates each month, hundreds each year, in a race to leap-frog each other in the race to the top of the DistroWatch.com charts.
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New Releases
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Team Tiny Core announced a new version of its small-footprint, in-memory Linux desktop distro. Tiny Core 3.7 now allows read access to NTFS partititions, includes new icons for Editor and Run, and introduces “starter packs” that simplify downloading tools, among other enhancements.
Tiny Core Linux is designed to reside in RAM, and can fit into just over 10MB, according to the project. Components that are said to reside entirely in memory include: the Linux kernel, the BusyBox tool collection, as well as minimal graphics based on Tiny X.
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Red Hat Family
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The consensus estimate is the same as three months ago. For the year, analysts are projecting profit of 71 cents per share, a rise of 18.3% from last year.
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Fedora
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Plus you can load your KDE desktop up with useful and fun widgets to enhance its functionality.
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When I can, I try to participate in The Linux Link Tech Show when it is streaming LIVE… but even when I can’t I often listen to the archived recordings. When I find something interesting I’ll sometimes shoot Dann Washko an email with my thoughts. This morning I found myself writing a long email to him on a subject they covered on their June 15 episode (#407). I thought I’d post it here too.
It just so happens that several of TLLTS regulars had attended the Southeast Linuxfest the weekend prior and one of the conversations that Dann encountered there was about Canonical and Ubuntu. Dann spoke about the questions and opinions he heard raised and asked for everyone else’s opinions but he didn’t get a whole lot of feedback so I thought I’d provide him with some.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Lately there has been some uproar about the ‘dumbing down of interfaces’..KDE4 didn’t offer the settings 3 did, Gnome dumbs everything down, and maybe Apple did the same the last decade. I couldn’t tell because I never touch anything Apple, and the only time I did the software crashed and all this dumbing down for the sake of usability! However in my opinion, they are wrong. They confuse ‘usability’ with ‘approachability’. Which leads to software which many times is not user friendly.
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A small but useful feature for the CD ISOs of Fedora, openSUSE, MeeGo, and many other Linux distributions is that they are spun as hybrid ISOs. Hybrid ISOs allow the same CD ISO to be copied directly to a USB storage device (i.e. flash drive) without needing to rely upon any external utilities. Ubuntu ISOs have not supported this feature, but they do have their easy-to-use start-up disk creator to take care of this task. However, the daily ISOs for the Ubuntu Oneiric development cycle and all official Ubuntu CD releases going forward for i386 and x86_64 platforms will be now spun as hybrid ISOs.
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Raising Linux’s visibility, generating excitement and creating name recognition are all among the ways Schroder believes Ubuntu has benefited Linux.
Its most significant contribution of all, however, has been “building a true community infrastructure that provides a clear path for users to become contributors, and for newbies to get mentoring and support,” wrote Schroder. “The lack of this is one of the biggest shortcomings of FOSS.”
Regardless of one’s views about Ubuntu’s latest particulars, “fostering a community and providing a space for noobs to learn and grow is a special skill set and a lot of work,” she concluded. “But for Linux and FOSS to continue to grow it’s the most important job of all, and Ubuntu and Canonical deserve credit for giving this a high priority.”
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1. Tell as much as you’re willing about your “real life” like name, age, gender, location, family, religion, profession, education, hobbies, etc.
Hi, I am Alan Bell, a 36 year old geek from Surrey in the UK, where I live with my family and pet chickens. My day job is helping organisations to use and get value from Free Software. As for education, I pursued a degree in Computer Science at Nottingham University, but never quite caught the thing.
2. When and how did you become interested in computers? in Linux? in Ubuntu?
My first home computer was a ZX Spectrum +2 (the one with the built in tape drive) which I loved, especially the manual which taught me programming and trigonometry and calculus and electronic logic circuits. I was quite disappointed when I got a Commodore Amiga and there were no circuit diagrams in the manual. Now computers just come with an EULA which doesn’t teach you anything useful. Kids these days don’t know what they are missing! When I first encountered Linux it didn’t have a GUI and I wasn’t that impressed (but I did like the GPL from the moment I read that). It was some years later when X worked on Linux and graphical toolkits became available that it started looking interesting to me, but it took quite a lot of additional years before I started using Ubuntu full time.
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This week has been busy. Lots of bits and pieces are coming together in Oneiric and the status overview might give you an idea how each feature is progressing.
If you look at the release schedule for Ubuntu 11.10 you can see that Oneiric is still in the development phase, where most of the heavy lifting is being done and where things are still broken.
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There are a bunch of different stories around one of our favorite Linux Distros this week. In the podcast we talked about Shuttleworth saying he is thinking about dropping Firefox for Chrome. As with most things like this we don’t think it’s a big deal because you can always just install Firefox after you have installed the machine.
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Ubuntu ISO images used to require the USB startup disk creator utility to be able to write the ISO image to USB (flash) sticks.
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In its apocalyptic battle with both Microsoft and Apple, there is one thing that both companies have that Google does not: a desktop OS. Chrome OS at best, is just a bridge OS. No matter how one looks at things today, there are hundreds of millions of machines out there powered by Windows or Mac OSX.
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The latest and greatest version of Ubuntu, 11.04 Natty Narwhal, was released on 28th April 2011. Ubuntu is now the most popular desktop operating system, and with this release, Canonical has made some major changes—both up front, and under the hood. Read on to learn more.
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Flavours and Variants
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Since the release of the Linux Mint Debian Edition distribution last December, and then the Linux Mint Xfce distribution which is also based on Debian rather than Ubuntu, I have found myself moving more and more toward using these Debian-based distributions rather than the Ubuntu-based Mint 11. In a lot of ways these Mint distributions seem to offer a good combination of a solid Debian base, with a choice between the standard 2.6.32 kernel (which is in the current Debian stable distribution) and the latest 2.6.38 kernel (which is in the current Mint 11 distribution), plus all of the excellent Mint utilities (such as MintMenu and MintUpdate), and the excellent software, application and utility selection that are included on all of the Mint distributions. I can’t put my finger on any specific thing that makes me prefer these Debian based distributions to the standard Mint 11, but it is a sort of general feel, consistency and reliability.
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Bodhi Linux is a relatively new GNU/Linux distribution being developed by Jeff Hoogland. I had read couple of reviews of Bodhi Linux earlier, but comment from the maintainer of Bodhi Linux in the review of MacPup 520 Linux ( you can read this review here ) , made me take notice of Bodhi Linux, and I decided to give Bodhi Linux a try.
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Phones
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Android
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Starbucks has introduced an application that lets users pay for coffee and other treats from the java chain via their Android smartphones. Available free, the software works at nearly 9,000 locations, according to the company.
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I don’t think Linus gets enough credit for helping to define (albeit unintentionally) the ideas behind open innovation a decade before books started appearing about it. In terms of achievement, it’s arguably up there with the Linux kernel and Git.
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The idea that FLOSS is irrelevant in licensing collapses under its own weight when the complexity of IT systems makes the valuation of licences impossible. VDI does that. It expands the problem that already existed with virtual machines on servers and compounds it. One does not need a licensing regime as complex as one’s IT system. FLOSS rationalizes the problem of accounting for licences by trumping complexity with four simple freedoms: use, openness, modification and copying. Use FLOSS.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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This is really cool, and a really good idea. Mozilla is working on a project that will allow PDF documents to be rendered within the browser using HTML5 and JavaScript as opposed to having to rely on a separate plug-in.
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Firefox 5 is nearing completion and likely will be out next week. As opposed to Firefox 4 which introduced a new UI, tab panorama, jetpack, sync and apptabs, Firefox 5 sure does feel a bit ‘light’ on the big features side.
It does however have at least on amazing under the hood feature that will make Firefox 5 the fastest Mozilla browser ever. Unfortunately Mozilla’s product people haven’t chosen to productize the feature name but that doesn’t make it any less important.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Except over at LibreOffice, where one of our new contributors, Pierre-André Jacquod, worked on this earlier this year. This work is present already in our 3.4.
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Speaking of The Document Foundation, Italo Vignoli of the steering committee, today announced the release of LibreOffice 3.3.3. This latest release “fixes several bugs and improves the security of the suite, to specifically address the needs of corporate deployments, where stability is more important than new features.”
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The conversations about OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice these past few weeks have put forks on my mind lately.
There are two long-standing opinions about forks in the FLOSS community: they weaken projects or they strengthen projects. There are interesting arguments on either side of the debate, but if history is any judge, there is a strong trend: the project that forked away from the mainline project tends to be the ultimate survivor.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Today, the Software Freedom Conservancy welcomes the Evergreen project as its newest member. Evergreen joins twenty-six other Conservancy members, who receive the benefit of aggregated non-profit status available to all Conservancy member projects.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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The nerds at Adafruit, our favorite open source hardware makers, have just released the iCufflinks, handsome, battery powered glowing cufflinks that pulse at the same speed as the Macbook’s “sleep” light. The circuitry inside is entirely open source (you can grab the source here) and the $128 links are made in North America.
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Programming
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Tools vendor ActiveState is acquiring cloud startup Phenora which develops a Perl cloud platform. The Phenora platform will complement ActiveState’s Stackato Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) effort which was announced in May.
Among the many things that make Phenora an interesting company is the fact that is it run by its 15-year-old founder, Daniil Kulchenko, who is still in high school.
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Science
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Using FAST’s unparalleled sensitivity and high surveying speed, the project is expected to enable the surveying of neutral hydrogen in the Milky Way and other galaxies, the detection of new pulsars (both galactic and extragalactic), the search for the first shining stars, and of perhaps most interest to many people, the search for extraterrestrial life. It is expected to be able to detect transmissions from over 1,000 light years away.
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Health/Nutrition
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It’s springtime in Colombia, and coffee experts from every part of the globe have convened in Santa Marta, a small city on the Caribbean coast. It is time to award the coffee industry’s most prestigious prize. The taste mavens make ready: Alberto Trujillo is deep into his pre-sip calisthenics, which consist of knee bends and alternating leg shakes. The Tijuanan has to prime his body, nose, and mouth for the so-called cupping that’s about to commence. As any java snob can tell you, to cup is to scrutinize the tastes and aromas of freshly brewed coffee. But Trujillo is no ordinary java snob, and what he’s girding for is no ordinary cupping. He has been certified by the Coffee Quality Institute as a licensed Q Grader, a person who can boast experience in everything from roast identification to sensory triangulation. And he’s about to serve as a judge in the annual Cup of Excellence competition.
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Security
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Let’s take some inventory. The latest attack is against the IMF, the International Monetary Fund which acts as kind of an overseer of the industrial world’s economic activity. They just got hit.
As the article goes on to list, that’s only the latest breech. There’s Sony Playstation accounts (which I just mocked here), aerospace defense contractor Lockheed Martin’s network, North American Citibank, an email database (Epsilon, an email marketing firm) related to BestBuy and Target, and an attack perpetrated through Gmail.
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Cablegate
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In this Jan. 17 1973 file picture, Daniel Ellsberg speaks to reporters outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles. Ellsberg’s co-defendant, Anthony Russo is at center right. Forty years after the explosive leak of the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study chronicling deception and misadventure in U.S. conduct of the Vietnam War, the report is coming out in its entirety on Monday, June 13, 2011. The 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks disclosure of its time, a sensational breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon’s presidency and prompted a Supreme Court fight that advanced press freedom.
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The declassification and online release Monday of the full original version of the Pentagon Papers – the 7,000-page top secret Pentagon study of US decision-making in Vietnam 1945-67 – comes 40 years after I gave it to 19 newspapers and to Senator Mike Gravel (minus volumes on negotiations, which I had given only to the Senate foreign relations committee). Gravel entered what I had given him in the congressional record and later published nearly all of it with Beacon Press. Together with the newspaper coverage and a government printing office (GPO) edition that was heavily redacted but overlapped the Senator Gravel edition, most of the material has been available to the public and scholars since 1971. (The negotiation volumes were declassified some years ago; the Senate, if not the Pentagon, should have released them no later than the end of the war in 1975.)
In other words, today’s declassification of the whole study comes 36 to 40 years overdue. Yet, unfortunately, it happens to be peculiarly timely that this study gets attention and goes online just now. That’s because we’re mired again in wars – especially in Afghanistan – remarkably similar to the 30-year conflict in Vietnam, and we don’t have comparable documentation and insider analysis to enlighten us on how we got here and where it’s likely to go.
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Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson has savaged The Guardian and New York Times for attempting to rush the publication of WikiLeaks material, suggesting the issue contributed to the falling-out between the online whistleblower site and the doyens of the progressive mainstream media.
The Guardian and The New York Times were the key English-language vehicles for the release of both the Iraq and Afghanistan “war logs” and the initial tranche of diplomatic cables WikiLeaks continues to release via over 50 outlets around the world. However, relations between the newspapers and WikiLeaks soured and both outlets and their senior staff have since launched stories highly critical of Julian Assange. The New York Times has also been revealed to have allowed the State Department to veto and censor WikiLeaks material.
Hrafnsson told Crikey the relationship between WikiLeaks and the newspapers had been going sour from before the release of the Iraq War logs in October 2010. “[The Guardian] said they’d been promised exclusivity; Julian said, ‘no — that was only for the print media.’”
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HENRY KISSINGER said he “must be stopped at all costs”. Richard Nixon was more blunt: “We got to get this son of a bitch.” And oh, how they tried, creating a team of operatives whose dirty tricks would eventually sink the president himself. But Daniel Ellsberg proved an elusive target, and anyway his work was already done. Forty years ago this week the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, the largest leak of classified documents in American history until WikiLeaks came along.
Julian Assange’s outfit is Barack Obama’s problem, and though the current administration lacks the vindictiveness and criminality of the Nixon White House, it has pursued leakers with just as much vigour. After promising the most transparent administration in history, Mr Obama and his Justice Department have pressed criminal charges against five suspected leakers under the Espionage Act, more than all other administrations combined, including Nixon’s.
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Wikileaks-Movie.com is pleased to introduce Clark Stoeckley, driver of the world’s first Wikileaks Truck called the “WikiLeaks Top Secret Mobile Information Collection Unit” and member of the Anonymous Theater Art Group. As many have remarked, when it comes to the Wikileaks story, ”You just can’t make this s__t up!” The issues are serious but there is plenty of room and an important role for levity, art and theatrics.
And now, just as we are watching new episodes of “The Lulz Boat” and taking in our daily dose of “JuiceMedia RapNews”, here comes Clark driving along in his thought provoking “WikiLeaks Top Secret Mobile Information Collection Unit” making the White House and U.S. Secret Service a little nervous.
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Finance
Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus (see Stuxnet context)
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.16.11
Posted in News Roundup at 8:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Software updates are one of the main areas of IT, mainly because of continuous security and enhancement updates. Microsoft usually releases a huge number of security updates each month, and even though they get criticised for this, GNU/Linux has a high number of updates as well, particularly Fedora which is treated as beta or cutting edge versions of free and open source software.
[...]
Also, the RPM system can provide a complete list of packages installed with the command “rpm -qa”. And, logs of the RPM installation process are always logged to /var/log/messages. Reporting could be set up to pull this data, however to date I have not discovered a central system for producing these types of reports. This is where the Kace/Dell Kbox steps in and uses a running agent on each client to gather data into a central SQL database.
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While Dell seems confused about tablets they seem less confused about notebooks.
“Built For Businesses
With Linux Operating System”
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Alexander Swen is a true Linux evangelist. Since 1996, when he started using Linux-Mandrake on his home computers, he’s been happily converting friends and family to the OS—even getting his parents on board. “I think everyone should use Linux,” he says. “And I want to help promote it any way I can.”
But Alexander wasn’t always a Linux man. In fact, even as he built up his Linux empire at home, he continued to work as a Windows admin up until 2004, when he finally realized he had to make a change. “I had become more and more frustrated by the instability,” he says. “And when a surprise update ended up ruining a working system, I decided that I had to move away from my Windows career—and start working as a Linux admin.”
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Chrome OS
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Under the hood, a Chromebook is a Linux system, customized by Google that runs the Chrome browser as its interface. That’s your desktop–a browser. It’s efficient and I use Chrome exclusively as my browser anyway. So, it’s a natural fit for someone who uses Linux, the Chrome browser and has a keen interest in the Cloud.
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IHS iSuppli published the results of a teardown of the 3G version of Samsung’s Chrome OS-based Series 5 Chromebook — which began shipping today for $500 — and estimates the solidly-built notebook cost $334.32 to build. Meanwhile, an eWEEK review of the Wi-Fi only Series 5 was similarly impressed with the hardware, but questioned whether Chrome OS would find many takers.
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If you want a Windows laptop, get a Windows laptop. But, if you want an easy-to-use, Web-based laptop, consider getting a Chromebook. So long as you realize that the Samsung Series 5 and its brother from another company, the Acer Chromebook, is not a full-featured Windows or Linux notebook computer you’ll be fine.
So it is that I’m pretty happy with my brand new Samsung Series 5 3G even though CNET gave it a just “ok” rating pending software improvements. While neither Chromebook will be generally available until June 15th, I was able to get my hands on one a week early. I’ve been working with mine for several days now and this is what I’ve found.
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The first few Chromebooks from Acer and Samsung feature a clean, clutter free design. Solid black, or black with a white top, and no stickers. A refreshing change from “Intel Inside” and “Made for Windows” stickers that accompany most PC laptops. The Chromebooks look good. The Chromebooks are small and light, and claim battery life between six and eight and a half hours of continual use. They come with standard ports and a webcam, but what is most interesting about the machines is what not listed. Google doesn’t draw attention to the tiny, and extremely fast, SSD hard drive, or the the amount of RAM in the machine, an intentional dismissal of their importance. Plainly said, it doesn’t matter, Chromebooks have speed where it matters, and are meant for only one thing.
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Server
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With Intel’s top brass bad-mouthing ARM-based servers, upstart server chip maker Calxeda can’t let Intel do all the talking. It has to put together an ecosystem of hardware and software partners who believe there’s a place for a low-power, 32-bit ARM-based server platform in the data center.
To that end, Calxeda, formerly known as Smooth-Stone, is launching the “trailblazer initiative” – a team of 10 software companies that will support upcoming servers based on Calxeda’s impending ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC) designs
The Calxeda ARM super friends include Autonomic Resources, Canonical, Caringo, Couchbase, Datastax, Eucalyptus Systems, Gluster, Momentum SI, Opscode, and Pervasive.
Canonical is of course, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, which is now first in line as the server operating system of choice for Calxeda ARM-based servers.
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Officials with Calxeda, the startup that’s building ARM-based chips for low-power data center servers, announced a “Trailblazer” program designed to create an ecosystem around its technology. But, while Calxeda touted support from Ubuntu Linux sponsor Canonical, among other companies, there’s been no hint from Microsoft that it will create a server edition of its ARM-based “Windows 8.”
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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We’re proud to announce the second version of the Native Linux KVM tool! We’re now officially aiming for merging to mainline in 3.1.
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Has it really been twenty years? Yes, yes, it has been twenty years since Linus Torvalds announced that he was working on “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.” Twenty years of Linux later, The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating Linux’s growth, has announced the program for this year’s LinuxCon North America taking place in Vancouver, B.C. August 17-19, 2011.
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The Linux Foundation has announced its program and schedule for this year’s LinuxCon North America event taking place in Vancouver, B.C. August 17-19, 2011.
LinuxCon is the world’s leading conference addressing all matters Linux for the global business and technical communities. LinuxCon includes in-depth technical content for developers and operations personnel, as well as business and legal insight from the industry’s leaders.
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What do we have in it? More than in -rc2. I’m clearly not the only one who was in Japan for LinuxCon, or something else just made people wake
up.
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Graphics Stack
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The Catalyst 11.6 for Linux build isn’t particularly exciting. Release notes for the 11.6 driver haven’t been made publicly available yet, but if they do emerge, they’ll basically say there’s installer/uninstaller improvements, support for reading the highest available memory clock from AMDCCCLE, and some other minor changes / bug-fixes. That’s about it.
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Applications
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The Boxee development team has announced that it will be bringing the open source version of the Boxee media centre back in line with the version of the software that it has been developing for the Boxee Box by D-Link. For the past eight months, the “downloadable” version of the software – which can run on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and Apple TV – has languished at version 0.92 with no updates, while the developers concentrated on the Boxee Box development where the firmware version has seen new features added and bugs fixed.
In May, the company delivered version 1.1 of the firmware version of Boxee, and now, in a post on the Boxee blog, CEO & Co-founder Avner Ronen says that the team hope to have new builds of the open source software available “this fall”. These new builds will include the features that current Boxee Box owners already have, including an updated browser, improved audio and video playback and support for even more content providers.
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I didn’t include here applications like GIMP or Krita since they are full-fledged image manipulation applications, not just simple painting programs, nor Scribus or Inkscape since they serve different purposes. This article overviews 7 8 simple drawing applications for both KDE and GNOME.
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Oftentimes reminder applications live as add-on apps to much more complex software programs. Email-Reminder is a standalone app that does one thing and does it well. Its way of reminding you of your tasks is by sending you an email at the appointed time. That’s rendered even more effective if you happen to carry email access at all times via a smartphone.
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Apache Traffic Server, the high performance caching HTTP/1.1 proxy server, has been updated to version 3.0.0 and is now a 64 bit application. In benchmarks, Apache Traffic Server 3.0.0 has been able to handle 200,000 requests per second, which the developers say is a 277% improvement over version 2.0.
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Proprietary
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The worst part? Adobe doesn’t even have the gall to respond to their users about the lack of updates.
Flash isn’t the only thing Adobe plans to screw it’s desktop Linux users on though. As of version 2.7 Adobe’s Air technology will no longer support desktop Linux. At least the developers at Adobe labs have the spine to tell us the are dropping support for the Linux desktop with Air instead of just leaving us wondering.
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Given the recent popularity of standards-driven HTML5 applications on a variety of platforms, including Windows, iOS, and Linux distributions, it seems pretty silly for Adobe, makers of Flash, to tick off even one set of platform users.
Yet, as Caitlyn Martin pointed out last week, that’s exactly what they may have done. It seems that Abobe’s Flash Player is still not available for 64-bit Linux users, despite promises in 2010 to serve this particular platform.
To Adobe’s credit, Martin’s initial column did illicit a promise from Adobe that they would indeed be getting out a 64-bit Linux product “later this year.” But, really, are we still living in an age where platforms like this have to cajole proprietary vendors to get with the program?
Apparently so. In terms of 64-bit Linux specifically, it used to be a small minority of a small-to-begin-with platform base. But now, as users buy new machines, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to get 32-bit machines. Most new users of any OS want that 64-bit functionality they paid for.
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Danger’s fate casts a long shadow today as Microsoft prepares to consummate its $8 billion purchase of the new hotness, Skype, a Luxembourg-based Internet phone service. Although Danger and Skype are decidedly different companies, there are parallels. Both are hyper focused on consumers, and both have a strong startup culture. The similarities make Microsoft’s experience with Danger all the more relevant to its pending assimilation of Skype.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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OpenClonk is free and open source successor of German shareware game series Clonk. Clonk, which dates back to 1994 with its first game on MS DOS has quite a dedicated fan following and an extremely popular game modding/extension system.
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Maybe I’m discovering boiled water here, but today I stumbled upon a little game. I downloaded it because it was very small, so even if it was bad, I wouldn’t have wasted too much time and space with the download. Its name is Gravitation, and it was released in 2008 (wow! that says how much into gaming I am these days!
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DEs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager: cross platform, available as portable and installable software for Windows (9x, 2k, XP, Vista) and Linux x86 and x86-64.
PeaZip is a desktop neutral application.
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GNOME Desktop
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Here are some more extensions designed to provide a classic style GNOME desktop for GNOME Shell (for the previous GNOME2-like desktop extensions, see this post). The first two extensions are called Reflection and Window List and are created for a Linux distribution called Guadalinex:
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New Releases
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After more than 5 months of daily development following the release of 4.2 AV Linux 5.0 is here. This release balances the rock-solid reliability of Debian’s stable ‘Squeeze’ release and fortifies it with some carefully selected Sid and Custom packages to make it a state-of-the-art Multimedia Content Creation Powerhouse. This release will usher in a less frequent annual release cycle and shift the focus from Linux Audio/Video software testing to reliable Linux Audio/Video PRODUCTION. If you are someone who’d rather create content than experiment with alpha/beta software then this release is for you.
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It’s that time of the month again. The most noticeable change is Rox now handles the desktop icons and feh displays the desktop wallpaper. These seemed like the best light weight choices in preparation for the new PCManFM when it’s released as stable. Parted was upgraded to 3.0, but GParted is still linked against LibParted 2.4 for now. All fonts should look good in Firefox if you use a language other than US English. A few other useful programs were added like ZFS Fuse, Lilo Setup, Rox Filer, and FixParts.
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The theme for v3.7 is improved integrity and interoperability. Tiny Core remains true to size. Currently at 10.3MB! Yet now adds NTFS read support. And seamless NTFS read-write support via extension or installation options. Improved integrity is achieved by better warning messages to prevent misuse of unsupported file systems. Also new are Starter Packs. As installation is typically a one time event. Therefore the GUI installation program and all necessary support extensions are now conviently packaged into a starter pack, install.gz. Same is offered with grub4dos.gz. This has the option to install inside an existing NTFS partition. Our network.gz starter pack, provides all the tools typically needed to get connected, including a tiny wifi manager. And, finally, combining multiple boot images together with starter packs, we offer multicore.iso. This bootable CD image, provides the easiest way yet to install, get connected, and get online.
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Red Hat Family
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By most accounts, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss middleware are both solid successes. But can two newer initiatives — namely, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and OpenShift — also gain critical mass, particularly among cloud computing partners? Here are The VAR Guy’s early educated guesses.
For those who are late to the Red Hat story, the company is on track to become the first $1 billion open source specialist within the next year or so. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has successfully pushed beyond traditional servers and is gaining momentum on cloud-centric servers, while JBoss middleware has caught on with sophisticated IT consultants.
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Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) are trading very close to calculated support at $41.30 with current price action closing at just $42.26 places the stock price near levels where traders will start paying attention.
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Fedora
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Dear Fedora fans, we are sorry to announced today that the Fedora 13 (Goddard) Linux distribution will reach end of life (EOL) next Friday, on June 24th, 2011.
Dubbed Goddard, the Fedora 13 operating system was released on May 25th, 2010. It was powered by Linux kernel 2.6.32 and it introduced features such as enhanced init system, topology awareness, color management, SystemTap static probes, Mozilla Firefox 3.6, Nvidia 3D support, and KDE SC 4.4.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, last month in Hungary, I was leading a session on application containing and gathered ideas on how to improve the safety of our user’s desktop while still making it easy for app developers.
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News on Ubuntu is getting better by the day. The first half of May saw Canonical joining GENIVI Alliance, the reference platform for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) for opensource products. Canonical will also introduce a new GENIVI compliant Ubuntu IVI Remix.
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Flavours and Variants
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Other options include Pinguy OS 11.04 and Linux Mint 11 “Katya” GNOME, which I know work well with Hulu and AV by AIM but which won’t be supported for as long.
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Imagination Technologies announced it is licensing a new version of its Meta core IP for Linux- and Android-based mobile devices. The Metaflow family of processors combines the Linux-ready Meta Series2 processor IP with the company’s Ensigma UCCP IP for Wi-Fi, mobile TV, and analog and digital TV and radio, says the company.
Known primarily for its Powervr graphics processor intellectual property (IP), Imagination Technologies has been steadily advancing its long-time, Linux-ready, programmable RISC Meta core IP. In November 2009, the U.K.-based firm announced it had begun licensing a Meta Series2 core IP, adding digital signal processor (DSP) functions, support for hardware multi-threaded execution, and hard real-time capabilities.
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TiVo Inc. announced a new version of its Linux-based DVR/IP set-top box (STB) called the TiVo Premiere Q — said to enable recording four streams at once while simultaneously transmitting three HD streams to other devices via a LAN. The company also announced its first non-DVR STB, the TiVo Preview, which can be used as a thin client multi-room extension for other TiVo devices.
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Kontron announced a machine-to-machine (M2M) development kit that ships with Wind River Linux 4.1. The Kontron M2M Smart Services Developer Kit incorporates Kontron’s nanoETXexpress-TT computer-on-module — which includes a 1GHz Intel Atom E640T — and offers not only gigabit Ethernet but also wireless interfaces including Wi-Fi, ZigBee, and optional 3G/4G cellular.
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Sonos is well known for its broad family of high-quality devices capable of playing audio streamed from a variety of Internet and local sources wirelessly — and synchronously — throughout the home. Sonos’s Linux-powered “ZonePlayers” represent the core of its wireless home audio entertainment architecture, as illustrated in the drawing below.
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Phones
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Android
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androidquestions.org [is launched by LinuxQuestions people]
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Wireless carrier T-Mobile has entered the group buying market with its own daily deal offering. Called “More for Me,” the nationwide service aggregates deals from such originators as Living Social and Groupon.
The service is available to anyone who owns an Android handset, T-Mobile spokesperson Anna Friedges told the E-Commerce Times — not just T-Mobile subscribers.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Huawei tipped a “MediaPad” tablet running Android 3.x, said to be due June 20 and to be the company’s smallest and lightest offering. Meanwhile, rival Chinese manufacturer Lenovo will release both consumer and enterprise 10-inch Android tablets, under the IdeaPad and ThinkPad brands respectively, says an industry report.
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Samsung and American Airlines announced they will deploy 6,000 Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets for premium class, in-flight entertainment on select flights later this year. The roll-out is designed to help promote Samsung’s Android 3.1 tablet in the enterprise market, according to the company.
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Riverbed is known in the market as a leading vendor of WAN optimization hardware solutions. Riverbed is also a leading sponsor of one of the most popular open source network applications, the Wireshark packet and network analyzer.
Riverbed’s involvement with Wireshark comes by way of its acquisition of CACE, a technology vendor whose executive team includes the founder of Wireshark, Gerald Combs. Riverbed’s open source networking credibility however goes back even further than the CACE acquisition. Steve McCanne, the CTO of Riverbed is the co-creator of the tcpdump command line packet analyzer.
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The ability to support the myriad of mobile devices in a coherent way is a bugbear for mobilising enterprise applications, but one local start up has leveraged open source components to make it all happen without the need for an on-premise server or native app.
Blink Mobile Interactive, based in Kariong on the NSW Central Coast (north of Sydney), has developed a Cloud service that integrates enterprise applications and presents them in the best form-factor for the user’s device – be it an iOS, Android, Symbian or Windows-based handset.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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On the eve of the Chromebooks being released to the public, Google has rolled out the next version of its Chrome Web browser: Chrome 12.
“Wait,” you say, “Didn’t Google just release a new edition of Chrome last month?” Yes, yes they did: Chrome 11 and now they’re back with another one. If you’re a cynic like me, your first thought might have been: “Is there anything new here besides the number? Is there really anything here that demands it be called a major new release?” The answer to those questions is: Yes. Yes, there are sufficient new features in this model for it to be worth given a new number.
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Mozilla
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As part of Mozilla’s new rapid release development process the beta development channel has been updated with a Firefox release candidate. For detailed information about the changes please visit:
* Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/5.0beta/releasenotes/
* Firefox mobile: http://www.mozilla.com/mobile/5.0beta/releasenotes/
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Mozilla is–and deservedly so–widely recognized for defending open web policies and standards, and now, in conjunction with The Barbarian Group, the company is calling for users everywhere to make their “marks” on the open web concept. Mozilla Mark Up is an online project that asks users everywhere to sign their names and contribute their “marks” to an interactive, graphical collection of yes votes in favor of the open web. It’s a small but nicely executed gesture backing important concepts.
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Databases
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In Part One of Scale Fail, I discussed some of the major issues which prevent web sites and applications from scaling. As was said there, most scalability issues are really management issues. The first article covered a few of the chronic bad decisions — or “anti-patterns” — which companies suffer from, including compulsive trendiness, lack of metrics, “barn door troubleshooting”, and single-process programming. In Part Two, we’ll explore some more general failures of technology management which lead to downtime.
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After six months in a public beta, Xeround is declaring its MySQL in the cloud database generally available.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation today announced new advisory board members saying it’s a demonstration of wide corporate support. Florian Effenberger said, “its composition shows that LibreOffice is a vendor-neutral, truly-free office suite, and confirms that The Document Foundation has created a solid base to build upon, for the community, for corporations and enterprises, and for adopters and end-users.”
Members include ” Google, SUSE, Red Hat, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest, and the Free Software Foundation.” Representatives from each will serve for one year providing advice and guidance on future
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The much-criticized JCP (Java Community Process), which maps out procedures for amending officially sanctioned Java technologies, is set for a face-lift that includes greater transparency and the possible loss of voting privileges for JCP members who disregard their responsibilities.
New procedures are part of the recently introduced Java Specification Request 348. “This JCR — nicknamed JCP.next — proposes a variety of changes to do with transparency, participation, agility, and governance,” JCP said in a document posted on its website on June 8. The document states that JCP chairman Patrick Curran views full transparency of a JCP expert group operations as the most important change introduced by JSR 348. “Many expert groups carry out their business openly over public mailing lists and publicly viewable issue-trackers, and they make public responses to all comments. JCP.next will elevate those recommended practices to mandatory status. The process of recruiting Expert Group members will also be documented for the public eye, ensuring that all applications are considered in a fair way,” JCP said.
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Computer maker Hewlett-Packard (HP) has settled a lawsuit brought against former boss Mark Hurd as it tried to stop him joining rival Oracle.
Under the deal, Mr Hurd will give up about $30m (£19.3m) in HP shares he was given in his severance package.
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If Executive Committee members of the Java Community Process don’t like how Oracle is handling Java and the JCP, then why don’t they just vote no when big Java issues come up? Business reasons are key, but a recent olive branch from Oracle may have helped turn the tide in Oracle’s favor.
First, let’s look at 13-1 vote that approved the release of Java SE 7 this week and see how each member of the 16-member committee voted.
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CMS
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The WordPress team has announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 3.2.
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Web, social, search, mobile, and CMS in a single composite platform
Open source CMS company Jahia has unveiled the commercial release of its Jahia 6.5 CMS. The company is hoping to differentiate the new product on the basis of its ability to bridge web, portal, social, search, mobile user experience, and content management with a single composite platform.
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Project Releases
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Come and get ‘em! GlusterFS 3.2.1 has just been released – it’s a maintenance release with performance enhancements and bug fixes. Packages are available for RHEL, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CentOS and source tarball.
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After more than two years of development to Horde open source project has released version 4.0 of its integrated groupware and webmail suites.
Back in April the project announced version 4 of the groupware components, but a further two months of development was done to prepare the integrated groupware suite, which also includes a Webmail Edition.
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The first public version of the Wakanda open source platform for developing web applications using just JavaScript has now been made available to software developers by global software group 4D.
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If you want to make a website go faster, you’ve got a number of options. One of the best and easiest is to place a proxy caching server in front of a website, that accelerates content delivery.
The open source Varnish Cache is one such technology and is deployed on big name websites, including Facebook and Twitter. Varnish Cache 3.0 was officially released today, expanding the technology with the promise of new modularity for the next generation of web acceleration needs.
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Public Services/Government
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Mark Taylor, CEO at Sirius, accused Computacenter of skewing an open source proof-of-concept pilot to favour Microsoft, with which the systems integrator (SI) has a commercial relationship.
“My opinion is that the large systems integrators would not survive a transition to open source in the public sector, for the simple reason that the savings would be enormous,” Mark Taylor told Computer Weekly. “The loss to their revenue would be massive. Their survival depends on there being no successful open source trials.”
A Computacenter spokesman said Taylor’s statement was “factually incorrect and potentially libellous”. Matt Kenny, client director at Computacenter, said: “If it’s right for the council then we’ll use open source software, if it’s not then we won’t.”
Computacenter later claimed the pilot had not been concluded. “Our commitment to Bristol City Council includes maximising the use of open source if it meets their defined business requirements.”.
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Licensing
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When you release code under the GNU General Public License (GPL), you undertake a specific set of obligations. Many of these obligations, such as providing a copyright notice and a copy of the GPL version you are using, are relatively simple. However, the obligation to provide source code with the object code is more complex, because you have several choices about how to fulfill it – and the choice you make can cause ongoing problems, especially if you are not set up to administer it.
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Programming
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Python logo As expected, Python 2.7.2 and Python 3.1.4 have been released by the Python developers. Both releases contain the security fixes to stop redirection errors that were included in May’s Python 2.5.6 and last week’s Python 2.6.7 “security fixes only” releases, but these are general maintenance releases and therefore contain many more fixes and corrections – although only Python 2.7.2 is a current production version.
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Recently, we covered some of the extensive results from the Eclipse Community Survey and Open Source Developer Report, which contains lots of data about open source trends. In this year’s survey, as has been seen in similar surveys recently, mobile applications and cloud computing are clearly on users’ and developers’ minds. Another set of results from this year’s survey is generating discussion online, though, and raising questions about whether the many new organizations and businesses adopting open source software are also giving back to the projects they benefit from. In many cases, it appears that they are not giving back.
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Google has made changes to its search engine as it strives to get consumers the information they want faster.
Its new Instant Pages system will shave between two to five seconds off the time it takes for a web page to load, the company said.
It is also planning to offer voice-activated and enhanced image searching.
Google, which processes one billion requests every day, said search remained its core focus.
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Health/Nutrition
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Ever wonder what happens to the premiums you pay for your health insurance?
You might be surprised to learn that more and more of the dollars you pay for coverage are being sucked into a kind of black hole.
It doesn’t really disappear, of course. It just doesn’t do you a bit of good — unless, of course, you believe it is to your advantage that it ultimately winds up in the bank accounts of a few investors and insurance company executives, including those who have to power to deny coverage for potentially life-saving care.
If you’ve been paying attention to what health insurance company CEOs have been saying to Wall Street over the past several months, you will know that they are spending more and more of their firms’ cash — which comes from you, of course — to “repurchase” their firms’ stock. And Wall Street absolutely loves that.
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The transfer of Medicaid policymaking authority in the committee’s budget bill raises serious constitutional concerns, just as the similar provisions in the budget repair did. By giving so much authority to an unelected official, both versions of this unprecedented transfer of lawmaking authority limit the ability of Wisconsin citizens to have a role in the process. However, in contrast to Act 10, the new bill goes much further in eliminating public involvement since it allows the sweeping grant of authority to be exercised by the DHS Secretary without so much as a single public hearing.
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Cablegate
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WikiLeaks has released a statement marking six months since Julian Assange was put under house arrest, setting out his defence against sexual assault claims.
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“The last thing Haiti needs now is an earthquake,” said a May 25, 2005, cable, written two weeks after a 4.3 magnitude tremor shook Port-au-Prince. No injuries were reported, and damage was minor. But the cable warned that “a more severe earthquake would be catastrophic, as the government of Haiti is unprepared to handle a natural disaster of any magnitude,” adding that such an event would compound problems of political instability, poverty and environmental degradation.
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In December 2010 Sweden issued two international warrants for Julian Assange’s arrest. He has been detained without charge since. This is a guide to the events, investigations and court proceedings that are connected with his extradition.
This guide is the first to map out the legal aspects of the UK extradition cases, the controversies surrounding the Swedish investigation, and societal and political reactions in Sweden.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The June 8 – June 10 episodes of MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show featured a three-part series titled “Firewater?” It pondered whether drilling for methane gas is a path toward a prosperous “clean energy” future for the United States, or if, to the contrary, the harms of methane gas drilling, caused by a process called fracking, nullify these oft-repeated industry claims.
While three recent scientific reports — one by Duke University, one by Cornell University, and one by the Post Carbon Institute — point to the latter, Ratigan’s series portrayed the issue as still up for debate, with both sides’ claims having equal merit.
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Back in 2005 it was clear to a number of observers that China’s trailing rate of coal consumption was so strong, that its demand was on course to double by the end of the decade. As of 2010, this is precisely what’s happened. From a jump between 2002-2003, around 850 Mtoe (million tonnes oil equivalent), China is now consuming 1713.5 Mtoe as of last year, according to the BP Statistical Review. | see: China Coal Consumption in Mtoe 2000-2010.
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The above chart shows the latest proportions of primary energy sources, as reported by the BP Statistical Review. You can see that Renewables now appear in the data, and account for 1.32% of total world supply of energy.
There are two big stories in the 2010 data from BP Statistical Review. The first I have already addressed: the colossal growth in coal consumption–predictably in non-OECD–but also the surprising strength in OECD coal demand.
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CRUDE-OIL prices shot up on June 8th—Brent crude to a one-month high of $118.59 per barrel—after OPEC representatives meeting in Vienna were unable to reach an agreement on production quotas. Many had expected an increase in quotas as members with spare production capacity, led by Saudi Arabia, pushed to avoid a price spike that may dampen long-term demand. As figures released in BP’s “Statistical Review of World Energy” show, global oil production has struggled to keep up with increased demand recently, particularly from Asia. In China alone consumption has risen by over 4m barrels per day in the past decade, accounting for two-fifths of the global rise. In 2010 consumption exceeded production by over 5m barrels per day for the first year ever, as world oil stocks were run down.
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Finance
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June 13 (Bloomberg) — William Cohan, author of “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World” and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor, talks about Goldman Sachs’s position on mortgage securities before the market’s collapse. Cohan speaks with Erik Schatzker and Deirdre Bolton on Bloomberg Television’s “InsideTrack.” (William D. Cohan is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. Source: Bloomberg)
You didn’t really think Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) would go down without a fight now did you? Of course not. So it should come as little surprise that recently Goldman has started to push back hard against its nemesis, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and his narrative that the firm is the lead villain of the financial crisis.
In its new mission, Goldman has been very careful not to take on Levin directly — after all he remains a very powerful figure in Congress and incurring his further wrath would be plain silly. Instead, the firm has taken its case to the court of public opinion, through a series of orchestrated presentations with members of the mainstream business press and to at least one Wall Street research analyst.
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How many bankers, mortgage brokers, and the rest of the well-renumerated hooligans who brought the economy to its knees have been investigated or prosecuted for what appears to be some highly questionable activities? Very few.
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Kathleen Gallagher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote a good article on the subject earlier this week. As she reported, James Buchen, vice president of government relations for Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, called the amendment “the icing on the cake for us be able to go out and sell Wisconsin as manufacturing heaven.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Among them: first-ever head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Bush Administration from 2003-2005, former Governor of Pennsylvania from 1995-2001, and former Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from from 1983-1995.
Upon leaving the DHS in 2005, Ridge started his career as a lobbyist, opening a lobby shop known as Ridge Global, located in Washington, D.C, which he still currently heads. Beyond this stint, though, Ridge is also a paid “consultant” (a.k.a. lobbyist) for the Marcellus Shale Coaltion, a “trade association” in disguise that in reality is a methane gas industry-funded lobbying group.
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During the Wisconsin protests against Walker’s collective bargaining bill, Walker received an email from a Republican activist and Indiana prosecutor urging him to employ a “false flag operation” — to pretend that he was injured or attacked by a “union thug” — to discredit the unions. The prosecutor lost his job for recommending such a partisan stunt, but the Wisconsin GOP has apparently not learned its lesson.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Spotify could finally be closing in on a U.S. launch, with three of the major record labels having signed up to provide the service with content, and the fourth and last rumored to be close to doing so. And about time too.
I’ve been writing about Spotify wanting to launch in the U.S. for over two years now. Only six months after I, resident in the U.K., was able to start using the service. Spotify and its CEO Daniel Ek’s stance has been that it’s definitely coming, just when the time is right. And the time hasn’t been right so far. Mainly because the major record labels in the U.S. haven’t been willing to soften their stance on licensing agreements. Until now, possibly.
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Send this to a friend
06.15.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is currently revamping its technology strategy to bring it up to date with the needs of customers, but Mac and Linux users hoping to use this year’s DIY E-tax software will be once again left out in the cold.
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* The OpenSUSE Conference Heats Up
* FreeNAS 8: The FreeBSD Spin on Network Storage
* The Ubuntu Software Center: The Apps Concept for Ubuntu
* Fedora to Switch to BTRFS
* Mageia 2.0 Is Already in the Works
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I care about software freedom as much as I care about software usability.
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Desktop
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Google’s Chrome OS has been highly anticipated by people all over since its announcement. Manufacturers such as Samsung and Acer are trying their best to be the one company that gets the honor to first release a laptop or a netbook to the market that runs Chrome operating system.
Things are pretty much looking good for the two companies when out of nowhere, Kogan broke the news that they already released a laptop with Chromium OS as its operating system. Kogan is an Australian manufacturer that has been shipping the notebook in Australia and the United Kingdom since June 7 leaving Samsung and Acer to eat its dust.
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Kernel Space
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It was just over 100 days ago that OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland launched from the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in Los Angeles. Now that these major releases have been available to the public for over three months, and Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad will be released in just a couple of days, here’s some overview statistics of where our open and collaborative testing platform is at today.
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Powertop, a tool for detecting power wasters under Linux, is about to make a generational jump: version 2.0 provides improved diagnostic options and a redesigned user interface. It also offers a simple, manual way of enabling numerous power-saving features that can noticeably extend the battery life of notebooks.
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The Linux Foundation announced the final program for LinuxCon North America in Vancouver, B.C. August 17-19, 2011. Events include the 20th anniversary of Linux gala celebration, a discussion between Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman, a keynote by IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger, and a “20 Years of Linux” panel featuring Jon “maddog” Hall and Eben Moglen.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Boxee swung its focus back to the desktop on Monday with a promise of a major update for the Mac, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows versions of its media front-end app. The new version will bring the reworked browser and content options that have been present on the Boxee Box in recent months. The code would also be more closely in step with the dedicated box in the future.
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Last week, we announced that Tux Paint was our Project of the Month for June 2011. Geared at encouraging children to use the computer to create drawings, this project is a fantastic tool for educators and parents for fostering creativity.
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i haven’t been making much music in the last week. mostly been coding, hacking, and working on things that will allow me to create music and strange new sounds.
for example, i got madrona labs’ aalto software synthesizer working in linux. they just released the windows port a few days ago, and have already expressed interest in creating a linux port, so i pointed them to the cross-platform, open-source juce framework. meanwhile, i set out to get the windows version running in linux.
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Proprietary
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As Adobe faces increasingly stiff competition on different fronts, one might think the company would be eager to reach the broadest base of end-users possible. Yet its record of engagement within the open source channel remains lackluster at best. Let’s take a look at Adobe’s trends on this front, and what they might mean over the long-term.
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Driver code for the graphics chip of AMD’s Llano APUs has just made it into Linux 3.0, which could be given version number 3.0.0 after all. Meanwhile, there have been further discussions about the best approach for overlay, aka union, filesystems.
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Instructionals/Technical
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etckeeper is a collection of tools to let /etc be stored in a git, mercurial, darcs, or bzr repository. It hooks into apt (and other package managers including yum and pacman-g2) to automatically commit changes made to /etc during package upgrades. It tracks file metadata that revison control systems do not normally support, but that is important for /etc, such as the permissions of /etc/shadow. It’s quite modular and configurable, while also being simple to use if you understand the basics of working with revision control.
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Games
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One of the areas where GNU/Linux lacks, is the number of game available on the platform, number of games is limited compared to popular proprietary operating system, however, there are still some pretty interesting and fun games available on the platform like for instance, I had immense fun playing xBill or Tux Racer.
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Instead it aims to be a 2D tag-team-fighting game something similar to the online game “Kongai“.
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Pioneer is a space adventure game set in the milkyway galaxy at the turn of the 31st century.
The game is open-ended, and you are free to explore the millions of star systems in the game. You can land on planets, slingshot past gas giants, and burn yourself to a crisp flying between binary star systems.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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After the overview of 20 best KDE applications, it’s time to have a look at what GNOME has to offer, right? This article overviews 20 of the GNOME applications which are, in my opinion, the best in their category. Only a single application from each category is included, and screenshots are attached. The list is put up in no particular order and at the end of the article I put noteworthy alternatives for each category (only GTK alternative applications).
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I was going to tell you good readers about ImagineOS, but it didn’t seem to like my video card. So instead I decided to try out the new ClearOS alpha. ClearOS used to be a server system, but the upcoming 6.1 release will also provide a suitable desktop environment. It’s based on Red Hat Enterprise, so I thought it might be interesting.
However, it was and it wasn’t.
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In Linux World, formatting a Usb Flash Disk is not an easy operation for end-user; in Pardus we always use one sentence: “Make it easy !“. So, we have to find an easy way to formatting a removable disk !
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GStreamer maintainer and code god Wim Taymans just posted an update on the the progress of GStreamer 0.11 to the GStreamer development mailing list. For those interested in learning about the new features coming in GStreamer 1.0 this email (along with the previous update) is must read material.
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The big reason that NetworkManager 0.9 is slower to connect than NM 0.8 is that we flipped IPv6 addressing on by default. That means that when you connect to a new network and that network supports IPv6 autoconfiguration via router advertisements you’ll get IPv6 connectivity. But if that network doesn’t support IPv6 then you’ll spin for 60 seconds or so waiting for a router advertisement because there’s nothing on the network that listens to the IPv6 autoconf solicitations that the kernel puts out when the link comes up. You can fix that but changing the IPv6 addressing method to “Ignore” in nm-connection-editor if you know your network doesn’t support IPv6.
Why don’t we bring up IPv4 and just wait for IPv6 to happen in the background? That’s a great question; I’m glad I asked it. First, it requires some small changes in NetworkManager’s D-Bus interface to add connected states for both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously so that applications can listen for when each stack’s connectivity is available. That’s trivial. It could be done tomorrow. It’s not a technical problem at all.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Since it is a fork and uses Mandriva 2010 as its base, the system will be very familiar to users. And since Mandriva is very user-friendly, it and Mageia would be easy for users of other distributions to adapt to using. But Mageia’s primary philosophy is rooted in the community. When the founders began the early stages of forking, they invited the community to participate. When they began packaging, they recruited community and even inexperienced maintainers. These “new guys” were giving mentors and taught the “business.” Today Mageia proudly proclaims, “Mageia is about people – the people who make and the people who use Mageia the Linux distribution. We’re completely community based, with everything that implies.” The main thing that implies is that Magiea is “not dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company.”
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Gentoo Family
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In order to have the best results one should update their system about once a week or so. If you wait too long, sometimes issues can crop up. I’d be disingenuous if I said that updating often didn’t rarely cause breakage as well. Which is precisely why the periodic releases are welcome. It’s been my good fortune that a couple of times in the past the new releases came just about the time I really needed a fresh install.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Evolution Systems, a Sydney, Australia-based full service IT support business, has built its cloud service offering, The Evolution Cloud, on a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
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Technology markets go through a predictable pattern. First there is discovery, then development of a product, the creation of a market with multiple products, and finally consolidation around a market leader.
Clouds are the first enterprise computing platform to be delivered in the age of open source, so as we enter the third phase (multiplicity), open source bonafides become a selling point.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Santos, a leading supplier of oil and gas for Australia and Asia, has achieved cost savings of $2.5 million with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition, the energy pioneer has gained greater stability and faster performance, helping the company reduce its global carbon footprint.
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A funny thing happened to Red Hat–the poweful purveyor of support and services surrounding Linux–over the past couple of years as large open source-focused companies such as Novell and Sun Microsystems became acquisition targets for big software companies: It became the only viable, U.S. publicly traded company focused on open source. While many people understand Red Hat’s business in parts, a really big part of the company’s strong performance over the past several years comes from poor economic times, and the cost savings that Red Hat can offer businesses. Now, the company is out with a useful case study illustrating how the savings work.
Santos, a leading supplier of oil and gas for Australia and Asia, has announced that it has achieved cost savings of $2.5 million with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It’s not alone. Gap Inc. has standardized on Red Hat’s Linux software and support, as have many other big companies.
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The release about Santos was put up on the Red Hat site nearly a month ago. Then, presumably, someone realised that the media should know about it. Perhaps because Santos sales last year were in the region of $2.2 billion.
The funny thing is, there are other companies – Lonely Planet and Specsavers, for example – which have done similar or bigger deals (one can only judge by the details provided) with Red Hat. Presumably again, these deals were finalised after the Santos transaction as they were detailed on Red Hat’s site at a later date.
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Fedora
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Votes | Candidate
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1120 | Kevin Fenzi (nirik)
1020 | Bill Nottingham (notting)
764 | Tomáš Mráz (t8m)
699 | Peter Jones (pjones)
567 | Stephen Gallagher (sgallagh)
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535 | Kyle McMartin (kylem)
480 | Justin Forbes (jforbes)
398 | Iain Arnell (iarnell)
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Debian Family
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This is a simple tip but an important one: when you’re installing Debian, take the time required to ensure the machine is connected to the Internet with a wired connection. If you have DHCP available, the debian-installer will use it to configure the network.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The latest version of Ubuntu, 11.04, has a different look to previous versions. We demonstrate the basics
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KDE is arguably the best-known alternative to the GNOME desktop, and it’s what you’re already used to if you run Kubuntu instead of the standard desktop Ubuntu.
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With Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu underwent a major transformation. Gone was the plain and simple GNOME UI, and in came the shell interface with shiny new features. Though Canonical had high hopes from this release, the response Natty received was hugely disappointing. Many users felt that the release was a half-baked one with too many confusing features. However, a few good features did shine through leaving some users thoroughly impressed by Unity. Good or bad, Unity in its current avatar has plenty of room left for improvement. So, here are a few things we think can make Unity a better interface.
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I was traveling into San Francisco the other day, and I had an idea I wanted to share. This is very much just an idea, and given I don’t have the time to work on it, I just wanted to share it so if someone else wants to run with it, they can.
Every Wednesday at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern, I do a live Ubuntu Q+A videocast. In pretty much every show someone always asks me about gaming on Ubuntu, and if it is going to be a focus for us. I think gaming is really important for Ubuntu and something we should certainly focus on more in the future. My idea is linked to the importance of gaming, but with a slightly different tack.
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Here at SCW, we donate to open source software, created a political demonstration website against Canadian Usage Based Billing, and constantly try to balance the needs of security with our beliefs in freedom and the openness of information. So, we are going to take a break from talking about security, to talk about ubuntu, linux, wine and FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).
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Flavours and Variants
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It’s been a little over a year since I reviewed the first Peppermint OS, and while I liked the first effort on this new project, I’ve been really looking forward to Peppermint Two. Well, my wait was over as of last week, so I was able to kick the tires and get a good feel for it after installing and using it for a few days.
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I took some time to contact Jeff Hoogland, lead developer for Bodhi Linux, and asked him a few questions about the distribution he is in charge with.
TuxArena: Hello there, Jeff. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us about Bodhi Linux.
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Luxoft and Elektrobit Corp. (EB) announced a jointly developed, Linux-based reference platform for a DLNA-ready in-car media server, and also demonstrated Luxoft’s Linux-based DashCore and Android-based DroidBuzz IVI software. The “wallet sized” In-Car Media Server and Internet Hotspot is based on a 456MHz ARM9 processor, and offers 64MB SDRAM and 128MB flash, plus Ethernet, USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 3G connectivity, says Luxoft.
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Canonical announced recently that is joining the GENIVI Alliance and that it will create a GENIVI-compliant Ubuntu IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) Remix operating system based on the Ubuntu Core sub-set.
Announced by Canonical a couple of days ago, Ubuntu IVI Remix will be an In-Vehicle Infotainment operating system, supporting Intel and ARM processors.
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Linux Mint 11 Katya is an excellent release. It has a few issues, but overall, it’s very good. Why, you may ask? What makes it special? Functionality wise, it’s about the same as Julia and comparable to most other popular distributions, more or less, with emphasis on more. It’s a bunch of small things, the attention to details, which make all the difference.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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It has been a long time coming, but we can now tell you that the Sakshat Indian tablet has now got the go ahead. We first assumed that the device would cost $35, but that has been increased to $50. However, once you take into consideration the government subsidy the tablet will cost just $24, which makes it Rs. 1,100.
Taking that price into consideration you are now looking at the world’s cheapest tablet – so would make it the Tata Nano of the consumer electronics world. It does seem fitting that India is able to corner both these markets, and it is no surprise. India is an emerging market, and to make things more affordable to all Indian’s these could be just the start.
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The Canonical design team are currently hard at work designing, testing, evaluating new layouts for the Ubuntu Software Centre version 5.0.
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These are impressive news, because it clearly shows the big players are aware of and watching what goes on the OpenSource/OpenMovie community. It is a very delightful piece of news and I am happy for Colin and the blender project seeing them getting this kind of recognition!
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Events
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On May 7 and 8 I attended the Linux Audio Conference for 2011 held in Maynooth, Ireland. Due to a temporary mental malfeasance – for some reason I assumed the Earth rotated in the opposite direction – I booked my flight for the wrong departure date and was unable to change its itinerary without paying out a hefty sum to the airline. So, on Saturday morning I arrived at NUI in Maynooth, completely out of sync with the local time zone and ready to pack four days worth of activity into two.
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Monday morning after a great conference can be a downer, but the conference can keep rolling right here. This past weekend’s Southeast Linuxfest was full of great technical talks, as well as more community-focused ones, many by opensource.com authors.
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Once again the SouthEast LinuxFest was a success. Now in its third year, this is a well organized FOSS conference held in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I went for the first time last year when we were a sponsor and had a blast. It was just as good this year.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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LINUX DISTRIBUTION Ubuntu will continue to use Firefox as its default web browser at least until version 12.04 is released next year.
Canonical, the vendor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution told The INQUIRER that Firefox will continue to be the default web browser it ships with Ubuntu until at least its 12.04 release. The comments come after Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder said that Google’s Chrome came close to replacing Firefox as the default browser in Ubuntu.
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Google’s Chrome browser could replace Firefox in Ubuntu, according to Mark Shuttleworth.
The founder of Ubuntu-backer Canonical said “it’s a real possibility” Chrome could become the default browser in a future iteration of the open-source OS, according to an interview in Network World.
“We looked at it closely in the last cycle and the decision was to stick with Firefox in 11.10,” he said. That version, called Oneiric Ocelot, is due out in October.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Forking is possible because of the licence under which the code is released; anyone who thinks he/she or a collective can do a better job or wants to introduce customisations that the mainline project is unable or unwilling to, can take a copy of the code and run with it.
When the number one FOSS office suite, OpenOffice.org, was inherited by Oracle as part of its purchase of Sun Microsystems, interested coders and those who had been involved prior to the purchase waited for a while before they realised that things were going nowhere.
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As you’ve probably heard, the proposal to move OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation was approved by a wide margin. Volunteers interested in helping with this project continued to sign up, even during the 72-hour ballot, giving the project 87 members, as well as 8 experienced Apache mentors, at the end of the vote. The volunteers signed up included an impressive number of programmers from OpenOffice.org, RedOffice and Symphony, as well as QA engineers, translators, education project experts, OOo user forum moderators and admins, marketing project members, documentation leads, etc. The broad range of support for this new project, from volunteers as well as voters, was very encouraging.
Of course, this is not the end of our recruitment effort. In some sense it marks only the beginning. What I wrote about in my previous notes, about the Apache meritocracy remains true. However, now that the proposal has advanced and an Apache “Podling” (a probationary project) has been created, the way to sign up has changed. You should now sign up to the project’s mailing lists directly. For example, an email to ooo-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org will get you onto the project’s main dev mailing list. Anyone interested in participating needs to get onto this list, including those who already earlier expressed interest as “proposed committers” as well as new volunteers.
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It’s been several weeks I hadn’t updated this blog. I was quite busy but I really avoided to comment on the latest developments at Apache and OpenOffice.org. Now that the OpenOffice.org project has formally been voted as an Apache project in incubation phase, I feel I can more easily comment on this latest move.
To start with the straight question; what do I think about this? I do have mixed feelings about Oracle moving the OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation. As explained in the Document Foundation’s official press release, this is a missed opportunity to reunite OpenOffice.org to the Document Foundation. By reuniting the two Oracle wouldn’t have accomplished a reconciliation, as there was no real need for this (whatever reconciliation would happen on a personal level) , but it would have brought order and coherence to the free and open source software office suites. Instead, Oracle chose -in a move where resentment and vengeance were not absent- to dump the OpenOffice.org code and trademark to the Apache Foundation without the Oracle engineers who had been working on it since fifteen years.
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CMS
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Two recent blog posts explained what I think the Drupal development cycle is like; see the Gartner hype cycle and Drupal and the Drupal mood cycle. These thoughts came from living through many major Drupal releases and noticing patterns of developer and user mood as release dates approached and receded. Make sure to read these posts first, before reading this one.
Developers like to release code. “Release early, release often” wrote Eric S. Raymond in his famed essay on open source, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and that philosophy has facilitated the rise of many open-source projects — including Drupal. At the same time, many end users dislike change: they would prefer that software versions stay stable as long as possible, because change means work or cost.
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Education
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School’s out for summer, but that doesn’t mean the learning ends for teachers or students. Open source education applications offer a great option for students who are looking to get ahead or catch up over the summer. And summer is an ideal time for educators to find out more about some of the free open source tools available to help them in the classroom.
There are several good reasons why educators should try open source software, most notably financial savings. Many, many schools are facing budget cuts in the coming year, and those schools could realize significant savings by switching from proprietary to open source software. In addition, schools with knowledgeable IT staff can adapt open source software so that it meets their needs exactly –something that’s all but impossible with closed source software.
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The only reason anyone would want to run a Nightly build of a Mozilla product like Firefox is because they want to help provide a test environment for providing that vital early feedback on a product that’s so fresh it’s completely untested. This early exposure provides the basis on which Firefox, Thunderbird and its brethren migrate towards the first major milestone in a program’s life, the alpha build.
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Programming
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Meet Daniil Kulchenko. He was an HTML programmer at age six. He was a freelance Linux systems administrator at 11. And at 15, he founded his first business: Phenona, a platform-as-a-service for building and hosting Perl applications.
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The results from the Eclipse Foundation’s annual Community Survey were published last week, with the output in report form available here (PDF warning).
The survey, completed by 624 individuals, was a voluntary response as opposed to a random sample, and therefore from a statistical perspective the results cannot be considered representative. It is, nonetheless, an interesting observational study.
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For example, yesterday, after I finished using it, I shut down Microsoft Windows. As usual, it needed to install more updates, so it decided to do so between clicking “Shut Down” and actually shutting down. I figured it shouldn’t take that long, so I closed my laptop lid and went to eat dinner. This wouldn’t be news, except that when I came back, I found that it had gone to sleep in the middle (i.e. it hadn’t actually finished installing updates). That was one annoying thing. Anyway, I woke it up, and it finished installing updates and then properly shut down with no apparent errors.
Today, when I booted back into Microsoft Windows, I got a message saying that Microsoft Windows didn’t shut down properly the last time. WHAT? It’s telling me that it’s my fault that it took so long to install updates that the laptop went to sleep before it could finish, and that what looked to be a fine shutdown process was actually faulty in some magical way, and I’m supposed to blindly believe all that?
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Finance
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Last summer I wrote about Arianna Huffington’s latest book, Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream and talked about the Great Recession, the Great Bailout, and the Great Cover-Up of financial crimes.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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If you want a vision of the world of global repression and bullying that copyright maximalists are striving to create, try this:
A Sheffield student is facing up to five years in jail if convicted in America for a website which provided links to movie clips.
Let’s just look at the component parts of this story.
First, the website was run by a UK national, and hosted in the UK. As the student’s lawyer points out:
“The essential contention is that the correct forum for this trial is in fact here in Britain, where he was at all times.”
So what would the situation be here in the UK? Well, a very similar case involving alleged unauthorised links to copyright material played out a few years ago – the famous OiNK trial. Here’s what happened:
Lawyers have presented their final arguments in the trial of Alan Ellis. The prosecution slammed the ex-OiNK admin, saying that the site was set up with dishonest and profiteering intentions right from the start. The defense tore into IFPI and countered by calling Ellis an innovator with talents to be nurtured. Today the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty, and Ellis walked free.
Aside from the unanimous verdict, what was notable about the trial was that Ellis was accused of “Conspiracy to Defraud the music industry” – not with linking to copyright material. That is probably because the latter seems not to be a criminal offence, and so it was necessary to find some other charge.
Asterisk 1.8 and Asterisk SCF
Credit: TinyOgg
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